Good morning, everyone. Welcome. For new people, I'm Taigen Danley, the Guiding Dharma teacher here at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. I'm very happy to have as our guest speaker this morning Stephen Hein. Maybe all of you have heard him here before. He's been to Ancient Dragon numbers of times, but just briefly he is, I would say, the foremost American academic scholar of Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen in the 13th century, and generally of Zen and of Talans. He's written many, many books. It would take the whole morning to just name them all. Anyway, we are going to talk this morning about new directions in Zen studies. And this is from a workshop that Stephen and I both attended. There's a couple of other people

[01:03]

here, I think, who attended. And this was an academic workshop over the last two days. And this is not a comprehensive inclusion of all new directions in Zen studies. As someone pointed out at the end, this was restricted to Japanese Zen, not Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese. But there were six really fine leading scholars of Zen. So what we're going to try and do, I will basically introduce and hit key points in each of them in turn. Then Stephen will respond. And then at the end, we'll have hopefully time for questions and discussions. Three of the papers were related to Dogen directly. A couple of them were more modern 20th century issues.

[02:05]

So I'm going to just start with William Botterford, who was talking about the resurrection of Dogen. So William is one of the, if not the leading scholar of medieval Soto Zen. And before his paper was on the resurrection of Dogen, starting in the early 1920s with the writing of Wat Suji Tetsuro, I'll come back to that. But before that, he said some very interesting things about medieval Soto Zen. So some of you have heard the stereotype that Dogen was not studied from, I don't know, maybe around 1300. He died in 1253, until the early 1600s. And William persuasively indicated that this was not really true. There were many different versions and different texts of Shobogenzo essays that were circulated. They're still being discovered in all Soto temples around Japan. And a lot of them had

[03:13]

marginal notes that indicated a shared culture of reading Shobogenzo texts. So there were prior texts that were indicated in the margins that were in common. So there was a very active, during this whole period, there was a very active culture in Soto Zen of reading Dogen. Again, the 13th century founder of what we now call Soto Zen, who brought this tradition from China to Japan. And maybe I was going to say something just briefly about academic study, or scholarly study in general, and practice, which is our concern here. But the two can be mutually reinforcing. So to learn about the tradition and to learn about what is happening in academic studies can be informative to our practice, which is for us the point. So I'll try and keep these two points that relate to our practice. But one of the main points that William

[04:18]

Botterford brought up was about this resurrection of Dogen in the 20th century. That starting in the early 1920s, there was this article, which was eventually a book on Shaman Dogen, Monk Dogen, by a layperson, Hatsuji Tetsuro, a Japanese person who was trying to bring Dogen to the attention of Japanese people beyond the Soto school, where he'd been mostly, most of the attention was before. And part of this is to show Dogen as an independent philosopher, and to show that Japan had a tradition of philosophy to match or to dialogue with Western philosophy. William mentioned a number of other versions in his paper of Dogen

[05:19]

from 1944 to 1970. These are based on particular articles, or papers, or books. Dogen, the religious innovator. So Dogen was one of the early 13th century figures in Japan who started new movements in Buddhism, including Shinran, and Pure Land, and Nichiren, the Lotus Sutra. Then Dogen, the Zen master, talking about his role as not just a writer, but as someone who was actually supervising monks and building temples. And then Dogen, the internationalist in 1958, started to talk about all the translations of Dogen, which now the point was made that Dogen is not just a Japanese Buddhist figure, he's a world figure, not even just in North America or throughout Europe and South America. And into Asia, people are reading Dogen. Then 1965, one of the most interesting is Dogen, the literary person.

[06:25]

So for a long time, Dogen was considered this religious writer. But starting in 1965, and including much later, he started to be included in poetry collections, and people started appreciating his prose writing. So as a literary writer, Dogen, the philosopher of 1970, and also in 1970, someone did a paper on Dogen, the human being, of course, all the others are human beings, but this person really did a kind of psychological biography. He was someone who had done a biography, a psychological biography of Leonardo da Vinci based on a couple of lines from something he wrote. So that's just kind of introduction to what William Boddiford presented. Stephen, would you care to amplify that or say some more about William's paper and presentation?

[07:26]

Yes, Taigen, thank you. First of all, thank you for the introduction and for the opportunity to be with Ancient Dragon once again. And I think it's a very interesting topic. So William Boddiford, I'm sure many of you are familiar with some of his works. He wrote a monumental book in 1993, the Soto Zen in Minipo, Japan, that still is an extremely useful resource for understanding the early period of Soto Zen. It's not primarily on Dogen, but he does have an excellent discussion of Dogen and his early disciples, and then how Soto sect continued to evolve over the next couple of centuries. And William's work is, I guess, overall is primarily medieval, but he, like many people, also delves into Dogen in the modern period or later implications or more recent appropriations,

[08:34]

interpretations, acceptances, various views of how Dogen has been seen in the modern period, because you can't separate the fact that we're all kind of modern looking back at the ancient and medieval periods. So I guess William's remarks, as Taigen indicated, were kind of going a little bit in two paths. The opening remarks, he talked about the manuscript culture related to Dogen Shobogenzo. So as part of the Soto Zen translation project that has been working for over two decades now to develop a bilingual edition that would give a complete translation with many annotations and other tools for the reader, like glossaries, on the Shobogenzo. And William has been involved in that project, and he's writing maybe the introductory volume,

[09:40]

depending on how the publication works out, but he's writing a very lengthy and substantial introduction. And so he's been doing a lot of research. And for research that I did also, kind of separately, but I've been in touch with him the whole time, and we've traded some notes. But for a book I published last summer on Shobogenzo, I was also looking at what is kind of a black hole, I think, that needs to be understood better and some misimpressions rectified about what was going on with Shobogenzo over the course of many centuries. So Shobogenzo was not complete when Dogen died. Dogen died a little bit prematurely, we could say, when he was 53 years old. And there were several versions of Shobogenzo at the time that he and his main disciple, Ejo, apparently had been working with. It's not clear exactly what Dogen's intentions were for the final editing and the final production of Shobogenzo,

[10:45]

so that has been a bit of a mystery. And the kind of stereotype has built up that after a couple of attempts at making commentaries on Shobogenzo in the first three or four generations after Dogen's death, and there were basically two attempts at that, but I'll come back to that in a second, after the attempts at interpretation, then Dogen was kind of, or Dogen in general, and maybe, and Shobogenzo were kind of forgotten about for a number of centuries in the medieval period because there weren't additional commentaries in the typical sense of the term for several centuries. It's true from the early 1300s to the earlier mid-1600s, we don't see the commentary tradition continued. So that in that sense, the conventional view is kind of

[11:45]

correct, but does that mean that Dogen was forgotten about or, and Shobogenzo neglected for that period of time? You know, I definitely agree with William's comments, his brief comments yesterday, that no, it doesn't mean that, and I'll explain more in a moment. So, and then what happened after that in the early 1600s, that's the Tokugawa period or the Edo period in Japanese history, there was a lot of new influences coming in from China. The shogun wanted the Rinzai Zen school and the Soto Zen school to kind of define themselves and distinguish themselves and not have overlap, so there was an attempt by the leading monks to kind of reclaim Dogen as their founder and their leader, and that was a way of distinguishing Soto from Rinzai. There were more commentaries, but still I think the impression has been given that, well, maybe there were a handful of commentaries. Still wasn't very much going on until

[12:48]

Watsuji comes along in the 1920s to re-evaluate and resuscitate or restore a reputation for Dogen, but he does it kind of stripping it away from the Soto tradition and Zen heritage and looking at him as kind of a worldwide philosopher or thinker. So, in that sense, the traditional Dogen still is kind of forgotten. Let me go back to those early centuries very briefly. There were two commentaries on on Shobo Genzo, different editions of the work. One was prose, line by line or interlinear commentary. For the most part, that has not been translated yet into English, but it's very interesting because it gives interpretations of just about every sentence, every phrase, every passage, so it's important. And then

