ZEN MESTEREK ZEN MASTERS
« Zen főoldal
« vissza a Terebess Online nyitólapjára

Carl Bielefeldt

Curriculum Vitae
http://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/people/carl-w-bielefeldt/curriculum-vitae/
http://www.cuke.com/people/bielefeldt.htm
https://www.sotozen.com/eng/library/journal/index.html

Publications

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Number 14 Sky Flowers / Kuge Dharma Eye No.47 (March, 2021)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Number 7 One Bright Pearl Dharma Eye No.46 (September, 2020)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Book 6 Deportment of the Practicing Buddha / Gyo-butsu iigi Dharma Eye No.45 (March, 2020)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Number 4 Studying the Way with Body and Mind / Shinjin gakudō Dharma Eye No.44 (September, 2019)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: An Annotated Translation of the 75-Fascicle Redaction of the Shōbōgenzō by Dōgen. In preparation.

“Finding Dōgen in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End.” In Richard Payne, ed., Festschrift for Lewis Lancaster (working title). Forthcoming.

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Book 35 Spiritual Powers / Jinzu Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 34 (October, 2014)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Book 12 Lancet of Seated Meditation / Zazen shin Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 33 (March, 2014)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Book 10 Great Awakening / Daigo Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 32 (August, 2013)

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Book 25 Sound of the Stream, Form of the Mountain / Keisei sanshoku Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 31 (March, 2013)

“Shōbōgenzō uji 正法眼藏有時: Being Time.” Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 30 (Autumn, 2012).

“Shōbōgenzō kannon 正法眼藏觀音: Avalokiteśvara.” Dharma Eye (Hōgen 法眼) 29 (Spring, 2012).

“Disarming the Superpowers: The abhijñā in Eisai and Dōgen.” In S. Heine, ed., Dōgen: Textual and Historical Studies , pp. 192-206. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Reprint of Dōgen zenji kenkyū ronshū 道元禅師研究論集 (2002) article.

“Shōbōgenzō shin fukatoku 正法眼藏心不可得: The Mind Cannot Be Got.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 28 (Autumn, 2011).

“Shōbōgenzō mujō seppō 正法眼藏無情説法: The Insentient Preach the Dharma.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 27 (Spring, 2011).

“Le Shôbôgenzô alors et maintenant” (“The Shōbōgenzō Then and Now”). Revue Zen 93 (2010).

“Shōbōgenzō busshō 正法眼藏佛性: Buddha Nature (Part 2).” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 26 (Autumn, 2010).

“Shōbōgenzō busshō 正法眼藏佛性: Buddha Nature (Part 1).” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 25 (Spring, 2010).

“Expedient Devices, the One Vehicle, and the Lifespan of the Buddha.” In J. Stone and S. Teiser, ed. Readings of the Lotus Sutra . NY: Columbia University Press, 2009.

“On Translation.” Buddhadharma (Fall, 2009).

“Shōbōgenzō henzan 正法眼藏徧參: Extensive Study.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 24 (Autumn, 2009).

“Shōbōgenzō jippō 正法眼藏十方: The Ten Directions.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 24 (Spring, 2009).

“Shōbōgenzō ryūgin 正法眼藏龍吟: Song of the Dragon.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 22 (November, 2008).

“Shōbōgenzō soshi seirai i 正法眼藏祖師西來意: The Intention of the Ancestral Master's Coming from the West.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 22 (November, 2008).

“Shōbōgenzō hotsu bodai shin 正法眼藏發菩提心: Giving Rise to the Mind of Bodhi.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 21 (March 2008).

“Shōbōgenzō hakujushi 正法眼藏柏樹子: The Cypress Tree.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 20 (Autumn, 2007).

“Shōbōgenzō butsudō 正法眼藏佛道: The Way of the Buddha.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 19 (March, 2007), pp. 17-27.

“Shōbōgenzō kattō 正法眼藏葛藤: Twining Vines.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 17 (Spring 2006).

“Shōbōgenzō zanmai ō zanmai 正法眼藏三昧王三昧: King of Samādhis Samādhi.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 18 (Autumn, 2006).

Review of Bowring, The Religious Traditions of Japan 500-1600 ; and Swanson and Chilson, ed., Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions . SSJR Bulletin Supplement 2006.

“Practice.” In D. Lopez, ed., Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, pp. 229-244 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

“Shōbōgenzō sesshin sesshō 正法眼藏説心説性: Talking of the Mind, Talking of the Nature.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 16 (Autumn, 2005).

“Shōbōgenzō kaiin zanmai 正法眼藏海印三昧 : The Ocean Seal Samadhi.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 14 (Summer, 2004).

Entries on “Buddhism in Japan” and “Dōgen.” Encyclopedia of Buddhism. NY: Macmillan, 2003.

“Shōbōgenzō kobutsu shin 正法眼藏古佛心: The Old Buddha Mind.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 13 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 15-18.

“Shōbōgenzō tashin tsū 正法眼藏他心通: Penetration of Other Minds.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 12 (Spring, 2003) pp. 21-27.

“Disarming the Superpowers: The abhijñā in Eisai and Dōgen.” In Dōgen zenji kenkyū ronshū 道元禅師研究論集 [Dōgen Studies], ed. by Daihonzan Eiheiji Daionki Kyoku 大本山永平寺大遠忌局, pp. 1018-1046. Fukui-ken: Eiheiji, 2002.

“Shōbōgenzō sansui kyō 正法眼藏山水經: The Mountains and Waters Sutra.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 9 (2001), pp. 10-17.

