#145. THE KING IN THE BURNING HOUSE. In the twelfth century in Japan, a civil war took place between the two most powerful ruling clans, the Taira and the Minamoto; the Minamoto clan won. Its reverberations weakened the political connections of the more powerful Buddhist sects, and other schools began to splinter off and consolidate: the Tendai, the Pure Land sects, Zen. An illegitimate scion of the Minamoto clan with the monastic name of Dōgen Eihei began his studies at Mount Hiei, a Tendai monastery, the Tendai being a scholastically-inclined sect interested in systematizing the Buddhist scriptural teachings, but which included Pure Land devotional practice, Zen meditation, esoteric practices and study of the Buddhist precepts. Dōgen left the monastery, dissatisfied with its teachings, and underwent the perilous passage from Japan to China, China being seen as the intellectual homeland through which Buddhism passed from India to Japan. Dissatisfied as well with koan practice, he met the teacher Rujing, of the Caodong sect, and here found the teacher that, he felt, settled his “quest for the great matter.” Returning some five years or so later to Japan, Dōgen settled into an abandoned monastery near Uji, and from there into Eihei-ji, north of Kyoto, and became not only the most respected master of Sōtō Zen (the Japanese name for the Caodong sect) but one of the most revered of all Buddhist teachers. He was a voluminous writer and has been called Japan’s greatest philosopher—although that term, as so often with Western terms applied to Eastern practice, is a few degrees off trim.
Dōgen’s masterwork is a collection of talks, the Shōbō Genzō or “Dharma Treasury of the True Eye.” Reading the ten or dozen pages of the Shōbō Genzō’s chapters is an extraordinary act of suspense: the opening metaphors are introduced, and we are tugged helplessly along, like Alice behind the White Queen. This is not in pursuit of a systematic philosophy or set of ideas: phrases and images appear, are repeated, varied, rung changes on, smashed, recombined and reillumined; logic is reversed, reversed again, negated, spun and reconstructed, in a method very like that of the Lankavatara Sutra, a late Yogacara scripture. The chapters are dense, challenging reading—Robert Aitken said that “Dōgen wrote from the outermost edge of human communication”—best tackled one at a time. Reading them reminded me of what D.J. Enright wrote of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas: “The chapters are so weighty, their specific gravity is so high, that the reader is positively appreciative of their brevity. It is not that he fails to read on, but he does experience a relief analogous to putting down one solid object before picking up the next.” The other side of the suspense in reading Dōgen is our wonderment at his invention and vision, our fear that he will not be able to sustain it. The fear proves illusory: no Zen teacher, and few religious teachers I know of, are so inexhaustibly fecund, so supplied to overflowing with things to tell us.
He wrote in Japanese, the vernacular to the time’s classical Chinese. His images, though he speaks with reverence and affection of his teaching ancestors, are of brilliance as well as calm: the circle of the full moon. Early in his Tendai training, Dōgen became absorbed in the question of the nature of the enlightened being: “As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all the ages—undoubtedly in the possession of enlightenment—find it necessary to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice?” From this preoccupation everything in Dōgen’s practice—from the metaphysics of the Shōbō Genzō to the particular notions of time/being to the practice of the shikantaza form of meditation—comes forth and hangs together. He spoke of the oneness of practice/enlightenment; Gary Snyder compared it to the water-wheel, which lifts with one basket while it pours off from another. It informs to the smallest nuance the language Dōgen uses and the substance of his talks. Every detail of Zen practice, from cleansing the body and caring for the monastic robe—one of his most famous talks is “Instructions on Kitchen Work”—to the most abstruse and challenging notions, is included and is all of a piece, its goal the sacralization of every part of life: “the blossoming of the entire world.” Hence Dōgen’s terse, frequent exhortations: “Endeavour thoroughly.” “This could be the last day of your life.” “Investigate these words.”