[13:50]

there was a prose commentary on a different edition of Shobo Genzo, excuse me, a poetic commentary that I published last year by a monk named Gion, who was the fifth abbot of Eheji, and that's not really an interpretation because it's poetry, so it's kind of like a spiritual exposition or a spiritual explanation of Gion's view of the essential meaning of each of the Shobo Genzo fascicles or chapters without really trying to analyze them. So then what happens in between? Again, the commentaries pick up in the 1600s, so there's 300 years that are kind of a blank slate. Well, as William pointed out, there were dozens and dozens of copies made of the manuscripts that are available. They've been recovered from archives of temples throughout Japan. And Soto sect was growing, so Soto sect started having dozens and hundreds and thousands of temples throughout the Japanese countryside. And Rinzai Zen was pretty much limited to Kyoto in

[14:59]

terms of its geographical scope, and Soto Zen was just about everywhere else. And Shobo Genzo was being copied by monks who would visit Eheji, take a manuscript copy back to their home temple, and a lot of those have been recovered. So we see a lot of activity, a lot of interest. Formal commentaries weren't written at that time, but notes were taken. There was a kind of juggling of the order and sequence of the fascicles and different thoughts about how to present a complete edition. And so, because this has been part of the Black Hall, you know, his work is helping to restore an understanding. Then let's come up to Watsuji. As Taigen mentioned, part of the main theme for William's analysis yesterday was Watsuji, who in 1920s, almost single-handedly, people

[16:00]

look back and say, well, he told the world, hey, there's this traditional Japanese philosopher who stands on a world stage in terms of his significance. But Watsuji was kind of an anti-sectarian person. He wasn't only a layperson. He said, well, the tradition, you know, can't keep Dogen to itself, so we have to talk about him separately. Actually, I think if you read his interpretation, it's kind of traditional in its own way. So, you know, it's part of the intellectual discourse at the time was to be secular, to be modern by reclaiming the tradition, but putting it in a modern standpoint. And as Taigen explained, that opens the door to looking at Dogen many different ways. So, you know, is there a real Dogen? And what happens to Dogen as the religious figure, as the person who advocates meditation, as the person who talked about dropping off body-mind, as the person who led temple rituals, who emphasized monastic discipline?

[17:08]

What happens to those traditional elements of Dogen in Watsuji's view or other views that talk about him as a philosopher, as a literary figure? Now, one person I want to mention briefly is a scholar in Germany who's published a number of things in English, Ralph Muller, who wrote an interesting article a few years ago showing that Watsuji, of course, didn't come out of a vacuum. He was not really the first one to do this. Several other predecessors going back to the 1890s started to do it, and it kind of built up over the course of those decades that there was this interest by the Japanese who wanted to present a modern view of Japan to the West and say, hey, we also want to say, hey, we have a history that's kind of equal to yours. One of Watsuji's interests was to talk about the city of Nara and the large temples and pagodas there and kind of compare them to Greek architecture and talk about that as a classical

[18:16]

period of Japan. So that was another angle where he was trying to put Japan and its cultural history into world prominence, and Dogen gets caught up in that. But I'll make one more comment and turn it back to Taigen. I think one of the interesting things about what William is showing, and it's pretty evident, and it's also quite evident now in the English writings, whether academic or not academic about Dogen, is there's so many different ways of interpreting and appropriating the significance of Dogen, and sometimes it's almost unrecognizable if he's looked at as a philosopher versus a religious teacher or if he's looked at for his writing quality as opposed to his emphasis on practice. But at the same time, if we put those

[19:19]

interpretations together, it helps to complete the puzzle and gives, you know, each one contributes in its own way to a fuller picture of Dogen. Thank you, Stephen. I'll just add briefly to what you said, and we have a lot of material to cover, but that first commentary on Dogen in prose, which unfortunately has not been translated yet, was by two direct disciples of Dogen. So later commentaries lean on that comment on that Japanese commentary, because these were commentators who actually heard Dogen give the talks that Shofuken says based on. So there's a lot more to say about it. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's a very, very important point. But let me just add to that, that they were direct disciples, and so they would have attended the lectures, but it didn't come to get published as publishing was back in those days until

[20:26]

1308 is the date that's given. So there was a big time lag there. And in the meantime, they had returned to Kyoto, and the first of them had died off, and the second one did the publishing. But because they were in Kyoto and Soto Zen was spreading up in the territories around Eheji, it seems like it got lost. So that manuscript was probably not being read for several hundred years. And but once it was rediscovered, yeah, then people said, hey, this is the real thing, because these guys heard it, you know, directly from Dogen. Thank you. Yes. So there's so much more to say on all of these six papers, and where some of we're going to just barely mention. But the next one, this was the paper by Stephen Heine himself, called When Mountains Can No Longer Be Seen. So this is very interesting for us, because it's dealing with Genjo Kōan, one of Dogen's main writings. Sometimes chant is a little long

[21:32]

for chanting usually. But one of the key phrases, Stephen talks about one sentence only, or one phrase only, and looks at, in his paper, through the history of different commentaries on this one, on this one phrase. So it's very interesting. And Stephen, I hope, when you're ready, that I can share that paper. I think a lot of people here will be interested in it. But the sentence that, well, let me read the sentence that, as in Stephen's translation, when the Dharma has not yet been studied fully with body-mind, it seems adequate. But if the Dharma is simply, is amply realized with body-mind, one has a feeling of lack. And then this, this is the sentence, for example, when riding a boat out to sea, where mountains can no longer be seen, we look around in four directions, and all we seem to view is a circle. We do not see any other shape. Nevertheless, the great ocean is not round or square, and the remaining features of the ocean are altogether inexhaustible. So this is a key

[22:39]

phrase in Dogen. Let me read it, just for those of you who are familiar with the version by Kastan Hashi that we chant. When Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. And we've talked about that here a lot. It's really a poignant passage. Then, for example, when you sail out in a boat to the midst of an ocean where no land is in sight, literally it's no mountains in sight, as Stephen points out, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way, but the ocean is neither round nor square, and features are infinite in variety. So Stephen looks in his paper at a whole centuries of commentary just on that sentence about going out into the middle of the ocean. And as I've pointed out to him, to go into the middle of Lake Michigan, I understand it's the same way. You cannot see any land. And this is an important point because it brings in Dogen's teaching about perspective

[23:45]

and the limitations of human perspective, the limitations of what we can see. So I'm just going to maybe list a few phrases from Stephen's long paper that jumped out at me. He talks about the ongoing possibilities that are often imaginative and inventive means of disclosing truth, not disconnected from untruths. So when we can only see the ocean as a circle and can't see the details of the shoreline, we have to imagine reality. We have to imagine the reality of the ocean. So he talks about the relationship between perception and reality, or subjectivity and objectivity, which comes up from this phrase, from the sentence. He also talks about the founder of modern Dogen Soto studies, Nishiyari Boksan, who's a very important figure and important for us because he was the teacher of Kishizawa Eon, who was one of Suzuki Roshi's teachers. And Nishiyari Boksan suggests that

[24:52]

apparent partiality is actually intended to indicate limitless capacity. So there's this tension between the limitations of our perceptions, of our intellect, of our human reality and true reality. And Stephen points out that Dogen's standpoint is based on personal authentication rather than abstract speculation or even experiential corroboration. So this personal authentication is an interesting way of talking about Dogen. Last thing I want to say, well, two more things. One thing that Stephen's paper says, which I had never thought of before, that Dogen's journey to China in 1223, where he spent four years studying and then came back to Japan, what produced an awakening reflected in this passage, because he

