and ideologically, however, Dogen launched a successful new trajectory for
Zen. He consummated the shift from Zen syncretism to the doctrine of pure
meditation. His monasteries were the first to build a detached monks’ hall
solely for meditation. In part he was moved by fortuitous political pressures;
in the 1230s, as he raised his claim to the truest Buddhist path, his Kyoto
center was attacked by Mount Hiei troops, leading Dogen to establish his head
monastery in then-remote Echizen Province (some 100 miles north of the
capital). In fact he was following the population flow, which had spread from
the home provinces to the north. Dogen’s disowning of paradoxical koan fitted
well with a movement away from the sophisticated elite; and his emphasis on
the identity of enlightenment with everyday life was an incentive for ordinary
work. Soto’s practices emerged at the same time that the Pure Land movements
were spreading to much the same audiences. Dogen had originally studied with
Pure Land teachers, and his Soto was in effect a Zen competitor to Pure Land.
In the generations after Dogen, Soto spread very widely, away from the
capital cities where Rinzai flourished. Soto monks worked in the fields along-
side the people; lay associations were formed around the temples, through
which the laity, including women, could join in meditation (Dumoulin, 1990:
138–143, 208–210, 213–214). Organizational success watered down Soto’s
distinctiveness. The third-generation disciple Keizan Jokin inherited a great
Shingon temple as well as a Soto lineage; from this base Keizan initiated the
nationwide Soto movement, at the cost of mixing Zen with Shingon rituals,
burial services, incantations, and prayers for worldly well-being. Dogen’s origi-
nal polemic notwithstanding, koan were reintroduced as an aid against dis-
traction during meditation. Keizan’s pupil Gasan Joseki, in the mid-1300s,
eliminated the unorthodoxy by replacing koan with a five-stanza formula
which pithily summarized the essence of the Hua-yen (Kegon) metaphysics,
taken over from the Kegon school, now largely defunct in Japan. The formulas
now took precedence over the study of Dogen’s philosophy; an extensive
scholarly literature became developed in commentaries on this so-called doc-
trine of the Five Ranks. Soto took on the character of an educational institu-
tion, paralleling Rinzai, but at a different social level: whereas the Rinzai
monasteries of the Five Mountains became cultivated academies of the elite,
Soto monasteries became schools for the rural populace. Thereafter Rinzai and
Soto carried on in their independent niches. In both branches the routinization
and scholasticism of organizational success was setting in.
The Rinzai Establishment and Secularization by Aesthetic Elite
Rinzai Zen lost little time in becoming accepted into the highest level of the
new political establishment, while keeping on excellent terms with the old court
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 337