A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

A later, highly significant master, whose name looms large in Zen history, is the aristocratic priest, Dogen (1200-1253), renowned for introducing the Soto Zen school into Japan, but whose greatest achievement, paradoxically, is in the realm of words, his monumental collection of essays, the Shobogenzo, or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.

Dogen was an extremely well-read man and something of an infant prodigy. By the age of seven he had devoured the major Confucian classics, and by nine, the complex psychological literature of Southern Buddhism. Unlike the T’ang masters, who revelled in their anti-literacy, Dogen was more of a contemplative kind, a thinker who nevertheless transcended his own thought processes. He is perhaps an ideal example for Westerners, as against the poor and apparently illiterate Hui Neng whose early experiences can only be simulated nowadays in the Third World.

It was the death of Dogen’s mother when he was eight that precipitated his first interest in Buddhism. It is said that as he watched the smoke rising from the incense stick that burnt by the body, he felt directly the transience of all existence. His loneliness drew him towards seeking an explanation for this cruel evanescence, one that satisfied his deepest sense of being, not just a form of words.

Even then he must have been acquainted with the Buddhist notion of annica, impermanence, change. Now he had first-hand knowledge of the principle in his own life. Not surprisingly perhaps it was the phrase, “shedding body and mind”, which was an important catalyst in his realization at the age of twenty-eight. At the moment of his enlightenment Dogen exclaimed: “There is no body and no mind.”

According to a spiritual heir of Dogen, Soto master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1905-1971): “all his being in that moment became a flashing into the vast phenomenal world, a flashing which included everything, which covered everything, and which had immense quality in it; all the phenomenal world was included within it, an absolute independent existence. That was his enlightenment.”

His experience was that he had shed body and mind, but still existed — as skylike mind. Suzuki continues: “Because you think you have body or mind, you have lonely feelings, but when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, you become very strong, and your existence becomes very meaningful.”

Suzuki Roshi, former Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, distinguishes between “little mind”, which is associated with body-mind, and “big mind”, which is everything: Buddha-mind, Buddha-nature. When, during enlightenment we align with big mind, little mind is seen to be just an expression of big mind; clouds scudding across a vast blue sky.

Dogen’s views on enlightenment are generally well-known and much quoted in the literature. Like many a good writer he had the knack of creating memorable phrases, and in this he has been well served by his translators.

“To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.” That is, to forget little mind. And in similar vein: “When one leaves the Way to the Way, one attains the Way.” Or again, on the “unattainability” of attainment: ”to consider attaining such a thing, one must be such a person; already being such a person, why trouble about such a thing?” Here he is playing around with the notion of suchness, allowing it to penetrate into his phraseology with great exuberance.

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