[25:55]

was literally out to sea on the way from Japan to China and could not see any lands around. And Stephen goes into how that was a kind of awakening where he realized what he describes in his Genjo Koan passage of not being able to see the details of the shoreline, the mountains around. And just a quote from a piece from Stephen's paper, Nishiari books on indicates the journey created a dramatic transition with profound theoretical implications from Dogen's previously landlocked outlook to the awakening of a more comprehensive multi-perspectival approach for understanding the complexity of reality in relation to human perception, limited human perception, and the complexity of reality. They're marked an abrupt and irreversible sense of shifting

[26:55]

away from a physical connection with the shoreline, with the shore, to an incomparable feeling of solitude and the inescapability of realizing just how much one cannot possibly know. So that's from Stephen's comment on Nishiari's books on. Very interesting. And Stephen ends with talking about Dogen's standpoint, which I think is very useful, of creative ambiguity. So a lot of Dogen's writings, as a lot of you know, are very difficult because he doesn't pin things down a lot of the times. He leaves things with questions. He directly asks questions, but there's a kind of possibility there, which has led to a lot of later and modern interpretations. But that's kind of intentional for Dogen. I think that's what Stephen is saying when he talks about creative ambiguity in Dogen's writing. So we have a lot to cover today, but Stephen, do you want to

[27:57]

add to what I said about your paper? Yes, thank you for the introducing it that way. I appreciate your very nice summary. On that issue of translating it as land or mountain, yeah, literally it's mountain. Yama, Yamanaki, Kaichu are the four characters. No mountains, or the four phrases, no mountains in the middle of the ocean is what it literally says. But of course, land is accurate. I mean, because you're not seeing a landmass in front of you anymore. But I think, you know, the idea of the mountain is that that would be the very last thing you might see if there was a very tall mountain off in the distance. And when that, so when that also kind of disappears from view. Now, when Taigen and I were talking about this on the phone a couple weeks ago, I, you know, he said the title talks about one sentence. And I said, well, it's really one phrase. And then I said, yeah, but you got to look at the whole paragraph. So he said to me,

[28:58]

is it one? Are you talking about one sentence or one phrase or one paragraph? And then we kind of laughed to each other and said, you know, Genjo Koan is like one big, long sentence without any punctuation, because it's so, you know, intricately connected in the way he weaves back and forth between the various kind of existential reflections or thoughts about perception and reality. And then the natural images. And he talks about the boat, riding a boat here. And he talks about the boat as emblematic of impermanence in a previous paragraph. And then he talks about the fish swimming in the sea a little bit later on. So it's all very much interconnected. You know, on the landlocked part, I realized I had spent a lot of time some years ago thinking about Dogen's travels in China and how he and other monks at that time would have traveled around to the various temples, what they might have carried with them. You know, Dogen comes back with such a tremendous storehouse of knowledge of Zen writings that were not available in Japan

[30:05]

previously. So how did he, you know, he didn't have digital versions. So how did he learn these? And how did he memorize them? And, you know, did he carry them with him? And, you know, there's a backpack, a wooden kind of backpack that he carried. It would not have held all those materials. So there must have been an entourage of people. And, you know, it's hard to speculate. But also the question of how did he travel in that mountainous area where he was in China? And apparently he probably went through canals and some ancient footpaths that the monks had carved out centuries before. But also how did he get to China from Japan? And going from Kyoto to the southern island of Kyushu and the port there, he probably took some inland waterways because that would have been the quickest way to go. But, you know, you're still going to see the land around you because they're, you know, unlike Lake Michigan, you know, those areas are

[31:05]

probably not big enough to give that sensation of being cast adrift. And, you know, the travels at that time were not very easy for a number of reasons. For political reasons, not many monks had gone to China. That's why Zen was so brand new. Even though it had been in China for hundreds of years, it was new to Japan because the monks hadn't encountered it. Dogen was the second famous monk to have gone in that period. And also, you know, there were a lot of storms. There was apparently a lot of piracy. The Japanese blamed the Koreans and the Koreans blamed the Chinese and so forth about, you know, who were the pirates in those waterways. But, you know, it said that people who traveled in that time, the monks who traveled in that time and others who traveled, whether they were for commercial or cultural reasons, often, you know, didn't necessarily expect that they were going to come back in one piece, either because of the travel itself or

[32:05]

difficulties they'd have in China. And we know that when Dogen got to China, it took him several months to get off the ship and into the monastic system. And we don't know exactly the reasons. He was sick. He had trouble with his kind of visa or his paperwork. There's a lot of theories about that. But, you know, Dogen is consumed by the great doubt at that point, which he supposedly had developed about 10 years before when he first experimented with Tendai Buddhism as a young monk at the age of 12 or 13. And he left that and started practicing Zen. And he was practicing Zazen for a number of years. And he went with his teacher, Myozen, and a couple of other monks to China. But, you know, we have to assume that the great doubt was foremost on his what drove him, you know, and they had debates because should Myozen leave, make the trip when somebody close to him was sick. And, you know, Dogen was in support of the idea like the Dharma

[33:10]

counts the most and let's make this trip. And the political circumstances that made it a little bit easier to make the trip. And so I imagine him kind of teetering, tottering when he gets to that point in the waterway. And, you know, the positive side is that he's kind of releasing the tensions, the preoccupations with the doubt, perhaps seeing things anew. But as he says in the passage, he knows he's seeing it wrong. At that moment, you know, your perception is wrong. And you know that you can tell yourself that, but it's hard to deny that it appears round. And then he goes into a kind of Yogacara Buddhist view of how do the fish see it, how do the dragons see it, you know, how do other kinds of beings perceive this situation. So that kind of personal reflection or the existential moment in Dogen's biography is something that I think was very interestingly brought up by Nishihari Boksan, as Taigen mentioned,

[34:13]

who wrote one of the first main modern commentaries that was published in 1906. And Nishihari started the tradition of what's known as genzo-e or genzo study retreats, where you take a fascicle or you take a passage and study that for, you know, a number of days or weeks. And apparently in the Edo period, in the 17th and 1800s, famous monks like Menzan, who was probably the single most famous interpreter of Dogen from that period, apparently had a thousand day retreats, they said, and, you know, gave lectures almost every day to his followers, including some of those lectures were held at a prominent temple in Tokyo. So it must have been a very exciting time when all these ideas were being expressed about Dogen. But at the same time, all these interpretations show that nobody quite

[35:13]

knew the answer. There's no definitive view. And that's the way Dogen wanted it. I think the creative ambiguity is the idea that I don't think Dogen necessarily invented it. I think he was very influenced by the Chinese Zen approaches, but he certainly took it to another degree of saying, we have to turn things upside down and topsy-turvy and look at it from different angles. But in the end, you, the disciple, you, the reader, you, the audience in the assembly that's hearing my lectures and sermons is going to come to your own conclusion. And, you know, then you get into the delicate and intricate situation. How are those conclusions judged by the teacher? And Dogen doesn't dwell on that as much as some of the Chinese Zen works do. So I think, Taigen, I'll turn it back to you. You're muted. You're muted.

