It can only be ironic that what began in China as a school of meditation, then became an iconoclastic movement using koans to beat down the analytical faculties finally emerged (in an amalgam with other teachings) in Japan as a psychological mainstay for the soldiers of a military dictatorship. There was, however, another Japanese school of Zen that introduced its practice in a form more closely resembling original Ch'an. This was the movement started by Dogen, whose life we may now examine.
The Soto master Dogen (1200-53) is probably the most revered figure in all Japanese Zen. Yet until recently he has been comparatively unknown abroad, perhaps because that great popularizer of Zen in the West, D. T. Suzuki, followed the Rinzai school and managed to essentially ignore Dogen throughout his voluminous writings. But it was Dogen who first insisted on intensive meditation, who produced the first Japanese writings explaining Zen practice, and who constructed the first real Zen monastery in Japan, establishing a set of monastic rules still observed. Moreover, the strength of his character has inspired many Zen masters to follow. Indeed, it is hard to contradict the scholar Dumoulin, who declared him "the strongest and most original thinker that Japan has so far produced."1
Born January 2 of the year 1200 an illegitimate son of a noble Fujiwara mother and a princely father, Dogen's circumstances from the start were aristocratic.2 Around him swirled the literary life of the court, the powerful centuries-old position of the Fujiwara, and the refined decadence of ancient Kyoto. Although his father died when he was two, his privileged education continued at the hands of his mother and half- brother. He most certainly learned to read and write classical Chinese, as well as to versify and debate--all skills that he would one day put to extensive use. His poetic sensitivity (something traditionally prized by the Japanese above logic and precision of thought) was encouraged by all he met in the hothouse atmosphere of ancient Kyoto. This idyllic, protected life was shattered at age seven with the sudden death of his mother. But she set the course of his life when, at the last, she bade him become a monk and reach out to suffering mankind. A popular tradition has it that at his mother's funeral Dogen sensed in the rising incense the impermanence of all things. After the shock of his mother's death he was adopted by an uncle as family heir and set on the way to a reluctant career in statecraft. But as he approached age twelve, the time when a formal ceremony would signify his entry into the male circle of aristocracy, his reservations overwhelmed him and he slipped away to visit another uncle, a priest living in the foothills of Mt. Hiei. When Dogen begged to be allowed to turn his back on the aristocratic world of Kyoto and fulfill his mother's dying wish by becoming a monk the family was dismayed. But finally they relented, and he was ordained the following year as a Tendai brother on Mt. Hiei.