What do you think?
Rate this book
Engaging Dogen's Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening
How are the teachings of a thirteenth-century master relevant today? Twenty contemporary writers unpack Dogen's words and show how we can still find meaning in his teachings.
Zen Master Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism, is widely regarded as one of the world’s most remarkable spiritual thinkers. Dogen influence on both Japanese and Western Zen Buddhism cannot be overstated. His writings, emphasizing the nonduality of practice and enlightenment are vastly subtle, endlessly sophisticated—and renownedly challenging to read on one’s own.
This unique collection of essays opens up for the reader new pathways for connecting to and making use of Dogen's powerful teachings. Some of Soto Zen’s leading scholars and practitioners offer a masterfully guided tour of Dogen’s writings, organized around two key Shushogi , which is a classical distillation of the whole of Dogen’s teachings, and Fukanzazengi , Dogen universal instructions for Zen meditation. Along the way, the reader will gain an enriched understanding of the Zen practice and realization, of shikantaza or “just sitting,” and of the essence of Mahayana Buddhism—and a much deeper appreciation of this peerless master.
Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis.
Zen Master Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism, is widely regarded as one of the world’s most remarkable spiritual thinkers. Dogen influence on both Japanese and Western Zen Buddhism cannot be overstated. His writings, emphasizing the nonduality of practice and enlightenment are vastly subtle, endlessly sophisticated—and renownedly challenging to read on one’s own.
This unique collection of essays opens up for the reader new pathways for connecting to and making use of Dogen's powerful teachings. Some of Soto Zen’s leading scholars and practitioners offer a masterfully guided tour of Dogen’s writings, organized around two key Shushogi , which is a classical distillation of the whole of Dogen’s teachings, and Fukanzazengi , Dogen universal instructions for Zen meditation. Along the way, the reader will gain an enriched understanding of the Zen practice and realization, of shikantaza or “just sitting,” and of the essence of Mahayana Buddhism—and a much deeper appreciation of this peerless master.
Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis.
296 pages, Paperback
Published January 17, 2017
23 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 2, 2019
The irony: putting reason to sleep is called awakening in all cults. Without this sleep metaphor meme cults seem simply disintegrate.
May 30, 2018
Ways to Enlightenment
A Review of
Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening
by
Shuzan Dai Kou a.k.a. Jason Giannetti
It’s been said that each of us has within us a genjōkōan, that is, a koan that emerges of its own and, like the proverbial ball of hot iron that one can neither swallow nor spit out, this organic koan propels us to the point of madness or breakthrough. For Layman P’ang, the self-arising koan was “What about someone who has no connection with the ten thousand dharmas?” For Neo of The Matrix it was, “What is the Matrix?” And for Dōgen, his innate koan was: If the teaching of original enlightenment is true, then what need is there for practice, such as zazen (seated meditation)? In other words, if, as the teaching goes, we are, already buddhas, that is, enlightened, ab initio, then what’s the point of Buddhist or Zen practice, ritual, and training? As we are told in the biography of Dōgen, it was in search of the answer to this burning question that Dōgen set out to leave his native Japan and its Buddhist teachers in order to find the answer among the supposedly more authentic authorities of China. (p. 202)
The new book from Wisdom Press, Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening, Edited by Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Shūdō Brian Schroeder, and Kanpū Bret W. Davis, seeks to quest along with Dōgen in trying to resolve this tension between hongaku (original enlightenment) and acquired awakening. Along the way, the text opens up for us a myriad of fascinating byways and divergent paths.
Set up in three parts with contributing essays from nineteen respected scholars and practitioners heavily weighted toward the Continental tradition, the authors engage with Dōgen on many levels – from the biographical to the philosophical. The text begins with an introduction from the editor, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, that presents the historical setting, both of Dōgen and also of the scholarship that developed in his wake. Dōgen, who lived 1200 – 1253 C.E., was writing on Zen just at the time that Christianity was making inroads in Japan. As a result, there has been an ongoing debate as to the degree to which Christianity influenced Dōgen’s discussions of repentance and his seeming to address a lay audience in his Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye).