[36:14]

Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah. So thank you very much, Stephen. There's so much to say about all of these, and we have four more papers and not so much time. So I'm going to go very quickly on the next two. But Stephen, you can add important points. Pamela Winfield, who's a professor at the University of North Carolina, talked about Zen bodies of knowledge. Her research is very interesting. She started off talking about visual objects, sculptures, and paintings. Then she talked about material ritual objects, and she's shifting to talking about bodies and how does the teaching get embodied or the practice. So just briefly, she brought up a passage from Bendowa, the Self-Fulfillment Samadhi, that I've talked about a lot here. Oh, I wanted to say, I'm sorry, about the Genjo Koan. For those of you who don't know it, if you go to our Ancient

[37:20]

Dragon website and look under Chants and scroll down there, you can find our version, the version that we chant of Genjo Koan. So if people want to look at that text, it's very juicy in lots of ways, as Stephen talked about. Yeah, so Pamela brought up Bendowa and Self-Fulfillment Samadhi. She talked about it in terms of its relationship to Chinese cosmology. One of the themes, I could say, in terms of a lot of these papers is how Zen and Dogen and Zen in general does not stand alone or separate from the rest of Japanese and even Chinese Buddhism. Dogen was a Tendai monk from a Chinese Chianti school influenced by the Lotus Sutra. Sometimes Zen is presented as something separate, but actually it's very clear more and more in modern scholarship that it's very much

[38:26]

connected. So Pamela looked at the passage that I've commented on a lot about earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles being connected to the Zazen practitioner and this mutual guidance between them, and then she added the wind and water movement and pointed out how those five, earth, grasses and trees as wood, fences and walls as metal, tiles and pebbles as fire because they include fire, and wind and water as space or literally feng shui. Wind and water is feng shui. So this Chinese cosmology is embedded in Dogen, and in this section of Dogen that I've talked about a lot, I've talked about in terms of how Dogen says that the Zen practitioner is connected to the environment and there's a mutual guidance between them, but she brought out how this goes back to Chinese cosmology. She also talked about

[39:30]

that in terms of the monastery structure that Dogen and later Soto teachers constructed, which has been compared to the human body in terms of the structure of the Dharma Hall, the Buddha Hall, the Monk's Hall where they do Zazen, the mountain gate, and that this also has a connection to these five elements of cosmology from China. So again, this is about connecting Dogen to this Chinese cosmology. Stephen, do you want to add anything to that? Yes. Briefly? Yeah, briefly. Okay, so I think one of her themes is that in Vendoa, which was one of Dogen's earliest writings in 1231, and his first temple is opened two years later, 1233, Koshoji Temple, that Dogen was trying to mobilize support to gain donations, to gain supporters,

[40:32]

benefactors who would help with the construction of that temple, which was apparently successful. And by integrating the Chinese cosmology in an indirect way, which was something that would have been part of the intellectual worldview in Japan at that time as well, that this would help to create a kind of discourse that would have a broad appeal and help to present the new Zen teachings, which after all were brand new. And one of the brand new things about the Zen teachings was how to lay out the temple structure with the order of the buildings, known as the seven hall structure, that eventually gets compared to the human body so that the idea is in a way that when you walk into the gate, into the temple grounds, you're walking in the body of the Buddha. And that sense of intimacy, that you're, you know, the unity of macrocosm and microcosm and history and present time is an interesting theme that she also brought out.

[41:39]

Yes, thank you very much. And how to appeal to the current culture to help develop and fund a new temple is something that our Sangha will have to look at, although Chinese cosmology is probably not going to be part of it. No. So we'll have to look at that as over the next couple of years. So thank you, Stephen. I want to mention briefly again another paper by Martha Sanvito, who's a very interesting scholar. She's a young scholar at UC Berkeley. Her topic was called Deconstructing Heresy, Premodern Secret Knowledge of the Making of Modern Zen. So she works mostly in Soto Zen, but in this paper she was looking at a particular Rinzai, Japanese Rinzai lineage, and just a couple of points about what she presented. It was pretty wide-ranging, but she talked about how the text she was looking at

[42:48]

incorporated elements of Shugendo, which is the traditional Japanese practice, mountain practice, kind of Vajrayana practice. So again, this is an example of how Zen was not some pure thing separate from the culture around it or from Buddhist traditions. She looked at some kirigami, which are kind of special teachings that are passed down in the lineage. A couple of you know about this, but it's very interesting because the one that she showed featured the Li hexagram, the double fire hexagram, which is also mentioned in the Song of the Jewel Mary Samadhi, the precious Mary Samadhi that we sometimes chant from Dongshan, the founder of the Soudong or Soto Chan, Soto Zen, in the 800s in China. So a lot of this kind of cultural

[43:51]

context is deeply embedded in Zen aspects. So there was a whole lot that Marta Sambita presented, but do you want to add anything to this, Stephen? Yes. No, it's a very good introduction to it. And Marta, I think her work will soon emerge and gain a reputation because she's covering those couple of centuries between the 1300s and the 1600s that have been this, for the most part, a black hole in terms of how its lack of understanding so far in the West. And she's filling in a lot of these gaps. And there was a lot of interaction between Soto and Rinzai monks and temples at that period. And she particularly focuses on the, in some of her other research, she focused on the five positions, which of course Taigen has talked about, I think, particularly in the, what's the title? Just this is it,

[45:00]

Dongshan and the Practice of Sessionists. So going back to the Jewel Bearer Samadhi. Yeah. Yeah, which goes back to Dongshan. And then Dogen didn't deal with it very much, but it was important in Soto discourse after Dogen and for several centuries. So I think as her work gets published, we'll learn a lot more about that time period, which helps to connect back with Dongshan. Thank you, Stephen. So I do want to leave time for discussion, but the next two papers deal with 20th century developments and are relevant for us in various ways. So Makellam Ross from Stanford talked about the invention of lay Buddhist choirs in modern Soto Zen. This is something that's not been so much a part of American Zen, and I know a number of you,

[46:00]

Kyoshin and others who like choir singing, this will be very interesting. So this is something that developed like around 1950 to 1952. I have to get out my notes, I forgot to write down the name, but there was a previous trip. So we chant kind of in a monotone, which is one major style of chanting in Buddhism. But there had been previously to this 1950 movement a tradition of Shomyo or Go-Eka, which was kind of melodic devotional chanting in Soto Zen. But what developed is called Baika, which is very interesting. So I want to talk about this a little, and this is something for us to look into. So again, there was one person, a monk

[47:05]

named Niwa Botsuan, who was at a temple called Tokien, and he really pretty much single-handedly developed this Baika kind of chanting. I saw it when I lived in Japan, and it uses bells, but it's a very melodic chanting. It wasn't so initially, but within a couple of years or so, first he had to struggle with the headquarter temple in Eheiji to get it accepted. But these Baika chants eventually were for women, for laywomen. It was a way that Soto Zen school incorporated the laywomen disciples. Actually, Niwa Botsuan was from Shizuoka, which is where Suzuki Roshi's temple in Soen is, that area. So these are basically used,

[48:10]

often used in memorial anniversary celebrations, and mostly they're about Dogen and Keizan, who was the second founder, he's in Jokin, of Soto Zen, five generations after Dogen. The first one was for Shakyamuni. These are hymns, there's a text to it that were developed and written by particular people in Soto Zen. But interestingly, the melodies they use come from Shingon, which is the Japanese Vajrayana practice. So again, this is another example of how not just Soto and Rinzai interacting, but also Zen interacting with the native Japanese traditions like Shugendo, but also with the other schools like Shingon, which is a very, one of the most important schools in Japanese Buddhism before Zen, along with Tendai. So these Baika were hymns to mostly Dogen and Keizan. Part of this is the reality that a lot

[49:31]

of the lay people in Soto Zen weren't as focused on Zazen as we are in American Soto Zen, that there were lots of devotional practices, that faith and devotion is very much a part of all of Buddhism, including in Dogen's writings and including in Soto Zen. And so for the lay people, the women who came to do Baika choirs probably didn't do so much Zazen. There was a question about that that came up. But this is a very popular form where there are these very melodic chanting. Now, just to conclude on that, this is something that is entering American Soto Zen just in recent years. So Zuiko Redding, who is the priest in Iowa, she was at a temple monastery where I practiced in Kyushu in Japan. She also practiced with Katagiri, Roshin people,

[50:35]

but she's been working in importing people from Japan to teach Baika, so she's doing Baika choir work. And I think some of the people in the Katagiri lineage up in Minnesota are also doing it. So maybe after the pandemic, this is something to look into, and this is something that we might incorporate. It's a whole different aspect of what we think of as Zen practice beyond Zazen, beyond our usual chanting, but a kind of melodic ceremonial chanting that commemorates. So there are many of these different hymns to Dogen and hymns to Keizan. A couple of them were apparently composed, well, there's one example of a melody that was composed by a Japanese temple wife, I think. But anyway, this is a whole different aspect of Zen practice than what we usually think of as just Zazen and meditation. So it's very much popular in

[51:44]

Japanese Soto Zen and something for us to consider as we develop our practice of Soto Zen in America. So Stephen, do you want to add anything to that? Yes, I'd like to do a screen share for a moment and so I can play a few seconds. Well, I'll stop there, just to give an impression. That's great. Thank you for giving us a feeling of it. Yeah, and the ringing of the bells accompanies, as Mikhail pointed out, even though some forms of chanting and singing and reciting in a musical way had been around

[52:49]

for centuries, the Baika is the Soto name for a tradition that kind of started in Shingon in the 1920s and spread to some of the other Buddhist schools. And then in the early 1950s, which was the 700th anniversary of Dogen's death, and these 50-year anniversaries, including most recently 2002, have been occasions for new developments, innovations in various ways in the sect. So one of the things they did in the post-war period and then trying to get more lay people involved and women participants was to emphasize the Baika singing. And so, you know, when Michela gets a chance to get back to Japan after the COVID, she's going to do more research on the sociology of the choir networks.

