One teenage monk's nagging question led to Japanese Soto Zen
If everyone is born enlightened, why did every Buddha still need to practise? That puzzle haunted Dogen from his teens on Mount Hiei. Nobody in Japan could answer it, so in 1223 he crossed the East China Sea, found a Chan master in Ningbo, and came home to found Soto Zen.
Dogen was born in 1200, probably the illegitimate son of the nobleman Minamoto Michichika, and lost his mother at about seven. At twelve he ran away from his uncle's house to Mount Hiei, headquarters of the Tendai school, citing her death as his reason for becoming a monk. Tendai taught original enlightenment, the idea that all people are awakened by nature. Dogen could not see why, in that case, practice mattered, and he was also put off by the mountain's politics and hunger for status.
An abbot advised him to study Chan in China. After training at Kennin-ji in Kyoto under Myozen, he and Myozen sailed in 1223. Dogen grew tired of the heavy focus on koans in the Zhejiang monasteries and even turned down one transmission. In 1225 he reached Rujing, thirteenth patriarch of the Caodong line, at Mount Tiantong, and heard him say the words usually rendered as cast off body and mind. That phrase became the hinge of his thinking. Rujing gave him formal transmission in 1227; Myozen had died soon after they arrived.
Back home, Dogen wrote short instructions on zazen, sitting meditation, open to lay people of either sex and any class. His ideal was shikantaza, just sitting in alert attention without an object, and non-thinking, a state beyond both thinking and suppressing thought. Friction with Tendai drove him from Kyoto to Uji, then to Fukakusa, and in 1243 a patron, Hatano Yoshishige, offered land in distant Echizen province. The temple built there was renamed Eihei-ji in 1246 and remains one of Soto Zen's two head temples.
His masterwork, the Shobogenzo or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, sits beside the Eihei Shingi, the first Japanese Zen monastic code, which shows he kept ritual and discipline alongside meditation. In 1247 the regent Hojo Tokiyori summoned him to Kamakura for lay ordination. Falling ill in 1252, he handed his robes to his student Koun Ejo and died in Kyoto the following year.
Source: Dōgen
