Dōgen - Dōgens manuals of Zen meditation

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank the Japan Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for grants in support of the initial research for this work; the Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Research in International Studies, Stanford University, for support of the writing; Professors Kajiyama Yuichi and Yanagida Seizan, of Kyoto University, for assistance during the initial research; and the Kuroda Institute and the University of Hawaii Press for permission to reprint here a revised version of my article "Ch'ang-lu Tsung-tse and the 'Secret' of Zen Meditation."

Introduction

The Zen school is the Meditation school, and the character of Zen can be traced in the tradition of its meditation teaching. Historians have shown us that the origins of the school in China are considerably later and more complicated than the traditional account of the lineage of Bodhidharma would have it and that the early history of the school is in fact a history of the teachings and traditions of several Buddhist meditation communities of the seventh and eighth centuries. If the masters of these communities did not yet see themselves as members of a Ch'an, or Meditation, school, and ifas is clear from their own reportsthey did not always agree on their interpretations of Buddhism, still they were bound together by a common concern for the immediate, personal experience of enlightenment and liberation and, hence, by a common emphasis on the cultivation of spiritual techniques conducive to that experience. To this extent they may be spoken of as participants in a single reform movement, which sought to cut through the scholastic elaborations of the medieval Chinese Buddhist church and to translate the yogic traditions of north China into a popular modern idiom acceptable to the T'ang Buddhist community.

By the end of the eighth century the Ch'an reformation had established itself as a distinct Buddhist school, complete with its own history, literature, and dogma. Nevertheless, the emphasis on practice and immediate experience remained a hallmark of the faith. Indeed some scholars have held that it was precisely this emphasis that allowed the school to weather the persecutions of the late T'ang and emerge as the sole surviving form of Chinese monastic Buddhism. On several counts such a view is probably overdrawn; but, if the number of Ch'an books from the late T'ang and Sung suggests that there was considerably more to Ch'an religion in those days than simply "seeing one's nature and becoming a Buddha," there is much in the content of these books to indicate that the ground of the religion continued to be the meditation hall and the daily round of the monastic routine.

Few Buddhists, whether of the Zen or other persuasions, would disagree with D5gen that, since the days of Sakyamuni, meditation has been, in one form or another, a core element of the religionthough most might question whether it is in itself sufficient to gain the final religious goal. Few Zen Buddhists, whether of the Soto or other denominations, would be surprised by Dogen's claim that (at least when rightly understood) the practice of Zen is itself the direct realization of the enlightened Buddha mind within us all, but many would doubt that the meaning of this claim is best interpreted through the concrete exercise of seated meditation. Dogen was not unaware of these questions and doubts. The true vision of the shobo genzo, he held, was always the minority view, handed down in each generation through a unique line of transmission (tanden) from Sakyamuni and preserved in his own day only in the person of his Chinese master, the Ts'ao-tung teacher T'ien-t'ung Ju-ching (i 163-1228). As for the restthe benighted adepts of the Hinayana, the word-counting scholars of the Mahayana, and the self-styled masters of the other houses of Ch'an (especially of the Lin-chi house that had come to dominate Sung China)they blasphemed zazen or paid it lip service without real understanding or authentic practice.