China & East Asia · 1200–1253
Dōgen
Japanese monk who founded Sōtō Zen
Taught “just sitting” (shikantaza): practice is not a means to enlightenment but enlightenment itself, and being is time (uji).
Life and thought
Dōgen was born in Kyoto in 1200 into the aristocracy and lost both parents young. Ordained a Tendai monk on Mount Hiei at thirteen, he was troubled, tradition says, by a question: if all beings already have Buddha-nature, why practise at all? He studied Rinzai Zen in Kyoto and in 1223 sailed to China, where under the master Rujing he experienced the “dropping off of body and mind”. Returning in 1227, he founded a monastery near Kyoto and in 1244 moved to the remote mountains of Echizen, where he built Eiheiji. He died in 1253.
His answer to his early question is that practice and realisation are one: we do not sit in meditation in order to become enlightened; “just sitting” (shikantaza) is enlightenment expressing itself. In the essays of the Shōbōgenzō, written in Japanese rather than Chinese, he bends language to show this, writing that being is time, so that a pine tree or a moment of practice is time itself, and that impermanence is Buddha-nature. Sōtō Zen, which he founded, became one of Japan’s largest Buddhist schools, and modern philosophers rediscovered him as a thinker.