“Circumabulating the Mountains and Waters.” Dharma Eye ( Hōgen 法眼) 9 (2001), pp. 5-7.

“Sanka suru bukkyō ni mukete 参加する仏教に向けて [Toward a Participatory Buddhism].” In Nara 奈良 and Azuma 東, ed., Dōgen no nijūisseiki [Dōgen's Twenty-first Century], pp. 211-232. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 2001. English version published as “Toward a Participatory Buddhism,” Mountain Record 21:1 (Fall 2002), pp. 28-39.

“Descriptive & Prescriptive Approaches to the Three Disciplines: A Response to Prof. Ishigami.” In Proceedings of the Conference on Zen and Nenbutsu , Los Angeles: Bukkyō Daigaku, 2000.

“Living With Dōgen: Thoughts on the Relevance of His Thought.” Proceedings of the Symposium Dogen Zen and Its Relevance for Our Time , pp. 123-133. Tokyo: Sōtōshū Shūmuchō, 2000.

“Zongze: Principles of Seated Meditation ( Zuochanyi ).” In W.T. de Bary and I. Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition , 2nd. ed., vol. 1, pp. 522-524. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. (Originally appeared as appendix to my Dōgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation .)

“Dōgen's Lancet of Seated Meditation .” In G. Tanabe, ed., Religions of Japan in Practice , pp. 220-234. Princeton Readings in Religions . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. (Earlier version appeared in Mountain Record 8:2 [summer-fall 1989], pp. 40-50.)

“Shōbō genzō zazen gi 正法眼藏坐禪儀 : Principles of Seated Meditation.” Zen Quarterly 11:2-3 (1999), pp. 5-8.

“Kokan Shiren and the Sectarian Uses of History.” In J. Mass, ed., The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century , pp. 295-317. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

“Soto Zen at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” Wind Bell 32:2 (1998), pp. 17-24.

“The Mountain Spirit: Reflections on Reading the Shōbō genzō .” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Korean Sπn Buddhism . Seoul: Bibaek Institute, 1998. (Reprinted as “The Mountain Spirit: Dōgen, Gary Snyder, and Critical Buddhism”, Zen Quarterly 11:1 [1999], pp. 18-24.)

“Commentary on A. Andrews, ‘Hōnen's Journey from the Ōjōyōsh ū to the Senchakushū.'” In Hōnen jōdokyō no sōgōteki kenkyū 法然淨土教の総合的研究 [A Comprehensive Review of the Pure Land Buddhism of Hōnen], pp. 89-92. Kyoto: Bukkyō Daigaku, 1998.

“Reading Others' Minds.” In D. Lopez, ed., Buddhism in Practice , pp. 69-79. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (Earlier version appeared in The Ten Directions 13:1 [spring-summer 1992], pp. 26-34.)

“A Discussion of Seated Zen,” in D. Lopez, ed., Buddhism in Practice, pp. 197-206. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (Earlier version appeared as “Enni's Treatise on Seated Zen .” The Ten Directions 9:1 [spring-summer 1988], pp. 7-11.)

“Filling the Zen Shū: Notes on the Jisshū yōdō ki.” Cahiers d'Extrême Asie 7 (1993-94), pp. 221-248. (Reprinted in B. Faure, ed., Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context, 2003.)

Review of Gregory, Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism. Cahiers d'Extrême Asie 7 (1993-94), pp. 446-449.

“Shōbō genzō eiyaku o kangaeru: kaishaku to hōhōron ni tsuite 正法眼蔵英訳を考えるー解釈と方法論について [On meaning and method in translation of the Shōbō genzō ].” Sōtō shūhō 曹洞宗報 686 (11/92), pp. 72-75; 687 (12/92), pp. 82-87. (English translation appeared in Zen Quarterly .)

“Dōgen Studies in America: Thoughts on the State of the Field.” Zen kenkyūjo nenpō 禅研究所年報 [Annual of the Zen Research Institute, Komazawa University] 3 (1992), endmatter pp. 1-17. (Reprinted in Zen Quarterly 4:3 [Autumn 1992], pp. 7-12; and The Ten Directions [fall-winter 1992], pp. 20-24.)

“No-Mind and Sudden Awakening: Thoughts on the Soteriology of a Kamakura Zen Text.” In R. Buswell and R. Gimello, ed., Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought , pp. 475-505. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 7. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.

“Ten Thousand Ways to Make a Buddha: Universal and Particular in Dōgen's Zen.” In The Future of the Earth and Zen Buddhism, pp. 17-23. Tokyo: Sōtōshū Shūmuchō, 1991. (Reprinted in Zen Quarterly 4:2 [Summer 1992], pp. 5-7.)

Review of Buswell, The Formation of Ch'an Ideology in China and Korea. History of Religions 31:2 (11/91), p. 210.

Review of Dobbins, Jōdo Shinshū: Shin Buddhism in Medieval Japan. Journal of Japanese Studies 17:2 (Summer 1991), pp. 381-386.

Review of Kamens, The Three Jewels. Journal of Religion 71:1 (1/91), pp. 128-129.”The Story of Hui-Neng.” Wind Bell 25:2 (fall 1991), pp. 28-34.

“The One Vehicle and the Three Jewels: On Japanese Sectarianism and Some Ecumenical Alternatives.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 10 (1990), pp. 5-16.

Review of Tanabe and Tanabe, ed., The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture. Journal of Asian Studies , 49:1 (2/90), pp. 173-175. (Revised version appeared in Wind Bell 24 [fall 1990], pp. 21-23.)

“Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Reflections on Enni's Treatise on Seated Zen .” The Ten Directions 10:1 (spring-summer 1989), pp. 7-21.

Dōgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

“The Four Levels of prat ī tya-samutpāda According to the Fa-hua hsüan-i .” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 11:1 (1988), pp. 7-29.

“Ch'ang-lu Tsung-tse's Tso-ch'an i and the ‘Secret' of Zen Meditation.” In P. Gregory, ed., Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism , pp. 129-161. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 4. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986.

“Recarving the Dragon: History and Dogma in the Study of Dōgen.” In W. LaFleur, ed., Dōgen Studies , pp. 21-53. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 2. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985.

Annotated translation of Yanagida Seizan, “The Li-tai fa-pao chi and the Ch'an Doctrine of Sudden Awakening.” In W. Lai and L. Lancaster, ed., Early Ch'an in China and Tibet , pp. 13-49. Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series 5. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1983.

Review of Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan. Journal of Asian Studies 41:4 (8/82), pp. 841-843.

Review of Kodera, Dōgen's Formative Years in China. Journal of Asian Studies 40:2 (2/81), pp. 387-89.

Abstracts of Japanese articles on Buddhist studies. Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie 12-13 (1980), entries 936, 941.

“Dōgen's Shōbō genzō sansuikyō .” In M. Tobias and H. Drasdo, ed., The Mountain Spirit , pp. 37-49. New York: Overlook Press, 1979. (Reprinted in Mountain Record [winter 1986, spring 1987].)

Translation of Kajiyama Yūichi, “Mahāyāna Buddhism and the Philosophy of Prajñā.” In A.K. Narain, ed., Studies in Pali and Buddhism , pp. 197-206. Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1979.

Review of Nishimura and Stevens, Shōbōgenzō , vol. 1; Yokoi, Zen Master Dōgen ; Kennett, Zen Is Eternal Life ; Kim, Kigen Dōgen: Mystical Realist . Shambala Review 5:1-2 (Winter 1976), pp. 53-55.

Review of Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan . Shambala Review 4:6 (5-6/76), pp. 10-11.

“T'an ching (Platform Sutra).” Philosophy East and West 25:2 (4/75), pp. 197-212. (With L. Lancaster)

Review of Luk, Transmission of the Mind. Codex Shambala 4:2 (1975), pp. 12-13.

Translation of Yokoi Kakudō, “Fundamental Understanding of Sōtō Zen Buddhism.” Komazawa daigaku bukkyō gakubu kenkyū kiyō 駒沢大学仏教学部研究紀要 [Bulletin of the Faculty of Buddhist Studies, Komazawa University] 31 (3/73), pp. 1-6. (With F. Bielefeldt)

PDF: T'an Ching (Platform Scripture)
by Carl Bielefeldt and Lewis Lancaster
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 25, no. 2 (1975) p. 197-212.
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/HistoricalZen/PlatformSutra_Bielefeldt.htm
https://www.academia.edu/10095062/Tan_Ching_Platform_Scripture_

Ch'ang-lu Tsung-tse's Tso-ch'an I and the "Secret" of Zen Meditation (DOC)
by Carl Bielefeldt
In: Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism
Edited by Peter N. Gregory
Includes content by: Peter N. Gregory, Alan Sponberg, Daniel B. Stevenson, Bernard Faure, Carl Bielefeldt
Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 4., University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1986, 129-161.

PDF: Dōgen's manuals of Zen meditation
University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1988

PDF: “No-Mind and Sudden Awakening: Thoughts on the Soteriology of a Kamakura Zen Text.”
by Carl Bielefeldt
In: R. Buswell and R. Gimello, ed., Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought,
pp. 475-505. Studies in East Asian Buddhism 7. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.

PDF: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
Volume: 1-7
An annotated translation by the Soto Zen Text Project
The Administrative Headquarters of Soto Zen Buddhism
Sotoshu Shumucho
Edited by Carl Bielefeldt
Tokyo, 2023

DŌGEN STUDIES IN AMERICA: THOUGHTS ON THE STATE OF THE FIELD
by Carl Bielefeldt, Stanford University
From Zen kenkyū jo nenpō 禅研究所年報 3 (1992), endmatter pp. 1-17.
http://www.china2551.org/Article/EnglishBudhis/Research/200803/5213.html

I have been asked to take as my subject here the “state of the field” of Dōgen studies in America. This I shall try to do.[1] However, in taking up this subject, I should warn you in advance on two points. First, although I have myself done some study of Dōgen, my own academic interests stand somewhat outside most American work in this field, and I am not particularly expert in, or even in many cases familiar with, this work. I shall not, therefore, try to give you here either a comprehensive bibliography of the literature or a detailed appraisal of individual examples; rather, I shall restrict my remarks to a brief historical survey of English-language publications and a more general overview of the ways that Dōgen has been and is being treated in America.[2] Second, although we may of course in a loose sense speak of a “field” of American Dōgen studies, from what I know of the work on Dōgen, my own feeling is that it may be misleading — both historically and analytically — to speak as if what we have in America represents anything so imposing as a “field” of Dōgen studies — at least if we mean by this much more than a collection of books and articles on certain aspects of Dōgen. I shall try in what follows to explain why I say this.

There is no doubt that American interest in Dōgen has increased remarkably in recent years. A frequenter of the book shops of Jinbōchō, I note that the “Dōgen boom” in Japanese publication that began some years ago has not yet run its course. American book stores may not have anything quite like the daunting “Dōgen” sections we find in Tokyo, but I venture to say that there are now more books in print in America on Dōgen than on any other single figure in the history of Zen or even, I suspect, in the history of East Asian Buddhism as a whole.[3] As a result of these books, Dōgen (at least the name “Dōgen”) is now familiar not only to specialists in Zen or East Asian Buddhism but to many scholars in other fields and even to many among the general public with interest in Asian culture.

