 Well actually this speaker does not really need much of presentation especially to those who have words in Japanese religion and on Chinese Buddhism in general. But I will give it a try. So Professor Stephen Heine is a professor of inter-studies and history at the Florida International University and where he also studied television studies. He would be known, it really does, as a very prolific writer on Zen Buddhism. He has written on Dogen, I think that was his first work, and has done really groundbreaking studies on Dogen's major work, the Shogun, on which I think he would tell us something today. And he has also written a lot on a genre of Zen writing, on the Koan. Your book on the Fox Koan has been a favorite of my students for many, many years. And on the history of Zen Buddhism in general. I would say that Professor Heine has also done a huge service to the field by editing many important books on Zen and something that have collected works by major scholars of the tradition and are again wonderful tools for teaching on the tradition. He has written about 30 books, so I thought I shouldn't be reading them, but I think many of the editing books also need to be mentioned. He has also worked since the beginning, really, of his career on the relation of East and West, in particular what is known as the Kyoto School, the modern philosophy and the work of Abe Masao. And that was also very important work. I don't think you've gone back to that recently, or have you? Not so much, yeah. But at the beginning, talking about the 90s, it was very important work again for situating the genealogy of the Kyoto School within the Zen tradition. Professor Heine has also received honors from the Japanese government as the recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun Award, which is an important award given to those who served as bridges between Japan and the West and served to property to Japanese culture, and this is, without a doubt, very well deserved. His last book just came out a few months ago, I believe, is an editor book on Zen and material culture, and I'm sure we'll all be looking after the talk. But today we are going back to, as I said before, one of the most important subjects of Professor Heine's research, that is the actual book itself. Without further ado, I leave the floor. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction. Let me ask one quick question. How long should the speaking part be before? It's fairly, the speaking part is around one hour, but if you want to go a bit more... Oh, okay, no, no, okay. 50 minutes. All right, all right, good, good. Well, thank you again for inviting me and for the kind introduction. It's great to see Lucia and meet some new friends. And yeah, I'm very excited to talk about Shobo Genzo once again. This is how my career started, and when I was in graduate school, 40 years ago, in the late 1970s, I began studying Shobo Genzo. And at that time, the early translations and scholarly works on Shobo Genzo were just beginning to come out. Probably many of you are aware that for various reasons and people attributed to D.T. Suzuki's Rinzai orientation, there wasn't much about the organ until the 1970s. And all of a sudden there was a wave of partial translations of Shobo Genzo and some other writings. And a couple of very good scholarly works that are still useful today. And recently I was invited to write a new book on Shobo Genzo for a series on Buddhist literature. And so I was reflecting back on those 40 years. And now, at that time, there were a couple of good partial translations, and there was one kind of notorious complete translation that hasn't held up very well. But in recent years, now there's about four or five newer complete translations. One of those is still being completed by the Stanford Translation Project led by Carl Bielefeld. And I think they're getting closer to the production stage because they've had some of the material on the website for a long time. And they took the material down from the website, which was kind of a tragedy for me not to have easy access. But then I was assured that that meant, that was a good sign because it meant that the publication is getting closer and because of copyright issues they had to remove it from the website. But anyway, here's my point. So what's happened in those 40 years? Well, the newer translations are much more sensitive to the Chinese-Chan influences on Dogen. And Dogen's appropriation of Chinese materials. Shobogenzo is often referred to as the first vernacular text in Japanese Buddhism. But it's not exactly a vernacular text because it relies heavily on quotations of Chinese Chan and some Mahayana Buddhist sutras in Chinese. And Dogen kind of invents his own language. It's not exactly a kana or a vernacular language. It's not exactly Kanbun either. He kind of invents his own language. And in doing so, he's not only translating the Chinese sources, but he's taking the liberty to alter them. And this is, in a way, a kind of basic point. But it's also an all-encompassing point with many ramifications that need to be dealt with, I think, in the scholarship and translation. I think that the translations today are much more sensitive to some of those issues. And then they have to make decisions about how much annotation to use and whether to still try to make it readable and to lose some of the nuance or not. But we can see that effort being made. So that's a very good thing. But then I realized one basic thing had been overlooked, I think, almost entirely overlooked in Western scholarship. Of course, it's much more advanced in the Japanese scholarship, which had to do with material about Shobogenzo that had been created in the interim period. So what happened between the 1250s when Dogen died? And he was still in the act of editing Shobogenzo at the time he died. So he never considered a complete text. And he himself seemed to divide it between what he called the old draft or the early draft and the new draft or the later draft. And his main disciple Ejo, who was his main scribe and editor after Dogen died, also left behind several different versions. And they contain different numbers of chapters or fascicles. Sometimes those fascicles are in different versions and there's different ordering to them. Some are left in, some are left out. And the scholarship in Japan has been dealing with that quite extensively. The Western scholarship has touched on that. Of course, people like Carl Bielfeld and William Boniford have dealt with that in creative ways. But generally, there hasn't been much said about what's happened since that time. So late Kamakura period, more Machi period, Edo period. And what I started to realize was that there was kind of an echo chamber where a few things were said in Western scholarship. And then other people seemed to see those few catchphrases and repeat them. And I think some misimpressions had been created to the effect that the Shobogenzo was not really at all important in the Soto sect for hundreds of years until all of a sudden in 1906, in connection with the 600, how many years is that now? 1906 would be the 650th death anniversary of Dogen. There was the first modern typeset edition produced, which triggered off a lot of commentaries in additional scholarship. And so what happened in those 600, 700 years in between? And I think there were a couple of basic misimpressions which I'm going to get to. So after I sent the original title, then I added a main title outside of a small circle. Because a phrase that I see mentioned a number of times in the Western scholarship is that to the extent that it is talked about at all is that, well, the Shobogenzo was only in the hands of a small circle of Soto specialists. And other than that, nobody paid any attention to it. And even those people weren't really reading it in the way we would think of scholarly studies. They had it more as a ritual object, as an iconic possession, as a prestigious icon that would give status to their temple. And there's some truth to that, of course, but I think that when you look at it closely, that's mostly untrue. And so I want to pick that apart historically. And the first page of the handout gives a very brief overview of some material I've been working on by trying to track in one page. And I have an article that is much longer and goes into detail about many of these items. But I tried to compress it here into one page to give an overview of what's happened historically in those 600 or 700 years. So let me briefly talk about the handout and front and back pages, and then go to the PowerPoint. And then I will come back to the flip side of the handout, which has to do with the particular passage that I want to analyze, like philologically and philosophically, from one of the fascicles called Zazen Shin, or the point of Zazen, or the lancet or needle of Zazen. But let me just mention briefly about the front page. So if you look at that 600 or 700 year period, generally what's said is that the late Kamakura and Muramachi period was a dark age of sectarian studies. That's a phrase that's been used. It was used in Japanese scholarship. It was picked up in some Western scholarship, and it's been repeated quite a bit, a dark age of sectarian studies, but there weren't any real scholarly studies of Shobogenzo or Dogenzo other texts. And there's some truth to that. Because if you look here, one and two, we see that in the early 1300s, there were two prominent commentaries on Shobogenzo, quite different styles. One was in prose, kind of line by line commentary on each and every passage by two monks who had been schooled in Japanese Tendai Buddhism, and are generally thought to have read Shobogenzo in light of Tendai original enlightenment or Hongaku Shiso ideas. And that was a commentary on what's called the 75-fascical edition of the Shobogenzo. And the other commentary was a prose commentary by Gi-Yun, who was another lineage of Dogen's following. And this is on the 60-fascical version, and I realize it gets very technical very quickly, but it's important to understand that there was no clear definitive version of the Shobogenzo that they had. So different lineages had different versions. And then his was four line Chinese verses with a capping phrase. And it was not in line by line or interlinear discussion at all. It just kind of gives poetic impressions of the meaning of those. And those were both completed by the 1310s, 1320s. And it is true that there weren't major commentaries in the Morimachi period. So it wasn't until late 1600s that we start getting extensive commentaries on Shobogenzo. However, in the Morimachi period we do see a lot of activity. There were different theories about how long, how many fascicles should be included in the Shobogenzo. Different editions were produced, different copies being made. There were discussions about which were the authentic copies. Temples were exchanging copies and trying to consolidate them into critical editions. And there were some minor commentaries being used. When I say minor commentaries, I mean that they weren't completely dedicated to Shobogenzo, but Shobogenzo ideas were being discussed in poetry and prose commentaries during the Morimachi period. So I don't really consider it a dark age because there was a lot of activity. It just wasn't activity that's quite as easily recognizable for what people tend to be looking for. Now, there was a vigorous revival of interest in the Edo period for various reasons. And what I try to do here is compress that five or six main figures produced over 40 commentaries. Those are full volumes, sometimes they're multi-scrawled volumes of commentaries. One commentator, Banjin Dodtan, who's very well known for discussions of the precepts and for the succession of lineage in the Soto sect, he produced 16 commentaries on Shobogenzo. A couple more famous figures, especially Menzan Suihou, was probably the single main figure who wrote well over 100 volumes on various aspects of Dogen's life and thought, had nine commentaries. And that list could be enhanced because they had other works that dealt extensively with Shobogenzo, but these are commentaries dedicated to particular fascicles or groups of fascicles or for the entire Shobogenzo. And that list could easily be doubled or tripled. And I've documented that in an article of more than 80 prominent commentaries. So when you look at the Western scholarship, generally they'll say, oh yeah, there was a revival and there were five or six commentaries. Menzan had one or two and they mentioned a couple of others. But it's been pretty much overlooked. The Japanese scholarship goes into tremendous detail because these are, you know, becomes a multifaceted kind of scholarly game, so to speak, because there's the commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries. So what happens in that period is that the commentators are lining up in different views and rebutting one another, sometimes very harshly and sometimes in a more moderate tone. But there were very heated debates setting off one another. So the one main school was by Tenkei Densan. He turned out to be a critic of Dogen. And basically the idea that set in, going back to Dogen's use of the Chinese, was how well did he know the Chinese and how well did he use the Chinese and why did he have all these points that seemed like the stakes in the Chinese? And Tenkei was a harsh critic. He lined up with another famous Edo period scholar from that period, Mujaku Dochu, who's a Rinzai scholar. And they borrowed some ideas from each other and they had a list of criticisms. Mujaku was not that concerned with Dogen, and it was kind of easy for him to be somewhat dismissive. He did recognize the importance of Dogen, and other Rinzai people from that period, especially Hakuin, did recognize Dogen's importance and often did praise Dogen and they made him criticize Soto Zen other than Dogen. But Mujaku joined forces with Tenkei Densan on the criticism. And he goes to the point where Tenkei, being a Soto person, doesn't think of himself as an opponent of Dogen. He thinks he's Dogen's savior. And so what he does is he comes in and starts rewriting Dogen. And basically says, if Dogen could rewrite the Chinese, I can rewrite Dogen. And so he only produced two main commentaries, but those commentaries are rewrites. They're rewriting Dogen's passages to make them more authentic with Chinese. Now, why was that issue so important? Of course, because of Confucian influences, because of the influence of the Obaku sect that had come migrated from China in the 1600s and because of other kinds of secular pressures from the Shogunate on creating sectarian identity for the different sects, especially the sects that had started in the Kamakura period and were still prominent, there was a strong emphasis on showing the authenticity of Dogen. And that was also true for other figures. Asai, the founder of Rinzai Zen, his main text, the Kozen Gogoku-Lon, was also put to this kind of scrutiny. And it was taken out of circulation for a period of time by some of his followers, because they were kind of embarrassed about the fact. Now, Asai did not try to do what Dogen did, which was a kind of creative hermeneutics where maybe we could say he's deliberately misreading, he's a genius of misreading, creative misreading. Asai wasn't quite doing that, but there are patterns where he seemed to have missed the nuances of the Chinese. So, one of the interesting things is that in the 17th and 18th century, especially the 18th century, the 1700s, and I might have had a typo, and now I realize in the slide coming up, but in the 18th century when almost all of the commentaries I'm talking about were created, so there's dozens of them, there was also a ban on publishing the Shobogenzo, because the Soto sect worked with the Bakfu, and they tried to shut down the publishing of it because they were concerned with Tankei's criticism, Ujaku's comments, and they didn't quite know what to do with the Shobogenzo. And there were so many different versions of it, and then once Tankei was circulating with the rewrites, they tried to say, like, don't publish it, and that ban was enforced for 70 years, so most of the commentaries were written during the ban. That meant that if the commentaries were critical editions, they weren't published, apparently, and the authors couldn't trump