But from the Prajnaparamita texts onward, Buddhism harbored the idea/experience that the division between the loftiest wisdom, nirvana, and the sorrows and difficulties of life as we live it, samsara, is itself illusory. Dōgen insists, time and again, that there is nothing to be acquired or achieved. The paradoxical tone of this perception is the great matter of Dōgen’s language, imbedded and embodied in every sentence of his talks. He speaks, more convincingly than perhaps any other Buddhist teacher, from the far side of wisdom, but insists that that wisdom is our own. Perhaps the closest we have come in modern times is Shunryū Suzuki, the modest pilgrim monk who helped Soto Zen find a lodging in postwar American culture; he was Dōgen’s spiritual descendant and, like Dōgen, he emphasized the unity of practice and everyday living. It will always be, for most of us, the most difficult lesson to learn. “Who is aware the King of Dharma abides in the burning house?”
There are many selections and editions of Dōgen’s work: for a beginning selection, Moon in a Dewdrop, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi (North Point Press, 1995) is excellent. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbō Genzō, again edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi (Shambhala, 2010) is a complete version and quite beyond praise: excellent translations by a team of thirty-three translators, beautifully edited to blend into a single voice, handsomely printed and bound—a reminder that we are living in a great, perhaps unparalleled period of literary translation. His other major collection of short dharma talks and poems is available as Dōgen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shōhaku Okumura (Wisdom Publications, 1995); the translation here is excellent as well, and the annotations are particularly helpful, identifying references that would otherwise seem merely mysterious to modern readers but are taken from the familiar lore of Zen. From there there is a library of commentary and explication in English—Dogen has not been neglected. Investigate his words thoroughly.
P.S. 2024: I have just recently discovered and finished reading Dogen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki: The New Annotated Edition, also including Dogen’s Waka Poetry with Commentary, translated and introduced by Shōhaku Okumura (Wisdom Publications, 2022), which is an entirely separate work from the Shōbō Genzō, discussed above. This collection of short talks is more simply exhortatory, with fewer of the mind-spinning flights characteristics of the Shōbō Genzō and the Eihei Kōroku. What is wonderful in it is how moving and convincing Dōgen’s exhortations are, how much they do genuinely push us to further our practice. The Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, with its directness, charm and emotional appeal, might provide a simpler, less forbidding first step into Dōgen’s mind and thought—as much as anything can prepare you for the dazzlements of Dōgen’s other work.
There can be a certain rigidity in Dōgen, with his insistence on Buddhism purely as a practice for “home-leavers,” the monks who have left behind family and society; anything else, to Dōgen, is hardly Buddhism at all, reminding us that Buddhism did first evolve as a specifically monastic practice. (It was one of the challenges that faced Shunryū Suzuki as he attempted to carry Zen practice to America, and he evolved an approach in which the line between monastic and lay person was more fluid.) And Dōgen’s belief in the urgency of Buddhist practice may shake our secular minds a bit: when he suggests that it might (emphasis on the might: he is not dogmatic) be more important for one of his students to seek out teachers in China than to care for his elderly mother, we may balk a bit. This put me in mind of the passage in Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, discussing “the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.” Genuine questions. Still, Dōgen’s words, that render so beautifully what must have been the depth and authority in Dōgen’s presence, catch at us throughout; the exhortation, the encouragement, take hold.
The second half of the book is Dōgen’s waka poetry, with texts, translations and commentary. Writing verse was then seen by monastics as a somewhat worldly, frivolous pursuit, but it was also deeply imbedded in the Japanese definition of what it was to be an educated and civilized person—one of those itchy little contradictions that has kept Japanese civilization awake at night for centuries. Dōgen clearly enjoyed writing poetry—and he was good at it—and clearly felt he shouldn’t—and kept on doing it. Personally, I find this funny and endearing more than just contradictory. And the good news is that the poems are actually poems, not just versified teaching—readable and accessible in English despite the much-bemoaned difficulties of translating from the Japanese. Okumura’s commentary emphasizes the Buddhist content inherent in them, but you can take as much of that as you want; the poems themselves have some of that speedy, hit-and-run quality of some of the great Zen discourses. They knock you down and are out the window before you hit the floor.
Written by Dōgen at the end of his life:
I wasn’t sure if I could expect to see autumn again
gratefully I view tonight’s full moon
How is it possible to sleep?
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