Of all the three great sects of Zen in Japan, the Soto school is perhaps the best-known and most inclusive, admitting to its ranks lay people and women in addition to monks. It’s one of the most widely practiced forms of Buddhism in Japan, where there are reportedly nearly fourteen thousand temples dedicated to it. Soto is also very popular in North America; in 1966 the Soto Zen Buddhist Association was founded by Japanese and American teachers, a response to a great and growing interest outside Japan in the practices of this school.
The most famous of Soto teachers is the founder of the movement, the Japanese master Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), who finds in Steven Heine an ideal biographer and pre-eminent explicatorHeine has written a number of books on Dogen and Zen Buddhism, and in this one he has, as the back cover has it, “condensed decades of scholarship into this precise, concise, and remarkably engaging read,” and is a fine addition to Shambhala’s excellent series Lives of the Masters.
Dogen had the fortune (or misfortune) to have lived in Japan during interesting times. “Japanese society,” Heine explains, “transitioned swiftly from the long-standing power of the aristocracy to the dominance of the samurai,” Dogen was a member of the former, with family ties to the imperial family as well as to the powerful Minamoto and Fujiwara clans, all of which were gradually yielding real power to the samurai class. There was little doubt of Dogen’s aristocratic lineage; he was distantly related to the reigining emperor, Go-Fukakusa (reigned 1246-1260), and when his father died in 1202 he was adopted by his uncle, a member of the Minamoto family. Dogen’s mother Ishi was a Fujiwara; she encouraged Dogen to study both Chinese and Japanese literature as well as philosophy and religion, and as a result Dogen became well-versed in both Daoism and Confucianism. “Dogen frequently expresses views that are borrowed from, but provide a creative refashioning of, Chinese classical philosophy,” Heine tells us. From his literary studies he also came to understand particularly the importance of language, which he believed “must play a crucial role in conveying the experience of awakening,” and that because learners don’t all learn at the same speed, “there is never only one connotation indicated by a set of words.” This open-endedness is a significant part of Soto Zen’s appeal.
It’s reported that he took orders at the age of twelve, joining the Tendai sect of Buddhism headquartered at Mount Hiei. It was there that he started to experience religious doubts; was Tendai doctrine, which had dominated in Japan since the 9th century, sound, and did it really address the question of salvation? Young Dogen began asking uncomfortable questions about the nature of original enlightenment, which apparently were not taken seriously by the monks, and in 1223, becoming more and more spiritually frustrated, he decided to embark on a pilgrimage to China, the country of origin for Chan Buddhism, from which Zen is derived. In China, Dogen encountered three people who were to have a significant effect on the way he lived and taught: an unnamed cook (I won’t spoil the story here) and the two Buddhist masters, Myozen (1184-1225), who was one of his travelling companions (he unfortunately died in China), and Tiāntóng Rujing (1163-1228). Dogen stayed in China for four years, and the rest, we may say, was history.
The encounter with Rujing was vitally important for Dogen. In Jinshang, he had seen an apparition of a sage, which told him he needed to go to Mount Tiāntóng, “because, in the entire land, the only one fully prepared to instruct you just became the new abbot there.” When Dogen met Rujing he was surprised to find that the Chinese master didn’t believe that meditation should have a plan or purpose, and on top of that Rujing went ahead and “broke the spearpoint” of Dogen’s self-assured and somewhat arrogant attitude, that is, he “deliberately caused a breakdown of the young trainee’s ego.”
This was the basis for Dogen’s emphasis on meditation as the way to see things as they are, just sitting without thinking. He kept notes of his conversations with Rujing, which he wrote up in a book now known as Private Conversations. Rujing even suggested that Dogen join up with him, but Dogen felt that this wouldn’t be a good idea, because, as he explained, “I am from a distant land,” and asked, “would there not be trouble from skeptics within some of the major monasteries?” Rujing then offered the dharma transmission to Dogen, an important step, formally recognising him as a successor in a lineage which could trace itself back to the Buddha himself.
What was perhaps just as important as establishing a lineage, however, was that under Rujing’s direction Dogen learned to “cast off” the distinction between body and mind, which was the way to see things as they actually are. “He spontaneously experienced the shedding of hindrances, the surpassing of all attachments and impediments,” Heine explains, which enabled him “to gain insight into the dharma,” and this casting-off became one of the fundamental tenets of Dogen’s own teachings. Rujing, according to a later biographer, saw the monk next to Dogen nodding off in a meditation session, and reproached him, saying that “Studying Zen is a matter of casting off body-mind.” He went on to ask the monk “why are you engaged in single-minded slumber, rather than single-minded meditative sitting?” Dogen heard this, and “suddenly had a great awakening.” Zazen would become the heart of Dogen’s Soto practice.
Dogen was determined to establish a new school of meditation in Kyoto based on his Chinese experience as soon as he got back to Japan. Heine discusses in detail how Dogen set up his assembly and the difficulties he had in doing so. Between 1233 and 1237 he succeeded in founding the Koshoji temple in Fukakusa, Kyoto (it was later moved to the Uji area) and started to introduce the practices he had learned in China as well as writing several books, including forty chapters of his complex masterpiece The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, or Shōbōgenzō (1231-53). He was also lecturing informally and writing poetry. By the early 1240s, his school was doing well and his temple had, through the donations of wealthy patrons, expanded to the seven-hall construction found in Chinese Zen buildings.
Dogen was, of course, the abbot, and there was a hierarchy of monks under his direction, as clerical discipline was very important to him. Every activity in the temple down to cooking, cleaning lavatories and other seemingly mundane everyday chores, was linked to understanding karmic causality, namely that whatever one does has an effect, just as Dogen had learned from his Chinese teachers.
Other Buddhist groups weren’t too happy with Dogen’s success, and 1243 he moved to a more secluded location at Daibutsuji (its name was later changed to Eiheiji) to avoid further problems with funding and patronage caused by politics or rival Buddhist factions and their supporters. He would remain there, apart from a six-month sojourn in Kamakura, until his death in 1253.
Dogen is considered the “original Zen teacher” in Japan, and Heine’s book takes us through the process by which he got there. As with so many other Buddhist masters, Dogen’s life story is often colored by the myths and legends perpetrated by oral traditions or recorded by his medieval biographers, and Heine has to navigate through a great deal of these. The problem is that it’s through the eyes of these writers that people saw Dogen, but Heine manages to offer readers insight into the actual life lived by his subject. He states clearly, moreover, that “many of the main elements of the traditional narrative seem to be valid,” and that “tales about Dogen contribute to the powerful spiritual symbolism of the overall narrative, even if those reports cannot be verified.”
In any event, Heine succeeds in his main objective, “to make the narrative as clear as possible.” We can see Dogen in context and move on to understanding why he is so well-regarded in our own times. It’s his holistic philosophy, his idea that all beings are one, which appeals to thinkers today in every realm of human activity from ecology to social justice. These lines by Giun (1253-1333), a successor of Dogen at Eiheiji who wrote a verse-commentary on the Shōbōgenzō, clearly show Dogen’s belief that “truth is readily apparent in all phenomena”:
Do not overlook what is right in front of you,
Endless spring appears with the early plum blossoms.
By using just a single word you enter the open gate,
Nine oxen pulling with all their might cannot lead you astray.
You won’t see the truth if you can only see disconnected phenomena in front of you; Heine explains, “Giun’s comment suggests that spring is not the abstraction of a date on the calendar … it exists in and through concrete particulars.” Here, those would be the “early” blossoms.
Dogen himself “strongly encouraged creative expressions”, because they could clarify obfuscation with simpler language; remembering that plum blossoms can appear whenever they like reminds readers that time is a human construct—take it away and you see things as they are. Heine explains that the oxen, which are stubborn beasts, symbolize, says Heine, “selfish desires and attachments that need to be tamed and controlled” as they pull us in the opposite direction. Heine stresses the value of commentaries such as Giun’s (he has edited a volume of them), as many of Dogen’s writings “display an inimitable and sometimes impenetrable eloquence,” and offer a multiplicity of approaches to understanding the dharma.
Heine ends with a detailed section on Dogen’s legacy, about which he says:
Dogen has come to be seen as a religious figure able to help both monastics and lay people find peace of mind through harmonious existence within the complex and deeply unsettled circumstances of modern society.
It’s Dogen’s take on meditation, in the end, that is the core of Soto Zen, because it is, for him, the only way to embark on the road to peace of mind. He consistently taught that meditation “was always, without exception, the one true training technique that was used by all Buddhists.” For him, meditation isn’t just an exercise, but a way of understanding the interconnectedness of all things and was something one should do every day.
Heine quotes an essay Dogen wrote just after his return from China, which he says we can take as “a manifesto for the practice of just sitting,” in which he argues that if Buddha-nature is in every sentient being, “why must people develop the aspiration for awakening and vigorously engage in austerities to realize this truth?” Thus, all that was really needed for meditation was “just sitting”, which Dogen said was “the gateway of truth to total liberation”.
There is much more in this book than a review such as this can discuss. More than just a biographical introduction to an important thinker, Heine gives us detailed analyses of Dogen’s major works, provides some original translations of lesser-known writings as well as devoting a whole chapter to them, and situates Dogen in the modern Buddhist world. He does this with wit, consummate scholarship, and a very accessible style which will definitely persuade readers into further examination of this remarkable man’s teachings. As Dogen says, “To study the way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self.”
John Butler recently retired as Associate Professor of Humanities at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba, Canada, and has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria and Japan. He specializes in early modern travel-literature (especially Asian travel) and seventeenth-century intellectual history. His books include an edition of Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels in Africa, Persia and Asia the Great (2012) and most recently an edition of Sir Paul Rycaut's Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667) and a book of essays, Off the Beaten Track: Essays on Unknown Travel Writers.