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學道用心集

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Text ID
KR6t0287
Date
1234–1234
Dynasty
日本

Xuédào yòngxīn jí 學道用心集

Collection of Concentrations-of-Mind for Studying the Way by 道元 Dōgen (撰)

About the work

A single-fascicle introductory primer of Zen practice by 道元 Dōgen (1200–1253), composed at Kōshō-ji 興聖寺 in Uji (south Kyoto) in Bunryaku 1 / 1234. The work is the principal Dōgen propaedeutic text — the one most often recommended for new students of the Sōtō-Zen path. The full Japanese title is Eihei shoso gakudō yōjinshū 永平初祖學道用心集 (“Collection of Concentrations-of-Mind for Studying the Way, by the First Patriarch of Eihei[-ji]”) — Eihei shoso being the standard posthumous epithet given to Dōgen as the founder of Eihei-ji 永平寺 (founded 1244).

Abstract

The text is structured as a series of ten chapters (jō 條), each headed by a brief topic-phrase and developed in a short essay. The chapter-topics:

  1. One must give rise to bodhicitta (可發菩提心事): Dōgen’s distinctive doctrine that bodhicitta is fundamentally “the mind that contemplates the impermanence of the world” (nagare-na-yori-no-mui-shin 無常心) — not any of the metaphysical refinements found in scholastic Buddhism. He explicitly criticises three alternatives that he attributes to misguided contemporaries: bodhicitta as the supreme-equal-awakening mind, bodhicitta as the Ichi-nen-san-zen (one-thought-three-thousand-worlds) contemplation, bodhicitta as the Ichi-nen-fu-shō (no-thought-arises) gateway — calling the first the proper bodhicitta and labelling all three alternatives as superficial.

  2. On hearing the true Dharma one must practise it (見聞正法必可修習事): the obligation to act on what one has heard.

  3. The Buddha-Way must be practised through bodhicitta: practice cannot rest on virtue alone.

  4. One must put aside doubts and entrust oneself to the master.

  5. One must not have a wholly-personal mind in the practice.

  6. One must not, having heard a single phrase, hold it forever as the whole teaching.

  7. One must wish to practise the Buddha-Way without seeking fame and gain.

  8. One must not be moved by worldly conditions.

  9. One must practise the way of the Buddha-patriarchs.

  10. One must directly hand over the self of the Buddha-Way to the patriarchs.

The text is in Sino-Japanese kanbun with parallel Japanese yomi-kudashi, written in the elegant prose-poetry register that distinguishes Dōgen’s earliest writings. Each chapter’s argument turns on a specific kōan-passage or doctrinal claim from the Sōng Chán tradition: the great-doubt of Bodhicitta, the Lóngshù (Nāgārjuna) definition of bodhicitta as the contemplation-of-impermanence-mind, the Sòng dharma-encounter idiom, and so on. Chapter 1 — the bodhicitta doctrine — is the most cited single passage in the modern Sōtō literature on Dōgen’s distinctive doctrinal position.

The dating is firm: composition at Kōshō-ji in Bunryaku 1 (1234), as recorded in the Eihei-roku 永平録 and in Dōgen’s biographies. The Taishō recension is the standard Edo-period block-print preserved at Eihei-ji.

Translations and research

Principal English translations:

  • Yuhō Yokoi with Daizen Victoria, Zen Master Dōgen: An Introduction with Selected Writings (Weatherhill, 1976) — includes a complete translation.
  • Daniel Leighton and Shōhaku Okumura, Dōgen’s Pure Standards for the Zen Community (SUNY Press, 1996) — partial.
  • Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed.), Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (North Point Press, 1985) — includes a complete translation.

For Dōgen’s bodhicitta doctrine and the chapter-by-chapter argument, see Hee-Jin Kim, Dōgen Kigen: Mystical Realist (Univ. of Arizona Press, 1975); Carl Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Univ. of California Press, 1988); Steven Heine, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (SUNY Press, 1985); Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist, rev. ed. (Wisdom, 2004).

Other points of interest

The work’s combination of doctrinal precision with pastoral immediacy makes it the standard first-text in Sōtō-Zen ordination training. Dōgen’s anti-metaphysical reduction of bodhicitta to the mind that contemplates the impermanence of the world is one of the most distinctive doctrinal positions in medieval Japanese Buddhism and a touchstone of modern Dōgen scholarship.

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