This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I gave this talk the provisional title of How to Study Dogan. And I thought what I'd do is just kind of tell you how I studied Dogen and hope that maybe that provides some kind of inspiration or, I don't know, something. At least maybe I can think of some jokes along the way. There are not too many jokes. Actually, there are jokes in Dogen, but they're hard to get. So, first off, I'm going to assume most of you know who Dogen was, but I'm going to also assume a few of you don't.

[01:01]

So who was Dogen? So I'll be short with this. He was a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest and writer who lived from the year 1200 to 1254, I believe, or 53 or 54. Anyway, so he wasn't very old when he passed away. people tend to misguess my age, but I'm only about a year younger than Dogen was when he died. So when I think about that nowadays, I think, oh gosh, he was pretty young when he died. But he wrote a lot of stuff. His main accomplishment, he was born the illegitimate son of a nobleman, and his Courtesan, I suppose. Maybe that's a polite-ish word for what she was. But both of his parents died when Dogen was quite young.

[02:05]

So I think he was three or four years old when his father was assassinated. So if you think politics now is a poop show, I'm not going to work blue in this room. It was much worse in Dogen's day. So getting assassinated for being a low-level public official was just what happened. very often then. His mother, I don't know what became of her exactly or why she passed away, but she passed away when Dogen was seven. So he lost both of his parents and ended up going to practice Buddhism. And at first he practiced a sect called Tendai. This is an esoteric sect of Buddhism, which is probably in broad terms most similar to Tibetan-style Buddhism, if you know, if you know anything about that. So there's a lot of sort of worship and a lot of ideas about getting into odd states of mind and doing this very... I don't know what you'd call it.

[03:11]

A secret sort of practice that gets into a lot of weird stuff. I don't know much about Tendai Buddhism, as you can tell. He was... He was unsatisfied with that because it didn't address his burning questions, and he thought Buddhism should address his burning questions, which is, you know, why do we suffer? What's going on? So he ended up at a temple. I believe it was only the second Zen Buddhist temple established in Japan. I originally thought it was the first, but somebody corrected me on it. So... And he studied there for years, but he still found it lacking. He had one burning question, which was, if, as the sutras all say, we are perfect just as we are, then why do we have to do all this weird meditation stuff to figure that out? And people couldn't answer him. So he ended up going with his teacher, Gaiden Myozen, to China, and

[04:17]

and spent a few years in China, and Miozen passed away while they were there, while they were over there. Dogen eventually found a teacher who in Japanese is called Tendon Yojo, Tiantong Yujin, I think is how it's pronounced in Chinese, who told him that Zazen... was enlightenment itself. So it wasn't that you used Zazen, you used meditation to try to discover enlightenment, that the practice of Zazen was enlightenment itself. And Tendo Nyojo also made Dogen his formal successor, and Dogen went back to Japan. And then he wrote a lot of stuff, the main bulk of which is a book called Shobo Genzo. It's a giant book. And then when he was 54 years old, he died. That's the short version of Dogen's life.

[05:19]

Dogen is interesting to me in that he's kind of one of those lost... Shobogenza is sort of one of those great lost albums. I'm a big... rock music fan. Within the canon of rock music, there are these sort of records that were, for example, the Beach Boys' Smile. I don't know if you guys are fans of that sort of stuff. But Brian Wilson had done this great album called Pet Sounds that was so terribly poorly received, even though it was amazing. And he was working on a follow-up called Smile, which was going to be even more great, more grandiose. And then when he heard the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, apparently he got so depressed that he thought he could never compete with Sgt. Pepper. So he put Smile away. And they only just, they finally released in 2004. I don't know if somebody can correct me on that. They finally put it out, you know, years later. Shobo Genzo's a little bit like that. In that Shobo Genzo was written between the years 1227 and I think he was working on

[06:29]

bits and pieces of it right up until he died, until Dogen died, even though he stopped writing actual chapters in the 1240s, I believe, but he was revising the stuff he'd written up until the end. But then it sort of dropped off the map, Shobo Genzo did. Dogen established a temple called Eheiji, which I'm sure some of you have heard of, and some of you have probably even been there. And Eiheiji spawned several other temples in Japan, and the style of Zen that Dogen brought from China became extremely popular in Japan. And Dogen was revered as the founder of this thing, the guy who brought it over and the guy who made it work. But his actual written teachings were kind of forgotten. I mean, they weren't forgotten in the sense that nobody knew about them, but they weren't widely read, and they weren't widely copied and distributed.

[07:30]

But enough copies existed in various temples, and there were enough monks who were aware of them and who studied them over the years that it was preserved. But it wasn't as if Shobo Genzo became the founding book for Soto Zen in Japan. That was not the case. What actually happened was that in... I'm skipping over a lot of history here, so some of you might be more up on the history of Dogen and can chew me out about that at the end. But after the Meiji Restoration, I don't know how much Japanese history you guys know, Japan closed itself off from the rest of the world for how many years? 300 years and didn't allow almost any trade at all with the outside world.