Nevertheless, if Dōgen has grown quickly to become America’s favorite Zen master, he has done so with surprisingly little help from American scholarship. Most of the Dōgen titles are trade books, intended for a popular audience; most of them are translations, few of which reflect significant research in primary sources. Many of them are not by scholars and not by Americans. If we look beyond the covers of these books for examples of original American scholarship on Dōgen, the list is much less impressive. In fact, the academic study of this Zen master remains in its infancy — remains, that is, not only young but small, weak and immature. Thus, historically speaking, it may simply be premature to imagine an academic “field” of Dōgen studies in America. It may even be premature to predict that the considerable American interest in Dōgen is leading toward such a field. My own sense, at least for the immediate future, is that it is not.

I shall come back to the future at the end. Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that it is not only the age and size but also (and more importantly) the shape of American work that makes me reluctant to speak of something as broad as Dōgen studies in America. Insofar as there has been American scholarly work on Dōgen, it has been for the most part concerned with only one kind of Dōgen.

When we look at Japanese scholarship in this century, we can find at least three major kinds of Dōgen: first and most conspicuously, of course, there is “Dōgen the Zen master,” the patriarch of the Sōtō Zen school and teacher of shikan taza; second, “Dōgen the philosopher,” the metaphysician of “being-time” (uji) and the Buddha nature; and finally, “Dōgen the Japanese,” the Kamakura-period Buddhist author and religious leader. Each of these Dōgens has his own origins: the Zen master Dōgen was largely inherited by modern scholarship from the sectarian studies (shūgaku) of the Edo period; the philosopher Dōgen was born from the pre-war Japanese encounter with Western thought; the Japanese Dōgen has been created largely by post-war historiography. Similarly, each of these images of Dōgen appears against and becomes defined by the background of his own setting: the Zen master belongs to the religious history of Zen tradition; the philosopher seems to move in the abstract atmosphere of timeless, universal truths; the Japanese is bound to the specific circumstances of medieval society and culture.

Of course, this kind of simple tripartite typology is too crude to do real justice to the varied, complex, and shifting styles of Dōgen studies in Japan (and I welcome your corrections to it). The categories are by no means clearly bounded but overlap to such a degree that perhaps most scholarship cannot be fairly embraced by any single one alone. The line, for example, between the Zen master as thinker and the philosopher as Buddhist is obviously not easy to draw. Indeed the study of what I am calling “Dōgen the Zen master” is a field of such proportions that it reaches from what in another context we would call “constructive theology” to highly revisionist (and sometimes quite positivistic) historiography. In the end, perhaps what such extremes have in common is only that they treat Dōgen in terms of the history and thought of Zen tradition.

In any case, I trouble you with this crude typology here only as a heuristic device to help me emphasize the particular character of American academic interest in Dōgen. If you can grant me for the moment at least something like my three “ideal types” of Dōgen in Japanese scholarship, I want to suggest that it is only my second type, the philosopher (or perhaps the philosophical theologian), that has so far shown signs of flourishing in the American environment. Of the Zen master, and especially of Dōgen the Japanese, we have yet to see very much. First, let me give you a brief historical sketch of English-language publications on Dōgen; then I shall step back to reflect a bit on the academic “sociology,” as it were, within which my various Dōgens are (and are not) being studied in America.

* * * * *

If the various Dōgens of Japanese scholarship were born at very different times — Edo, pre-war and post-war — the Dōgens in America (insofar as we can find a plurality) are very young. When I first began to read about and practice Zen as a philosophy student in San Francisco in the 1960’s, Dōgen existed in America almost only as a Zen master — and this perhaps less on paper than in the imaginations of a few zazen students at the San Francisco Zen Center and other such Sōtō-related Zen communities. Our books on Zen Buddhism at the time were mostly by, or influenced by, D. T. Suzuki; and, as you know, the Rinzai professor Suzuki did not much appreciate the Sōtō patriarch Dōgen.

I confess that, except for occasional flashbacks, my picture of the 1960’s has long faded, but I recall from this decade only three significant English sources on Dōgen.[4] The first was The Sōtō Approach to Zen, an obscure little collection of essay and translation by the late professor of this university Masunaga Reihō.[5] Early in the decade, A History of Zen Buddhism, by the Sophia University professor Heinrich Dumoulin was translated into English from the German.[6] This book, which contained a lengthy chapter on Dōgen’s life and thought, was for many years the most extended and substantial treatment of Zen history in English and served to introduce Dōgen to a wide American audience; it has been superseded only by Prof. Dumoulin’s own recent revised and enlarged two-volume version, Zen Buddhism: A History.[7] In 1967, Jiyu Kennet, the English Sōtō nun trained at Sōjiji, published a collection of Sōtō Zen materials, including some of Dōgen’s writings.[8] These three early treatments of Dōgen, though very different, had at least three things in common: first, none was written by an American; second, all (albeit in different senses and degrees) were products of and sympathetic toward Sōtō tradition; and therefore, finally, all took as their object some version of what I am calling Dōgen the Zen master.[9]

Thus, in the early 1970’s, when I started graduate Buddhist studies at Berkeley, the American Dōgen was still only a Zen master, and Zen masters were still only on the margins of academic Buddhist studies, which tended to look down from its scholarly heights on the popular American literature on Zen and the unlettered enthusiasms of American Zen students. By the early 1980’s, however, when I finished my dissertation, Zen studies was becoming recognized as a legitimate, even vital new area of academic Buddhist studies, and Dōgen was beginning to develop an established academic identity. Interestingly enough, this new identity has developed for the most part outside of Buddhist studies.

