Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010). Most paragraphs in Shushōgi are derived from the 12-­fascicle Shōbōgenzō, although some are derived from the 75-­fascicle version and a few from the 95-­fascicle version. The first sentence in paragraph ten originates in the Kegon Kyō or Avataṃsaka Sūtra.

2.See Steven Heine, “Abbreviation or Aberration: The Role of the Shushōgi in Modern Sōtō Zen Buddhism,” in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, eds. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 169–92. This invaluable essay has become perhaps the definitive historical and critical appraisal of Shushōgi in the English language. Heine also recounts that during this upheaval, not only were Buddhists persecuted in favor of the promotion of Shinto shrines in their new State-­supported status, but the customary vocations of the priests themselves were radically altered: “After centuries of the valorizing of celibate, vegetarian monastic practice, they were encouraged or even required to marry and eat meat” (ibid., p. 174).

3.Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, vol. 2: Japan, trans. James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p. 414.

4.shushō-­ittō.

5.Heine, p. 170. Nonetheless, the very title Shushōgi derives from Dōgen’s phrase shushō-­ittō, which he coined as early as 1231 CE in the fascicle “Bendōwa.” That being said, shushō-­ittō is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in Shushōgi (ibid., p. 180). Heine argues that Shushōgi, with its reliance on repentance (sange), causality (inga), and the precepts, is more indebted to the more controversial 12-­fascicle Shōbōgenzō than the 75-­fascicle version.

6.Ibid., p. 171.

7.Ibid., pp. 171–72.

8.Ibid., p. 180.

9.William M. Bodiford, “Zen in the Art of Funerals: Ritual Salvation in Japanese Buddhism,” History of Religions 32, no. 2 (1992): 150.

10.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 502.

11.Heine notes that this phrase appears nowhere in any version of Shōbōgenzō (p. 184).

12.Heine: “It seems clear that Ōuchi Seiran and other Meiji lay leaders created a view of repentance in Shushōgi based in large part on the challenge of Christianity during the Westernization process” (p. 186).

13.busshō.

14.The insistence on repentance as a way of eradicating sins and obtaining one’s original purity implicates Shushōgi with the Critical Buddhists’ accusation that “Buddhism fosters problems of social injustice, ethnic discrimination, and nationalism/militarism, in that the basic notion of original enlightenment proclaims a false sense of equality on the absolute level while allowing conflicts based on inequalities and hierarchical distinctions to be perpetuated on the everyday level” (Heine, p. 184).

15.Ibid., p. 185.

16.Ibid., p. 187.

17.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 7.

18.Tendō Nyojō.

19.Sōtōshū.

20.The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Three Hundred Koans, trans. Kazuaki TANAHASHI and John Daido Loori (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2009). See also Sitting with Koans: Essential Writings on Zen Koan Introspection, ed. John Daido Loori (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2005). Although Sōtō practice, with some important and valuable exceptions, is no longer generally associated with dokusan and kōan training (that is more the provenance of the Rinzai school), this omission was not Dōgen’s practice.

21.We have generally relied on both Heine’s account (p. 182) as well as Matsubara’s account for the sources of Shushōgi sentences and paragraphs in the various versions of Shōbōgenzō. See Matsubara Taidō, Shushōgi ni Kiku: Dōgen Zen no Shinzui (Tokyo: Chōbunsha, 1996).

22.Zen-­en.

23.Quoted in Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, vol. 1: India and China, trans. James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter (New York: Macmillan, 1988), p. 9.

24.yuibutsu yobutsu.

25.shuryō.

26.Davis writes: “While discursive thinking and the study of texts are not engaged in during the practice of ‘just sitting’ in the Monk’s Hall (sōdō), Dōgen’s conception of the monastery also includes an adjacent Study Hall (shuryō), wherein each monk is assigned a desk. In ‘Shuryō Shingi [Regulations for the Study Hall],’ Dōgen writes: ‘In the study hall, read the Mahāyāna sutras and also the sayings of our ancestors, and naturally accord with the instructions of our tradition to illuminate the mind with the ancient teachings’” (the passage in “Shuryō Shingi” is quoted from Dōgen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community: A Translation of Eihei Shingi, trans. Taigen Daniel Leighten and Shohaku OKUMURA [Albany: SUNY Press, 1996], p. 109).

27.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 8.

28.Ibid., p. 87.

29.Ibid.

30.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, “Gyōbutsu Igi [Awesome Presence of Active Buddhas],” p. 261.

31.shushō-­ittō.

32.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 182.

33.Ibid., p. 184.

34.Ibid., p. 192.

35.Ibid., p. 229.

36.Ibid., pp. 222–­23.

37.Ibid., p. 222.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1.Author’s note: I would like to thank the translator, Dainen David Putney, for his hard work on my essay. As someone born and raised in Japan as well as someone whose training in Sōtō Zen was exclusively in Japan, it is easiest for me to express myself in my mother tongue. Zen in both the West and Japan is at a real crossroad, and I wanted to express my hopes for a better way forward for everyone in the subtle and nuanced fashion that this occasion merits. I am happy to see that my thoughts and dreams have made it to the other shore of the English-­speaking world with their original subtlety intact. All the following notes in this essay are those of the translator, Dainen David Putney.

2.sange metsuzai.

3.jukai nyūi.

4.hotsugan rishō.

5.gyōji hō’on.

6.The Sōtō sect has split into two branches: the original Eiheiji branch associated with Dōgen, and the Sōjiji branch associated with Keizan as well as Dōgen.

7.Following Steven Heine, I translate kyōkai as “fellowship,” as opposed to “church,” because this was a joint project of the Eiheiji and the Sōjiji branches.

8.Kōshō ITAGAKI explained in a note to me that, according to the Rev. Azuma Ryōshi, a specialist on Keizan Zenji, the Rev. Takiya Takasha, abbot of Eiheiji (though formerly a member of the Sōjiji branch), finalized the final version of Shushōgi. The head abbot of Sōjiji at that time was the Rev. Azegami Baisen. Although the two temples issued a joint edict promoting Shushōgi as a manual for lay devotion and monastic ritual, the abbot who finalized the present Shushōgi was primarily Takiya, with the Rev. Azegami putting in very little input. Takiya, as abbot of Eiheiji, kept the focus on Dōgen Zenji’s magnum opus, Shōbōgenzō. Kikuchi Rōshi argues that Shushōgi should have had more content from Keizan’s Denkōroku.

9.During this period, the government (bakufu, comprised of the Tokugawa shōguns and governmental officials) worked in part to limit the power of Buddhism, while at the same time using it to regulate the people of a village or district in a city. The Edo bakufu imposed what is called the Danka temple system. These regulations were meant for population control, both peasants and samurai, by minimizing their mobility by tying them to the village where they were born and to the temple where both their ancestors are buried and their family registries are kept. The government reduced the total number of local temples, making sure that each village had only one temple. Priests were ordered to marry, and the temple was passed down through the family so that it could continue to regulate the people from generation to generation. Many of these changes, though not in the repressive form of the Edo period, have continued up through the present.

10.For all practical purposes the Edo period, which lasted until the Meiji era in 1868, began in 1600, after the Battle of Sekigara, where Tokugawa Ieayasu defeated the primarily western Daimyō (feudal lords and absolute rulers of their fiefs). Ieyasu officially took the title of Shōgun in 1603 and this became the official beginning of the Edo period, which lasted 265 years.

11.Christianity became illegal in Japan through the Expulsion Edict of 1614 and all Buddhist temples were required to issue a certificate confirming that no one in their village or precinct was Christian. Everyone in a village or rural area was also required to belong to a temple and temples were officially designated as the only approved operators of funerals. There was to be only one temple per village and everyone was required to belong to this temple, regardless of denomination.

