Dōgen Zenji

Eihei Dōgen was born in 1200 to a noble family in Kyoto and orphaned by age eight — his mother's death gave him, he later said, his first direct experience of impermanence. He became a Tendai monk at thirteen but was tormented by a question: if all beings already have Buddha-nature, why must we practice at all? No teacher in Japan could answer him. At twenty-three he sailed to Song-dynasty China. He spent five years searching. He nearly gave up. Then under master Tiantong Rujing at Mount Tiantong, in the middle of zazen one early morning, he heard Rujing scold a dozing monk — "Zazen is the dropping off of body and mind!" — and broke through. He returned to Japan in 1227 carrying nothing but the practice of shikantaza, "just sitting." No mantra, no koan, no goal. Sit upright. Breathe. Let body and mind drop away. His answer to his old question: practice and enlightenment are not two. To sit zazen is not to become a Buddha — it is to be one, in that moment, fully. There is no destination to arrive at. He founded the Sōtō Zen school and built Eihei-ji monastery in the mountains of Echizen, where the lineage continues today. His writing is unlike anything else in Buddhist literature — precise, paradoxical, and so densely poetic it remains hard to translate. He saw mountains as sutras, rivers as the teaching, time itself (Uji, "Being-Time") as something we do not move through but are. Key works: Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) — 95 fascicles, his life's work. Also Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendation of Zazen), Genjōkōan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), Bendōwa (A Talk on Pursuing the Way), and Tenzo Kyōkun (Instructions for the Cook — on the spiritual practice of ordinary work). He died in 1253, age fifty-three.