Dōgen

Who they were

Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253) founded the Sōtō school of Japanese Zen and wrote the Shōbōgenzō, one of the most demanding and original works of philosophy produced in East Asia.

He is read now well beyond Buddhism — by philosophers of time, of language and of self — which is unusual for a thirteenth-century monastic writer.

Where they came from

He was born into the aristocracy and orphaned early; his mother died when he was around seven. Tradition holds that watching the incense smoke rise at her funeral gave him his first direct sense of impermanence, and set him on his course. He was ordained at Mount Hiei, the great Tendai monastery, in his early teens.

There he ran into the question that defined him. Tendai doctrine taught original enlightenment — that all beings are already, inherently, buddha. If that is true, Dōgen asked, why did the buddhas and patriarchs practise? Why should anyone sit? If we already have it, practice is unnecessary; if practice is necessary, we do not already have it.

Nobody on Mount Hiei could answer him. He went to China in 1223 and studied under Rujing at Mount Tiantong, where he had the experience he described as shinjin datsuraku — body and mind dropping away.

He returned in 1227 and eventually founded Eiheiji in the mountains of Echizen, deliberately away from the capital and its politics, in 1244. He died at fifty-three.

What they taught

Practice-realisation. His answer to his own question is that the question assumes practice is a means to enlightenment, and it is not. Practice and realisation are one thing. Zazen is not something you do in order to become a buddha; sitting is the activity of buddha, performed. There is nothing to attain because there is no gap between the doing and the having.

This is not a consolation prize. It reorganises everything: there is no progress to measure, no state to acquire, nothing to be got somewhere else or later.

Shikantaza — "just sitting". No object, no technique, no kōan, no goal. Sitting with the whole of oneself, without adding anything to it.

Being-time. The Uji fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō argues that time is not a container in which things exist but is identical with existence. There is no time apart from beings and no being apart from time; each moment is complete rather than a step toward another. It is the passage most often taken up by contemporary philosophers, and it is genuinely difficult.

The famous lines, from Genjōkōan: to study the Buddha way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualised by the ten thousand things.

His practical writing is equally characteristic. Tenzo Kyōkun, instructions for the monastery cook, treats preparing food with complete attention as identical in kind to sitting — because on his view there is no lesser activity to relegate it to.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the philosophical work is serious and has been taken seriously outside Buddhist studies. The Kyoto School — Nishida, Nishitani — drew on him substantially, and Western philosophers of time and of self engage with Uji on its own terms.

We can say he was relatively marginal for centuries. Sōtō became a large institution, but Dōgen's own writings were not widely read within it for a long period, and his elevation to a major philosophical figure is substantially a twentieth-century event.

We can say his position resists the framing this site usually applies. Asking whether shikantaza "works" imports the means-and-ends structure Dōgen spent his life dismantling. That does not exempt it from examination, but it does mean the ordinary question lands oddly, and honest reporting has to say so.

We cannot say what dropping off body and mind refers to. Dōgen wrote a great deal and never explained it in terms that resolve into anything else — which, on his own account, is what one would expect.

Further reading

• Shōbōgenzō, in Kazuaki Tanahashi's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (2010) — the fullest English edition. Start with Genjōkōan, not at the beginning.
• Fukanzazengi — two pages, his universal instructions for zazen.
• Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (1975) — the standard study.