12.jizoku.

13.Skt. duḥkha.

14.Tendō Nyojō.

15.Acts 9:18.

16.Hannya Shingyō.

17.Kannon bosatsu.

18.Skt. śūnyatā; Jp. kū.

19.jiriki.

20.tariki.

21.furyū monji.

22.kyōge betsuden.

23.kenshō jōbutsu.

24.suimon.

25.honrai no menmoku.

26.shugyō.

27.The honzan of the Japanese Tendai sect of Buddhism.

28.There is no evidence that Dōgen actually met Eisai. Records show that Eisai was in Kamakura in an effort to get the government to recognize his new temple. Older schools of Buddhism were trying to get his temple shut down. You needed government permission to establish a new type of temple.

29.Keitoku.

30.shinjin datsuraku.

31.kūshu gennkyō.

32.This is from Dōgen’s “Buddha Nature” fascicle of Shōbōgenzō where he takes the phrase “shitsu’u busshō” from the Great Nirvana Sutra. Note: “All beings — Buddha Nature” is translated in Japanese as shitsu’u busshō.

33.byōdō soku shabetsu. Shabetsu soku byōdō.

34.Skt. Pāramitāyana .

35.Skt. dāna, śīla, kṣānti, vīrya, dhyāna-­samādhi, prajñā.

36.Skt. dharmas.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 2

1.Dōgen, Dōgen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, trans. Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku OKUMURA, ed. with introduction Taigen Dan Leighton (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004).

N0TES TO CHAPTER 4

1.Skt. upāya.

2.buppō.

3.On this issue, see David Putney, “Some Problems in Interpretation: The Early and Late Writings of Dōgen,” Philosophy East and West 46, no. 4 (October 1996): 497–531.

4.busshō.

5.Skt. anātman; Jp. muga.

6.Keiji NISHITANI, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), p. 216.

7.hongaku.

8.shikaku.

9.The gerund form “awakening” is used here in order to highlight the aspect of process as opposed to the more static and thus potentially essentializing sense of the frequently used term “enlightenment.”

10.It has been long debated in Buddhist scholarship whether the tathāgatagarbha tradition is genuinely Buddhist on the grounds that it is actually closer to a substantialist position. For recent considerations of this question in the context of “Critical Buddhism,” see Matsumoto Shirō, “The Doctrine of Tathāgata-­garhba Is Not Buddhist,” trans. Jamie Hubbard, pp. 165–73; Sallie B. King, “The Doctrine of Buddha-­Nature Is Impeccably Buddhist,” pp. 174–92; Yamabe Nobuyoshi, “The Idea of Dhātu-­vāda in Yogacara and Tathāgata-­garbha Texts,” pp. 193–204. These essays are found in Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm Over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997).

11.The concept of tathāgatagarbha clearly invokes both feminine and masculine imagery, even if it refuses to situate Buddha Nature as being fundamentally one or the other. On the relation between the feminine and the masculine and between women and men in Buddhism, particularly with respect to Zen and Dōgen, see Erin McCarthy, “A Zen Master Meets Contemporary Feminism: Reading Dōgen as a Resource for Feminist Philosophy,” in Buddhist Responses to Globalization, eds. Leah Kalmanson and James Mark Shields (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), pp. 131–48.

12.Skt. śūnyatā; Jp. kū.

13.Skt. tathatā.

14.Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlama-
dhyamakakārikā, trans. with commentary Jay L. Garfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), XXV.19, p. 331. On the notion of emptiness in Nāgārjuna with reference to the tathāgatagarbha tradition, see Bret W. Davis, “Forms of Emptiness in Zen,” in A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), pp. 190–213.

15.Skt. avidyā.

16.Skt. pratītyasamutpāda; Jp. engi.

17.For other references to karma by Dōgen, see in Shōbōgenzō: “Keisei Sanshoku [Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors],” “Shoaku Makusa [Refrain from Unwholesome Action],” “Kesa Kudoku [Power of the Robe],” “Sansui Kyō [Mountains and Waters Sutra],” “Sanji no Gō [Karma in the Three Periods],” “Shizen Biku [Monk of the Fourth-­Stage Meditation].”

Also see in Dōgen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, trans. Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku OKUMURA, ed. with introduction Taigen Dan Leighton (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004): volume 4, section 275 (references hereafter referred to as follows: 4:275), 5:383, 5:386, 6:437, 7:485, 7:517, 7:504, 7:510, 7:524.

18.shushō-­ittō.

19.Daikan Enō.

20.tongo.

21.Dōgen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, vol. 1, “Undivided Activity [Zenki],” ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), p. 451.

22.The principal text in English on this movement, which contains both supporting and critical essays on it, is Hubbard and Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm Over Critical Buddhism.

23.Hee-­Jin Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 55–56. While there are numerous assessments both critical and supportive of Critical Buddhism, Kim offers one that is both, succinct, and balanced. See ibid., pp. 53–­58. Also see his “Preface to the Wisdom Edition” of his masterful study Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004), esp. pp. xix–xxii.

24.Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking, p. 55.

25.Dōgen, “Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen (Fukan zazengi) [Fukan­zazengi],” in Soto School Scriptures for Daily Services and Practice, ed. and trans. Carl Bielefeldt and T. Griffith Foulk, with Rev. Taigen Leighton and Rev. Shohaku OKUMURA (Tokyo: Sotoshu Shumucho and the Soto Zen Text Project, 2001). For a slightly different translation see Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 908.

26.In Chants and Recitations (Rochester, NY: Rochester Zen Center, 2005), p. 35.

27.Ibid.

28.Shushōgi, § 30.

29.Tendō Nyojō.

30.Sōtō Zen.

31.Rinzai.

32.“Zen is also deeply concerned with the question, ‘What am I?’ asking it in a way peculiar to Zen, that is: ‘What is your original face before you were born?’ Science seeks for the origins of our existence in a temporal and horizontal sense — a dimension which can be pushed back endlessly. To find a definite answer to the question of our origin we must go beyond the horizontal dimension and turn to the vertical dimension, i.e., the eternal and religious dimension” (Abe Masao, “God, Emptiness, and the True Self,” in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries, ed. Frederick Franck, with foreword by Joan Stambaugh [Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004], p. 65). This essay was previously published in The Eastern Buddhist 2, no. 2 (1969): 15–30.

33.See Masao ABE, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Śūnyatā” and “A Rejoinder,” in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-­Jewish-­Christian Conversation, eds. John B. Cobb, Jr., and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990).

34.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 12.

35.myōshū.

36.hi-­shiryō.

37.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 243.

38.Daii Dōshin.

39.Daimon Kōnin.

40.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 241.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 5

1.All references to Shōbōgenzō are from Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross (Charleston: Book Surge Publishing, 2006).

2.Ibid., p. 5.

3.Ibid.

4.Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis and ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 215.

5.Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, p. 27.

6.Ibid., p. 28.

7.Ibid.

8.Ibid., p. 27.

9.Ibid., p. 141.

10.Ibid., p. 142.

11.Merleau-­Ponty, p. 134.

12.Ibid., pp. 137–­38.

13.Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, p. 16.

14.Ibid., p. 26.

15.Ibid., p. 92.

16.Ibid., p. 141.

17.Ibid.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 6

1.Skt. anātman.

2.Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1979), p. 69.

3.Both are in the Udāna.

4.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 884–­85.

5.Ibid., p. 429.

6.Ibid., pp. 30–31.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 7

1.Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter 2: “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 96.