The 1970’s saw a large leap in the English resources on Dōgen, with a good number of his writings being re-translated or newly rendered. In 1971, for example, Prof. Masunaga’s translation of the Shōbōgenzō zuimon ki appeared from the University of Hawaii Press, a publisher that has been particularly active in Dōgen studies and Zen studies in general.[10] Yokoi Yūhō translated the Eihei shingi,[11] as well as the Fukan zazen gi, Gakudō yōjin shū, and the twelve-fascicle (jūni kan bon) Shōbōgenzō.[12] The first volume of Nishiyama Kōsen’s complete translation of the Shōbōgenzō appeared in 1975.[13] Particularly welcome during this period, though never to my knowledge brought together in a single volume, were the careful, annotated translations of the Shōbōgenzō and other texts, published throughout the decade in the journal The Eastern Buddhist, by Norman Waddell, often in collaboration with Abe Masao.[14] In addition to these works of translation, the 1970s also saw the publication of Hee-jin Kim’s important Kigen Dōgen: Mystical Realist. This book, produced in 1975, was the first (and even today, over fifteen years later, remains the only) general academic study in English of Dōgen’s life and thought; it has continued to serve over the years as America’s best single introduction to Dōgen.[15] .

Prof. Kim’s work combines a close familiarity with Sōtō shūgaku with the author’s own interpretation of Dōgen’s thought as religious philosophy. This interest in philosophy has been central to the work of Abe Masao, a man who has done much to spread an appreciation of Dōgen in America. Prof. Abe’s scholarship differs markedly, of course, from that of D. T. Suzuki, but it is probably fair to say that he more than anyone else has inherited Suzuki’s mantle in America — both in the sense that he has taken on Prof. Suzuki’s mission as interpreter of Zen to the West, and in the sense that his interpretation, like Suzuki’s, is closely linked to the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy. Unlike Suzuki, Abe has made Dōgen central to his interpretation of Zen.[16] Especially during the decade of the 1980’s, through his publications in English, his many lectures and seminars throughout America, his ongoing dialogue with Christian theologians, he has carried Dōgen’s thought beyond the Zen centers and the academic Zen studies programs to a broad audience of American intellectuals.[17]

In any case, it has largely been Prof. Abe’s image of Dōgen the religious philosopher that has dominated American interest over the 1980s. The decade has seen a steady stream of new translations of the Shōbōgenzō, and occasionally of other texts, by Thomas Cleary,[18] Francis Cook,[19] Hee-jin Kim,[20] Kazuaki Tanahashi,[21] Thomas Wright,[22] Yokoi Yūhō,[23]and others. More significantly, this period has also witnessed, for the first time, the production of original scholarly studies of Dōgen by a number of young American scholars trained in Western and often Japanese philosophy, who seek to interpret Dōgen’s thought through the techniques of phenomenology, analytic and comparative philosophy, and so on. Examples of these new interpretations can be found in books such as Tom Kasulis’s extremely popular Zen Action-Zen Person,[24] Steven Heine’s Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen,[25] David Shaner’s The Body-Mind Experience in Japanese Buddhism: A Phenomenological Perspective of Kūkai and Dōgen[26] or Joan Stambaugh’s recent Impermanence and Buddha Nature: Dōgen’s Understanding of Temporality.[27] Clearly, in such books we are in the presence of a Dōgen who has transcended Sōtō Zen, not to mention Kamakura Japan, to take his place among the World Philosophers.

* * * * *

Culturally speaking, that it should be the transcendental philosopher who has been most successfully exported to the West should not surprise us: he was, after all, from the beginning created with the foreign market in mind — a model first developed in pre-war Japan from imported Western ideas as a part of the project to modernize and internationalize the country’s intellectual history, in order to establish the place of the insular culture among the nations of the world. Predictably, the nations of the world now find their own ideas reflected in the model, and many Americans now find themselves more attracted to it than to the old Zen master. What seems more surprising is the relative neglect of a figure as famous as Dōgen by American students of Zen history, who are supposed, after all, to be attracted to old Zen masters.

Within the specific culture of the American academy, it may well be that Dōgen’s very fame, both in America and Japan, is partly to blame for his neglect: he is, as it were, too “big” to offer an immediately promising subject of study — at once too familiar to the American public to be academically fashionable and too imposing in the Japanese secondary literature to be easily manageable. Hence, the student of Zen studies (who in America after all still has almost the entire field from which to lay professional claim to a specialty) is likely tempted to look around for more exotic, less overworked areas where there is greater room for original scholarship. Nothing is so appreciated in the American academy as original scholarship.

It may also be not only the fact but the particular type of Dōgen’s fame that is to blame: his dual status as philosophical giant and as sacred ancestor of Sōtō tradition has probably made him less, rather than more, attractive to Zen studies as it is typically done in America. Academic Zen studies arose in America during the 1970’s largely within the environment of a “scientific” Buddhology centered in Indology and dedicated to rigorous historical and philological inquiry into ancient Buddhist texts. As a living East Asian religion that celebrated its freedom from the texts and norms of ancient Indian Buddhism, and as a religion that was tainted by its association with popular, anti-intellectual American fads of the 1960’s, Zen was an “alien” (not to say “heretical”) subject that needed to be domesticated.

