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正法眼藏

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Text ID
KR6t0288
Date
1231–1253
Dynasty
日本

Zhèngfǎ yǎnzàng 正法眼藏

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by 道元 Dōgen (撰)

About the work

The magnum opus of 道元 Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Japanese Sōtō-Zen school, and one of the most consequential works in the history of Japanese thought. The full Japanese title is Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏 — “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye” — a phrase Dōgen took from the foundational Chán claim that on Vulture Peak the Buddha “raised a flower and Mahākāśyapa smiled — that was the transmission of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the Wondrous Mind of Nirvāṇa.” The Taishō recension is the 95-fascicle (kyū-jū-go-kan-bon) recension prepared by Kōzen 高泉性敦 (1633–1695) and Manzan Dōhaku 卍山道白 (1636–1715) and printed in Genroku 元祿 / Hōei 寶永 years (1693–1715) — the Manzan recension that became canonical in the late-Edo Sōtō establishment.

Abstract

The opening editorial preface 嘉暦四年中夏 (Karyaku 4 / 5 = 1329-06) by Eihei Goso Gi’un 永平五祖義雲 (1253–1333, the fifth-generation patriarch at Eihei-ji and dharma-grandson of Dōgen’s heir Tetsugikai), the jūshu kyōyōroku (重輯狹要錄) of the earliest fascicle-ordering: “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Secretly transmitted, secretly entrusted. Past and present — the proper Buddhas and proper patriarchs. The Founder of Eihei [Dōgen] entered Sòng, drilled the root-stem of the Five-Petal [tradition], returned to Japan, was able to be the shade-of-the-one-sky’s-cool. With excessive grandmotherly mind, with the kana-script he softened the Han-language. Uniquely wonderful and skilful: he caused people not to be encumbered by literary words. Like stone holding the jade, like earth lifting the mountain. He sewed-together humble words and recorded their great purport. Posterity! If these eight characters [the title-phrase shō-bō-gen-zō] are not cracked open, the wonderful mind-source has not been thoroughly penetrated, the whole-canon teachings, the Shaolin wondrous secret — even dream-state has not glimpsed it.”

The publication-preface 彫刻永平正法眼藏縁由 (in Japanese mixed prose) describes the long manuscript history: “Reverently we recall: in the distant past, our founder-patriarch Zenji, on a single reed crossing the ten-thousand-mile dangerous waves, did not avoid the difficulty of wind-and-wave. He entered Sòng, finally ascended Tendō-zan at Mingzhou, called on Zenji Rujing, and there directly recognised that body-and-mind drop off, eye-cross nose-straight. With empty hands he returned to his country, first opening the dharma at Kōshō-ji 興聖寺 at Fukakusa south of the capital, later proclaiming the Way at the home-mountain Eihei[-ji] in Shibi north of Echizen. In the intervening twenty-some years, the spreading of the dharma to benefit beings — the household-instructions of crosswise-speech vertical-speech — were how-many-fascicles. Among them, the work in which using kana he softened the Han-language and broadly preached to the various capacities of monastic and lay — a hundred fascicles of all. He himself titled it Shōbōgenzō. This is none other than the meaning of the Tathāgata’s whole-discourse, the wonderful import of the gold-text 5,000-scroll, fully exhausted; and the proper meaning of patriarch-to-patriarch single-transmission directly indicated. … Although five hundred fifty stars-and-frosts (= 550 years) have passed since the master’s parinirvāṇa, this book had not yet been allowed to be cut into wood-blocks. The descendants merely copied and held it in reverence.”

The 95-fascicle text covers the full range of Dōgen’s doctrinal teaching. The most-cited single fascicles in modern scholarship include:

  • Genjōkōan 現成公案 (“The Realised kōan”) — the great opening fascicle, the foundational statement of Dōgen’s ontology.
  • Busshō 佛性 (“Buddha-Nature”).
  • Sansui-kyō 山水經 (“Sūtra of Mountains and Waters”) — the great Dōgen meditation on the jiang-shan contour-line as a sacred-text.
  • Uji 有時 (“Being-Time”) — Dōgen’s celebrated ontology of time.
  • Shōji 生死 (“Birth-and-Death”).
  • Bendō-wa 辨道話 (an introductory fascicle).
  • Zazen-gi 坐禪儀.
  • Tsuki 月 (“Moon”), Kōkyō 古鏡 (“Ancient Mirror”), and many other doctrinal fascicles.

The dating bracket spans Dōgen’s writing career: the earliest fascicle (Bendō-wa, 1231) at Kōshō-ji; the latest (Hachi dai-nin gaku 八大人覺, 1253) at Eihei-ji days before his death. The 95-fascicle Manzan recension stabilised the text in 1690s–1710s; this recension is reproduced in the Taishō.

The text is one of the most original works of philosophy in pre-modern East Asia. Its idiosyncratic Japanese prose — Dōgen reading Chinese kōan-phrases against the grain, breaking standard parsing, treating each grammatical possibility as ontologically loaded — and its uncompromising commitment to shūshō ichi-nyo (practice-and-realization-are-one) make it both untranslatable in any straightforward sense and inexhaustibly generative for later interpreters. In the twentieth century the text became the central reference of modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy (Tanabe Hajime, Akiyama Kanji, Matsumoto Shirō, Hisamatsu Hōseki, and others).

Translations and research

The Shōbōgenzō exists in multiple complete English translations:

  • Gudō Wafu Nishijima & Chodo Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 4 vols. (Windbell, 1994–99) — complete translation of the 95-fascicle recension.
  • Kazuaki Tanahashi, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 2 vols. (Shambhala, 2010) — complete translation with extensive scholarly apparatus.
  • Hubert Nearman, Shōbōgenzō: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law (Shasta Abbey, 2007).

For scholarly studies, see: Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist, rev. ed. (Wisdom, 2004); 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); Heine, Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition (SUNY Press, 1994); Bret W. Davis et al. (eds.), Engaging Dōgen’s Zen (Wisdom Publications, 2017). In Japanese, the standard critical edition is Kawamura Kōdō 河村孝道’s Shōbōgenzō no kihon-teki kenkyū 正法眼蔵の基本的研究 (Daihōrinkaku, 1995), 4 vols.

Other points of interest

The textual history of the Shōbōgenzō is exceptionally complicated. Dōgen himself appears to have planned the work in different recensions at different times — some of these recensions are preserved separately (e.g. the 60-fascicle Roku-jū-kan-bon, the 75-fascicle Shichi-jū-go-kan-bon, the 12-fascicle Jū-ni-kan-bon, a few isolated fascicles in the Goroku corpus). The 95-fascicle Manzan recension reproduced in the Taishō was the late-Edo Sōtō-school consensus text but is not necessarily Dōgen’s last word: modern critical work by Akiyama Kanji and Kawamura Kōdō reconstructs a probable original sequence different from Manzan’s order. Specific fascicles (“Shinjin gakudō”, “Den-e”, and several others) have textual variants between the 75-fascicle and 95-fascicle recensions that scholars treat as evidence of Dōgen’s own revision-process.

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