[08:32]

In 1868 Am I getting this right? Admiral Perry, the American, came and forced Japan to open to international trade, which turned out to be a very good thing for Japan because they realized as a country that they were very far behind in technology and weapons technology in particular and all sorts of things. And had they not opened up to trade with the Americans at that point, they probably could have been... quite easily taken over by some foreign power. But they weren't. But this kind of lit a fuse, lit a fire under the collective bums of the people of Japan that they had to catch up with the rest of the world. And if you've ever seen The Last Samurai, that's, you know, not the... not the most accurate historical film in the world, but it's fairly true to at least what I've understood of what happened, except Tom Cruise was not actually there.

[09:37]

But it does show a lot of what happened in Japan in those times, and this real push to modernize. Part of the push to modernize that doesn't get a lot of... press was that the Japanese decided that they had to find sort of equivalent Japanese things that kind of could compete on an international level. And one of the things they searched for was in the area of philosophy and religion. So it was at this point that people started... digging through sort of different Japanese religious and philosophical texts that hadn't been very widely discussed for many, many years. And Dogen became rediscovered then. So this guy, the main guy who gets credited for his rediscovery is a guy named Watsuji. I think it's Tetsuo, Tetsuo, Watsuji, I don't know. Watsuji, something Watsuji. I wrote a book called Shaman Dogen, which just means the monk Dogen.

[10:44]

And it became very popular and influential in Japan and led to a lot of people rediscovering Dogen. One of those people who rediscovered Dogen during that sort of wave was my teacher, Gudo Nishima. He was born in 1919, and Shaman Dogen was published in, I think, 1921. So as a young man, Nishimi Roshi was aware of this book. And I remember him telling me a story once that he, as a teenager, he liked to browse in used bookstores for interesting old books, which is something we had in common. And he came across a book of Dogen's writings. And what amazed him about this was he was aware that Dogen was an important person, an important writer. philosophical writer, and he read this book and was amazed that it was a book written in his own language that he could not understand.

[11:48]

So he made it kind of his quest to try to figure out what this book meant, which lets you know a little bit about the book itself, about Shogo Genzo itself, is even if you are a Japanese person reading it in its original language, it is a difficult book. So Wrapping this or tying this into how to study Dogen. I started studying Zen in the early 80s when I was a college student. And just came across this teacher named Tim McCarthy, who was a student of Kobanchino. Some of you may know Kobanchino. And Tim taught Soto-style Zen. And he was a fan of Dogen. but we didn't really spend a lot of time reading Dogen. I remember he had a copy of the Nishiyama Stevens translation, and I would pick that up here now and then and look at it and go, oh, I don't understand this.

[12:54]

I ended up moving to Japan in the early 90s and started studying with a guy named Gudo Nishijima, who I just mentioned. Nishijima Roshi was at that point working on what would become only the second complete English translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo, of his masterwork Shobogenzo, 95-chapter monstrosity, which some of you have probably seen in the bookstore for $100, the Kaz Tanahashi version. I think he was two volumes into it when I met him, meaning two volumes were published. The third one was about to be published, and the fourth one he was actually finishing up at the time that I met him. So what he would do is he had these lectures that he would do on Saturday afternoons at Tokyo University's Young Buddhists Association. you know, obviously patterned on YMC, in Young Men's Christian Association, which is the Young Buddhist Association.

[13:58]

And he would, what he would do was he would give a lecture, he would read a part of his work in progress, English translation of Shobo Genzo, and then we'd discuss it. So I would go to these, we would sit Zazen first. So I should bring that up. So I really actually went for the Zazen myself. and then he would do these discussions. But I became real interested in this, and it was nice to have the guy who was translating it in English standing in front of you, and you could ask, what the hell did that mean? So I got a lot out of those lectures, and after going to them for probably a few years, it just kind of blipped into my mind. Nishijima Roshi has spent... All these years, 30-some years writing this English translation of Dogen, the least I can do is read it. So I bought a full set of them, or at least whichever ones were available at the time.

[15:02]

Eventually, I got the full set when it was available. And I had to commute. I worked for a company called Tsuburaya Productions, which made a TV show called Ultraman, a great Japanese television program, and a superhero show. And I had an hour commute each way, so two hours commute. And so I used to take, this isn't the Nishijima version, but I used to take the Nishijima version of Shobo Genzo and just read it on the train. And my strategy was that... I realized I wasn't going to understand this book on first reading. So I kind of knew going into it that it was going to be difficult because I listened to a lot of lectures. So I decided to just read it. I decided I wasn't going to worry about comprehension too much. I was just going to scan across the pages and let the words enter my brain and just get from the beginning to the end of it.

