Chinese Lin-chi (Rinzai) line, soon produced a number of figures of at least
secondary fame. Among them, Enni Ben’en was instrumental in giving prece-
dence to Zen meditation as the one practice that carries the mind of Buddha
throughout the centuries; though he still allowed the practice of rituals and
scripture readings, Enni downgraded miraculous powers to insignificance,
thereby breaking with the prevalent themes of Tendai and Shingon. Enni’s
great-grandpupil Kanzan Egen in the mid-1300s brought a full revival of
classical Lin-chi rigor, handing out enlightenment with shouts and blows of
the staff.
Parallel with the line of famous Rinzai masters in these generations, there
emerged a line of Soto masters. Soto was officially imported from China by
Dogen. Japanese networks reorganized to fill the attention space with rival
schools. Dogen began as a grandpupil of Eisai, but he already had a trajectory
toward independence since he and his principal follower, Koun Ejo (who played
a similar organizational role in Soto as Enni in Rinzai), were also trained by
the lineage of Dainichi Nonin. The Soto-Rinzai rivalry continued the conflict
which already existed in the generation of the proto-founders of Japanese Zen.
Other lineages too were founded at this time, typically by a combination of
splitting off by pupils of the earlier Japanese masters, plus travel to China to
pick up direct credentials—a practice which was at its height throughout
the 1200s, despite the upheavals of the Mongol conquest and the atmosphere
of Japanese chauvinism during the Mongol invasion threat from the 1260s
through 1300.^9
Soto and Rinzai: Rival Niches
The moment of transition during the organizational break which first opened
up the Zen movement promoted a rare peak of philosophical creativity. The
outstanding figure here was not in the Rinzai movement but from its opponent.
Dogen built on two conflicts. In China he studied under the master T’ien-tung
Ju-ching (356 in Figure 6.4), notable primarily for attacking the famous Ta-hui
for syncretizing Ch’an with Confucianism and Taoism (Kodera, 1980: 102–
103)—a doctrinal retreat characteristic of schools in organizational decline.
Upon returning to Japan, Dogen developed his independent position by ex-
tending the controversy. He criticized Ta-hui for emphasizing the doctrine of
emptying and quieting, instead of the original Buddha nature; more generally,
Dogen accused Chinese Ch’an of slandering the sutras and reducing Buddhism
to a few sayings of Lin-chi (Dumoulin, 1990: 57–62). In effect this was an
attack on the central Lin-chi/Rinzai practice of koan meditation. Since Ta-hui
was a famous ancestor of the Rinzai line, Dogen’s criticism put him in imme-
diate confrontation with his Japanese contemporaries. Perhaps this was Do-
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 335