it, hey, this is what we're doing. So since I think one of Tankei's versions had come out before the ban, what they often did was to comment on his version since that was okay, technically it wasn't quite as subject to the new ban. In any case, those works were being produced, and they got the idea, like, let's have an authoritative version. Let's have one version everybody can agree to. Well, very difficult under those circumstances, but the idea was put out there as early as the 1690s, and that contained 96 fascicles. There's a woodblock edition of it that was produced in 1806 for the 550th death anniversary. A dog in the age of 1253, but it took a few years to... Those death anniversaries could encompass several years of production. They built new buildings at the temples, and new biographies were often part of it and new editions of the main text. It's interesting because the 1806 woodblock edition was still incomplete. First of all, most people... I think my kind of joke is if you walk down Russell Square and you ask 10 people how many fascicles in the Shobo Genzo are there, what would they say, probably? Nine out of 10 would say... No, no, in my world, they all know that. They all know the Shobo Genzo. They would all say 95 fascicles, though, but that's the first kind of myth that I want to deconstruct. Because even the original version that we think of as having 95 actually had 96, and then they took one out, so it became 95. But the 95 fascicles were ordered in very different ways. If you look at this 18th century period, there was no single 95 fascicle version that had emerged very quickly. The Japanese scholars have catalogued some of these, and you can see the differences. They had a lot of debates about how to order the sequence of the 95 and which ones should be in the 95, because some were deliberately left out. There were alternative versions of some that were sometimes included, listed as a bepon, or they were not included, but other people argued they should have been. So it wasn't easy, and by the time they produced the woodblock in 1806, there were only 90 fascicles, because there was still much debate about five of them. Now, one of the things was, one of the debates was if they were too controversial because of the apparent misuse of Chinese, that led people to not come to an agreement. And also, Dogen sometimes harshly criticized Chinese monks like Lin Ji, Da Hui, and other prominent figures. And if he was too critical, it seemed kind of embarrassing why he was so polemical, they might have left those out. So that seems to apply to the ones that were left out of this 1806 edition, which only had 90 of the 95. Five more did come out in the mid-1800s, but they were still reluctant to go public with it. This was still kept basically within a small circle, so to speak. I think that the small circle is not really so small. It was a big circle, but it was still a Soto circle. The 1906 typeset edition exposed it to a much larger circle. And that's when 20 years later, we get the famous work by Watsuji Tetsuro, Shaman Dogen, a monk, and he says Dogen is not part of the sect or he shouldn't be limited to the sect. The sect has gotten corrupt. Dogen is for all humanity. And Watsuji's comments didn't come out of a vacuum. That had been building up since late Meiji and there were other commentators saying something like that. So the secular viewpoint and what became the Kyoto school of philosophy got into the picture very early. Tanabe Hadjime had a famous short monograph in 1939. And Akiyama Hanji was another figure in the Kyoto school who had a detailed philosophical discussion of Dogen in 1936. But that had been building up for several decades. Meanwhile, on the sectarian side, that triggered off dozens of new commentaries that are more the Teisho style, more the preaching style rather than a philosophical analysis. And some of the key figures are Nishihari Bokusan and Kishizawa Ion. Okay, so before I get to the PowerPoint, one other comment briefly and we'll come back is the flip side. I'm trying not to get too carried away with only these historical oddities about the text, but what's the result of it? So how can it influence our discussion of it? And I want to look at one particular passage which takes a famous koan concerning thinking and non-thinking. And so it shows Dogen's hermetic style of rearranging the Chinese order at work. And I also included in the middle of the page a little bit of Carl Bielefeld's translation, which was very useful, and some other comments about the main concept of Hishiyo or non-thinking as opposed to not thinking. So I'll come back to that later. All right, now, I think one of the new trends in the Japanese scholarship that, you know, beginning to filter into the Western scholarship is to look at Dogen's Shobogenzo as a provisional and contested text. So we've talked about some of the contests that came up later. But even for Dogen himself, he seemed very much torn about the content, the writing style, and the intention. And so this is supposed to be a manuscript of Dogen, and we can see him crossing things out. And that's a very important point. One of the famous scholars, probably the single most famous scholar of Soto's and studies of Dogen in the post-war period, Kagemishima Genyu, I heard the anecdote that he... that when the critical Buddhism movement came up in the late 80s and 1990s, and that was challenging a number of orthodoxies in the Soto sect, including orthodox views about Dogen and Shobogenzo, Kagemishima, and they were pointing out that Dogen had changed his mind quite a bit about what was supposed to be in the Shobogenzo. Kagemishima, who's one of the main people who documented all the Chinese influences, and his work is still celebrated. But apparently, I heard the anecdote that he was... expressed that he was very distraught when some of these manuscripts were coming to light that were being discovered in temple archives in the 80s and 90s, and when you look at them and you see that Dogen was not pristine, and it wasn't the later people that clouded the picture, it was Dogen himself that changed his mind. So for example, the title Shobogenzo, apparently he didn't start using that as the title until the year 1245, and by that time, most of the texts had already been completed. Over three-quarters of the fascicles by 1245, and then he went back and started renaming them all Shobogenzo, Busho, Shobogenzo, Genjoukouan. But he had different ideas about... He himself was editing. We don't have so many manuscripts that are in his hand, but we can see that he was making a lot of changes. Okay. Now, here's the famous cover of the Ehé Shobogenzo, what's called the Honzan edition, the main temple edition, because it was associated with Ehéji and some of the texts that had been stored at Ehéji, and this is what I was referring to as the 1806 woodblock that came out in 1906. At that time, they came out in a modern typeset edition in 1906. And then after that, there was a Zenshu of Dogen that came out in 1909 that had a different version. And... Then when the Kyoto School got into the picture, there was a scholar named Eto Soko, who was president of Komizawa University for a while. He came out with a new edition, an Iwanami Bunko edition in 1939 that was different from the other two in some significant ways when you look at passages carefully, because he did some of his own editing. And that came out, and that was considered... Okay, that was the standards. Four volumes, small paperbacks, easy to acquire. But that became very controversial actually after the war. People said that he had misunderstood the earlier manuscripts, and also that he was... But also the whole attention to the 95 fascicles began to unravel. So we'll go back to Russell Square and inform the people that please consider other alternative versions of Shobo Genzo editions. But also in 1906, Nishihari Bokusan started what they called Genzo-e, which still continue at Aheji and other temples. And those were intensive retreats. So probably in the three-month summer retreat, this might last for a month, and they take one fascicle and discuss that. How creative it still remains, or whether it's kind of a dry lecture series now, and whether it's really a creative discussion, that can vary quite a bit, and there's different comments on that. But apparently, when it started in 1906, it was a very vigorous activity that's spread to a number of Soto temples. But in fact, actually, when you track this down, and David Riggs has talked about this there were thousand-day retreats that were being held back in the 1700s. And there were also lecture series at several temples, especially in Tokyo, what we could call Edo seminaries that eventually merged and formed Komozawa University in the 1880s. So my point is that there's been a lot of confusion, but there's been a lot of activity as well. And I think it's better to look at the activity rather than overlook it in order to unravel the confusion. Okay, I put this slide here. This is a modern calligraphy, but I think one of the stereotypes that sets in is that in this supposed dark age period, people only were fixating on key buzzwords, Shikantaza, Shijindatsuraku, Genjokoan, and there wasn't comprehensive studies. Again, I think that the numbers speak for themselves in refuting that. Okay, so basically I'm trying to look at the text historical situation, clarifying when, why, and where Shobogenzo versions and commentaries on them were created. But I want to build up to the philological and philosophical issue of understanding Dogen's rhetoric and how his misreading, or the genius of misreading, as some people call it, does apply to particular passages and we'll look again at Zazen Shin on non-thinking. Okay, so let me review some of the basics of Shobogenzo. There's an example of a Shinzo or a portrait of Dogen. This is from, I like this image. It's from the Tenzo Kanzaki Zoo, which was also produced in a series of 60 illustrations of Dogen's life story that was also produced in a black and white version that was later colorized in 1806 for that anniversary of his death. And this is, Dogen is a young monk when he's debating with the Tendai scholars on Mount Hiei before he leaves Hiei and joins Keninji Temple and studies there and then eventually goes to China. And this is supposed to be the moment where he's debating about Hongaku Shiso and whether original enlightenment idea vitiates the need for practice. Okay, four years of travels to China has the experience of casting off body-mind Shinjin Datsuraku under his Chinese teacher and returns to Kyoto and has his first main temple in Kyoto from 1233 to 1243 and then moves to the what's now Fukui prefecture known then as Echizen or the Hokuliku area and starts Aheiji and other temples accumulate nearby. Heisenji was an old Tendai temple that had been there long before Aheiji but Dogen's followers started Hokyoji, Daijoji and then in the Kazan era Yokoji and Sojoji up in the Noto Peninsula. Okay, now the difficulty of reconciling Dogen's use of Chinese with the Kanak commentary was discussed by Gion in his early comments from the 1320s. And in his preface to his verse commentary on the 60-fascical version and by the way, the 60-fascical version if you ask people how many fascicles does the 60-fascical version actually have? 59. Because one of the ones that is usually divided into two halves is not divided in the so the 60-fascical version only has 59 and the 95-fascical version actually has 96. But, okay, so he points out that Dogen had this grandmotherly kindness that was a typical Song phrase which was often used in a cynical way. So to have grandmotherly kindness could be good because you're bestowing the teachings to people that aren't really capable of understanding it or it could be that you're talking down to people or making it too easy for them. But anyway, he's probably using that in a positive enough way and he says that he's trying to kind of go 50-50 here with the Chinese and the Japanese vernacular, but people still didn't understand it. And so he's recognizing this back then and therefore he offers his verse comments. I'm translating those verse comments and actually I'm going to include a few of them in this Saturday seminar but I don't know whether they actually make it more understandable or not but that's another question. Okay, so here's a couple of examples of some of you may be familiar with some of these examples of what is so complicated and intricate about Dogen's use of the Chinese. And I'll just mention briefly, we start with the famous phrase casting or dropping off body-mind. That was his enlightenment experience under his Chinese teacher, Rujing, in 1225. And modern scholars have pointed out but this was discussed earlier as well but it's come up in a big debate in modern scholarship that Rujing probably never used that phrase and Rujing probably used the phrase casting dust off the mind and maybe Dogen changed it because casting dust off the mind or casting off the dust from the mind might sound dualistic and so maybe Dogen deliberately changed it but if you look at Rujing's collected works in the Taishou edition it's only mentioned one time in a poem and it's interesting because the Rujing's Taishou edition was all edited by Soto commentators from that period so it's kind of surprising that there's still so many discrepancies going on but we don't know how much Rujing would or could have used the original phrase and then we don't know if Dogen kind of misheard it because there are homophones in English excuse me, in Japanese but not in Chinese so maybe he just didn't have any ear for it or maybe he deliberately changed it and maybe Rujing by using the dust didn't mean dust in the sense of defilement but just meant dust as a sense object that was taken in that created a sense of impression and didn't have the dualistic implication anyway okay, one of the famous examples is when Dogen takes the saying attributed to Masu Tang master this mind is Buddha and he picks the words apart and rearranges them very difficult to translate in English most translators do try to make sense out of those four phrases but then I thought to myself the point was not to really make sense out of it but just to rearrange the letters so why does he do that and he does that with other four kanji phrasings in other examples as well but this is probably the most famous one and then for our Muchu Setsumu disclosing a dream within a dream he comes up with this kind of construction where the phrases used three times Muchu Setsumu Wa Muchu Setsumu O Muchu Setsumu so I don't know, I'm not even sure how to put it into English other translators have come up with creative ways of doing it but is so back in 10K's time the comment is is this much to do about nothing is he mystifying us and we're not we have to understand that he himself may not have quite grasped the original meanings okay a contemporary scholar Frederic Girard has he was in a book where he analyzes Dogen's rewriting of one of Rujing's poems on the wind bell a very interesting monograph that he published in English in Japan a few years ago but he comes up with the comment that okay what Dogen did is was deliberate, it was intentional he knew what he was doing and I think that's the mainstream view but there's so many examples that it's hard to make a sweeping statement a recent Chinese scholar Heian Shen who has translated Shobogenzo into modern Mandarin used this phrase and used this phrase and and so he's coming up with an affirmative factor and other people have analyzed it in terms of trends going back to comic court period of taking license to change and we know that in East Asian tendency in the Waka tradition or in Chinese poetry tradition is to take the original and make a slight alteration of it and that shows your originality so it's nothing new Dogen didn't invent that trend and you could see him as one more figure in Buddhist and literary traditions that were longstanding and doing his thing but he does it to such an extent and he comes up with things that are clear but so many things that are quite cryptic and mysterious that the question lingers okay so I discussed and that should be 18th century so during the ban in the 18th century there was the rewriting of the Shobogenzo and it's hard to weed that out now to know what we're looking at and as they discover more older in temple archives as they come up with more manuscripts it becomes very confusing for the people that love to study this that confusion is a great thing but it leads to inconclusiveness for example some of you are familiar with the 12 fascical Shobogenzo texts that was supposedly written towards the end of Dogen's life it was the new draft we can't exactly equate it to what he called the new draft but more or less that was the new draft that was written at the end of his life most of those fascicles are undated so we don't know how much Ejo might have edited them because his records say 1255, two years after Dogen's death so that's already creating a question mark but the point of the new draft of the 12 fascical Shobogenzo is that Dogen seemed to have this idea that he was going to start all over again and he wanted to collect 100 fascicles and then he started rewriting some of the older ones and they were quite different styles the new draft and the old draft in a lot of different ways so he himself was torn about what to make of it so it was natural that controversy would follow alright so this sums up some of the main points about why there was the revival in the late 16 and 1700s and Geshu there was a monk Geshu Soko that's mentioned on the first page item number three Geshu Soko was an abbot at Aheji in the Edo period who is given credit for triggering off this revival of the Shuto Fuku idea of let's restore the soto sect as it properly should have been and he came up with his own version of the Shobogenza which had 84 fascicles and he was looking for an authoritative addition and he made a lot of comments on issues that became very controversial how many precepts because Thogun was known for having only 16 precepts but was that complete or not or did he just offer that for novices and not intend that for the high level monks and also the succession whether you had to have face-to-face transmission from your teacher or whether you could succeed to the abyssey of the temple by selection from another from another temple or another lineage and so those were the so Geshu was already commenting on those and trying to organize those around what Thogun himself said in the Shobogenza and then Tenke comes into the picture and he picks up some of those arguments but he has kind of this insider-outsider view and he's also he's one of the sub-lineages stemming from Geshu and then the other lineage is on the Banjin Doton side and they had the fierce debates and back and forth commentaries okay alright so I just threw together here some terms that could be used for referring to different aspects of textual studies some of these terms come from the titles of the 18th century commentaries and some are more contemporary constructions but if you look at the titles of the commentaries the Shuten idea was used in both with that variation so both of those constructions were used in title after title so pulling out the sources let's go back to what the Chinese sources were now in that sense it's probably true that people weren't looking at it so in that sense there had been a dark age that they just didn't pay attention to it Guilin probably did know the sources because we can see in his even though we don't see it in his first comments we see in his other recorded sayings in his other lectures that he was very familiar with the Chinese sources but maybe some of that knowledge got lost in the 14 and 1500s and now it was being revived Chushaku and both of those constructions was used in a lot of those titles some of these other terms are major era constructions for how to do philology intellectual history thought and hermeneutics okay so alright so I'm going to go very quickly and then finish with the with Sazen Shint so this is what we got to tell the people on Russell Square that there's a lot of different versions so here is one configuration where we can see all the different the ABCs refer to different subdivisions of the this is another flowchart that shows how you can break it up into all these subdivisions and this was done by one of the scholars who preferred the 12th festival version and he tried some of the arrows are trying to document why that reign supreme or should reign supreme and so even to say 95th this is quite misleading because the new collections usually have 75 plus 12 festivals that's 87 but then they also have the Beth home the alternative version and if you add them up a lot of times they magically come out to 95 so people say aha that's the same version it has 95 if you add it all up but it's quite different when you subdivide 75 plus 12 in the older era in the new era and in fact sometimes it leads you to the opposite conclusions so that's why I call that collected with the subdivisions the de facto 95 version okay so another myth is that Dogen wrote it over 22 years from 1231 who is dead in 1253 and we can see that almost all the festivals almost all the festivals were actually written in a six year period so that's another myth that needs to get deconstructed and and in fact almost all the festivals were written before Dogen gets to Aheji Aheji only produced less than 20 festivals and so that's another myth this these two flow charts tried to document the movement and the linkages between the lineages in the Kamakura period and how those played out in the Edo period revival and the modern so we don't have time for that detail so let me go into the Zazen Shin so here's the case with a Dogen reading of the case which he gives in Kana so the case is a monk says to the master when you're sitting in when you're sitting upright it doesn't use Zazen but when you're sitting upright or you're sitting steadily or you're sitting in steadfast fashion what do you think about Dogen changes that question to you're thinking what? now does that make any sense or is that not so he's intervening or intruding into the story from the very beginning and in number two the answer to the question what are you thinking about is I'm thinking about non-thinking I'm thinking about not thinking but again the twist is given that since you're not really answering a question the first one is a statement that this is kind of reinforcing that statement that the what of thinking is not thinking now on the handout on that flip side under number two under number yeah under number two that bold sentence although not thinking maybe an idea that has been discussed for a long time here it means how you do think so Dogen's interpretation is that even though he's saying he's thinking about non-thinking again it reinforces the original declaration by the monk and so the monk is not a monk who needs to get enlightened by the master the monk is in the process of enlightening the master or at least the interaction between them is mutually reinforcing so in response to the master's answer to the first comment inquiries slash declaration he says the monk says well the conventional view he says how do you think about not thinking but in the Dogen reading he says not thinking is the how of what you think so they keep reiterating basically the point that was made in number one and the point made in number one was by the monk not by the master and so then the master says it is thinking of nothing so he changes the character from negation from fu to he in the Japanese reading and on number three in that flip side of the handout in bold we have Dogen's comment although the process of non-thinking seems crystal clear when we think about not thinking we are always already non-thinking now the always already using a phrase that is usually connected with Heidegger and you know maybe taking a little license here myself but the point is that simply blur the distinction between not thinking and non-thinking anyway and the blur distinction between the three thinking, not thinking and non-thinking are all in the same whatever you call them they are all the same process now if you had to pick one word that was the appropriate word I think Dogen would agree we would pick Heishilio non-thinking as the kind of buzz word to use but it's not an opposition there's not this dialectical movement from the lower level of thinking to a higher level of not thinking into another higher level which is the way it's usually portrayed so just very briefly here trying to delineate five or six steps of Dogen's rhetorical pattern where he subverts and diverts your attention from the original by picking apart a particular congee or a particular compound and misreading it deliberately we could say and then further intruding to say well this is what they really meant to say and the commentators have missed the boat and then probably coming back and inverting that if you look very carefully at the whole discussion there he doesn't stick with one clear point anyway and he kind of leaves it open ended I go back to the blue cliff record which I think is crucial to read as a predecessor for Dogen and in the blue cliff record they often end the cases by saying if I had been there if only I had been there this is what I would have said instead of what the master or the monk said but don't take my word for it what do you think and simply end what do you think over and over again Dogen doesn't exactly say that but I think that's his implication so you have to decide for yourself but in any case this is what I would call and this is a phrase that he does use the mutually reciprocal he doesn't use it in this passage but in other passages he occasionally uses that phrase and I have an illustration here this was adapted from a manga about Dogen to show the conventional view that the question and answer are going across purposes to one another to the Dogen view of the mutual reciprocity whereby the master and disciple are enlightening each other since they're all non-thinking we're always already non-thinking from the very beginning so whether that would clear up all of Dogen's sands, lineages clarifications or lack of clarifications about Dogen or not maybe it gives Tanke the license to rewrite, why not? this is an open text, Dogen was not completed and only sectarian orthodoxy would get shocked and horrified so let me end there and take your comments or questions this was a fascinating intriguing as you said actually Moran, anything else we should take questions from the primitive chair and start with a very very general question not so much about the the text itself but the occasion of reading the text you mentioned the Genzoe and you mentioned also the other people who have done it who clearly have not done it by themselves not as an individual monk relating to this text but as a kind of community group engaged in this text and I wondered what was the occasion because you mentioned places in Tokyo that would be after which we had in the university I was thinking of Dangi show of this kind of very important institutions in the Huwao in Japan actually very early already 16th century where monks were studying just like we do just in a room and taking instructions using text and was that the occasion in which the commentaries to the Shogunzoe were produced was there an audience that was beyond the commentator the writer himself very good I think if we recreate the Tokugawa world we see that kind of intellectual activity happening so I think and that recharged it yes because a few years ago I got interested in what were the origins of the Japanese Buddhist universities so they all started around the 1880s and they grew out of what we could call temple seminaries generally from the Edo period so they increasingly became more formalized as modern universities by the 1920s and then had other education reform movements during the occupation and generally expanded to include a lot of secular studies as well but in the 1880s you could see the hold over so Kamezawa University was held in the first couple of years at one of these seminaries in central Tokyo and there were three main places one was Sengakuji which is famous for the 47 Rounen being buried and it's not actually partly that temple had the prestige to receive the 47 Rounen because it was one of the main that Daimyo was connected with the Soto sect and this was one of the main because it had that seminary effect and another one was Kichi-joji which is located in Bunkyo Ward and another one say Shoji which is located near what's now Kasumi-kaseki area and so you had those three and the original Komezawa University in the 1880s was held at Shoji for a couple of years because they didn't have the other facilities and they built it so the stories were that going back and some of the stories say even before even in the 1580s when Shogunate gets formalized you can see how reliable those are we don't know but they talk about this kind of seminary activity of intensive studies of Shobogenzo and Dogenzo's other texts going on for many years and it was very prestigious so like Menzan he was kind of not even though he was the most famous scholar of that period in retrospect at the time he wasn't mainstream institutionally he wasn't considered one of the big guns either at or at Ahiji but he does he was invited to give lectures on Shobogenzo and that was like a big thing for him I think Geshu they say was responsible for these thousand day retreats we don't know if they actually counted those days or it was just a very long time but yes it was a community effort that's true in a way that would reinforce the stereotypes because you have the sensei and people are reviewing this and don't want to challenge those words and I think that's some of what comes through in the 20th century with Nishihari Boksan's lineage and his followers but it must have been an exciting time it changes like the way that you make commentary or the kind of issues that you may deal with what to say I mean how original now originally we were going to intervene on the text that's what I was thinking because you mentioned so much the question of recreating you know I was talking with a friend who works in Sanskrit mostly in Advaita Vedanta but we were just talking about the way commentaries work and he was saying commentaries he deals with they say well this is what outsiders our groups say and they state what it says and then this is what we say and then they go on to the next point and there's not a lot of give and take there there's the wrong view and here's our right view at least in the sources he was looking at I think you don't get that it's not that organized here but you do get the presumption that each time we're making a point there is another audience out there of the naysayers or the alternative so I think you're stimulating me to reengage now at some of the specifics and how much can you read between the lines to hear that kind of anonymous dialogue that must have been there because they were talking to the people that were there but they were probably always addressing a point to the people that weren't in that room as well so that community you know there's kind of the hidden community of the alternative views yeah because sometimes when I've read some of the fatels that translation of Bouchot 30 page books sometimes I wonder and get a bit dispirited given there's so much work plenty of puns on characters and misreading that somebody doesn't read other Japanese or Chinese that almost any translation is incredibly inaccurate and actually I'm deluding myself to think that I understand this and I just wondered what your view if you are reading a translation how accurate is it and if you were going to read the translation what one would you use yeah that's a great question and I thought a lot about that and you know sometimes I've seen a sentence that particularly troubles me so you have you know in some passages there's like a dozen translations right I mean maybe there's five or six complete translations but then Genjo Kouan or Buddha Nature or some of the other famous ones have many more and so you can look at a dozen and in some cases I've seen that there you don't even recognize that it's the same sentence and I think in sometimes you see even the good translations leave out part of a sentence occasionally and they kind of paraphrase so here like on the handout let me give an example so there's that character there's you know the original is this interesting characters that you know some commentators have said look like mountain Yama upside down but you know a stroke is missing