- Length
- 1100 pagesNishijima and Cross, Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, 4 vols, 1994-99
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Shobogenzo
The most difficult and most original philosophical writing produced in pre-modern Japan, composed in Japanese by a monk who had gone to China and come back with the conviction that practice and awakening are the same thing. It was barely read outside his own school until the twentieth century, when philosophers discovered it and have been arguing about it since.
- Date
- 1231-1253
- Author
- Dogen
- Region
- Kyoto and Echizen, Japan
- Language
- Japanese, with Chinese quotation
- 1958 English, Masunaga Reiho Early partial version Consensus
- 1994 English, Nishijima and Cross Complete in four volumes; in copyright Attested
- 2010 English, Kazuaki Tanahashi Treasury of the True Dharma Eye; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Read almost exclusively within one Japanese school for six centuries, and treated as a major work of philosophy only from the 1920s.
What the book says
Ninety-odd essays written over twenty years, in Japanese at a time when serious Buddhist writing was done in Chinese, and unlike anything before them. Dogen takes a phrase from an old Chan story and turns it until it yields something the story did not obviously contain. A master says that mountains are constantly walking, and Dogen spends an essay arguing that this is literally so and that our inability to see it is a fact about us. Firewood becomes ash, he writes, and it is a mistake to think the ash is the firewood's afterwards: firewood is completely firewood and ash is completely ash, each with its own before and after, and life and death are like that too. The central doctrine reverses the usual account of practice: sitting is not a method for reaching awakening, because practice and realisation are not two things - to sit is already to be enacting what one might have thought sitting was for. Being and time are treated as one word rather than two, so that a moment is not a container in which things happen but is itself the things. Other essays cover the robe, the kitchen, washing, the precepts, and the status of women, on which Dogen is unusually direct for his period.
What it argues
That the ordinary picture of practice - do this in order to get that - is wrong at the root, and that correcting it changes everything else. If sitting is undertaken as a means, then awakening is placed in the future and the sitter is elsewhere; but there is nowhere else, and the practice performed completely is what realisation is. The metaphysics follows the same shape. A moment is not a slot in which an entity persists; the entity and the time are one thing, so what exists exists as this time and not as something passing through it. Firewood does not become ash in the sense of persisting through the change, and a person does not pass from life into death: each state is complete in itself.
What it answered
The Chan tradition he had trained in, and specifically its habit of making awakening the point and practice the means. He is also arguing against a Japanese doctrine, then widespread, that original enlightenment makes practice unnecessary - a conclusion which his own premise might seem to license and which he rejects with some force, since the whole argument is that practice is not superfluous but is what the enlightenment consists in.
How it argues
By pressure on language, and it is why he is hard. Dogen takes a canonical phrase, reads it against its natural grammar, and shows that the misreading is truer than the reading - a Chinese line meaning that all beings have Buddha-nature is construed as saying that all being is Buddha-nature. Writing in Japanese lets him do this, since he can move between the Chinese quotation and a vernacular gloss that pulls it apart. The result is a prose that is neither exposition nor poetry and that translators disagree about at almost every sentence.
The moment
Thirteenth-century Japan, with the older Buddhist establishments in decline and new movements forming. Dogen trained on Mount Hiei, was dissatisfied, went to China in 1223, and returned four years later saying that he had come back empty-handed. He founded a temple, quarrelled with the establishment, and withdrew to the mountains of Echizen, where most of the later essays were written for a community of monks rather than for readers.
How it travelled
Hardly at all, and then suddenly. The essays were kept within the Soto school, circulated in manuscript, treated as too demanding for general reading, and not printed complete until the nineteenth century. Dogen's reputation as a philosopher rather than a religious founder dates from the 1920s, when Watsuji Tetsuro published an essay presenting him as a thinker of the first rank, and the Kyoto School took him up. Every English translation is recent, and the pace of scholarship on him has increased steadily since.
The strongest objection
That the writing cannot be checked. Dogen's method depends on construing a phrase against its ordinary sense, and there is no test proposed for when such a reading is illuminating rather than merely possible - his own practice of reading Chinese lines in ways their authors did not intend gives a licence he does not limit. Readers who admire him answer that this is what a philosophy of non-dual practice must look like, since a set of checkable propositions would restore the separation between the account and what it accounts for. That reply is coherent and is also unfalsifiable, which is the objection stated again.
Why read it
In small pieces and slowly. The essays on being-time, on mountains and waters, and on the practice of the way are the ones to start with, and none of them will make sense at speed. Read a translation with facing notes; Dogen's argument is often carried by a grammatical move that an English sentence cannot make, and the note is where it lives.
- First printed
- 1811
- First in English
- 1958
- Digitised
- Partial
Several arrangements exist - of seventy-five fascicles, of twelve, of sixty and of ninety-five - and which Dogen intended is unresolved. The ninety-five-fascicle version assembled in the seventeenth century is the one usually translated.
There is no public-domain English version. Nishijima-Cross, Tanahashi's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye and Waddell-Abe are all in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, and now among the most discussed non-Western philosophers in comparative work - particularly on time, on the relation between practice and understanding, and on whether a philosophy can be written in a form that resists paraphrase.
On quoting this book
The Japanese is public domain but every English version is modern and in copyright, and Dogen's prose depends so heavily on wordplay that a loose rendering misrepresents the argument. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How many fascicles belong to the work and in what order is genuinely unresolved, with four different arrangements in circulation. Whether Dogen's late writings mark a change of position - a harder line on monasticism and karma - is argued, and the twelve-fascicle arrangement bears on it. His account of his own training in China cannot be independently checked. And whether he is best read as a philosopher, as the Kyoto School and much recent scholarship have it, or as a religious teacher whose philosophical appearance is an artefact of modern interest, remains a live question in the field.