2.Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), chapter 3 (opening paragraph).

3.Shushōgi, § 2.

4.Ibid., § 3.

5.Genesis 3:19.

6.Martin Buber, The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism (New York: Citadel, 1996), p. 12.

7.Shushōgi, §§ 4–5.

8.Buber, p. 14.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 8

1.gō.

2.sange.

3.Shibayama Zenkei, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, trans. Kudo Sumiko (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 38.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 9

1.The Daihōkō Butsu-­kegon Kyō (Skt. Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra), or The Great Vaipulya Sutra of the Buddha’s Flower Garland, is the central sutra for the Huayan (Jp. Kegon) school, which flourished in Tang Dynasty China and has been associated with Tōdaiji in Nara since the eighth century.

2.mujō.

3.muga.

4.For a summation of this debate, see Steven Heine, “Abbreviation or Aberration: The Role of the Shushōgi in Modern Sōtō Zen Buddhism,” in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, eds. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 169–92.

5.For an alternative translation of this passage, see ibid., p. 169.

6.Ibid., p. 187.

7.Ibid., p. 170.

8.David Putney, “Dōgen: Enlightenment and Entanglement,” Buddhist-­Christian Studies 17 (1997): 25.

9.There is some debate among scholars as to whether or not Dōgen could have been motivated by such a question, or whether the question is in fact puerile. (Tiantong Rujing in Japanese is Tendō Nyojō.) See my Purifying Zen: Watsuji Tetsurō’s Shamon Dōgen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), p. 12.

10.The most important of these has to do with Buddha Nature itself, and with the character of enlightenment itself. See Hee-­Jin Kim, Dōgen: Mystical Realist, 3rd revised edition (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000); also see my Purifying Zen.

11.Dogen, Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, vol. 4, “Sanji no Gō,” trans. Gudo NISHIJIMA and Chodo Cross (Charleston: Book Surge Publishing, 2006), pp. 118–19.

12.The passages in Shushōgi that also appear in “Sanji no Gō” about whether karma waits for continuance or skips continuance are excerpted from the Abhidharma-­mahāvibhāṣa-­śāstra, a Sarvāstivādin text.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 10

1.Skt. anuttarā samyak-­saṃbodhi.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 11

1.Wilber thus speaks of three main axes of the psyche — states, stages, and shadow. The premodern religious traditions, according to Wilber, understood the first well but had much less to say on the second two, which descend from modern Western psychology: stages of development from James Mark Baldwin and Jean Piaget; and shadow as dissociation within the psychic system from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Awakening in this view is to become one with the always already stateless state of nonduality (even as there are types of nonduality — that is, “type” in the sense of style). Stage development and the integration of all forms of shadow do not necessarily or simply follow from awakening. Wilber here draws knowingly on large bodies of evidence in forwarding this conclusion.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 12

1.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010).

2.Ibid., p. 656.

3.Ibid., p. 657.

4.Ibid.

5.Ibid., p. 658.

6.bodai.

7.shin.

8.shinjin datsuraku.

9.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 662.

10.Ibid., p. 59.

11.Ibid., p. 60.

12.Ibid., p. 61.

13.Ibid., p. 51.

14.Ibid., p. 40.

15.Ibid., p. 41.

16.See “Keisei Sanshoku”: “Although you may have wasted time so far, you should vow immediately, before this present life ends: Together will all sentient beings, may I hear the true dharma from this birth throughout future births. When I hear the true dharma, I will not doubt or distrust it. When I encounter the true dharma, I will relinquish ordinary affairs and uphold the buddha dharma. Thus, may I realize the way together with the great earth and all sentient beings” (Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 90).

17.Śāntideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, revised edition, trans. the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2008).

18.Ibid., p. 55, verse 17.

19.Ibid., verse 18.

20.Ibid., p. 56, verse 19.

21.Ibid., p. 82, verse 19.

22.This is from the opening paragraph of Fukanzazengi found in Part III of this book.

23.shushō-­ittō.

24.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 18.

25.Skt. upāya.

26.Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma: The Lotus Sutra, trans. Leon Hurvitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 199.

27.Ibid., pp. 200–201.

28.In putting Śāriputra’s discrimination in its place, the dragon girl instantly turns into a man (ibid., p. 201). This, of course, has led some readers to conclude that the male form remains the requisite vehicle for awakening, although this fails to take into account that she was already fully awakened before she made sport of Śāriputra. In the seventh chapter of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, Śāriputra the misogynist is even more thoroughly schooled. See Vimalakīrti Sūtra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columba University Press, 1997), pp. 90–92. Śāriputra asks the goddess to change out of her form, but the goddess responds that a woman does not reduce to a mere form. “All things are just the same — they have no fixed form” (p. 91).

29.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 16.

30.Ibid., p. 77.

31.Ibid., p. 80.

32.Ibid., p. 79.

33.Ibid., p. 81.

34.Ibid., p. 82.

35.Grace Shireson, Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1999), p. 83. See also the seminal discussion in Paula Kane Robinson Arai, Women Living Zen: Japanese Sōtō Buddhist Nuns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 36–43.

36.Bernard Faure, Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 44.

37.Arai, p. 40.

38.Skt. moha and avidyā.

39.Skt. rāga; P. lobha.

40.Skt. dveṣa; P. dosa.

41.See especially Zenshin Florence Caplow and Reigetsu Susan Moon, eds., The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-­Five Centuries of Awakened Women (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2013); Eido Frances Carney, ed., Receiving the Marrow: Teachings on Dōgen by Sōtō Zen Women Priests (Olympia, WA: Temple Ground Press, 2012).

42.Shireson, p. 83.

43.Faure, p. 44.

44.William Bodiford, Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), p. 204.

45.Ibid., p. 206.

46.Ibid.

47.Hakamaya Noriaki, “Thoughts on the Ideological Background of Social Discrimination,” trans. Jamie Hubbard, in Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, eds. Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), p. 344. See also Steven Heine, “Critical Buddhism and Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō: The Debate over the 75-­Fascicle and 12-­Fascicle Texts,” in Pruning the Bodhi Tree, pp. 251–85. Heine articulates the nub of the problem: “Zen, in particular, has often hidden its support for the status quo behind what is, in effect, an elitist aestheticism based on the notion that everything reflects the Buddha Dharma (zen’itsu-­buppō)” (p. 257).

48.Skt. Śrenika.

49.Hakamaya, p. 345.

50.Ibid., p. 347.

51.Ibid., p. 348.

52.shushō-­ittō.

53.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 30.

54.Jōriki means the power of samādhi, the concentrated power that arises from dhyāna (meditation).

55.Ruben L. F. Habito, Zen and the Spiritual Exercises: Paths of Awakening and Transformation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. xxiii.

56.Yasutani Hakuun, “The Three Aims of Zazen,” in The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, Enlightenment, ed. Philip Kapleau, updated and revised edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 55. Saijōjō Zen, Yasutani tells us, is the “last of the five types” and is “the highest vehicle, the culmination and crown of Buddhist Zen. This Zen was practiced by all the Buddhas of the past . . . and is the expression of Absolute Life, life in its purest form. It is the zazen that Dōgen Zenji chiefly advocated and it involves no struggle for satori or any other object” (“The Five Varieties of Zen,” pp. 52–­53). Saijōjō means the superior vehicle, the consummate teaching.

57.kenchūtō.

58.Yasutani, p. 56.

59.Dongshan Liangjie (Jp. Tōzan Ryōkai), a ninth-­century monk and one of the founders of the Caodong (Sōtō) school, established in the Song of Precious Mirror Samādhi (Hōkyō Zammaika) the Five Ranks as one of this school’s central teachings. The Five Ranks are, each corresponding to a stanza in Dongshan’s poem: (1) shōchūhen: the relative within absolute emptiness (many within one, light within darkness, bent within straight); (2) henchūshō: absolute emptiness within the relative (one within many, darkness within light, straight within bent); (3) shōchūrai: awoken action that originates in absolute emptiness (the bent coming from the straight, light coming from darkness); (4) kenchūshi: arriving at the mutual integration and interpenetration of the opposites, and entering the market-
place as a bodhisattva; (5) kenchūtō: “attainment of unity” the practice of wakefulness in everyday life in everything that one does and thinks. See also Victor Sōgen Hori, Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Kōan Practice (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), pp. 24–25.

60.See Isshū MIURA and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan: Its History and Use in Rinzai Zen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), pp. 62–72.

61.Ibid., p. 63.

62.Ibid., p. 65.

63.Ibid., p. 70.

64.Ibid., pp. 71–72.

65.Ibid., p. 63.

66.Ibid., p. 72.

67.busshō.

68.jinzū.

69.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 291.

70.See fascicle 38 of Shōbōgenzō (“Shinjin Gakudō [Body-­and-­Mind Study of the Way]”). “Without practice, the Buddha way cannot be attained. Without study, it remains remote” (Ibid., p. 422). “Sometimes you study the way by casting off the mind. Sometimes you study the way by taking up the mind. Either way, study the way with thinking and study the way not-­thinking” (p. 423). “A moment or two of mind is a moment of mountains, rivers, and earth. . . . Just wholeheartedly accept with trust that to study the way with mind is this mountains-­rivers-­and-­earth mind itself thoroughly engaged in studying the way” (p. 424).

71.Ibid., p. 502.

72.Ibid., p. 507.

73.Ibid., p. 542.

74.Ibid., p. 543.

75.Ibid., p. 633.

76.Ibid., p. 635.

77.Hakamaya, p. 352.

78.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 77.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 13

1.T. Griffith Foulk, “Ritual in Japanese Zen Buddhism,” in Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Theory in Practice, eds. Steve Heine and Dale S. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 71.

2.Philip Kapleau, ed., Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment, updated and revised edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 236.

3.Ibid., p. 236.

4.Kazuaki TANAHASHI, ed., Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), pp. 44–45. Translations from Shōbōgenzō are based on the Tanahashi text, with my modifications.

5.Ibid., p. 44.

6.Ibid.

7.Ibid., p. 45.

8.Ibid., p. 44.

9.Kenneth Kraft, “The Greening of Buddhist Practice”; www.crosscurrents.org/greening.htm.

10.From the website of the Vermont Zen Center; www.vermontzen.org/ceremonies.html.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 14

1.My deep gratitude to Paul Forster and Timothy Engström for their careful readings and incisive comments on early drafts.

2.Compassion differs from empathy in that empathy involves feeling the pain of others but compassion adds the dimension of wanting to relieve the pain and suffering of others.

3.Thomas P. Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), p. 118.

4.Dogen, Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, vol. 3, trans. Gudo Wafu NISHIJIMA and Chodo Cross (Berkeley: Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai and Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1998), pp. 41, 175a.

5.Ibid., p. 46n19.

6.Translated by Steve Bein as Purifying Zen: Watsuji Tetsurō’s Shamon Dōgen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011).

7.Ibid., p. 65.

8.Joan Tronto notes that one requirement of care, along with some kind of engagement, is the following: “First, care implies a reaching out to something other than the self: it is neither self-­referring nor self-­absorbing” (Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care [New York and London: Routledge, 1993], p. 102).

9.Watsuji Tetsurō, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, trans. Seisaku YAMAMOTO and Robert E. Carter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 62.

10.Bein, p. 69.

11.Ibid., p. 78.

12.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, “Bodaisatta Shi Shōhō [The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance],” pp. 475–76.

13.See Thomas P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person, ch. 6: “Dōgen’s Phenomenology of Zazen” (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1985), for more on this.

14.Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, pp. 47n23, 222n172.

15.Ibid., pp. 47n23, 222n171.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 15

1.Skt. bodhicitta; Jp. bodaishin; may also be translated as the “thought of enlighten­ment.”

2.Yokoi Yūhō, “Meaning of Practice and Enlightenment,” Zen Master Dōgen: An Introduction with Selected Writings (New York: Weatherhill, 1976), p. 61.

3.Dogen, Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, vol. 3, trans. Gudo NISHIJIMA and Chodo Cross, Vol. 3, “Bodaisatta Shishōbō” (Berkeley: Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai and Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1998), p. 28.

4.My Japanese text for Shushōgi is taken from Sanzen Yōten, a manual of short Zen texts published by the Shūmuchō Kōhoshitsu (Tokyo: Sōtōshū Shūmuchō, 1956).

5.Skt. anātman; Jp. muga.

6.Skt. śūnyatā; Jp. kū.

7.Skt. pratītyasamutpāda; Jp. engi.

8.Dharma has many meanings in Buddhism. The two that most concern us here are (1) teachings, in general, or especially the Buddha’s teachings (Buddha Dharma), and (2) phenomena (or phenomenon) that we sense and perceive with our six senses (as well as the karmic formations and consciousness in the five aggregates). Dharma is often translated in this sense as “thing,” or dharmas as “things.” The Japanese is hō. A phrase used in Japanese Buddhist writings is shohō, “all dharmas” or “all things,” or “all phenomena.”

9.Tathāgata could be interpreted in two ways. One is a combination between “Tathā” (suchness or reality), plus “gata” meaning “has gone,” or “has attained”: the One who has crossed to the other shore from suffering and ignorance. This meaning is often translated as the “Thus Gone One” (the One who has attained ultimate wisdom or bodhi). It is also translated as “Thus Come One” (The One who has come from ultimate wisdom, bodhi). Tathāgata is synonymous with Buddha. The pun, if it is one, cannot be translated into Chinese or Japanese. This gives Tathāgata the implication of Buddha as “savior” in East Asia.

10.The Japanese text is hard to translate. Where Nishijima and Cross translate “the task of cooperation,” the Japanese text just says “ji —, ” the ji of dōji. Nishijima and Cross translate the sentence thus: “The task of cooperation means, for example, concrete behavior, a dignified attitude, and a real situation.” Although Nishijima and Cross note the distinction between dō and ji in a footnote, I would alternately translate this passage as “task” (as in the “task of cooperation”), meaning “appropriate form, solemnity, and bearing.” The Japanese text I rely on is Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, vol. 4, ed. with annotation Mizuno Yaoko (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1990); hereafter this four-­volume edition will be cited by volume and page numbers. Translations are my own, but I will indicate the corresponding page numbers in the following English translation: Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010).

11.Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, 4:426; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 476. Mizuno, in a note, translates the three into modern Japanese with terms that mean “dignity,” “attitude,” and “form.”

12.This is a Chinese Daoist text in twenty-­four volumes attributed to Guanzi Kanshi (Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, 4:426; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 476). It is interesting to note that in the “Four Elements of a Bodhisattva’s Social Relations,” when the text discusses the relationship between the Tathāgata and humans, the text of this fascicle goes on to say: “Judging from this identification with the human world we can suppose that he might [also] identify himself with other worlds” (Ibid., 4:426; p. 476).

13.Ibid., 9:71–72; p. 274.

14.Ibid., 4:426; p. 476.

15.Ibid., 8:58; p. 303.

16.Ibid., 8:62–63; p. 308.

