gen’s intention. Dogen’s position in the 1230s had been moderate and even
included some koan teaching; but after Enni returned from China in 1241 and
received massive patronage for building the Tofuku-ji, Dogen began to polemi-
cize against the lack of true succession in Japanese Rinzai. The correct practice
was not solving koan but “sitting straight” without effort at enlightenment.
Soto became the unembellished practice of zazen, without paradoxes or deep
trance. Enlightenment itself is not to be overstressed as a goal; post-enlighten-
ment practice was especially important. The creativity of Japanese Soto was a
negation of the previous Zen innovation. If the Zen movement generally was
a conservative throwback against Pure Land innovation, Dogen was the inno-
vator who found the ultraconservative path. Against his intention, this moved
him dialectically onward.
Dogen’s philosophical writings articulate Zen without the paradoxes. In
place of the paradoxical koan style, he explains the identity of conventional
oppositions: existence and nirvana, time and mind and the Buddha. Truth is
fluid, daily experience: “The very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and
forest, is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body
and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are
impermanent because they are Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlight-
enment, because it is the Buddha nature, is impermanent. Great Nirvana,
because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature” (quoted in Dumoulin, 1990:
85). Enlightenment is the grasping of this identity.
Part of Dogen’s motivation was to downplay the deliberate seeking of
enlightenment experience in conventional Zen practice. This led to Dogen’s
most original thinking, on the nature of time. Buddhahood does not reveal
itself to us on some occasion, as the culmination of Zen practice. Instead,
Buddhahood is itself time. “He who wants to know Buddhahood may know
it by knowing time as it is revealed to us. And as time is something in which
we are already immersed, Buddhahood also is not something that is to be
sought in the future but something that is realized where we are” (quoted in
Kitagawa, 1987: 301). One’s self is time. Dogen criticizes the view that time
flows from past through present into future, as if “while the time and mountain
may still exist I have now passed them by and I, at the present time, reside in
a fine vermilion palace. To [a person who believes thus], the mountain and
river and I are as far distant as heaven from earth.” But past and future are
really all one time, only one moment, “the absolute presence, in which all that
is present or absent is as such present” (quoted in Dumoulin, 1990: 88). Fully
grasping one moment is to touch all of reality.
Dogen’s philosophy was not followed up by any notable intellectual de-
scendants; eventually it was rediscovered in the 1920s, when it became ammu-
nition for the Kyoto school of modern academic philosophy. Organizationally
336 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths