Dōgen

Dōgen (1200–53). Also Dōgen Zenji or Dōgen Kigen, founder of the Sōtō school of Japanese zen, and one of Japan's most profound and original thinkers. He originally joined the Tendai school on Mt. Hiei, but became disillusioned and left to study Zen with Eisai shortly before the latter's death. With questions still unanswered, he decided to study in China, where he gained insight about the application of the enlightened mind to everyday life from an old monastery cook, and finally attained enlightenment (bodhi; satori) in 1225 under the Chinese master Ju-ching (1163–1268) at the Ching-te Temple on Mt. T'ien-t'ung. Ju-ching was a master in the Ts'ao-tung school, so when Dōgen established his own line of Zen teachings in Japan, he named it after this school, using the Japanese pronunciation Sōtō. Returning to Japan in 1227, Dōgen worked in and around the capital, but the threat of violence from the sōhei of Mt. Hiei and the competition from another Zen monk, Enni Ben'en, whose temple next to his offered more of the esoteric services patronized by aristocrats, impelled him to leave the capital and move to the remote mountains of Echizen, where he founded the Eiheiji, or ‘Temple of Eternal Peace’. He lived there quietly for the remainder of his days, devoting himself to teaching his disciples and writing the essays that would form his major work, the Shōbō-genzō, or ‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye’. After his death, his disciples published a record of his teachings entitled Shōbō-genzō Zuimonki.

The problem that vexed Dōgen as a young monk was: if Buddha-nature is perfect and complete in all beings, then why did the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas practise so assiduously? The answer that he developed while in China identified practice as a way of manifesting one's Buddhahood rather than a means of attaining it. Based on this, he taught shikan taza, commonly translated as ‘just sitting’. This meant that, rather than working on kōans or engaging in other practices intended to trigger enlightenment, Dōgen simply had his disciples sit with no goal in mind other than to enjoy the enlightenment they had already from the beginning. In the Shōbō-genzō, Dōgen also turned his mind to philosophical problems of an extremely speculative nature, such as the relation of time to existence, and the nature of change and stability in the world. In keeping with his discovery that beings already inherently possess the goal of Buddhahood just in being what they are, he postulated a completely immanent transcendent. That is to say, he identified the instability and transience of phenomena as the highest truth and unchanging being; he could find no further transcendent beyond these phenomena themselves. His writings, rediscovered in the 20th century, seem to presage developments in modern Western philosophy, sparking a renewed interest in and study of his work.