17.Ibid., 8:64ff; p. 310. For more on the question of women, see chapter 12.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 16

1.hōon.

2.hōon kōshiki.

3.Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 109.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 17

1.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, vol. 1, “Continuous Practice (2),” ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), p. 361. Unless noted otherwise, all subsequent quotations from Dōgen will be to this fascicle of Shōbōgenzō using this translation, referred to by the page number in the body of the text.

2.Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 173.

3.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 365.

4.Unmon.

5.Master Yunmen, From the Record of the Chan Teacher “Gate of the Clouds,” ed. and trans. Urs App (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994), pp. 104–5.

6.Dōgen, “Gakudō Yōjinshū [Points to Watch in Practicing the Way],” in Dōgen Zen, trans. Shohaku OKUMURA (Kyoto: Kyoto Sōtō Zen Center, 1988), p. 1.

7.Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, “Senjō [Cleansing]” and “Senmen [Washing the Face].”

8.Dōgen, “Instructions for the Tenzo,” trans. Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki TANAHASHI, in Moon in a Dewdrop, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (San Francisco: North Point, 1985), p. 56.

9.Chōkei.

10.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 369.

11.Ibid., p. 365.

12.Ibid., p. 362.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 18

1.zammai-­ō-­zammai.

2.bonnō soku bodai.

3.Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, vol. 1, “Genjōkōan,” ed. with annotation Mizuno Yaoko (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1990), pp. 53–54; Dōgen Kigen, “Shōbōgenzō Genjōkōan,” trans. Norman Waddell and Masao ABE, The Eastern Buddhist 5, no. 2 (1972): 134.

4.Skt. upāya.

5.Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, vol. 4, “Shōji,” ed. with annotation Mizuno Yaoko (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1993), p. 468; my translation.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 19

1.Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlama-
dhyamakakārikā, trans. with commentary Jay L. Garfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), XXV.19, p. 331.

2.sokushin zebutsu.

3.The dates for Bodhiruci vary. Traditional accounts hold he arrived in Luoyang, China, somewhere between 502–508 CE. More contemporary accounts situate his life two centuries later. Jinhua Chen states that Bodhiruci arrived in Luoyang sometime between 692–693 and during that time prepared a retranslation with an interpolation of the Ratnamegha Sūtra (Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician: The Many Lives of Fazang (643–712) [Leiden: Kloninklijke Brill, 2007], p. 232). Another account also places Bodhiruci in China during this time period. See Antonino Forte, “The Relativity of the Concept of Orthodoxy in Chinese Buddhism: Chih-­sheng’s Indictment of Shih-­li and the Proscription of the Dharma Mirror Sūtra,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), pp. 242–46.

4.Cited in William Theodore de Bary, The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 100; translation modified to reflect gender-­neutral language.

5.Skt. upāya.

6.Ch. dao; Jp. dō.

7.mushin.

8.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, vol. 1, “Busshō [Buddha Nature],” ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2010), p. 243.

9.Ibid., p. 15.

10.shinshō.

11.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, “Genjōkōan [Actualizing the Fundamental Point],” p. 30.

12.Skt. anātman.

13.bukkōjō ji.

14.Skt. tathatā.

15.Skt. śūnyatā; Jp. kū.

16.Bodhidharma, “Wake-­up Sermon,” in The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, trans. Red Pine (New York: North Point Press, 1987), p. 41.

17.Bodhidharma, “Bloodstream Sermon,” in The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, p. 9.

18.Huang Po, “The Chün Chou Record,” in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind, trans. John Blofield (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 29.

19.Rinzai Gigen.

20.Bodhidharma, “Bloodstream Sermon,” pp. 18–19.

21.Huang Po, “The Chün Chou Record,” p. 59.

22.Ibid., pp. 34–35.

23.Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 110.

24.shushō-­ittō.

25.Bodhidharma, “Wake-­up Sermon,” p. 55.

26.uji.

27.Shushōgi, § 31.

N0TES TO CHAPTER 20

1.Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, vol. 1, ed. with annotation Mizuno Yaoko (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1990), 30; hereafter this four-­volume edition will be abbreviated as SBGZ followed by volume and page numbers. Although I will often use my own translations for this and other texts, I will also provide references to available English translations. In this case: The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, trans. Norman Waddell and Masao ABE (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 20, translation modified.

2.SBGZ 1:222; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2012), p. 579, translation modified.

3.My source for the original text of Fukanzazengi is Dōgen Zenji goroku, ed. Kagamishima Genryū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1990), pp. 170–85. In general I will adopt, with some modifications (such as “nonthinking” rather than “beyond thinking” for hi-­shiryō), the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku OKUMURA published in Dōgen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004), pp. 532–35, and reprinted in the present volume. Given the brevity of this text, I will not cite page numbers for each quotation.

4.SBGZ 1:18; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 13.

5.Dōgen’s earliest version of Fukanzazengi, which is no longer extant, probably dates from 1227 CE; the earliest surviving edition, “Tenpukubon,” written in Dōgen’s own hand, dates from 1233, and the “circulated text” or “Rufubon,” Dōgen’s final version and the one that has become the standard, was probably composed in 1242. The text that appears in the present book and the one commented on in the present essay is “Rufubon.” For a detailed study of the two extant versions of Fukanzazengi, a study which compares them not only to each other but also to the previous manuals of meditation on which Dōgen critically draws, see Carl Beilefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

6.On the sociological factors and ideological problems involved in the composition of Shushōgi, see Steven Heine, “Abbreviation or Aberration: The Role of the Shushōgi in Modern Sōtō Zen Buddhism,” in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, eds. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 169–92.

7.A noteworthy exception is a contemporary Japanese group of scholars of “Critical Buddhism,” who claim that nondiscursive practices of meditation play no essential role in Buddhism. They also claim that as Dōgen matured he came to wholly reject “original enlightenment thought” in his commitment to a “deep faith in karmic causality” and rational analysis thereof. See Jamie Hubbard and Paul Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), especially the chapter by Steven Heine. One of the main proponents of Critical Buddhism, Matsumoto Shirō, writes: “Simply put, I see zen [meditation] as synonymous with the cessation of conceptual thinking, its aim being to induce the suspension of thought. If this is true, and if we grant the obvious point that wisdom is the fruit of conceptual thought, then the only conclusion we are left with is that Zen thought is the negation or rejection of wisdom . . . if zen (Skt. dhyāna) means the cessation of conceptual thought, then Zen is a denial of Buddhism itself” (“The Meaning of ‘Zen’”; ibid., pp. 243–44). It is true that Zen — along with most if not all schools of Buddhism — does deny the purportedly “obvious point” that “wisdom is the fruit of conceptual thought” alone. Indeed, insofar as one’s fundamental attunement, that is to say, one’s basic attitudinal awareness of and dispositional comportment toward the world, together with one’s core intuitions about the nature of reality, contribute to the very formation and orientation of one’s conceptual, discursive thought, then preconceptual and nondiscursive practices such as zazen can and do make a profound contribution to what most people, both within and beyond the Buddhist tradition, understand by the word “wisdom.” Dōgen goes so far as to say: “The realm of Buddhas is utterly incomprehensible, not to be reached by the discriminative workings of the mind” (“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:20–21; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 15; translation slightly modified). In Fukanzazengi he tells us that, in the practice of zazen, we must “give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views.” He instructs us rather to “think of not-­thinking” and to do so ultimately by means of “nonthinking.” This nonthinking “cannot be understood by discriminative thinking,” it is “a standard prior to knowledge and views.” And yet, as we shall see, this nonthinking by no means inhibits discursive thinking; it is rather the formless “ocean” or “empty space” of enlightening awareness that enables the functioning of wisdom, which includes the proper formulation and application of perspectivally delimited forms of knowledge by means of discursive intellection. Nonthinking is not antithetical to the faculty of reason; it is the prerequisite for the proper use of this faculty. While the Critical Buddhists’ call for rational critique of past and present social injustices is surely commendable, a correct understanding of the practice of zazen in terms of what Dōgen means by nonthinking should see this practice as enabling, rather than impeding, such ethically motivated use of our human powers of discriminative intellection.

8.1231 CE.

9.jijuyū zammai.

10.As Waddell and Abe point out, what Dōgen means by “the samādhi of self-­enjoyment and employment” (jijuyū zammai) is not merely the counterpart of — much less is it opposed to — tajuyū, which refers to aiding others so that they too can experience the joy of awakening. “Here Dōgen uses the term jijuyū samādhi in an absolute sense, without distinguishing between it and tajuyū, with jijuyū being the basic source of tajuyū and including tajuyū in its own development. For Dōgen, the jijuyū samādhi is zazen, because zazen is a fundamental practice that includes both self-­awakening and the awakening of all beings in the universe” (The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 8; see also the translators’ comments in The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dōgen’s Bendōwa with Commentary by Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi, trans. Shohaku OKUMURA and Taigen Dan Leighton [Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 1997], p. 43). As Dōgen goes on to say in “Bendōwa,” jijuyū is a matter of “self-­enlightenment qua enlightening others” (SBGZ 1:18; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 13; see also the final epigraph to the present essay).

11.1234 CE.

12.1235–37 CE.

13.Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, compiled by Ejō, ed. Watsuji Tetsurō (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1982), pp. 30, 52, 65; A Primer of Sōtō Zen: A Translation of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, trans. Reihō MASUNAGA (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1971), pp. 16, 34, 44; translation modified.

14.Steven Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 204.

15.1242 CE.

16.1243 CE.

17.1243 CE.

18.1244 CE.

19.Dōgen, Dōgen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, trans. Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku OKUMURA, ed. with introduction Taigen Dan Leighton (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004).

20.A handy collection of many of these texts in English translation can be found in Zen Master Dogen, Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2004).

21.nembutsu.

22.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:15; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 11; translation modified.

23.Hōkyōki (Record from the Baoqing Era or Hōkyōki Period), in Takashi James Kodera, Dogen’s Formative Years in China: An Historical and Annotated Translation of the Hōkyō-­ki (Boulder: Prajna Press, 1980), p. 124, original on p. 236. Dōgen repeats Rujing’s instructions to “just sit” without engaging in other Buddhist practices in “Zanmai-­ō-­zanmai,” SBGZ 3:354; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 668.

24.See T. Griffith Foulk, “‘Just Sitting’? Dōgen’s Take on Zazen, Sutra Reading, and Other Conventional Buddhist Practices,” in Dōgen: Textual and Historical Studies, ed. Steven Heine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 75–106.

25.Hee-­Jin Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004), p. 58.

26.Shohaku OKUMURA, “Introduction to Bendōwa,” in The Wholehearted Way, p. 9.

27.shushō ittō.

28.hi-­shiryō.

29.Quoted (in Japanese) from Sansogyōgōki [The Record of the Deeds of the Three Ancestors] and Kenzeiki [The Record of Kenzei] in Arifuku Kōgaku, Dōgen no sekai [The World of Dōgen] (Osaka: Ōsaka Shoseki, 1985), p. 20.

30.dō.

31.Okumura, “Introduction to Bendōwa,” p. 12. Śākyamuni’s “attainment of enlightenment” is thus referred to as jōdō or “fulfillment of the Way.”

32.“Busshō,” SBGZ 1:73; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 61; translation modified.

33.Kim, Eihei Dōgen, p. 23.

34.Hōkyō­ki, in Kodera, Dogen’s Formative Years in China, p. 119, original on p. 228; translation modified. See also “Shinjingakudō,” SBGZ 1:134–35; cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 427, where jinen-­gedō is translated as “the view of spontaneous enlightenment.”

35.shō.

36.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:11; my translation. Cf. The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 9.

37.“Shinjingakudō,” SBGZ 1:127; my translation. Cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 422.

38.shikantaza.

39.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:20; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 14.

40.Hakuin Ekaku, “Zazenwasan,” in Zenshū nikka seiten [Daily Scriptures for the Zen Sect] (Kyoto: Baiyō Shoin, 1998), pp. 99–102.

41.shinshōhonshōjō.

42.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:34–36; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, pp. 22–23. Here, “the oneness of body and mind” in Japanese is shinjin-­ichinyo.

43.Akizuki Ryōmin Rōshi helpfully elucidates the deep affinities, as well as methodological differences, between Hakuin’s Rinzai Zen and Dōgen’s Sōtō Zen in his Zen Bukkyō to wa nanika [What Is Zen Buddhism?] (Tokyo: Hōzōkan, 1990), pp. 24, 35–39. See also Akizuki Ryōmin, Dōgen nyūmon [Introduction to Dōgen] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1970), pp. 164–82.

44.mumonkan.

45.shokan.

46.The term kenshō, “seeing [one’s own] nature,” is attributed to Bodhidharma; it appears in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Huineng), and it is frequently used by Hakuin and others in the Rinzai Zen tradition. Dōgen, however, rejects the term (see “Sansuikyō [Mountains and Waters Sutra],” SBGZ 2:188; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 156; and “Shizen Biku [Monk at the Fourth Stage of Meditation],” SBGZ 4:355; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 864), presumably insofar as it can be misunderstood to imply a duality between the seer and the seen, and thus an objectification of the Buddha Nature. Curiously, he does not have the same qualms about the term “seeing Buddha” (see “Kenbutsu [Seeing Buddha],” SBGZ 3:217–39; Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 596–608). Dōgen even claims that the Platform Sutra is a spurious text (though it is not clear to which edition he is referring). “From Dōgen’s standpoint,” Kim writes, “the activity of seeing was itself one’s own nature” (Eihei Dōgen, p. 57). Yet this sounds no different than the manner in which D. T. Suzuki explains the meaning of kenshō in the Platform Sutra: “the seeing with [Huineng] was self-­nature itself,” and so “this seeing into self-­nature is not an ordinary seeing, in which there is a duality of one who sees and that which is seen” (The Zen Doctrine of No-­Mind [London: Rider and Company, 1958], pp. 42, 79; see also ibid., pp. 24–26, 45).

47.shin.

48.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:21; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 15.

49.shōjō no shu.

50.honshō no myōshū.

51.John Daido Loori, “Yaoshan’s Non-­Thinking,” in The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza, ed. John Daido Loori (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2002), p. 136. See also Francis Dojun Cook’s insightful essay “The Importance of Faith,” in his How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2002). Along with D. T. Suzuki and others, Cook recognizes the profound resonances between the Zen experience of satori and Shin Buddhism’s experience of utter reliance on the “other-­power” of Amida Buddha; he even claims that “Dōgen’s Zen is not really the Buddhism of self power (jiriki), it is the Buddhism of other power (tariki)” (p. 24). And yet, in conjunction with the nonduality of self and other in jijuyū samādhi, it would be better to say that Dōgen is calling on us to awaken to a nondual “power” that is beneath the very opposition of self-­ and other-­power. See my “Naturalness in Zen and Shin Buddhism: Before and Beyond Self-­ and Other-­Power,” Contemporary Buddhism 15, no. 2 (July 2014): 433–47.

52.Zengakudaijiten (Tokyo: Daishūkan, 1985), p. 603.