but it's supposed to create a physical sense like sitting upright you know and that's the point of that of those characters so I think Billifeld said steadfast sitting but one translation said sitting there all still and awesome like a mountain and then they kept repeating that over and over again now for the non-Japanese readers is that better because you know you can see he's trying to bring the wordplay into it and another translator had still-still state still-still state to get the two characters in there that's a little awkward so you know that's one of many many examples I think that you know I know it's not clear what the Soto project and Carl is going to do with those 67 pages of you know he's got two he's got the notes and then he's got the notes on the notes and when you can click around on the website you know when it's working when the links are working well they've all been stripped off now just in the last couple weeks but it's just astounding you know I printed it out I've sat there at the computer and you know he's the one person who has he has dug into a lot of these editorial commentaries and he uses that there and that's what's good so that's phenomenal but can you skip that and just read it well the other extreme is Kazawaki Tanahashi has done a number of translations he has a complete translation recently and his theory and he's got some great documentation you know if you look at the appendix usually he puts it in the appendix because he doesn't want to have a lot of footnotes so he knows the stuff really well maybe not he's not a scholar and maybe not as well as Carl Bielefeld does but he knows his stuff however in the translation he says he wants to make it seem like Dogen wrote in English and that's his philosophy of it and so you have the readability versus the reliability I mean fortunately we can kind of navigate between between those two the translation that's in four there's four PDFs you can get by Nishijima there's a couple different versions of that in one version in the original version he had a he had a lot of footnotes and then in the version it was basically the same translation but they left out a lot of the footnotes also and he footnoted some things that I think even Bielefeld didn't get to in some of in some of what he came up with although he doesn't give the detail backing up some of his claims but what's the best translation unfortunately you know I don't think there'll be just like there's no definitive addition in Japanese I don't think there'll be a definitive translation because I don't know what the Soto is going to turn into but it's going to be too unwieldy now you know he didn't keep up I mean Bouchot the Buddha nature is the one that he went into the most right and then there may be a half a dozen others that have similar and then some of them are just one set of notes you know when I see one set of notes I get very disappointed but I don't know what the final product will have to wait and see you know the Soto sect apparently I mean there are the debates because they don't want it to be they want to have a handy volume they can pass out for free at temples that even some Japanese could read and foreign tourists could read that's what they're looking for so the depth that he went into there may not see the light of day in the end I was just wondering what it was the first fascinating to do about Darwin and studying right right well you know I don't know if this is a common expression over on this side of the Atlantic but in America there's we have a saying you got to dance with the one that brought you so that's that's my answer like Dogen kind of brought me to the dance and so I have to stick with it but you know I mean you know Dogen's not the only person in world religious or literary history by any means who has an unendingly fascinating you know text to to have before it so you always feel like you're scratching the surface and that's one of the fascinating things I mean I think looking back I was lucky that Heejin Kim's book Dogen Mystical Realists that has been reprinted had just come out the translations in Eastern Buddhist by Norm Waddell and Masao Abe were just coming out Jim Kodera had and then he left the field of Dogen studies but he had Dogen's four minute views in China that had so there was some great stuff out there that was very very stimulating but I mean for me personally I had started more on I thought I was going to be interested in more on the classical Chinese side but I was always fascinated by Japanese walk-up poetry I had a professor undergraduate in a department that was then called Oriental Studies Department at University of Pennsylvania named Edel Saunders I don't know if that name rings a bell but he was he wrote a book on Japanese Buddhism but he was mainly a literary scholar and he did some translations of modern novels but he was he gave some great lectures on walk-up and then it kind of like fused the interest in Dogen became a way of fusing those so would it be influenced on Wakao and Dogen? Well I did translate Dogen's Wakao collection and again there's a lot of debates about the authenticity because it doesn't really appear until 1472 is the earliest and it gets embedded into a biography of Dogen so there's skeptics and because Dogen had a few sayings like he was famous for saying some Zen people mess around with poetry but we shouldn't do that so that Orthodox lineage in Soto following that idea denies that the poems are authentic but they were when Kawabata Yasunari won the Nobel Prize and he gave his lecture back in 1669 I guess the first thing he said was that Dogen Wakao attributed to Dogen so after that Dogen's Wakao have been on the map he also wrote more than his share of the Kanbon poetry it's usually not included in the Gozan Bukkaku collections but one because that's almost entirely Rinzai usually they have one or two of his of Dogen's poems in there just for the sake of it but one of the interesting things I've learned in through these studies is that's another big stereotype because were there Soto monks in the 1300s late Kamakura early Muramachi period who were doing which was going to China studying poetry with the leading monk poets like Zhong Feng Mingbin and another lesser known one Gu Lin but probably more important at the time actually and coming back and writing Kanbon poetry and there were a few not that many but it was much more complicated than what seems like and some of them there was one guy named Tai Chi who did write a number of poems about Shou Volgenzo during that supposed dark age period and that hasn't really come to light in fact Tai Chi's poetry is very extensively discussed in the Edo period commentaries just as its own collection it's got all these commentaries on it and then his poems on Shou Volgenzo were also being discussed at that time so that's how intricate it can get yeah yeah well so extrapolate in what sense they could apply in other traditions or in other lineages let me stick with it what we have on paper here okay well I guess one way to look at it is that there's two terms one is in Japanese, Teisho Teisho is the common term that's used for Zen sermon and Teisho can mean like putting forth an idea so it's a sermon in the sense that I think we would use the word in English like a teacher a preacher is taking a passage from a sacred writing and then giving an interpretation that somehow is applicable to life situations and dogen did some of that himself like when he was in China in those four years in China he did what the Chinese masters were doing at the time which was write poems for lay followers if there was death in the family if one of the children passed an exam he would contribute to that he didn't really do much of that lay back in Japan but he did seem to do have become common in some dynasty China but Blue Cliff Record and some other collections co-on collections use the term in Japanese it's Hyoushou which is an evaluative commentary and the evaluative commentary I think is where you're taking the license to intrude so the intrusion into the original you see that in the Blue Cliff Record and some of the other some commentary so you have all these what happens I guess in all the commentaries is that they're commenting on so many different layers of it and we're just kind of guessing some of the illusions we can track some of them down but we don't know all of them and some of them are Chinese some of them might be imperial poetry collections or other kinds of legends or mythologies that we're circulating at the time so it's difficult for us to track down exactly what they're referring to but I'm not sure if I'm answering your question but I guess the elusiveness to multiple layers and we're trying to read between the lines to tease out what we think are those illusions but that's where it gets overwhelming it's overwhelming to read it in English with Carl's notes and it's overwhelming to walk down just this term you know on the second page on the bottom of that page it says notion of Heel Shuyo and I just threw in there that could have gone on for ten pages just what different commentators from Edo period and modern commentators had said is Heel Shuyo not a negation of thinking on any level or not could they refute that or not one of the interesting comments is very scholar Tsunoda well let's go to Nishiari Boksan thinking has completely dropped thinking it is the thinking of how similarly not thinking does not abide in not thinking both thinking and not thinking have been dropped off so he's connecting it all with the Shinjin Datsuraku idea yeah I'm still not sure if I'm answering your question but one thing is I guess it goes back to Lucia's point about what was going on Edo period and you said I think your phrase was you're doing very similar to what we're doing now well the idea of the Dangi of the academy of Buddhist studies where actually people can don't need to be sectarian as sectarian as they become at the end of the year that was why I was interested so there was there was more stimulation to be non sectarian or trans sectarian I see I think of the Tenda and they are like there may be some homes who are not actually belonging to the sub branch sub lineage through which the temple would belong but they were there because that was the center of study of that kind of stuff so that's really interesting for me I keep thinking about how these commentaries do get something else which is not within a specific lineage how they are influenced by other attains so you're saying it was a more fertile time in the yeah and the question of commentaries in a sense could be to my eyes can include also this once the styles that you mentioned typically Zen whereas I think he wanted to know something more generally about Buddhism this is what he said what can we expect from this those are good questions is there no Kikigaki or Kaki-Gaki which come from oral transmission well yes actually that first the first prose commentary that's exactly what it was so let me make two points Kiki, yes right and so in oral so that was two layers it's attributed to Sene and Kyogo Sene's Kikigaki only appears in his disciple Kyogo's interpretation of it but in his interpretation of it sometimes he challenges it but you can see it but it doesn't exist somehow it stopped existing as in the Pentatex because it was oral and Kyogo was the only one who had the record of it but I think when you get to Edo period there was more emphasis on let's produce a written yeah, yeah so a lot of it had to do with these discussion sections or these preaching sections but let me make one other comment about cross fertilization it's just an anecdote which is that Komazawa University likes to the nickname in the school song Ndareen which means it goes back to a Tang dynasty Chan poem that talked about a true temple is like a sandalwood forest it's very pure and clear and smells fresh so the seminary, one of the seminaries Kichi Joji, they claim that in the early 1600s even before some of these famous names got associated with preaching terms there Chinese visitors, it's not clear whether that was connected with the Obaku I think it was supposed to be earlier than the Obaku but somehow there was a Chinese visitor who was not associated with their lineage was visiting and he said oh, this is a sendarian atmosphere here and so you can still see that sign up at the temple, the calligraphy and they're very proud of that whether that claim now makes any sense or they become a mouthpiece for the sectarian orthodoxy that said in later that's a very good point about there that early period must have been quite there was a question here before we have to close this is something from the 13th century I don't know how common it is but it's something that makes me think sometimes with this author of text we think there is a text and then there is the reception history of the Thai tradition but we don't really have an insight into the information of the text of the work itself our own books maybe takes many years to write and then we change the Thai we change the order something we take from chapter 1 to chapter 5 because it's more so I wonder how much insight we have from these materials into the information history of the work but also perhaps the intellectual development of himself of the other but also the context in which he was overriding so for example what kind of intellectual practices were there we would maybe send the draft to a colleague and then have a comment maybe collect or publish something and then we all of a sudden want to respond to that and then beyond the section so is there any looking at those autographs is there any idea of how he was looking at the text well good so a couple things one is a point that I was trying to make earlier but it may have slipped my mind which was the 12 that 12 that new draft text that wasn't really discovered until 1927 and that changed the landscape very much so and there was a brand new that nobody had ever heard of that was included in that that was found at that Yokoji temple up in Nohto Peninsula which was a case on lineage temple so which for some reason they were storing that that manuscript it was just a rumor until then Dogen had a famous collection of 300 cases of koans that without any commentary that was done in the 1235 that was also a rumor and there were some comments on it in the Edo period but nobody was really sure whether it existed or not and that was also discovered in in these archival hunts that modern scholars have done so that's that's one aspect of it another thing that I think is exciting is yeah you can get a sense from different indications here we see a manuscript where he's crossing out there's other manuscripts where you can see that there's a there's a fascicle Daigo great enlightenment now we have like six or seven different versions that of of either in Dogen's hand or Ejo's hand that compare them and some of them are quite different and some of them overlap with passages in his other his other writings Laihai Tokusui is the one where he particularly talks about whether women can get enlightenment lightened or not you know that there's a 28 fascicle edition of Shobo Genzo that has a very different version of it than what we normally see in the in the 95 fascicle sometimes the translators have thrown in a few passages from that at the end so to me it makes it even more exciting other people may get distraught but one last point about it is the postscripts sometimes talk about the atmosphere when Dogen gave his lectures so you know in one fascicle he says like what he really liked about Rujing was that he would wake people up in the middle of the night they bang the drum they get people and he's going to give a sermon and then they'd line up for the personal interviews and Dogen said that nobody else in China could do that well we don't know if others were doing it or not but Dogen did give some midnight lectures that are included in Shobo Genzo so cameo bright light or radiant light that was supposed to have been given on the dreariest day of the year in the rainy season you know and so his words brighten that night the by Ka plum blossoms you know a symbol of renewal from winter to spring that was given after you know huge blizzard took place in Echizen so we see him responding you know I think that makes it even more fascinating okay okay thank you thank you