[53:50]

Yeah, thank you, Stephen. Michela's interesting. She actually started as a jazz saxophonist, but then became this Zen scholar. She's at Stanford now. So she's participated actively herself in some of these choirs. So I know there are numbers of people in our sangha who are musicians and who lament that our Zen tradition doesn't have music. Well, we do. It's in Japan, and it's up to us to import it. And we have help from Suiko and some of the people in Minnesota to try to develop this kind of choir tradition. These are separate events, separate from, you know, Zazen sitting, but all of them are the texts of them. I don't know if they're English translations or if we could translate them into English. Maybe that's not necessary, but or maybe that's not as necessary in the choir singing, I guess.

[54:56]

Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but some of them are based on Dogen's poetry, his walk-up poetry. Also, I wanted to, on Michela, in a different kind of musical ritual, she worked with some local priests, maybe 12, 15 years ago. And she played saxophone, actually, in some of the rituals. So she, you know, she had her cake and ate it too. So this is something for us to explore moving forward, how to include music in our forms. So very interesting. And yeah, one of the points that she made was that Soto school was the very last of these schools to incorporate this kind of musical choirs. They'd been in Shingon, they'd been in Jodo, the Pure Land schools, they'd been, they were started in Rinzai a little bit before Soto. So anyway, this is very interesting. And again, certainly a new direction for us in terms of thinking about not just Zen study,

[56:01]

but Zen practice. So we can look at that more. And if you have questions about it, please bring that up. But the last paper I want to talk about was from Richard Jaffe, called Zen and D.T. Suzuki's Columbia University Lectures from 1952 to 53. I want to talk about Richard a little. He was a practitioner at San Francisco Zen Center. In fact, he was the Tenzo at Tassahara Monastery when I first lived there. So he did a lot of Zen practice first. And he's not the only, well, then he became a very prominent academic professor at Duke University. He's a very prominent Buddhist scholar, particularly looking at modern Zen, and modern Buddhism generally from the Meiji period, from the mid-19th century on.

[57:02]

So he's a very prominent scholar. There are many other academic scholars who started out as practitioners, as Richard did. But his current work, he's done a bunch of things, but his current work is focusing on D.T. Suzuki. The other Suzuki is sometimes said besides Suzuki founded our lineage at San Francisco Zen Center. And D.T. Suzuki, probably most of you have heard of, he first came to America with his teacher Soen Shaku in the 1908 Chicago Exposition, or 1904, anyway, early on. He was a Rinzai Koan practitioner, a student of the Ngakuji, which is a temple in Kamakura lineage of Rinzai. But one of the things about D.T. Suzuki, he's been

[58:03]

kind of a straw man for modern Buddhist and Zen scholarship. There are numbers of prominent American Buddhist scholars who made their career on attacking D.T. Suzuki. So Richard is trying to rescue him from that. He mentioned that D.T. Suzuki has been called a charlatan. And I don't think that's fair at all. I would say that a lot of people thought of what D.T. Suzuki presented in as many books and writings as what Zen was when he first came and was popularizing Zen in the 50s. And I'll come back to that. Some people thought of that as the only form of Zen. But actually, D.T. Suzuki doesn't talk about Zazen much. I don't think he ever talks about Dogen or Soto Zen. So what D.T. Suzuki presented was limited, but he certainly was

[59:10]

very well respected and qualified within his own branch of Rinzai Zen. One of the things that Richard talks about is that when D.T. Suzuki was teaching at Columbia University in New York, the lectures that Richard is working on are from 52 to 53. And he's working from transcripts of that. But D.T. Suzuki was teaching there until 1957. And at that same time, he was kind of central to salons in New York City that helped to spread awareness of Zen. And people like John Cage came, psychologists like Eric Fromm, many artists and scholars, Alan Watts visited, many Gurjeef people. So there was a whole salon of people in New York in the 50s who D.T. Suzuki was one of the central people in these.

[60:16]

His version of Zen was what was popularized initially before people like Suzuki Roshi and other practice teachers came to America. D.T. Suzuki was talking about the intellectual aspect of Zen, not the practice aspect. So just to say a little bit more about the content of what and Richard talked about this a little bit, what the content of what D.T. Suzuki was teaching in the 50s, again, was focused on koans, not on Zazen, again, from this particular branch of Rin Zazen. He did discuss and wrote about what's called in Japanese the Keigon-kyo, the Flower Ornament Sutra, the Avatamsaka Sutra, which I think this week we're going to have our monthly reading of, if Dylan is here somewhere still, so that we do a monthly reading Friday evenings

[61:24]

from this. And D.T. Suzuki really introduced that teaching to the West. He introduced a number of other teachings, including the Awakening of Faith. He focused on the Lankavatara Sutra, a major Yogacara Sutra. He did the first translation of this, and there's a new one by Red Pine. One of the other things that Richard said about D.T. Suzuki's teaching is that he emphasized, rather than Zazen or meditation, he emphasized vow. And I think that's important for us too, this sense of, as one of the paramitas for Bodhisattvas, this idea of vow or commitment and the intention towards Bodhisattva practice. And we chant the four Bodhisattva vows usually at the end of our events. So that's just a little bit about what Richard presented, but I think it's interesting to look at D.T. Suzuki, see the limitations,

[62:32]

but also see that he really was very committed, was very energetic, published a huge amount of texts. I still like Zen and Japanese culture, parts of it have been critiqued by more modern scholars, but he talked about Japanese culture as a reflection of Zen too. So that's a little bit on that paper. Stephen, could you please add to that? Yes. Suzuki, one point I want to make briefly about Suzuki and Soto Zen is that, in at least one very important way, he was involved with Soto Zen. In fact, in the 1930s, he was particularly invited by Soto Tempo, which held this old manuscript. I won't go into the details, but it was a very important manuscript, and they chose D.T. Suzuki to be the scholar to come to look at the manuscript for the first time and publish it, and he did publish a version of it. So he was not totally

[63:35]

ignoring or oblivious to Soto Zen, although you're right that 90% of his works or more don't mention Dogen. Another key feature about Suzuki is that he was born in 1870, first came to America in 1893 to be a translator for the World Parliament of Religions, stayed in America, wrote, learned, you know, was very good at English, wrote a lot of books in English, wrote in Japanese. But he's probably most famous for a series of lectures he gave at Columbia University, which is what Richard Jaffe is working on, in the 1950s. And so all these years later, and he's now in his mid-80s, late 80s, that's what we best know him for. So that's a very interesting feature. He died in 1966, and for those old-timers who remember when he was a very big presence in Zen, and that was kind of Zen for those years in

[64:42]

the late 50s and early 60s, you know, the influence is strong. And it's good that Richard Jaffe is coming back to restore an appreciation for that. Thank you, Stephen. So that's a lot of material, to say the least. But if any, so we do have time, thankfully, for some discussion, questions, responses. So again, we talked about Dōgen in various ways, different versions of Dōgen in modern times, this passage from Genjo Kōan about going out into the middle of the ocean, the ways in which he incorporated Chinese cosmology, and also then questions or comments about Baika, this modern Japanese choir singing, or about D.T. Suzuki. So there's a lot of material. Xingyu or David, maybe you can help me call on people. There's two screens, so you can raise

[65:52]

your hand physically, or you could go to the participants screen on the bottom and go to the then we can call on you. So any questions, comments, responses to any aspect of any of what we've talked about, very welcome. Douglas has his hand up. Douglas, you're still muted, I think. I'm not on mute. Let's see what I can do. We can hear now. Okay. Stephen, I really have appreciated your Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree, the book about Giun's verse comments on Shōgō Genzo. But an interesting thing is you've also written a very interesting book about the Blue Cliff record, and in addition your other works on Dōgen and Shōtō Zen. So that's kind of a wide range of

[67:00]

different topics in Zen. What are you working on next? Okay, yeah, thank you. You know, some people who, you know, aunts and uncles type of people say it's all one topic, what are you talking about, but I appreciate that you have a sense of the diversity of those topics. So right now, as you know, as readers of Dōgen's extensive record know, that there's a lot of Chinese-style poetry in the extensive record, and if you add it all up, according to a modern scholar, there's about 450 poems. Back in the 1700s, Menzan, the famous scholar of Dōgen at that period, created a collection of 150 out of those 450. And so, you know, of course looking at

[68:01]

the versions by Taigen and Shōhaku, I'm kind of doing my own translation of those, and also comments on that, and trying to situate that. So to me, it's kind of an extension of the translation of the poetry of Dōgen, and more understanding of that. But I'd like to go back to the Blue Cliff Record, and I'd like to talk more about Dōgen in China, and I'm trying to figure out how to do that without, well, let's put it this way. I've always said, I still feel that the single main book that I would recommend to somebody if you want to study Dōgen, maybe this is a little strong, but, you know, one of the main books to look at is Blue Cliff Record, because Dōgen is so indebted to the style, the teaching style, the literary

[69:06]

flourishes, the overall discourse. And so I want to look more deeply at some of those connections down the road. Thank you for that question. Thank you, I look forward to it. Thank you, Stephen. So, Ron Bass, you have a question. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes. Stephen, thinking about the transmission of Dōgen's writings from the time of his death through the 16th century, to what extent might this have been affected by the following? A, the general level of literacy in Japan at the time. B, Black Death that decimated, at least decimated Europe starting in 1348, and might or might not have started earlier or later in Japan. And C, I don't know when printing press was introduced into Japan, Gutenberg press in Europe

[70:10]

appeared around 1440. So to what point were manuscripts circulating only as manuscripts, and at what point did movable type enable wider dissemination of works? And I guess my final thing is, do you have a recommendation on a good general medieval history of Japan that has been translated into English? Well, good, that's a very good point. So in the printing press, of course, people say that it actually came from China and migrated through the Silk Road into Europe. So Japan had printing, I, you know, how sophisticated it was, but they say that the very first Sōtōzen publication was actually Gion, the fifth abbot, his recorded sayings. And then shortly after that,

[71:12]

Dōgen was being, you know, some of Dōgen's works were published, not Shōbō Genzo though. So Shōbō Genzo was in manuscript form. I don't necessarily think it's because printing was unavailable, however, but it was a kind of hidden document, so to speak. You know, they wanted it to be kept to the people who were knowledgeable enough to understand it and not just widely circulate it. So you had to go to Heiji and make a copy of it, basically. That's my understanding. In terms of the Black Death, that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about whether that affected Japan in that period. Actually, over the weekend, we had a historian of Japanese medical history named William Johnson, who I think teaches at Westland College. I never met him before, but anyway, we could have asked him that fascinating point, and, you know, it'd be very interesting to see. On the literacy, the monks were literate. I mean,

[72:14]

they could read Chinese at that time. They obviously knew different dialects and different vernacular approaches to Japanese. Of course, Dōgen's writing is particularly difficult in the way he crosses over between the Chinese and Japanese, so fluently, but not in a way that's always decipherable. So the sheer difficulty might have been an imposition. And there was one other point I think you made. If you know of a generalized history of medieval Japan that has been translated into English. Well, I mean, I think in terms of Zen, I would still recommend Heinrich Dumoulin's book that was published originally in the 1980s, and I think it's been repeated in terms of the medieval history of Zen. You know, Peter Haskell, I think, Taigen, you knew him at Columbia, maybe? Yes. And he's published a number of interesting books,

[73:17]

and he had a series of articles in a Zen magazine, I think it's called Dharma Notes or something, maybe 10, 15 years ago, that talked about some of the medieval writings between Rinzai and Sōtō that I find very useful. It's something you can Google, I think, and find those old issues online. But that's within Zen. In terms of the medieval history more generally, I mean, you know, there's a lot of books out there. I'm not sure what the main, what the one main book would be at this, off the top of my head, however, I'm sorry. I would just add again William Botterford's History of Medieval Sōtō, that focuses on Sōtō Zen, but that's very valuable. Yes, and Martin Colcutt's Five Mountains. And then, you know, there's a very interesting book by a guy named Joseph Parker, who was a scholar who published the book on Zen art and painting. So it's mostly Rinzai, it's mostly Kyoto temples, but

[74:24]

that also covers that 1300-1400 time period. Great, thank you. So, Jonathan. Hi, thank you. First of all, I want to say thank you, Dr. Hein and Dr. Lin for the talk. I just had a kind of brief question, you know, thinking back on Dr. Hein's comments on Yamanaki Kaichū and Dōgen's acceptance of, well, kind of Dōgen realizing the limitations of humans reaching, you know, the imperfect view of the absolute. It got me to think about some of other, some of Dōgen's other writings, such as the Tenzo Kyōka, where he kind of sets this very high standard of performance, like you can't waste a single grain of rice, you know, when you're cooking. And that kind of got me thinking, like, is Dōgen encouraging us to kind of emphasize on

[75:29]

that journey towards enlightenment, and that in itself is enlightenment? Or, you know, that's kind of like my thought process when I thought about Dr. Hein's presentation. Yeah, well, thank you. The Tenzo Kyōka is very interesting because it talks about Dōgen's arrival in China, and when he meets a couple of Tenzo that are very influential to him because of their dedication, their commitment, you know, they're in kind of overdrive, in a good sense, without thinking about themselves. And, you know, one of the things he says is that when he got back in Shōbō Genzo Zui Monki, he says, and maybe in Tenzo Kyōka, I can't quite remember, but between the two, he talks about when he got back to Japan, and Eisai was no longer alive, leading

[76:30]

the temple in Kyoto. And Myōzen, of course, died, who went with Dōgen, died when he was in China. So, Keninji was kind of adrift, and that's why Dōgen knew that he had to create his own temple. And one of the symptomatic problems in Keninji temple was that he said the cooks, you know, one of the cooks probably never lifted a pan in his life, you know, and just kind of ordered fancy food that he thought would be interesting, because, you know, if a donor, if a secular donor was willing to subsidize that. And so, you know, focusing so much on that specific detail, and the rice, and then in the Eihei Shingi, that is one of the books that Taigen and Shōhaku had translated, they come back and talk about various officers, right? I think it's in the

[77:31]

Eihei Shingi chapter, various officers, including the Tenzo. So, but yeah, going back to Tenzo Kyokun, those couple dialogues he has with those cooks are, you know, before he meets his teacher Rūshin a couple of years later, you can see that's continuing that path, if that was the implication of your question, that, you know, maybe he had a kind of awakening being out to sea, and then when he arrives, he runs into some obstacles, but those cooks inspire him so much. And even though some of the leading monks that he meets at various temples before Rūshin don't inspire him, and he feels like they're going through the motions, they, you know, their teaching is kind of mechanical, they care about their pride and their reputation more than the Dharma, the cooks are the ones who embody it, for sure. And, you know, those couple dialogues, you know, we can read those dozens of times and still get something out of it, I think.

[78:33]

If I can just add to that, and I appreciate your question. And I think this is one of the top, one of the themes in Stephen's paper is a connection between, well, we can say the absolute and the particular or the ultimate truth and our limited perceptions. But Dogen, I think, emphasizes, and Tenzo Kyokun is a very good example, he emphasizes how to, and this is something you've all heard, you know, Ancient Dragon people have heard me say a lot, but he emphasizes how the ultimate can be expressed in ordinary, everyday activity. And this is, you know, a major theme, I would say, for Dogen. And, you know, the example you gave of telling the Tenzo, the head cook, to not waste a single grain of rice, and he goes into great detail about the numbers of grains of rice and so forth. You know, this emphasis on not some ideal,

[79:38]

absolute reality, but how does this get expressed in more worldly forms than in our interaction with the world? And as Paul Disko has talked about in terms of, you know, buildings and carpentry and, you know, all of the practical matters, that's a great deal of Dogen's emphasis, of course, balanced with Zazen, where we do get some sense of something beyond something ultimate. So thank you for the question. Thank you for the responses. Joe Kai has his hand up. Hi, Steven. You briefly touched on the secular interpretation of Dogen, but I was wondering if you could expand a little on that and how we can look at Dogen, if we kind of separate him from the religious practice.

[80:41]

Yeah, so if you look at Watsuji, which is translated, I think the title is Purifying Zen, and the translator's name was Steve Bain, B-E-I-N, or Bain, I'm not sure how he pronounces it. But the, you know, Watsuji says in the first couple of pages, oh, you know, the Soto leaders are all scoundrels these days. You know, they've imprisoned Dogen and we have to liberate it. It's a very intriguing and, you know, provocative passage. In the end, I think his interpretation, and I'm not sure if I could show historically that he read this guy Nishihari Boksan, who was kind of the epitome of the Soto orthodoxy, trying to bring it into modern, you know, into the 20th century. But I don't think they're really that far apart when you see what Watsuji is talking about when he interprets a few of the fascicles from Shobo Genzo. So I think, and I think it was pointed out over the weekend that, you know, one of the things that

[81:49]

Watsuji does is emphasize that Dogen, his commitment to truth, and his very uncompromising, and he would not take donations from the Shogun if he didn't think they were sincere. And he, you know, in a famous story, he punished the monk who did, behind Dogen's back, take the donation from the Shogun, and he was very upset with that. And he had a generous spirit. I think there was a compassionate spirit. I think that Shobo Genzo Sui Monkey, a lot of the stories he talks about, because sometimes there he talks about secular leaders in Chinese and Japanese history or mythology, and he's trying to emphasize the compassionate, caring view, but at the same time, you know, the strictness and the kind of puritanical spirit, in a positive sense, is there. So I think Watsuji is trying to bring that out. But, you know, it's kind of uncanny when you look at Dogen's being time fascicle and some of his

[82:54]

kind of philosophical writings about time and permanence, death, and, you know, how they shape our understanding of reality. And, you know, some correspondences perhaps to Einstein and quantum physics are, you know, seem quite apparent, and some people want to bring those out. So, you know, so did Dogen have a kind of view guided by his meditation that allowed him to be so objective and neutral in observing reality, that he could have a degree of insight that went beyond, you know, even other great Buddhist thinkers throughout history, and captured something that's so modern? And then in his writing style with that ambiguity and using all these intricate paradoxes and word plays and kind of word puzzles in various ways,

[83:56]

you know, does that kind of anticipate T.S. Eliot and what sometimes is called literary modernism? Of course, Eliot and other writers of the time were very much influenced by early translations of, not necessarily of Dogen, but of Buddhist and Asian thought. So, so I think, you know, I think for a lot of people, the appeal is, of course, is that is the teaching. For other people, okay, there's ideas, and maybe those ideas deal with the environment, maybe they deal with human perception and temporality and philosophical issues that have been long discussed. Maybe they deal with how to approach ethical issues in terms of his uncompromising view. You know, Botterford's point was, hey, we shouldn't take, we shouldn't strip Dogen away from the fact that he was basically a religious figure who was trying to teach his sangha. And I think that's a simple point,

[85:06]

but I think I agree with that point. I've tried to answer your question. Yes, just amen to that. He was a religious teacher. He did have a sangha. But just to add to what Stephen said, that the fact that Watsuji's book from the 1920s is now published, translated into English and published, so just for your information. Purifying Zen is the title of it. I see, so would you like to go on it? Sorry, you said certifying Zen? Purifying. Purifying. So, other questions, comments, responses on any aspect of any of what has been discussed, please, you can raise your hand physically or, so Nyozan has his hand up. Yes, thank you for this interesting sort of overview. I guess I have a question that may relate most to Stephen's paper that he was talking about yesterday, and I don't know if this question

[86:13]

picks up on where the paper goes or not, but this passage, Yamanaki Kaichū, and when Taigen was giving an overview, he was talking, he talked about, apparently in this paper, you evoke imagination, and so on. And I'm just wondering if you can say a little bit more about doken and imagination, because it occurs to me that there's considerable distance actually between, you know, in that situation of being in a literal or a metaphorical ocean, you know, on the one hand, there can be the recognition, the really taking in that you cannot see the whole picture. So, there's knowledge, I'm not seeing the whole picture. That on the one hand, on the other hand, going to sort of imagining what, you know, what it is that you're not seeing, which strikes me as potentially a very dangerous thing,

[87:17]

right? I mean, a lot of problems that human beings deal with come from making stuff up about what they don't really know. And so, I don't know if this really picks up on anything you dealt with in the paper, but I just wonder if you can sort of talk about how doken straddles that tension. I mean, one of the cliches about Buddhism is about, you know, it says, well, you practice so that you can see things how you are, which would seem to rule out the category of imagining too much. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Very good question and could lead to, you know, an in-depth discussion. So, to try to touch it briefly as best I can. Yes, see things as they are. And I think that's partly what Ginjo Koan means. It's like the Koan is right in front of you. You're just, you know, but your eyes are open to seeing things as they are. You're not seeing anything different. You're just seeing things as they are, which we don't usually see because we have the blinders, we have

[88:17]

the filters, we have the biases and assumptions that disallow us for the most part. However, you know, dogen is famous for having, you know, a set of discourses, flowers in the sky, which was a, you know, a kind of idiom that was used to refer to the understanding of cataracts back in those days that when you saw floaters or you think you were seeing double or you, you know, and dream within a dream and disentangling vines. And he uses the phrase making mistake after mistake until you make the right mistake. And then he in one bright pearl fascicle, he says that even in the demon's cave, which was part of the original dialogue with the monk Xuanzang, he says even the darkest part of the demon's cave on the dark side of the mountain, the one bright pearl is still there. So I think with, you know, dogen going back to,

[89:17]

you know, kind of the ultimate and the relative or world of particularity, a simple way of saying it is like dogen is always trying to take each side to the extreme, like the oneness and the multiplicity, take them to the extreme, and then also bring them together in a kind of radical way. And so that's true with the illusion. Yes, it is a dangerous implication. And it can lead to, you know, the general category is antinomianism, which is true for other meditation and mystical traditions, that if your main concern is to see, you know, kind of one truth, but that one truth allows for, you know, it's something that nobody else can see, pretty much, you know, you claim that only this meditation or this kind of practice allows them to see it. And therefore the rules are different once you see it. And maybe the rules for bodhisattva are different from an average person,

[90:18]

because they see the true reality. And, you know, we have the famous story about cutting the cat that is discussed in the Shobo Genzo Zui Monkey. And so that's a little bit dangerous. And I think people have brought that up. I mean, I think some traditional and some modern commentators on dogen, sometimes from within the Soto sect, sometimes from outside, you know, from Rinzai Zen or other perspectives have brought that out. Well, where does dogen really, really stand with those, with that implication? But I think what dogen would say is, be resolute in the sense that, in the fascicle, Gyoji, sustained exertion is one of the translations. He talks about a monk who turned down the imperial rope several times and never took it. Now they say dogen took it the third time. So maybe he did make a compromise. But this Chinese monk in the in the 1000s, Furong Daokai,

[91:19]

apparently never took it. And dogen really admires that kind of character. And it's that character that's going to prevail, I think, according to him. If the character is true, then it conquers the illusions. But it realizes that the illusions aren't going anywhere for most of us. And even for the enlightened person, there's still going to be some misconceptions that come in. So you can't, so he doesn't want to claim a final state. But it is, it is a tricky way of interpreting. And then, you know, one question would be, does he kind of alter his view as time goes by? That's a complicated issue we don't have time for now. But so I agree. And he may, just to finish off, he may himself and he might actually enjoy the fact that he's pushing the envelope in that regard.