The five essays that comprise Part I of the text introduce the reader to Dōgen and his writings. In the first essay, by Kosho Itagaki, we are presented a cold, unsentimental assessment of contemporary Japanese Buddhist institutions, described as “funeral Buddhism” and “temple inheritance.” (p. 17) We are then offered a slightly more positive, though still critical, view of Zen’s travels to and appropriation by America. A salutary word of caution is given that argues in favor of the project of the text at hand. Itagaki says, “We need not reject ‘Beat Zen,’ or New Age eclectic Zen, or Zen as a sophisticated intellectual pursuit, such as they are. But I think that it is essential that we reexamine the teachings of Dōgen and make sure that we are not diluting them through the filter of cultural preferences.” (p. 20)
Chapter 4, “Practice-Realization: Dōgen Zen and Original Awakening,” by Shūdō Brian Schroeder and chapter 5, “Walking with Mountains, or What Shōbōgenzō and Dōgen Mean to Me,” by Glen A. Mazis, really delve into the philosophical quandary that faced Dōgen. Investigating the issue of original enlightenment, Schroeder dares to ask, if everything is Buddha nature, then is not everything permitted? Original enlightenment would seem not only to call into question the purpose and benefit of practice, but the philosophical tenant of karma as well. Schroeder tells us that “Dōgen utterly refused this viewpoint.” (p. 46)
Schroeder suggests a clever solution to the bull’s horns of either fully enlightened as we are or not, and therefore in need of improvement. He proposes that “[b]eing fully in the moment is the sudden realization of original awakening,” but there is a “gradual process of continually learning how to be fully in the moment.” (p. 49) In other words, we are always, already enlightened, just as we are, but practice (of zazen) is necessary because we don’t always realize it. It is like Moliere’s Mr. Jourdain who, after his first lesson on language, remarks that he has been speaking prose all his life and didn’t know it.
In Chapter 5, Mazis deepens the philosophical reflections of Schroeder with a meditative/poetic reading of Dōgen’s use of the term uji, “being-time” or “time-being.” All time is present in this moment, this eternal Now, but it is in the linear temporal unfolding of time that we come to this realization. And when do we come to it? Now.
Part II is comprised of fourteen brief essays on Dōgen’s Shushōgi (The Meaning of Practice and Verification). Part II begins with a translation of the brief text which itself is a sort of hornbook of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. Each of the authors elaborates upon some discrete part of the text and expands its meaning in often fresh and unexpected directions and depths.
Just to give a few examples, Drew Leder takes the passages of Dōgen through a rapid comparison with Jewish ritual, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Merton before bringing it back around again to a discussion of Martin Buber.
Graham Parkes’ essay in chapter 17 is a prolonged present-tense meditation on mindfulness that takes the reader through the eternal nows of Parkes’ day. As he says, “Here, in Japan, now that winter is almost over, it is the season of the satsuma tangerine.” (p. 173) He then goes on to describe in detail the peeling and arranging, biting and tasting of the tangerine while interspersing his account with reflections on Dōgen. This sort of meditation is appropriate given how much Dōgen focused not only on the here-and-now in general, but specifically giving instructions for the cook of the monastery.
And in chapter sixteen, the usually scholarly Steve Heine offers a rare treat that explores the use of nonhuman figures in Dōgen to suggest an approach that transcends “anthropocentrism by learning from the behavior of altruistic animals.” (p. 170)
Finally, Part III is a single essay by Kanpū Bret W. Davis on Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen). This lengthy piece brings the work back around to the question of gradual vs. original enlightenment. Davis leads us to a path that goes beyond the various dualisms (gradual/original, thinking/not-thinking), to what he calls “nonthinking.” That is, that which is beyond or underlying thought and from which both thought and not-thought arise.
Engaging Dōgen’s Zen is not a perfect book. It is uneven, both in its structure and in the style, length, and depth of the individual essays. However, it is an important contribution to a tradition (Sōtō Zen) that, in America at least, has been much overlooked.
Of Dōgen it has been said that he is “The Greatest Philosopher You’ve Never Heard Of.” (Adam Frank, NPR.org May 31, 2016) But, to the extent that you have heard of Zen Buddhism and sitting meditation, you have heard of him, indirectly. At least as far back as J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, which opened in 1953 with the epigraph, “But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” America has been tantalized by the prospect and promise of Zen koans; so much so that Americans have treated the koan as a synecdoche for Zen; conflating the idea of Zen with the koan. But koan practice is primarily used in Rinzai Zen, where zazen (silent sitting meditation) is also practiced, but less prominently (at least in the popular imagination). By contrast, in the Sōtō Zen tradition, koan practice is still employed but deemphasized, in favor of emphasizing zazen. Perhaps as a result of the American preoccupation with the koan, this towering figure of Zen has not garnered the attention he deserves and this work does much to rectify that neglect. It is needed now, more than ever, for, as Itagaki has pointed out, with the ever increasing Western appreciation for “mindfulness” and meditation, it is well worth our while to go back and study the texts of he who coalesced the Chinese tradition into something new and engaging in Japan.
Further, if we embrace the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, which views the imperfect, the asymmetrical, the incomplete as beautiful, then we can accept this book for what it is: a slightly flawed finger pointing at the moon. And perhaps the defects of the text are instructive as well. Since the text is made up of nineteen very different authors, it may be that through the various voices we hear yet one more answer to the genjōkōan that dogged Dōgen – original or gradual enlightenment? Could it be that this text with its multiple answers is also implicitly suggesting that there are as many ways to enlightenment as there are practitioners? – original, gradual, sudden, koan meditation, study, zazen, even “peak experiences” such as are found in the making and experiencing of art, playing basketball, engaging in sex. Who knows where or when you’ll find your enlightenment?!
A Review of
Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening
by
Shuzan Dai Kou a.k.a. Jason Giannetti
It’s been said that each of us has within us a genjōkōan, that is, a koan that emerges of its own and, like the proverbial ball of hot iron that one can neither swallow nor spit out, this organic koan propels us to the point of madness or breakthrough. For Layman P’ang, the self-arising koan was “What about someone who has no connection with the ten thousand dharmas?” For Neo of The Matrix it was, “What is the Matrix?” And for Dōgen, his innate koan was: If the teaching of original enlightenment is true, then what need is there for practice, such as zazen (seated meditation)? In other words, if, as the teaching goes, we are, already buddhas, that is, enlightened, ab initio, then what’s the point of Buddhist or Zen practice, ritual, and training? As we are told in the biography of Dōgen, it was in search of the answer to this burning question that Dōgen set out to leave his native Japan and its Buddhist teachers in order to find the answer among the supposedly more authentic authorities of China. (p. 202)
The new book from Wisdom Press, Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening, Edited by Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Shūdō Brian Schroeder, and Kanpū Bret W. Davis, seeks to quest along with Dōgen in trying to resolve this tension between hongaku (original enlightenment) and acquired awakening. Along the way, the text opens up for us a myriad of fascinating byways and divergent paths.
Set up in three parts with contributing essays from nineteen respected scholars and practitioners heavily weighted toward the Continental tradition, the authors engage with Dōgen on many levels – from the biographical to the philosophical. The text begins with an introduction from the editor, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, that presents the historical setting, both of Dōgen and also of the scholarship that developed in his wake. Dōgen, who lived 1200 – 1253 C.E., was writing on Zen just at the time that Christianity was making inroads in Japan. As a result, there has been an ongoing debate as to the degree to which Christianity influenced Dōgen’s discussions of repentance and his seeming to address a lay audience in his Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye).
The five essays that comprise Part I of the text introduce the reader to Dōgen and his writings. In the first essay, by Kosho Itagaki, we are presented a cold, unsentimental assessment of contemporary Japanese Buddhist institutions, described as “funeral Buddhism” and “temple inheritance.” (p. 17) We are then offered a slightly more positive, though still critical, view of Zen’s travels to and appropriation by America. A salutary word of caution is given that argues in favor of the project of the text at hand. Itagaki says, “We need not reject ‘Beat Zen,’ or New Age eclectic Zen, or Zen as a sophisticated intellectual pursuit, such as they are. But I think that it is essential that we reexamine the teachings of Dōgen and make sure that we are not diluting them through the filter of cultural preferences.” (p. 20)
Chapter 4, “Practice-Realization: Dōgen Zen and Original Awakening,” by Shūdō Brian Schroeder and chapter 5, “Walking with Mountains, or What Shōbōgenzō and Dōgen Mean to Me,” by Glen A. Mazis, really delve into the philosophical quandary that faced Dōgen. Investigating the issue of original enlightenment, Schroeder dares to ask, if everything is Buddha nature, then is not everything permitted? Original enlightenment would seem not only to call into question the purpose and benefit of practice, but the philosophical tenant of karma as well. Schroeder tells us that “Dōgen utterly refused this viewpoint.” (p. 46)
Schroeder suggests a clever solution to the bull’s horns of either fully enlightened as we are or not, and therefore in need of improvement. He proposes that “[b]eing fully in the moment is the sudden realization of original awakening,” but there is a “gradual process of continually learning how to be fully in the moment.” (p. 49) In other words, we are always, already enlightened, just as we are, but practice (of zazen) is necessary because we don’t always realize it. It is like Moliere’s Mr. Jourdain who, after his first lesson on language, remarks that he has been speaking prose all his life and didn’t know it.
In Chapter 5, Mazis deepens the philosophical reflections of Schroeder with a meditative/poetic reading of Dōgen’s use of the term uji, “being-time” or “time-being.” All time is present in this moment, this eternal Now, but it is in the linear temporal unfolding of time that we come to this realization. And when do we come to it? Now.
Part II is comprised of fourteen brief essays on Dōgen’s Shushōgi (The Meaning of Practice and Verification). Part II begins with a translation of the brief text which itself is a sort of hornbook of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. Each of the authors elaborates upon some discrete part of the text and expands its meaning in often fresh and unexpected directions and depths.
Just to give a few examples, Drew Leder takes the passages of Dōgen through a rapid comparison with Jewish ritual, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Merton before bringing it back around again to a discussion of Martin Buber.
Graham Parkes’ essay in chapter 17 is a prolonged present-tense meditation on mindfulness that takes the reader through the eternal nows of Parkes’ day. As he says, “Here, in Japan, now that winter is almost over, it is the season of the satsuma tangerine.” (p. 173) He then goes on to describe in detail the peeling and arranging, biting and tasting of the tangerine while interspersing his account with reflections on Dōgen. This sort of meditation is appropriate given how much Dōgen focused not only on the here-and-now in general, but specifically giving instructions for the cook of the monastery.
And in chapter sixteen, the usually scholarly Steve Heine offers a rare treat that explores the use of nonhuman figures in Dōgen to suggest an approach that transcends “anthropocentrism by learning from the behavior of altruistic animals.” (p. 170)
Finally, Part III is a single essay by Kanpū Bret W. Davis on Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen). This lengthy piece brings the work back around to the question of gradual vs. original enlightenment. Davis leads us to a path that goes beyond the various dualisms (gradual/original, thinking/not-thinking), to what he calls “nonthinking.” That is, that which is beyond or underlying thought and from which both thought and not-thought arise.
Engaging Dōgen’s Zen is not a perfect book. It is uneven, both in its structure and in the style, length, and depth of the individual essays. However, it is an important contribution to a tradition (Sōtō Zen) that, in America at least, has been much overlooked.
Of Dōgen it has been said that he is “The Greatest Philosopher You’ve Never Heard Of.” (Adam Frank, NPR.org May 31, 2016) But, to the extent that you have heard of Zen Buddhism and sitting meditation, you have heard of him, indirectly. At least as far back as J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, which opened in 1953 with the epigraph, “But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” America has been tantalized by the prospect and promise of Zen koans; so much so that Americans have treated the koan as a synecdoche for Zen; conflating the idea of Zen with the koan. But koan practice is primarily used in Rinzai Zen, where zazen (silent sitting meditation) is also practiced, but less prominently (at least in the popular imagination). By contrast, in the Sōtō Zen tradition, koan practice is still employed but deemphasized, in favor of emphasizing zazen. Perhaps as a result of the American preoccupation with the koan, this towering figure of Zen has not garnered the attention he deserves and this work does much to rectify that neglect. It is needed now, more than ever, for, as Itagaki has pointed out, with the ever increasing Western appreciation for “mindfulness” and meditation, it is well worth our while to go back and study the texts of he who coalesced the Chinese tradition into something new and engaging in Japan.
Further, if we embrace the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, which views the imperfect, the asymmetrical, the incomplete as beautiful, then we can accept this book for what it is: a slightly flawed finger pointing at the moon. And perhaps the defects of the text are instructive as well. Since the text is made up of nineteen very different authors, it may be that through the various voices we hear yet one more answer to the genjōkōan that dogged Dōgen – original or gradual enlightenment? Could it be that this text with its multiple answers is also implicitly suggesting that there are as many ways to enlightenment as there are practitioners? – original, gradual, sudden, koan meditation, study, zazen, even “peak experiences” such as are found in the making and experiencing of art, playing basketball, engaging in sex. Who knows where or when you’ll find your enlightenment?!
October 7, 2023
This collection of essays by different Buddhist scholars of varying backgrounds moves thoughtfully, paragraph by paragraph through the Shushogi, itself a collection of verses from the earlier Shobogenzo by Dogen. Each author’s approach is unique and they draw on a host of sources from Zen, Tibetatan and the Pali Canon to examine and explicate the teaching.
April 26, 2020
The book provides a fleeting glimpse of what cannot be grasped with words. No more, no less. No gain - just practice. Within practice there is a way, a place, that is no way and no place, because it is every way and every place. It is like the ever so slight smile of a very old man.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews