Dogen by Steven Heine

Author:Steven Heine [Heine, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2021-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Literature and Legacy

Dogen has a clear and direct message that was consistent throughout his career.

Dogen’s writing is difficult to decipher and underwent dramatic shifts in style and content.

Dogen has long been highly regarded by Soto Zen practitioners for an outlook reflecting solicitous quietude and supreme silence as enacted through the sustained practice of just-sitting meditation. This core method and the mindset it fosters serves as the basis for undertaking diverse monastic activities, such as cleaning, cooking, and other daily chores, as well as performing the Buddhist rites of adhering to precepts, donning robes, or reciting sutras. For cultivating these kinds of meditative and ritualistic behaviors, the study of the founder’s texts may seem an unnecessary distraction.

Since the early twentieth century, however, Dogen has become renowned among worldwide enthusiasts of mysticism and comparative philosophy of religion mainly for his remarkable literary accomplishments. These works display an inimitable and sometimes impenetrable eloquence. They creatively convey the multiple meanings of the dharma based on profound musings regarding the topics of epistemology, hermeneutics, ethics, and metaphysics as they pertain to the rigors and routines of Zen practice. For many readers, the ideas expressed by Dogen can be further applied to a range of contemporary issues concerning self-awareness, rhetorical innovation, environmental protection, and social inequalities derived from discrimination or gender disparities.

Despite the fact that their value is well recognized today, over the centuries Dogen’s works were sometimes neglected outside of a small circle of the most advanced and dedicated sectarian supporters—those capable of comprehending his dense, logic-defying prose and poetic constructions. Even for them, it took dedication to grasp Dogen’s obscure allusions and imaginative discursive flourishes, which often combine Japanese and Chinese syntax in ways that flout grammatical rules, upend intellectual conventions, and confound or reorient long-standing sacred customs. Less sophisticated readers were cautioned not to attempt to approach the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye until they were deemed ready by their teachers, who would first steer them toward others of Dogen’s works that were considered more appropriate for entry-level trainees. This pattern recalls the strictures of the Kabbalistic tradition that advises students not to begin high-level studies until at least the age of forty.

Dogen’s writings, most of which have now been translated at least once, with several of the more popular texts featured in numerous renderings in English and several other languages, are many and varied. They consistently demonstrate his ingenious ability as a wordsmith, who in many ways created a hybrid language. Even in Japanese, Dogen can best be studied today through paraphrased commentaries referred to as modern translations (gendaiyaku), much like the way Chaucer’s Middle English is made accessible in contemporary editions. The works of Dogen show how he sought to turn nearly every situation and perspective, whether special and ritualized or mundane and fleeting, into a grand opportunity for disclosing Zen insight. In that manner, he explored diverse means of conveying the absolute truth of the here-and-now realization of the universality and uniformity of buddha-nature. This unity is experienced

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