Zen students, seeking academic styles that would distance them from Zen’s alien ways and make them respectable Buddhologists, have tended to be shy of the big ideas of Zen philosophy and embarrassed by the popular pieties of Zen religiosity.[28] Dōgen, as object of both philosophical speculation and religious cult, has been in this sense doubly problematic for academic Zen studies. No doubt a number of the scholars of my generation who have begun to establish the field of American Zen studies originally came to these studies, as I did, with interest in Dōgen. I have, for some reason, been slower than most to outgrow this interest, but most of my generation has succeeded in finding more appropriate subjects. Apart from my own little study of the Fukan zazen gi,[29] James Kodera’s work on the Hōkyō ki may be the only American book to deal with Dōgen in the context of Zen history.[30]

The early direction of academic Zen studies in America was particularly influenced by two books published in 1967: Yanagida Seizan’s Shoki zenshū shisho no kenkyū,[31] which became a kind of “bible” of the field during its inception in the 1970’s; and Philip Yampolsky’s The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch,[32] which, as the first scholarly study of a Zen text by an American academic became a standard against which the field could measure itself. Both these books, of course, dealt with the origins of Zen in the T’ang dynasty, and both sought to reevaluate Zen tradition through the techniques of modern textual and historical scholarship. Subsequent American Zen studies has tended to favor this same subject and these same techniques.

Although we are now beginning to get some excellent original American studies of T’ang-dynasty Zen, the field remains weaker for later periods and for Japan (not to mention Korea and Viet Nam). Profs. Yanagida and Yampolsky have themselves moved on from their earlier studies to consider topics in Japanese Zen, and recent American Zen studies shows some signs of following suite; but the fact remains that most areas of Japanese Zen have yet to be explored. This is unfortunately true not only within Zen studies but also in other fields of Japanese studies from which we might have hoped for scholarship on Dōgen as medieval Japanese figure. In fact, this last of my three Dōgens is the least known in America.

While the study of Japanese Zen (and, apart from some notable exceptions, of Japanese Buddhism more broadly) has lagged behind work on China, American scholarship has made significant advances in Japanese history, literature, and religion. Yet this scholarship has not, for the most part, been attracted by the technicalities of Buddhist thought and has, therefore, largely stayed clear of the “great thinkers” of Kamakura Buddhism — the Dōgens, Shinrans and Nichirens — preferring to leave such towering figures to the specialists in Buddhist studies. Since American Buddhist studies has not yet been ready to accept the challenge, we still have nothing approaching an adequate history of Kamakura Buddhism within which to place Dōgen and, therefore, little sense of him as a participant in and creator of medieval Japanese religious culture.

In short, then, it seems that the conditions of the American academic community have so far not been very conducive to the development of the study of Dōgen as an historical figure, either within Zen tradition or the Japanese past. If we can take as representative of American scholarship the collection of papers, entitled Dōgen Studies, published in 1985 as a result of the first Kuroda Institute conference on Dōgen, it is still almost entirely Dōgen’s ideas that preoccupy us.[33] Yet conditions are rapidly changing, and I would like to close with a few thoughts on the future of Dōgen studies in America.

* * * * *

Among the most general changes that may effect this field is the increasing incorporation of Asian humanities into American university education. One sign of this change is the recent graduation of Buddhist studies from the relative isolation of Asian language programs into religious studies departments. If this move may be tending to increase the distance of Buddhologists from their colleagues in Asian philology and classical languages, it is also bringing them into much closer contact with the interests and methods of new colleagues and thereby breaking down the old barriers, almost as daunting in America as in Japan, between the disciplines of Buddhist studies and religious studies. How might such contact affect the future careers of my three Dōgens?

At first glance, religious studies would seem the ideal environment for further development of scholarship on Dōgen as religious philosopher, providing an intellectual setting in which he can be viewed alongside, and in conversation with, the great thinkers of the world’s religions. Some American academic institutions may in fact provide such a setting. But it must also be realized that the discipline of religious studies in America has itself been undergoing considerable change in recent years, moving from earlier emphases on theology, intellectual and church histories, history and phenomenology of religions, and so on, toward increasing concerns for recent developments in hermeneutics and critical theory, culture studies and social history. In this new environment, the old ways of doing the humanities, with their focus on the cultural products of the social elite, are being called into question; and in religious studies departments deeply influenced by this environment, the study of the “great” religious traditions and of the great religious thinkers of the past is giving way to new interests in popular religious “mentalities” that are best discovered in the ordinary beliefs and everyday practices of the community.

There is an obvious sense in which such developments do not bode well for Dōgen studies, which has been after all, both in Japan and America, a prime example of the “old ways” of the humanities. Certainly the new religious studies environment will not be conducive to the study of Dōgen as philosopher; for the time being, it may be difficult for such study to find a comfortable home in at least the more up-to-date institutions. But the study of Dōgen as Zen master, at least as this study has traditionally been approached, is also not likely to flourish: if American Zen students were unattracted to such study in the earlier Buddhist studies environment (where they were at least expected to read the great books of the tradition), it is difficult to see what in the new environment will encourage them to the years of textual work involved in fitting Dōgen into Zen tradition. We should probably not expect soon to see many American specialists in such subjects as the Chinese sources of Dōgen’s doctrine or the textual history of the Shōbōgenzō. On the other hand, since Japanese scholarship is so good at such subjects, perhaps we do not need many of these American specialists.