53.ekōhenshō.

54.Jp. Rinzai.

55.The Record of Linji, trans. Ruth Fuller Sasaki, ed. Thomas Yūhō Kirchner (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), p. 155.
Note: “lack of faith in yourself” or “lack of self-confidence” (Ch. zixin-­buji; Jp. jishin-­fukyū).

56.Ch. xinxin; Jp. shinjin.

57.Ch. dachengqixin; Jp. daijōkishin.

58.See Yoshito S. Hakeda, The Awakening of Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 28–30.

59.mokushō.

60.kanna.

61.shiryō-­funbetsu.

62.Nishimura Eshin, Mumonkan [Wumenguan, The Gateless Barrier] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1994), pp. 21–23; Zenkei SHIBAYAMA, The Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2000), pp. 19–20, translation modified. It is important to point out that, while such “initial barrier” (shokan) kōans are crucial, insofar as it is by breaking through them that one first attains kenshō, they are but the first step of the extensive kōan curriculum in Rinzai Zen, a curriculum that includes “investigation of words” (gonsen) and other types of kōan that focus more on cultivating an experiential understanding of the “Dharma reason” (hōri) of Zen. G. Victor Sōgen Hori points out that the “first half of kōan training puts major emphasis on kyōgai [existential state of being and behaving] and a lesser emphasis on hōri, whereas the second half reverses these emphases” (“Kōan and Kenshō in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum,” in The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, eds. Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], p. 286). See also Victor Sōgen Hori, “The Steps of Kōan Practice,” in Zen Sand (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), pp. 16–29.

63.Hakuin, The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, trans. Philip B. Yampolsky(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 144.

64.daigijō.

65.daifunshi.

66.daishinkon.

67.shinjin datsuraku. There are, however, some modern scholars and Sōtō teachers who claim that the fourth Sōtō patriarch, Keizan, spuriously invented the story that Dōgen was “suddenly greatly awakened” upon hearing Rujing say “Studying Zen is the dropping off of body and mind” (The Record of Transmitting the Light: Zen Master Keizan’s Denkoroku, trans. Francis Dojun Cook [Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003], p. 254), and who argue that the reason why “Dōgen Zenji himself never wrote of a definitive enlightenment experience in any of his writings” is because he never had such an experience (Shohaku OKUMURA, Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen’s Shobogenzo [Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010], pp. 86–87). However, while it is indeed the case that, for Dōgen, “realization is a deep awareness of the fact that the existence of the self is not a personal possession of the self,” it is also the case that there can be decisive moments when one comes to this realization, when one awakens this awareness. Such moments would not be properly characterized as “some sudden and special psychological satori experience” (ibid., quoting Suzuki Kakuzen Rōshi), but indeed may be described as a sudden experience of “dropping off the body and mind,” or as “once, in sitting . . . immediately attaining an understanding of the Way” (Gakudō Yōjin-shū [Guidelines for Studying the Way]; see note 69 for full reference). Dōgen, after all, repeatedly affirms the traditional account of the Buddha attaining enlightenment upon seeing the morning star while sitting in zazen under the Bodhi Tree. “On this night the Tathāgata [Śākyamuni] completed true awakening. With effort and dropping away [body and mind], his eyes became clear.” “Right now,” Dōgen urges his disciples in another talk, “awaken the way and see the bright star” (Dōgen’s Extensive Record, pp. 451, 165; see also ibid., pp. 318–19). Also note Dōgen’s reference in Fukanzazengi to famous cases of “sudden enlightenment” when he speaks of “using the opportunity provided by a finger, a banner, a needle, or a mallet, and meeting realization with a whisk, a fist, a staff, or a shout.”

68.Among other places, in Hōkyōki (Record from the Baoqing Era), “Zazengi [Instructions for Zazen],” and Gakudō Yōjin-­shū (Guidelines for Studying the Way).

69.Dōgen, “Gakudō Yōjin-­shū (Guidelines for Studying the Way),” trans. Ed Brown and Kazuaki TANAHASHI, in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki TANAHASHI (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 42; translation slightly modified.

70.busshōkai.

71.Kajitani Sōnin, Yanagida Seizan, and Tsujimura Kōichi, eds., Shinjinmei, Shōdōka, Jūgyūzu, Zazengi (Tokyo: Chikuma, 1974), pp. 3–6.

72.See Case 33 of the Wumenguan (Jp. Mumonkan); The Gateless Barrier, p. 166.

73.shiryō.

74.shikaku.

75.goshaku.

76.“Genjōkōan,” SBGZ 1:55; “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” trans. Bret W. Davis, in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, eds. Jay L. Garfield and William Edelglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 257.

77.butsu-­kōjō.

78.Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 33.

79.Dōgen’s Extensive Record, p. 165.

80.See Case 7 of the Wumenguan (Jp. Mumonkan); The Gateless Barrier, p. 67.

81.tenzo. See “Instructions for the Tenzo [Tenzokyōkun],” in Dōgen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community: A Translation of Eihei Shingi, trans. Taigen Daniel Leighten and Shohaku OKUMURA (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 40–42.

82.shushō-­ittō or shushō-­ichinyo.

83.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:28–29; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, pp. 19–20; translation modified.

84.bonnō, the Japanese word for kleśa.

85.fuzenna no shushō.

86.The phrases “the Dharma gate of peace and bliss” and “undefiled practice-­enlightenment” are used in Fukanzazengi as well as in “Zazengi,” SBGZ 1:225; cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 580, which, however, translates fuzenna loosely as “undivided” rather than as “undefiled.” Dōgen adopts the phrase “undefiled practice-­enlightenment” from a dialogue between Huineng and Huairang. See Dōgen’s Extensive Record, pp. 328–29, 435–36, 575–76; and “Jishōzammai [Self-­Enlightening Samādhi],” SBGZ 3:385; cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 695.

87.taiho.

88.hō-­i.

89.“Genjōkōan,” SBGZ 1:60; “The Presencing of Truth,” p. 259.

90.Ch. wuwei; Jp. mu-­i.

91.The Record of Linji, p. 143. According to Nishitani Keiji, “there is not the slightest difference between the fundamental spirit of this saying of Linji and that of Dōgen’s ‘oneness of practice and enlightenment.’” Nishitani Keiji, Shōbōgenzō kōwa [Lectures on Shōbōgenzō], vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1987), pp. 69–70.

92.jinen-­gedō.

93.“Zazenshin,” SBGZ 1:233; my translation. Cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 306.

94.“Kokyō,” SBGZ 2:43; my translation. Cf. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 220–21.

95.“Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:29; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 20; translation modified. The ontology (or kenology) implied in Dōgen’s thought of the nonduality of practice and enlightenment should not be misunderstood either in terms of a metaphysical two-­world theory or in terms of an anti-­metaphysical doctrine of sheer immanence, be the latter a reductive positivism or a naturalistic pantheism. Abe endeavors to articulate this subtle yet crucial issue as follows: “Dōgen’s view of the oneness of practice and attainment . . . indicates a reversible identity, in which an absolute irreversibility between attainment and practice, the Buddha Nature and becoming a Buddha, can be reversed by virtue of the nonsubstantiality of attainment and the emptiness of the Buddha Nature. This point must not be overlooked. What is involved here is a reversible identity that is always inseparably connected with the aspect of irreversibility. . . . This means that Dōgen, and all of us, are always standing at the intersection of the temporal-­spatial horizontal dimension and the transtemporal vertical dimension insofar as we awaken to the oneness of practice and attainment” (Masao ABE, A Study of Dōgen: His Philosophy and Religion, ed. Steven Heine (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 30.