[16:04]

It's organized in... fairly short chapters. So it wasn't written... In the time Dogen lived, there wasn't such a thing as a book like this. You know, these did not exist yet. So it was written in pieces that were kept on scrolls, and each one... The average chapter in Shobo Genzo ends up being between 5 and 10 pages long when you translate it into English. So they're short. There's a few that are considerably longer, and there's actually a few that are a lot shorter. But that's the average. So you can read a chapter and just go through it. I ended up doing that three times. Three times through with Shobo Genzo. Start to finish. When I think about that now, that seems weird. I must have been a really strange guy during the time that I lived in Japan. I probably still am. But I got just really interested in this book and just reading it.

[17:07]

But this is the first sort of advice I often give people when they're trying to approach Dogen, is that it's not that important, I don't think, to fully comprehend every bit of it. Just reading it is kind of enough, because it... It conveys something. The thing I think is interesting about Dogen that makes him worth reading is he's kind of the intersection of two things that don't intersect a lot in human society, which is he's a person who worked very seriously on understanding himself and his place in the universe by doing this zazen practice very intensely. And he just happened to be a guy who was good at writing. He was an articulate person who was able to express himself. So there are often, there are a lot of people...

[18:08]

who are good at expressing themselves. I mean, especially American society, I'm finding more and more as I live in Los Angeles, is full of really great writers, people who can write, but they don't necessarily know themselves that well. So the writing may not reflect any deep knowledge of life, the universe, and everything. And there are also a smaller number of people who really do work on understanding themselves and their position in the universe through meditation and so forth. But they might not be very articulate people. You know, they might not be blessed with the gift of words. So they can't really tell us a lot. They can't really communicate to the rest of us a lot of what they've understood through this practice. But Dogen can't. But a lot of what he comes to understand through his meditation practice is stuff that most of us pass by, don't really encounter in our lives.

[19:14]

So there are a lot of reasons Dogen is difficult, and that is one of them. Because he's trying to express something for which there really aren't words. So even when you read him in the original Japanese, you can see that he's struggling to get these ideas across. The other thing, the other layer of difficulty we have with Dogen is he's Japanese and he lived 800 years ago. So everything that we read by Dogen is coming to us through translators. And generally, frankly speaking, in Japan, most Japanese people who read Dogen tend to read... contemporary Japanese translations of Dogen. There are a lot of those around in Japan where somebody has tried to make the ancient Japanese more colloquial. My teacher actually produced one of these before he produced his English language version.

[20:19]

He produced a 12-volume translation of Dogen into contemporary Japanese. That... I'll nerd out on you for a minute here. That happens to be a really useful thing. It's very hard to come by. I was very grateful that he just gave me a set one day because it contains both the original manuscripts. There's some dispute about the various manuscripts of Dogen, but the most widely accepted original manuscript of Dogen is reproduced. On one part of the book and on the other part of the book, usually on facing pages when he can cram it in that way, is his contemporary Japanese translation. So I've looked at that. My Japanese is not astonishingly good, but I did live in Japan for 11 years and worked for a Japanese company. Most of my friends when I was over there did not speak English.

[21:21]

So I... I learned to speak, read, and write colloquial Japanese, and also part of my job was translating from Japanese into English, usually written material rather than spoken, because that's harder to do quickly. So I had that background. So these days I'm able to look at Dogen's original Japanese, but I don't read it so well that I could pick up a copy of the... ancient Japanese version of Shobo Genzo and just read it for pleasure. But Nishijima kindly... I didn't discover this until I'd worked with it for way longer than you should have to work with it to discover something like this. But what he did with his English language version, which they have in the library, is on... There are little numbers on the sides of the paragraph, which I'd kind of just... You know, I'm just like, well, I don't know what that means. Those little numbers actually correspond to page numbers in the Japanese version.

[22:23]

So whenever I want to, whenever I read something in his and I want to find out what the original Japanese is, I can go to that page and usually after a few minutes of cringing and going, I can usually find the passage I want to find. So that's my level of understanding Dogen when it comes to Japanese. So, how to study Dogen. I guess I'm rambling a little bit. I think the first step is to kind of find a way to be less intimidated by the work itself. Because Dogen is just a guy. And he never claimed to be anything extraordinary. He was a pretty extraordinary scholar. But he was not superhuman or anything, and he's just trying to express himself.

[23:25]

Actually, there was a story I was going to... I just realized I'd forgotten the story I was going to begin this with. So let me tell you that. Apparently, Greg told me that when... He announced my talk yesterday. He described me as a Dogen scholar. And that just made me think of the story my friend Kevin Bortelin sometimes likes to tell. Kevin was also a student of Nishima Roshi, and his brother wrote a book called Dharma of Star Wars, which is in the bookstore, if you ever want to take a look at that. It's not bad. Kevin hasn't written any books himself, though. Kevin, from age... I don't know, 12 or 13, I think he said, until he was well into his 30s, was an avid surfer. He said at some points in his life he would surf every day. You know, he'd just go out there and surf. But he always says that he never in that time considered himself to be a surfer. Because a surfer is one of those guys who's like, hey, dude, I'm a surfer, you know.