If there is a bright spot in this rather gloomy forecast, I suspect it may lie in the study of the last of my three Dōgens, the medieval Japanese. To be sure, in a narrow sense and over the short term, a redirection of our attention from the great figures of the past to their historical contexts will make the great figure of Dōgen as Kamakura cultural hero less immediately attractive as an object of study; similarly, a preference for social history and culture studies over the history of ideas will not encourage an appreciation for such obvious subjects as the place of Dōgen’s doctrine in the history of Japanese Buddhist thought. Topics like “Dōgen and Shinran” or “Dōgen and hongaku thought” are not likely to be central to the concerns of the next generation of American scholarship. In a broader sense, however, and over the longer run, the new directions of religious studies should help to liberate Dōgen from such topics and make him more attractive to a wider range of American scholarship.

As Zen students are led from the sanctuary of traditional Buddhist studies into the fray of Asian religious and cultural life, the flood of historical realities they will encounter should work to erode the old Buddhological prejudices against Zen as alien and Japan as marginal. As American Zen studies becomes more sensitive to the varied cultural contexts of Zen, the specific historical instantiations of the religion will take center stage, and the particular features of Zen in Japan may begin to get the attention they have so far not enjoyed. Given what I have suggested here are his several handicaps as an object of such attention, I doubt that this process will start with Dōgen; but eventually American scholarship should rediscover his value, less now perhaps as universal philosopher or enlightened Zen patriarch than as an important expression of — and therefore a major resource for understanding — the religious life of medieval Japan.

At the moment, I can think of no young scholar at a major American university who plans to specialize in Dōgen. I can think, however, of several — at my own university and elsewhere — who have particular interest in the later history of Sōtō Zen, both medieval and modern.[34] Research in this history (especially of Edo and Meiji) could do much to help Americans understand the historical origins and ideological characteristics of our current images of Dōgen and thus indirectly spark renewed curiosity about the person and the books that may (or may not) stand behind these images. Perhaps from among these scholars, perhaps from among their students, will come a new generation of Dōgen studies in America.

* * * * *

But enough of such daydreaming about the future; let me close here with one brief final point less speculative and more urgent. Whatever direction American Dōgen studies is to take, if it is to flourish it will need considerably better access to Dōgen’s own writings than it now has in English. I need hardly point out to this audience the difficulties presented the reader by much of Dōgen’s corpus, with its unusual style, surprising linguistic play, obscure allusion to the literature of Chinese Zen, and so on. Of course, for most serious Dōgen scholarship, there can be no real substitute for work in the original texts, but the texts are sufficiently difficult that even the specialist can benefit greatly from scholarly translation.

With all due respect to their authors, and appreciating the considerable variety (and often high quality) of our current translations, I think it fair to say that few have been done with the scholarly reader in mind. Hence, they have tended to make Dōgen, as it were, too “easy” — covering over what is obscure in the original with a good guess, resolving what is ambiguous or multivalent with a single reading, often smoothing the exotic imagery and striking metaphor into a bland abstraction, sometimes masking (or even omitting) what seems irrelevant to the message or might be distasteful to the audience. Such translation surely has its purposes and its value, and no doubt it has made Dōgen more accessible to many readers; but it is too far from the original to serve as an adequate resource for many (I would say most) scholarly purposes. Thus perhaps the prime desideratum for American Dōgen studies today is a set of authoritative English versions of at least his major writings (including the Eihei kōroku, which has so far received far too little attention) — versions that are sensitive not only to the texts themselves but to the wealth of commentary and scholarship that has been done on them, versions that provide full annotation to the textual features, historical background and literary sources of the originals.

If I have been close to right here in my characterization of the American field, then we cannot expect it soon to produce a scholar capable of (or inclined to undertake) such a difficult and technical project. In any case, it should not be left to a single scholar or to the American field: it should be the long-term job of a team of Japanese and American scholars, representing differing expertise and disparate points of view. Similar teams have been at work in Kyoto, producing excellent translations of Shinran. Komazawa University is by any measure the “Mecca” of Dōgen studies, and I appeal to friends of American Dōgen studies among you to consider such a project here. To a large extent, of course, you would have to consider it a gift — a form, if you will, of intellectual foreign aid; but I suspect that the process of studying the texts together and arriving at a mutually acceptable reading might even have its occasional benefits for Dōgen studies here at home.

[1]This paper is a revised, annotated version of a talk to the Zen Kenkyūjo, Komazawa University, 7 October, 1991. The work was done under grants from the Fulbright Program and the Social Science Research Council.

[2]With only occasional exceptions, I omit reference in my survey to the treatment of Dôgen in journal articles or works on broader subjects and limit myself to representative books that deal specifically with him.

[3]Indeed, within Buddhism as a whole, his only serious recent competitor for the American Buddhist dollar (apart from Gautama) may be Tsong-kha-pa.

[4]My memory in general is not good, and writing this as I am in Tokyo, away from my books, I must beg indulgence for the failures in memory that have caused me to overlook work deserving mention in the following account. I should like to thank David Riggs and Richard Jaffe for reminding me of (and introducing me to) several titles.

[5]Toky Layman Buddhist Society Press, 1958. This book never had much circulation in America and, I believe, has been out of print for many years. Prof. Masunaga also published a number of other translations in Japan that rarely made their way to America.

[6]Boston: Beacon Press, 1963; the German version appeared in 1959.

[7]The Dōgen material appears in vol. 2, Japan (New York: MacMillan, 1989). See also Prof. Dumoulin’s Zen Enlightenment: Origins and Meaning (Tokyo and New York: Weatherhill, 1979).

[8]Selling Water by the River; reissued as Zen is Eternal Life (Emeryville, California: Dharma Publishing, 1976).

[9]I include Father Dumoulin’s work as a “product” of Sōtō tradition in the sense that it reflects the Komazawa shūgaku of its time. In addition to these three titles, we might mention in passing here Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), which, though it contained only a little on Dōgen himself, did through its considerable popularity at the time serve to introduce Sōtō religion (of the sort taught by Yasutani Hakuun) to many Americans.

[10]A Primer of Sōtō Zen: A Translation of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki (Honolulu).

[11]Regulations for Monastic Life by Eihei Dōgen: Eihei-Genzenji-Shingi (Toky Sankibō Busshorin, 1973).

[12]Zen Master Dōgen: An Introduction with Selected Writings, with Daizen Victoria (Weatherhill, 1976).

[13]Shōbōgenzō: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law, with John Stevens (Sendai: Daihokkaikaku). The work was completed in four volumes, the last of which appeared in 1983; it has been reissued by Nakayama Shobō in a one-volume version (Tokyo, 1988).

[14]The Eastern Buddhist, new series (hereafter cited as EB) 4: 1, 2 (1971); 5: 1, 2 (1972); 6: 2 (10/73); 7: 1 (5/74); 8: 2 (10/75); 9: 1, 2 (1976); 10: 2 (10/77); 11: 1 (5/78); 12: 1 (5/79).

[15]Published as an Association for Asian Studies Monograph (no. 29; Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press); a revised edition was brought out by the same press in 1987.

[16]Prof. Abe’s interpretations of Dōgen have just been collected in A Study of Dōgen: His Philosophy and Religion (Albany, N. Y.: SUNY Press, 1992).

[17]Prof. Abe has played a leading role in the recent development of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, including the on-going “buddho-theo-logical” consultation informally known as the “Cobb-Abe Group.” Thus, in certain circles in America, Dōgen may have become not only a famous figure in the history of Zen but also one of the chief representatives of Buddhist thought — a “spokesman,” as it were, for the Buddhist world view to whom Americans may turn for the final word on what Buddhists think about things.

[18]Record of Things Heard (Boulder, Colorad Prajñā Press, 1980) (translation of the Zuimon ki); Shōbō genzō: Zen Essays by Dōgen (Hawaii, 1986).

[19]How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbō genzō (3d ed.; Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1990); Sounds of the Valley Streams: Enlightenment in Dōgen’s Zen (SUNY Press, 1988) (both rendering selections from the Shōbōgenzō).

[20]Flowers of Emptiness: Selections from Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō (Lewiston, N. Y. and Queenston, Ontari E. Mellen Press, 1985).

[21]Moon in a Dewdrop, with others (San Francisc North Point, 1986) (containing selections from the Shōbōgenzō and other texts).

[22]Refining Your Life (Weatherhill, 1983) (translation of the Tenzo kyōkun, with commentary by Uchiyama Kōshō Rōshi).

[23]The Shōbōgenzō (Toky Sankibō Busshorin, 1986; originally published in separate fascicles, 1985-86); The Eihei-kōroku (Sankibō, 1987). Recently, the Kyoto Soto-Zen Center has been particularly active in publishing on Dōgen in English; see, e. g., Okumura Shohaku, Shobogenzo-zuimonki: Sayings of Eihei Dogen Zenji (Kyoto, 1987); Okumura, Dogen Zen (1988).

[24]Hawaii, 1985. Prof. Kasulis once offered his own perspective on the English materials on Dōgen; see “The Zen Philosopher: A Review Article on Dōgen Scholarship in English,” Philosophy East and West 28:3 (7/78).

[25]SUNY Press, 1985. See also Prof. Heine’s A Blade of Grass: Japanese Poetry and Aesthetics in Dōgen Zen (P. Lang, 1989). He has published a review of several translations of and articles on Dōgen in “Truth and Method in Dōgen Scholarship: A Review of Recent Works,” EB 20: 2 (Autumn 1987).

[26]SUNY Press, 1985.

[27]Hawaii, 1990. Though as far as I know it has not yet issued in a book, mention should also be made here of the excellent philosophical work of John Maraldo; see, e. g., his piece in Dōgen Studies (for which, see below, note 33) or “The Hermeneutics of Practice in Dōgen and Francis of Assisi: An Exercise in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue,” EB 14: 2 (Autumn 1981).

[28]As one prominent Zen philosopher has said of my own work, we want to see only the “horizontal,” not the “vertical,” dimension of Zen.

[29]Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

[30]Dōgen’s Formative Years in China: An Historical Study and Annotated Translation of the Hōkyō-ki (Prajñâ Press, 1980). For a rare Buddhological treatment, see William Grosnick, “The Zen Master Dōgen’s Understanding of the Buddha Nature in Light of the Historical Development of the Buddha Nature Concept in India, China and Japan” (dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1986).

[31]Kyot Hōzōkan.

[32]New York: Columbia University Press.

[33]Edited by William LaFleur and published in the Institute’s Studies in East Asian Buddhism series by the University of Hawaii Press. The book includes papers by Profs. Abe, Kim, Cook, Kasulis, Maraldo, and myself, with an introductory essay by LaFleur and a concluding essay by Robert Bellah. A second Kuroda Dōgen conference included unpublished papers by the Zen Kenkyūjo’s own Suzuki Kakuzen, as well as Tamaki Kōshirō, Tamura Yoshiro, and others.

[34]Probably the first published product of this interest will be William Bodiford’s excellent “Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan,” a book manuscript based on research done here at Komazawa under Prof. Ishikawa Rikizan and scheduled to appear in the Kuroda Institute’s Studies in East Asian Buddhism series.