Soto Zen
from 1227
Sitting is not a method for reaching awakening. Sitting is awakening, already, and expecting a result is the obstacle.
- Active
- from 1227
- Where
- Echizen, and then rural Japan
- Also
- 曹洞宗 Sōtō-shū
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Japanese And Korean
The claim
Practice and realisation are one. Shikantaza — just sitting — is not preparation for enlightenment but its enactment, and seeking anything through it is what prevents it.
What it held
Dogen's question as a young monk was this: if we are all originally enlightened, as Tendai taught him, why practise? He went to China for an answer and came back with one that dissolves the question. Practice is not a means to realisation; it is realisation. There is nothing to attain because attaining is the wrong shape of activity.
The consequence is shikantaza, just sitting — without a koan, without counting breaths, without an object. Sitting with the intention of getting something is, on this view, not sitting.
Dogen is also a philosopher of time of the first rank. Being-time — uji — argues that time is not a container things move through: to be is to be time, and each moment is complete rather than a stage on the way to another. Firewood does not become ash; firewood is fully firewood and ash fully ash, and neither is the other's future.
The writing is extraordinary and difficult, and it was largely unread for six centuries. The Shobogenzo became a major object of study only in the twentieth century, when Japanese philosophers recognised what was in it.
How it argued
Just sitting, plus a body of writing that treats every daily activity — cooking, washing, using the toilet — as the practice rather than as an interval between practices.
What it was arguing against
Rinzai's koan curriculum, and any framing of practice as instrumental.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether Dogen rejected koans or only their instrumental use — he collected three hundred of them, which complicates the standard contrast.
Common misconceptions
That Soto is the quietist school and Rinzai the vigorous one. Dogen's monastic regime was severe, and his writing is more philosophically demanding than anything in Rinzai.
How it began
Dogen's dissatisfaction with the Tendai answer to his own question, and four years in China under a master who told him to drop body and mind.
What became of it
Living, and the largest Zen school in Japan by a considerable margin.
Lasting influence
The Kyoto School read Dogen closely, and his account of time has been compared seriously with Heidegger's. Western Zen practice is largely Soto in form.
Why it still matters
Being-time is a genuine contribution to the philosophy of time, and it has been argued about by philosophers with no religious interest in it.
Put another way
Firewood and ash: each complete, and neither the other's before or after.
Where to start
Genjokoan, in a translation with commentary. Twelve pages that repay a great deal of rereading.
The surprising bit
His masterwork was barely read for six hundred years. The Shobogenzo was treated as a sectarian document until twentieth-century philosophers opened it and found a metaphysics.
In their own words
To study the self is to forget the self.
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Rinzai Zen
- Influenced
- Philosophy of the Kyoto School
The verdict
The most philosophically serious writing in Japanese Buddhism, produced by a man arguing that there is nothing to attain.