[24:27]

He was never that. even though he surfed all the time. And that's kind of my feeling when, if somebody calls me a Dogen scholar, because I figure, I feel like Dogen scholars are those guys over in the universities doing Dogen scholarship, like, you know, Tagging Dan Layton or somebody like that. There's several really good ones. Why am I not, why am I blanking on all their names? But anyway, there's several really good ones. There's a guy at Stanford who's really, really good. His name's Jason at the moment. Anyway. Bielefeld. Yeah, Carl Bielefeld, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Volk. I don't consider myself one of those guys. Those guys are way beyond me. And yet I've spent a lot of my life reading and researching Dogen, but not in what I feel is a scholarly way. And so if that's any encouragement, maybe that's encouragement, that you can study Dogen without being a Dogen scholar. I don't, Dogen writes at a very high level when he's writing in Japanese, but I also don't get the impression that he is writing for scholars.

[25:40]

The reason Dogen's work is usually to us in our society, the kind of, and frankly in Japanese society these days, is kind of the thing of scholarship is just is mostly because it's so ancient uh and and that makes it really difficult to read and because it's also very specifically buddhist you know so you have to know a lot about buddhism to understand what he's talking about but i also get the impression and it's it's really hard to dig up actual facts about this but i get the impression from some of the things i read in in shobo genzo and elsewhere that The people he was talking to, his monks, some of them were also intellectuals like him, but most of them I don't feel were. My favorite piece of evidence about this is his chapter, which I put in my book, Don't Be a Jerk, about how to use the toilet. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this. Dogen's Shobogenzo is full of all kinds of things. There's very high-level...

[26:42]

philosophical discussion. And then there are chapters about washing your hands and chapters about using the toilet and chapters about the proper way to wear your robes and, and very nuts and bolts stuff. In, in the chapter about using the toilet, there are some references to like things like don't write on the walls and stuff like that. So I, and so I kind of, I kind of think, Oh, these are the kind of guys token was talking to, you know? Uh, so he's some, He's talking at various levels there, so it's not actually intended to be something only scholars can understand. A lot of his stuff is written for lay people, especially things like Genjo Koan, which was specifically written for a lay person. What else can I tell you about it? The other thing that... proved to be really useful for me in understanding Dogen was Nishijima Roshi's formula for understanding Dogen.

[27:50]

And he was very fond of this formula. As the years have gone by, and now that Nishijima has passed away, I feel like I can... for it to be a little critical of the formula because it doesn't work 100% of the time, but it works enough of the time that I think it's a shame nobody else has really picked up on it, which is he talked about it in terms of the four views. So he said... One of the problems with reading Dogen is that Dogen seems to contradict himself all the time. He'll say one thing and then follow it up with a sentence that seems to contradict what he just told you, and then he'll follow it up with another sentence that seems to contradict even that. So it becomes baffling to try to understand what the hell he's trying to talk about. Nishijima's explanation for that was that Dogen understood that there were four ways, of course this is Nishijima's formula, four ways to look at any problem in life or anything.

[28:56]

And that was, he called them subjective, objective, action, and reality. One of his co-translators turned it into SOAR, S-O-A-R, to make it a kind of mnemonic. I don't think that was Nishijima's idea, but it helps me to remember it. So in the subjective point of view, that's your kind of internal point of view in which you're kind of seeing things in terms of subject and object, in terms of yourself in the outside world, in terms of your raw experience of whatever's going on. The objective point of view is more... objective is more looking at things in the kind of almost materialistic way you know there are there's there's wood here and there's metal here and there's glass here and and stuff is stuff and everything has its position in that in action in the action phase he's talking about how things are when you're actually doing something

[30:04]

And in that phase, everything kind of comes together, both the material side and the sort of spiritual or subjective side are functioning together in actual action when you're doing something. And then he tends to wrap it up into what Nishijima called the realistic point of view, which in Dogen's case tends to be poetic. He tends to like to make that into a poetic... expression. And one of the really good examples of this appears in Genjo Koan. So since I like to do Q&A more than I like to do talks, I'll wrap up with this bit, and if you have anything to ask. The beginning of... I couldn't find... Somebody must have maybe borrowed or stolen the first volume of the Nishijima translation of Shobo Genjo, but this is the Haz Tanahashi version. which I'm less familiar with, but they're both pretty much the same.

[31:08]

So what's nice about the Tanahashi version is that he seems to kind of understand that there's four things being discussed because he nicely cuts it into four sentences, one-sentence-long paragraphs. Make sense? which go as follows. As all things are Buddhadharma, there is delusion in realization, practice, and birth and death. There are Buddhas and sentient beings. So that would be Nishjima's way of thinking, the subjective point of view. So this is where things are divided into subject and object. There's delusion and there's realization. There's birth and there's death. There are Buddhas and there are sentient beings. The second phase, the objective phase in Nishjima's way of thinking is, As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.

[32:12]

And one way among many to understand that sentence is, if you just take the plain sort of nuts and bolts reality that we live in, the kind of material reality, the material aspect of reality, you can't really say there's delusion or realization or Buddha or sentient beings. We're all just... stuff. We're all just combinations of chemicals walking around on a planet, circling the sun, and all of these concepts are kind of meaningless. But the next phase would be action. The Buddha way is basically leaping clear of the many and the one, thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhas. And this leaping clear of the many and the one is kind of alluding to the idea that when we are actually doing something, these these distinctions of subjective and objective tend to fall away, and you're just doing a thing. And in that phase, you're back to there is birth and death and realization and delusion and so forth.

[33:14]

And then the final phase is a little poetic summation. Yet an attachment blossoms fall and an aversion weeds spread. I actually don't like that translation. It's one of my beefs with Kaz. I haven't actually told him this in person, but I think that's better expressed more like yet, even though we love flowers, they die. And even though we hate weeds, they spread. In other words, stuff happens and life is just what it is. even if you know all this. So that's where I'd like to wrap up my lecture bit. Is there anything anybody wants to ask or discuss? Or have I confused you or meandered so much that nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about? You can ask a difficult question. I'm just making... I have a compound question.

[34:14]

Okay. So there's a book in our library called Buddhist Theology, and it's an anthology of essays on what they call critical, constructive Buddhist thought, and how good it is in the imagining of Christians, basically how Christians engage in theology. Okay, I haven't read it. And it's a really great book. And so there's a chapter by Mark Uno where he contrasts Bogan and Maya of Choban Yeah, I'd much more hear it. Well, anyway, he says that Dogen, he kind of likens Dogen to Al-Sahad MacIntyre's way of doing theology. Okay, I don't know. Okay. He's of the view that the world is so convoluted. There's such moral diversity.

[35:15]

that basically what's to be done as per religious people is called the conservative retreat approach. And so his view is basically just focus your energy on maintaining the cloisters, maintaining your mountain refuge. Yeah, I can see the parallels to Durbin, yeah. Yeah, he likens Durbin to that sort of way of doing theology by his example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's also this idea that Dogan, I mean, there's some merit to it, that Dogan is this incredible innovator in the way that you use this language and express it as these different religious themes. I guess I was curious what your views are on that. How do you see that? How do you see the relevance of kind of categorizing Dogan? so much characterizing Dougie for a second, like engaging with Dougie.

[36:19]

How do you see that as relevant for what we're doing here, which is kind of a grand experiment? Yeah. Do you see that as sort of like what we're doing is an extension of that innovation or an extension of that conservatism or kind of a weird combination of both? Yeah, I think it's probably a weird combination of both. And that's probably what you're going to get if you do it in... in this country at this time, you know, it's kind of difficult to do exactly what Dogen talks about doing. That might have been something that even in his day was already kind of on the way out. So yeah, Dogen almost exclusively practiced in a monastic setting. away from the rest of the world in order to kind of focus. And especially in his later years, a lot of the things he wrote seem to imply that the only way to study this stuff is to cloister yourself off in a mountain and never talk to anybody who's not doing this practice for years and years.

[37:24]

And yet a place like this doesn't do that. I mean, you close yourselves off for three months at a time, but even then... you've still got a lot more contact with the outside world than you do, than Dogen could have imagined. And especially in the summertime, you've got people coming in and out and a lot of information, and so you're engaging with that. You know, I've kind of thought about this a lot because the example my teacher set for me was kind of at odds with itself. Because here he was espousing Dogen, this guy who talked about living in a monastic community and doing that practice almost exclusively, and yet he, well past retirement age, still kept a job at a soap and cosmetics firm, and... never really, you know, I never got the full scoop on how much, if any, real monastic practice Nishijima ever did.

[38:30]

I think he probably did some ongos here and there, and I know that he studied a bit with Kodo Sawaki, who was a kind of famous reformer and rebel in Japanese Buddhism. Um... But he never did the full-time monastic thing, except for possibly, you know, an ango or something like that. So he was very committed to this practice within the world. And in fact, I remember when one of his students decided he wanted to go off to Aheiji and become a fully ordained Aheiji monk, Nishijima did his best to talk him out of it. The guy eventually, he was a He was a guy from Florida. The guy eventually went to a Heiji anyway and, and Nishijima kind of worked it out so that he could go there, but he was, he was back in like a week. They, they kind of, he didn't speak Japanese well enough was the, was the excuse they gave for, for sending him back home.

[39:32]

But, but I think it was more to it than that. I just don't think he was ready for this. So, so I, I guess from that I would say that there are ways of engaging with Dogen without following to the letter the kind of practice that he describes. I think you can get something out of it even if you're not living that sort of life. And I think it's almost impossible to live that sort of life anymore anyway. You know, Dogen is a person of his time, and it's kind of interesting because he seems to be writing not to the people of his day, which I find kind of fascinating when I read him. He seems to be kind of over the heads of the people of his time. I remember talking to Nishijima once about that, and he said he thought Dogen was just completely, the people of Dogen's time were not able to understand him, and that we can understand him better because a lot of advancements have happened in terms of understanding psychology and human behavior and the way the mind and body work and so forth.

[40:40]

So he's very excited about that. But yeah, that's my best answer. It's a good question. I'm sorry I've been giving a convoluted answer. Yeah. Huh. These are questions I don't get often. I get the impression from reading Dogen that he thought... that this practice required a real intensity of focus, and that's probably why he saw monastic practice as the best way to do it. I've come to a kind of weird understanding of what monastic practice is. Maybe I can talk about that, because that's kind of the way I think of it, and it might help the explanation make more sense. I tend to think of monastic practice as You've got the example of somebody like Bodhidharma who went off by himself and found a cave and meditated until a bunch of people started bothering him, and then he let them come and meditate with him.

[41:52]

And this, to me, is the foundational example of what Zen practice is, which means it's a kind of practice that is generally done alone. because it's something you've got to really, really focus on. But if you get a group of people who agree that they all want to do that practice, they can support each other. And what monastic practice is, is I think it's everybody doing their individual practice as it is within a framework. You guys here like to call it a container. But within a framework that allows... for each individual to do that sort of practice. So I don't see it as being kind of religious indoctrination where somebody tells you what sort of experience you're supposed to have. You just have the experience you have and there's a support system to allow that to happen and you have people who've done it longer than you who you can talk to about it and such.

[42:56]

But it's not supposed to be this kind of You know, you're not supposed to produce this uniform cookie cutter product out of it. Everybody has their own experience, which, of course, all of us being human tends to converge at some point, but it's all very individualistic. So I think Dogen thought that monastic practice was the only way to do that. Why Nishijima didn't like monastic practices, I think... has a lot to do with what monastic practice has become in Japan. One of his favorite phrases to throw out was he would say, Zen priests in Japan are just a guild of funeral directors. He thought that the whole thing had kind of devolved into a kind of... play acting that you do for paying customers who are generally paying you for doing things like running funerals and doing certain ceremonies that people like to have done.

[43:59]

and that there was no real spirit in it. And he would even extend that to places like Eiheiji. He wasn't very fond of contemporary Eiheiji or Sojiji or any of these great monastic institutions in Japan because he found them lacking. And he thought his students could do better. And he wanted to kind of... I don't know what he really wanted, you know, what his end game was, but he... He talked a lot about trying to establish a new sort of or a new old way of doing things or finding a way to do things within this contemporary world we're living in with all of its internet and television and stuff. and doing and still continuing this practice. And I really think a place like Casa Hara is a good example of people trying to make that happen. And there are other examples. Other people have other ways of trying to find out how we can do that.

[45:05]

And I don't think any way anybody discovers is necessarily the right way. I think everybody kind of has to find their own way into this. And it's not even that I think... I think Dogen was one of the people in this world who understood himself as about as clearly as any human being would be capable of. And he's one of the best people to express that understanding. That's how I admire Dogen. But I don't necessarily think Dogen's way is the right way for everyone. I think a lot of what gives Dogen his power, though, is his insistence that it's the right way for everyone. And I kind of take all that with a grain of salt. I can't look in Dogen's mind and see if he intended it that way, but I take it as him being very, very... He'd understood the perfect way that made this...

[46:06]

deep inquiry into the nature of of self and the universe worked for him and and that's what he knew and that's what he taught and that's what he expressed but i don't think he was necessarily trying to say everybody must do it my way uh that is a whole different thing and that was also my understanding of nishijima i i found nishijima irritating when i first encountered him uh i i used to go to his lectures thinking One of these days, I'm going to find a decent Buddhist teacher. Really, for the first year or two that I went with him, I went basically for the zazen, and to be polite, I stayed for the lectures. But I found the lectures irritating in that way, because he was very forthright, and he kind of had this way of saying, this is the only way to do it, and I'm like, oh, come on. You know, but I tend to look upon that now as just a deep expression of confidence in what he had discovered and maybe trying to set an example for others that they can also find their own way rather than trying to hammer everybody into you must do it this way.

[47:14]

I'll go over there because I saw you first. For those of us who are reading English, we're used to working with your translation. Right. speaking up certain words that are entities themselves, playing them off against them. How would you describe the difference between doing that and being able to read in Japanese and investigate the plasticity of the language in that way? And is there anything lost for those of us who wouldn't be reading it? Well, it's an interesting question because the last two, the book, you have it over there. This last book I came up with was Don't Be a Jerk, in which I tried to take Dogen's writings and rewrite them in kind of contemporary English. And it was a project I started because I saw somebody did that almost as a joke with the Bible. And I found that it's called God is Disappointed in You.

[48:17]

And I found it really funny. He thinks the main message of the Bible is God is disappointed in you. And I thought, well, maybe I could do that with Shobogenzo. In fact, it was called, on my hard drive, there's still a file called Dogen is disappointed in you, which is the first attempts I did at this. So in doing that, what I did, so maybe this will be a convoluted way to answer your question, but what I did was I had all this stuff spread out on my kitchen table, which I use for a desk, I had Nishijima's translation of Shobo Genzo and the Kazutanashi translation of Shobo Genzo usually opened to a certain page because those are the ones I find most reliable in English. The Nishijima version is almost too reliable in that he and his co-translator, this guy named Mike Cross, who's a very almost... comically obsessive character, tried to mirror the Japanese exactly.

[49:22]

So if you want to know what Shobo Genzo might look like if you were a Japanese person trying to read it in Japanese, it probably looks like the Nishijima cross translation. But that makes it also really difficult to read. Luckily, they put a lot of footnotes in it, which helps a lot. The Tanahashi translation is much, much more readable. If you actually want to just sit and read something, it's much more user-friendly because it's much smoother and doesn't like it. wreck your head with all this weird language and stuff. But he also, in order to do that, he has to take liberties with the text. And so it's not a hundred... I don't want to diss this translation because I think it's very reliable, but it's not a hundred percent. There are times when he kind of throws things in that are his own interpretation more than what's actually written. And sometimes I think his interpretation is the right one, but it's still a little different.

[50:26]

Then there's a couple other translations I work with and partial translations. But whenever I would find that the Nishijima version and the Tanahashi version in a particular line deviated substantially, I would go, okay, time to look at what it says in Japanese there, which meant I was doing that. Well, not a lot, but often enough. So I'd go into the Japanese, and to me it provides another level of maybe obfuscation almost. Because reading it in its original Japanese, my Japanese, I learned Japanese in the 1990s. So it's quite different from the way they spoke it in the 1200s. So there's that level, that layer I have to get over. I find, interestingly enough, I think people who are... Foreigners who are learning Japanese might have a little bit easier time with that stuff than Japanese people in the sense that we're already used to it being a foreign language.

[51:31]

So the fact that the word order is weird and stuff, we're just like, okay, whatever, you know, about that. So we're not quite so intimidated by that bit. It... I find, I think Dogen is struggling even there. And I often wonder if Dogen had spoken English, how would he have written Shobo Genzo? Because English is quite different from Japanese. You know, Japanese is, according to the Department of Defense, one of the... the two most difficult languages. I think Korean and Japanese are listed as the two, or Finnish is up there too, as the most difficult languages for English speakers to ever learn, because they're so different from each other, even contemporary versions. So there's that. I think sometimes, and this might be blasphemous to say, but I think there's sometimes when the English translators can say

[52:35]

better what Dogen was getting at than he could in Japanese, which we don't know for sure because we can't dig him up and teach him English and say, is this what you meant? But I have my suspicion that some of the better translations are actually getting at the ideas a little bit more specifically than he was able to in Japanese. So reading all these translations, it's interesting to see how people work with it. You know, I found a lot of places, I was kind of fascinated to find places where you'd find a sentence where every translator has a completely different interpretation. Mostly the translations agree in broad strokes of Dogen's Shobogenza, but you'll find places where everybody's got a totally different version of the story, you know, just wildly different. Sometimes when I go back and look at those, what I'll find is often those are phrases that Dogen is quoting from a Chinese source.

[53:39]

So the translators are already struggling to try to read. Even if they're able to read Japanese, it doesn't necessarily mean they can read Chinese. Sometimes they're just doing the best they can with it. And sometimes all of us are just going, I don't know. I don't know what he meant there. But if you're doing a direct translation, you've got to include it. One of the luxuries I have in doing these last two books I've been working on is I can skip over that stuff. I can just be like, I don't know. But usually when that happens, I'll put a footnote or something in the commentary which will say, I came across this bit and the translators don't agree and I don't know what that is. So I think it's interesting. I think we get this interesting view. And also, I think it's good to remember that Dogen, like pretty much all of Buddhism, never claims to be the final word on anything. It's not like certain religions where they say, this book is the authoritative book, and what's it in the Bible?

