Reflecting on the Historical Dogen: Don’t Trust Anyone!

Blog Consumer Warning: This post is especially for Dogen-ophiles! Others read at your own risk.

However great his personal religious charisma while alive, Dogen was never prominent. After his death, he soon faded into obscurity. He would have remained forgotten but for several specific ritual techniques that brought his memory back to life, imbued it with mythic qualities, and then exploited its power. William Bodiford writes the above as part of his introduction to “Remembering Dogen: Eiheiji and Dogen Hagiography” (Journal of Japanese Studies, 32:1). The essence of the article is that Dogen would probably have been almost forgotten had it not been for Eiheiji’s need to make Dogen really something in it’s competition with Sojiji, the “other” main monastery in Soto Zen.

It may be, of course, that the Soto ancestors at Eiheiji also were very moved by Dogen’s teaching. I prefer a “thick” approach to interpretation of history (and personal stories too) rather than thin – complex and multidimensional, rather than a thin theory explains everything. That seems to fit life more closely.

Bodiford, though, is a one fine scholar. In this piece he explains how Eiheiji now and for a long time has needed to elevate Dogen. Tourists (and they have lots of tourists) are taken into a shrine room and allowed the opportunity to rub Dogen’s zafu and zabuton, for instance, which both look remarkably new. This is for good luck, I was told.

Also, despite respective reputations in the West, turns out that Sojiji has a lot more temples in its system (like way more, 13,850 to 148). So Sojiji has influence, financial support and also location, location, location (near Tokyo).

What’s a poor country monastery to do? In brief, in order to survive, Eiheiji got royal endorsements (starting in 1507, 250 years after Dogen), memorial services for Dogen (350 years after his death, perhaps), and seized the “traditional practices” authority beginning with one of my ancestors, Gento Sokuju, late in the 18th century. Traditional practices included “authentic” monastic training style and scholarship (publication of the Shobogenzo and lecturing on it).

One interesting thing is how recently a lot of this happened. In the old days, Dogen seems not to have been such a big deal. The Shobogenzo was mostly squirreled away in various monasteries as “secret texts” and not published and available until the early 19th century (also the work of Gento Sokuchu). Also, Giun, a third generation successor, seems to have been much more important to people in the 15th century than Dogen, if the number and size of contributions to Giun’s memorial (2.5 times Dogen’s) tell us anything.

Nishiari Bokusan (1821-1910), regularly quoted in these parts, is the first Soto priest of whom we have evidence that lectured on Dogen. And the first Dogen study session (Genzo-e) was held at Eiheiji in 1905 and slowly changed the style of the training of Soto priests to focus on Shobogenzo and lecture on it.

Strangely, the present style of Soto Zen in some keys ways is really very young, including major elements in the story of the founder, Dogen, probably made up by Menzan in his Teiho Kenzeiki in 1754 (five hundred years after Dogen). Menzan could have been relying on Soto Zen lore or simply taking some “creative license.” The previous most significant biography of Dogen was from 1452, just a couple hundred years after Dogen died, but Menzan added a lot that isn’t in that earlier version.

Bodiford writes about this,

Since the full extent of Menzan’s distorions was not immediately understood, many encyclopedia entries, reference works, and statements by Western and Japanese scholars published after 1975 repeated the erroneous accounts in Menzan’s annotated version of Kenzei’s chronicle (the 1452 version). One cannot trust anything written about Dogen’s life, therefore, unless one first ascertains whether its author made full use of Kawamura’s early manuscripts (the 1452 stuff).

So what? Bodhiford has this:

We should perhaps remind ourselves that the Dogen we remember is a constructed image, an image constructed in large measure to serve the sectarian agendas of Eiheiji in its rivalry with Sojiji. We should remember that the Dogen of the Shobogenzo, the Dogen who is held up as a profound religious philosopher, is a fairly recent innovation in the history of Dogen remembrances. However important that modern Dogen may be for our time, he might not be so important for Kamakura Buddhism….

As for me, I find it helpful that a religion that has the teaching and practice of emptiness at its core, is also a construction. There is no one, findable Dogen. Or Dosho. Or you, dear reader. So we all might lighten up.