[92:20]

You know, like, like, you know, there's there's these sayings that were around, adding for us to do, to do. That was a bad thing, because if you had to, you didn't need for us. Adding flowers to brocade, that was supposed to be a bad thing, because you had the brocade. Why don't why do you need to add more flowers to it? But Dogen always says, no, that's what you should do. And, you know, he and he knows he's, he's provoking the, you know, conventional people, but he, you know, he, I, from his standpoint, I think that's, that's what, you know, that's kind of a conceptual move he wants to take. But thank you for that question. I'll just add briefly one point that part of where that imaginative, imagination comes in for Dogen and for Zen and for Shoto Zen is in terms of the range of the sutras, the Flower Ornament Sutra, very much the Lotus Sutra, and also the Vajrayana elements from

[93:22]

Sugendo and other places. So there's this whole range of Buddhist approaches that allows a kind of spaciousness in terms of imagining, but yet, so Dogen includes that, but also grounds it, I think as Stephen was saying, in terms of, you know, taking care of the particular, taking care of what's in front of you. So thank you for that question and that response, Stephen. We're sort of out of time, but I kind of feel like in terms of this opportunity, if there's one, if there's anybody who has one more comment or question or response, maybe we could do one more comment from anyone on anything that was talked about. By the way, I'm looking at the screen here and I see Dylan, so I like that name,

[94:23]

and I see that he's got Dogen as the image for his screen. But I'm not picking, if you don't have a question, that's okay. I just... Dylan is our Eno. Okay. So, and champion of the Flower Arrhythma Sutra as well. So going once, going twice, anybody? Well, let me ask you a question, Taigan. Okay, last question. Last question. So when we discussed Pam Winfield, you said that Ancient Dragon may need to present a discourse touching base with current, you know, contemporary thought, but it probably would not involve Chinese cosmology, and you kind of chuckled to yourself, I think. I'm not sure. Well, you know, I think I was just saying that I have talked about this passage

[95:28]

that Pam was talking about, but not in terms of Chinese cosmology. I think her adding, so I've talked about this passage a lot, about self-fulfillment samadhi and the interrelationship of the practitioner and the environment and the whole world of the environment. I'd never thought about it in terms of these five, this Chinese... cosmology, so no, I appreciated that very much. No, no, I know you appreciated that, but what are the, do you use other interpretative models, or do you, so in other words, in talking about it, and of course you have the book on Bendoa, but do you put it in other, you know, going back to that issue, what Suji's trying to bring in all these other external viewpoints towards it, do you look at it that way, or do you kind of stick within the discourse of Dogen himself? Well, one aspect that I bring in when talking about that is about the environment.

[96:29]

Yeah. I think Dogen's radical statement, I mean, it still seems totally radical to our usual way of thinking that there's this mutual, inconceivable guidance and support between earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles, wind and water, and each of us, and it's mutual that we support the environment. So I think I talk about that in terms of environmentalism or environmental awareness, and I think it's very, very informative to environmental consciousness. So that's one realm that I bring in. Does that resonate with other colleagues who are concerned with Buddhist environmentalism? I think so. I hope so. Juan Pablo, I'll call on you. Does that resonate? He's doing a dissertation on environmentalism in various contexts. I think so.

[97:39]

Yeah. So anyway, I think one of the things about Dogen's creative ambiguity is there are lots of ways to see him, and that's part of what William Botterford was talking about in terms of all the different 20th century takes on Dogen, and I think we're still creating more. His writing is very rich and difficult, and at the same time, the creative ambiguity, I think, is a good way of talking about it. It evokes something. So we have to bring ourselves to trying to respond to Dogen, or how do we understand Dogen, which isn't to say that we can go anywhere, but how do we stay faithful to something that he's saying, and yet put it in a context that might be new, might be relevant to us, might be something that is especially important for our context.

[98:47]

Yeah, I think you put it perfectly. Let me add one more for us. A comment by William, and then I'll add a little bit to that, is that he was talking about there was a Japanese literary critic who dealt with classical period Japanese poetry and mythology, also was a bit of an expert on French literature and had, I think, done some translations from French to Japanese. But anyway, got involved with Shobo Genzo and worked with a scholar from the university, like a kind of traditional Dogen scholar, in putting out a major edition of Shobo Genzo back in the 1970s. And then because of that, he wrote a couple of essays. And like William said, at one point, this guy named Terada said something like, I always get stuck talking about Dogen, because I think I remember something he said, and I'm sure I remembered something he said. And then

[99:50]

when I go back to the text to find it, I can't find it, because my own imagination was working a lot. And, you know, I had that feeling myself in working on Shobo Genzo recently, because, you know, you've written about the Lotus Sutra, and Dogen talks about the sutras in a lot of different levels. The Lotus is the one he quotes the most, but he talks about sutras kind of generally a lot of times, and says all these different things. And then at one point, I was reading something he wrote in the Japanese, and I thought, like, okay, I understand it, where he's kind of saying, you have to read between the lines of the sutras, you know. And I had that passage, and went to quote that passage, and then I looked at it again, and, you know, it didn't really say what I had remembered that it said. And I thought, you know, had I superimposed that, or maybe I read in a different line of it. But yeah, that's where the ambiguity really gets you

[100:51]

on a very deep level. Yes, thank you. Yes, Dogen is very evocative, and we, to read Dogen, you have to kind of bring yourself into it, and and so, you know, so when people are trying to read Dogen, I often say, just read through it once, pick out the passages that are, don't try and understand it at all, pick out the passages that stand out, and then go back and look at those. And then, you know, it's not that it's impossible to understand Dogen on some level, but that's not the point. Well, we might have talked one time, there's a new book by a Japanese monk who came to San Francisco, was early involved in the San Francisco Zen Center, Kazumitsu Kato, have you seen that? Yes, yes, I know of him, yes. Yeah, and he did a, published a biography recently, and he said that when he was in Japan,

[101:54]

you know, they told him at first, don't read Shobo Genzo. And then they said, okay, you're experienced enough, he was like in his 20s, I think, or around 20, and they, and because this temple was connected at this big history, and so they gave him this rare manuscript to read, and he said he had no idea what it meant, and he asked the teacher, and teacher said, I don't know, you know, none of us know Shobo Genzo. But then he has a very vivid description when he gets to San Francisco, and the culture shock, and dealing with the early days of San Francisco Zen Center, and he said passages like the ones where, you know, where Dogen says tiles and bricks are, you know, and all these concrete elements, you know, he said when he's walking around, you know, in a traffic jam in Hills of San Francisco, you know, it came to him that Dogen was like kind of guiding him in a certain way that he hadn't thought of before, and when he just read it abstractly sitting in the temple. So that was another, that was really fascinating passage to me. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. So we'll have announcements

[103:02]

afterwards, but Shingyu, could we just do the repentance verse and the four bodhisattva vows to close out? Thank you.

[103:09]

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