[54:47]

If you change a jotel or something, there's like this weird phrase that will refer to Hebrew characters. Like if you change one Hebrew character in this, you'll be damned for all eternity or something like that. I think that's in the book of Revelation somewhere. But he's not, Dobin isn't claiming anything like that. He's just kind of presenting something to you for your edification and... And if you find something there that you like, then use it. And if you can't understand it, then, you know, that's okay, too. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Especially in his later writings, which causes a lot of people trouble, because his later writings seem to contradict his earlier writings. Because in his earlier writings, he will say, I can't quote chapter and verse, but things to the effect of anyone, man, woman, layperson, child, can do this practice.

[55:59]

And in later writings, he'll say, no one can do this practice except ordained monks who are studying with me. You know. Nishijima's interpretation of that was that he thought that a lot of those later writings were written as kind of encouragement for monks living a very hard life up in a remote temple. And he wanted to kind of tell them, yeah, this is worth doing because you're doing it the only way that you'll ever understand this. There's evidence that he, Dogen, was working on rewrites of the chapters in which he said anybody can do this. at the same time as he was writing these chapters in which he said, nobody can do this except ordained monks. So I don't think he changed his mind. I don't think the evidence is there to suggest that he, he had a change of heart about this, but that he was, he was using his, his writings for another purpose at that point in his career. Cause some of these were lectures that he gave, um, to the monks living in, in a AG, uh, who were probably having a hell of a time.

[57:05]

Do we have time? Wondering how this study has affected you. What was on for you that study? Yeah, you know, it's been funny. I came into Buddhism accidentally. I took a class called Zen Buddhism when I was either a freshman or sophomore at Kent State University. I don't even remember because it was a non-credit class, so it doesn't even show up on my transcripts. You know, the class that changed my whole life doesn't show on my college transcripts. I took it on a whim because I'd hung around some Hare Krishnas and things like that, you know, the previous years, and I thought, oh, I'll learn something about Eastern religions. I'll take this class called Zen Buddhism. And just when Tim McCarthy, who became my teacher, introduced some of these concepts that Dogen talked about, I'm like... I don't need to, this is it. I really felt like this is as close as I'm going to get to a written expression of what I'm looking for.

[58:12]

But I never intended to make it my life's work. I did Zazen every morning and every night because Tim said you should do Zazen every day. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to do it every day. And went to Japan not to study Zen Buddhism, but originally to get a job as an English teacher. And then I got a job for this company that made Ultraman and these monster movies that I loved. So I stayed on for that. But I kept studying this Zen stuff on the side. It was only when Nishijima kind of... I don't want to make a long story out of it, but he more or less insisted. He didn't really insist. He gave me a choice, but he was very clear that he wanted me to ordain as a monk, at least what he considered to be a monk, which we could argue about later on if you want. And at that point, I considered it for a few months and then finally said, oh, okay, I'll do that.

[59:17]

And then that led to this weird career that kind of popped up out of nowhere. I wrote that book, Hardcore Zen, which some of you must have read. I wrote it thinking that I was writing an unpublishable book, that I was writing a book that I might one day give to my nephew, Ben, who still hasn't read it. But at the time, he was 13 or 14 years old and he was interested in philosophy and stuff. And I thought, I'll try to write a book that Ben can understand about how I understand Buddhist philosophy and then maybe give it to him when I'm done. And it was only because I was a failed novelist and knew the process by which one sends a book to a publisher. That's the only reason I even sent it out. And I only sent it out to like five publishers and was astounded when one of them wanted to publish it. I was just like, really?

[60:18]

Do you want to publish that? I didn't even expect to get a response, much less a positive response. So it affected me in that I just keep doing this practice, having sort of... phased into the life of a teacher of Buddhism, which I never intended to do, has forced me to try to explain it to other people. And as some of you probably know from doing this yourselves, when you try to explain something to other people, you end up explaining it to yourself. And that process has helped me come to an understanding of Dogen, but I still don't feel like I quite understand him all the way through. There's a lot of stuff about Dogen where I just don't know what the hell he's talking about or, or why he's saying these things. I often, I saw that movie that came out a few years ago called Zen, which is a biographical picture, I think sponsored by the Soto Shu in Japan of, of Dogen's life.

[61:24]

And, and, and while it wasn't a, I didn't think it was a terrible movie or anything. The, the Dogen that they present in that movie just seems so different from the way I pictured him. that I thought, oh, you know, other people must think of this guy in a really different way from how I do. So I realized there's a lot I don't understand about Dogen. But I think his example of being a person who was very serious about finding out what the hell this is that we're living through, that I find really inspiring. And the fact that he doesn't come up with these sort of answers to that question I also find really inspiring. I think ultimately there isn't an answer. There isn't an answer to that question, but that doesn't mean the search for the answer to that question is futile. You know, that's something I've taken away from Dogen. So...

[62:26]

So even though you're going to work on this for your whole life and never come to any conclusions about it, isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I think that's really interesting. Because we normally don't think that way. And that, I think, is something important that Dogen has to offer. And maybe that's the most important thing. So good. I see from the folded hands that we must be out of time. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit SSCC.org and click Giving.

[63:11]

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