96.igi soku buppō, sahō kore shūshi. See Ikkō Narasaki Rōshi’s foreword to Dōgen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community, p. x.

97.Case 1 of Biyanlu (Jp. Hekiganroku); The Blue Cliff Record, trans. Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1992), p. 1; translation modified.

98.Case 19 of Wumenguan (Jp. Mumonkan); The Gateless Barrier, p. 140; translation modified.

99.chōshin.

100.chōsoku.

101.chōshin.

102.Elsewhere Dōgen does relate the following: “My late teacher Tiantong [Rujing] said, ‘Breath enters and reaches the tanden, and yet there is no place from which it comes. Therefore it is neither long nor short. Breath emerges from the tanden, and yet there is nowhere it goes. Therefore it is neither short nor long’” (Dōgen’s Extensive Record, p. 349).

103.susokukan.

104.zuisokukan.

105.shikantaza.

106.kanna.

107.See Kim, Eihei Dōgen, esp. chapter 3; Hee-­Jin Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); and Steven Heine, Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).

108.kattō.

109.See especially the “Kattō [Entangling Vines]” and “Dōtoku [Expressive Attainment of the Way]” fascicles of Shōbōgenzō.

110.watō.

111.Dōgen’s Extensive Record, pp. 327–28, 466–67.

112.“Zazenshin,” SBGZ 1:226; translation adopted, with some slight modifications, from Carl Beilefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 188–89.

113.Ch. siliang.

114.susokukan.

115.zenjō.

116.Shunryu SUZUKI, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), p. 128; see also ibid., pp. 34–36; Loori, “Yaoshan’s Non-­Thinking,” p. 138; Kosho Uchiyama, “The Tenzo Kyokun and Shikantaza,” in Loori, The Art of Just Sitting, pp. 60–61; and Hakuyu Taizan MAEZUMI, “Commentary on Fukanzazengi,” in ibid., pp. 82, 85.

117.Loori, “Yaoshan’s Non-­Thinking,” p. 141.

118.fushiryō.

119.Shunryu SUZUKI instructs us: “do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself.” Yet he also goes on to say that this “letting” requires a peculiar kind of “effort,” an effort that ceases to be “my effort” and simply becomes a “pure effort” (Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, p. 34). This can be understood as describing the transition, or backward step, from the still dualistic effort of “thinking of not-­thinking” to the “pure effort” of “nonthinking.” The pure effort of nonthinking can then freely take this or that form of thinking or not-­thinking, as the occasion demands.

120.shōfunbetsu.

121.Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking, p. 84.

122.shōshiryō; shōshiyui.

123.“Sanjūshichihon Bodaibunpō,” SBGZ 3:294.

124.The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, trans. Philip B. Yampolsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 135.

125.Case 19 of the Wumenguan (Jp. Mumonkan); The Gateless Barrier, p. 140.

126.“Genjōkōan,” SBGZ 1:54; “The Presencing of Truth,” p. 256.

127.Case 1 of Biyanlu (Jp. Hekiganroku); The Blue Cliff Record, p. 1.
Note: “I don’t know” or “not knowing” (Ch. bushi; Jp. fushiki).

128.In Chinese and Japanese, “heart” and “mind” are written with the same character (Ch. xin; Jp. shin or kokoro). In other words, these languages do not dichotomize the seat of the intellect and the seat of the emotions, suggesting that a truly open mind entails an open heart, and vice versa.

129.Taigen Dan Leighton writes: “The Zen monastic community that Dōgen depicts and encourages in the Eihei Shingi cannot be understood except as the expression of a harmonious lifestyle based on and emerging from the experience of zazen. Throughout his career, Dōgen advocated this nondualistic, objectless meditation practice, known as ‘just sitting,’ which developed from the ‘serene illumination’ meditation elaborated by Hongzhi Zhengjue in China in the previous century” (Introduction to Dōgen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community, 16). While discursive thinking and the study of texts are not engaged in during the practice of “just sitting” in the Monk’s Hall (sōdō), Dōgen’s conception of the monastery also includes an adjacent Study Hall (shuryō), wherein each monk is assigned a desk. In “Shuryō Shingi [Regulations for the Study Hall],” Dōgen writes: “In the study hall, read the Mahāyāna sutras and also the sayings of our ancestors, and naturally accord with the instructions of our tradition to illuminate the mind with the ancient teachings” (ibid., p. 109). Dōgen’s conception of Zen practice thus involves commuting between zazen and the study of texts (along with other activities). Such a practice of commuting between zazen on the one hand and textual study/discursive thinking on the other has been taken up in modern times by philosopher-­practitioners such as Nishitani Keiji, who described his life as a back and forth movement of “sitting [in meditation], then thinking; thinking, then sitting” (see Horio Tsutomu, “Nishitani’s Philosophy: The Later Period,” Zen Buddhism Today 14 [1997]: 22).

130.genjō kōan.

131.For an in-­depth study of Dōgen’s use of these metaphors, see Arifuku Kōgaku, “Shōbōgenzō” ni shitashimu: Dōgen no shizen shisō [Getting to Know Shōbōgenzō: Dōgen’s Thought of Nature] (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1991), chapters 4, 8, and 9.

132.On the various interrelated senses of “emptiness” in Zen, see Bret W. Davis, “Forms of Emptiness in Zen,” in A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, ed. Steven Emmanuel (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), pp. 190–213.

133.Translated by Paul Swanson in “Original Enlightenment Debates,” in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, eds. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), p. 93. For how this idea gets taken up by other Zen figures, see section two of my “Forms of Emptiness in Zen.”

134.“Kokū,” SBGZ 3:413; cf. The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 719–20.

135.“Kokyō,” SBGZ 2:11; The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 204; translation modified.

136.Harada Sogaku, Fukanzazengi kōwa [Lectures on Fukanzazengi] (Tokyo: Daizō shuppan, 1982), pp. 91–92.

137.“Butsukōjōji [Going Beyond Buddha],” SBGZ 2:140; Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 208.

138.zenki.

139.mufunbetsu no funbetsu.

140.“Busshō,” SBGZ 1:80; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, p. 67; translation modified.

141.“Kai-­in Zammai,” SBGZ 1:253; my translation; The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 380.

142.See “Kokyō,” SBGZ 2:21–30; The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 209–14.

143.uji.

144.Dōgen is a nondualist, rather than either an idealist or a materialist. Thus, on the one hand, he says that “the mind-­nature . . . embraces the entire universe. . . . All dharmas . . . are alike in being this one Mind”; “Bendōwa,” SBGZ 1:35; The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, pp. 22–23; see also “Sangai-­yuishin [The Three Worlds Are Only Mind],” SBGZ 2:406–16; The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 487–92. On the other hand, he affirms that “the entire earth [jindaichi] is the true human body [shinjitsu-­nintai]” (“Yuibutsu-­yobutsu [Only Buddha and Buddha],” SBGZ 4:455; The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, p. 878). The “Shinjin Gakudō [Study of the Way with the Body and Mind]” fascicle of Shōbōgenzō begins by saying: “The Study of the Buddha Way can be provisionally approached in two manners: what is called study with the mind and what is called study with the body.” Yet these two paths converge insofar as, on the one hand, one discovers that “mountains and rivers, the great earth, the sun, moon and stars are the mind . . . walls, tiles, and pebbles are the mind”; and, on the other hand, one realizes that “the whole world in all ten directions is this true human body” (SBGZ 1:127–34; my translation; cf. The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, pp. 423–26).

145.See Bret W. Davis, “The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism,” in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, eds. Jay L. Garfield and William Edelglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 348–60.