The centring of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253) as the transmitter of continental Chan teachings and common patriarch of all Sōtō 曹洞 lineages has been a, perhaps even the, decisive manoeuvre in the on-going and repeated construction of Sōtō Zen identities throughout history. Previous scholarship has focused on its implementation especially during the Tokugawa 徳川 (1603–1867) period, which saw the first emergence of patterns that would eventually reify into being constitutive of the tradition’s specifically modern configuration. These patters include, first, the reform and eventual, if never complete, unification of Dharma transmission practices (denbō 伝法, shihō 嗣法, or similar) at the hands of Manzan Dōhaku (1635-1715) 卍山道白, as well as the repositioning of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵 through doctrinal and textual scholarship by Menzan Zuihō 面山瑞方 (1683–1769). More modern examples include the composition of the Shushōgi 修証義) from Shōbōgenzō excerpts by the layman Ouchi Seiran (1845–1918) or the establishment of shikantaza 只管打坐, a term rarely used by Dōgen himself, as the Sōtō school’s central ideology of practice by the influential modern Zen teacher Sawaki Kōdō 沢木 興道 (1880–1965). What all these strategies have in common is that they represent a strategic reworking of Dōgen and its representation in the tradition he supposedly founded.
This paper shall demonstrate that, despite the supposed rediscovery of Dōgen during the Tokugawa period, these reworkings of the founder’s image actually are but the latest episodes in a long history of “rediscovering” the “real” Dōgen to meet contemporary needs. As much is clear from Manzan’s own attempts at restoring Dharma transmission. Manzan relied on sources supposedly recording Dōgen’s own teachings. In fact, these were medieval productions of Manzan’s own sub-lineage. Dōgen, in other words, was far from forgotten during the medieval period; rather the founder very much was part of claims and counter-claims to legitimacy. In order to make this point, this paper shall draw on a treasure trove of still underexplored materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper” slips. These often very brief documents contain the secret lore passed down as part of the system of oral transmissions that formed the backbone of the pre-modern Sōtō institutions’ mechanism of controlling, verifying, and circulating knowledge. The paper will draw on four sets of such documents to analyse the use made of Dōgen’s biography in the pre-modern Sōtō tradition.
The first set of documents leverages episodes of Dōgen’s life to legitimize new teachings and ritual practices Sōtō lineages adapted from other traditions, notably Tendai 天台. One such practice involves the use of mirrors during Dharma transmission ceremonies, borrowed from Tendai oral transmission lineages (kuden hōmon 口伝法問). In kirigami sources, this use of mirrors is instead embroidered with detailed conversations Dōgen is supposed to have had with his Chinese mentor Tiantong Rujing (1163–1228). The second set of documents concerns the establishment of what could perhaps best be described as Sōtō Shintō, an exposition of the centrality of Dōgen to not only cults of not only local deities but even central institutions such as the twenty two shrines. The final set of documents relates Dōgen’s biography in complex ways to wider mythological motifs also apparent in the biographies of other founding figures of Japanese Buddhism. One such document, for instance, describes Dōgen harbouring a white snake in the bag containing his monastic robe when crossing from the mainland back to Japan. The final set concerns not Dōgen himself but rather the “life” of his most famous work, the Shōbōgenzō. Interspersing key phrases of the text into other ritual or doctrinal contexts to construct secret transmissions was a common technique to add the patriarch’s imprimatur to later medieval innovations.
The paper concludes that the uses of Dōgen in the Sōtō transmission need to be reevaluated. Rather than postulating a supposed “rediscovery” of Dōgen’s hidden life during the Tokugawa period, it would be more appropriate to consider the uses made by Manzan and others of their founder’s legacy as a its re-inscription into a new system of knowledge in which legitimacy was granted and negotiated by novel means such as textual scholarship or appeal to sectarian unity. It was, however, but one in a long series of such re-inscriptions that continue to the present day.
This paper investigates how the biography, work, and legacy of Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the supposed founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, was manipulated in medieval esoteric transmission materials known as kirigami 切紙 or “cut paper slips.” Whereas much scholarship postulates a recovery of Dōgen’s lost importance during the Tokugawa period, and in the course of Sōtō sectarian reform, the paper argues that such recovery happened against a backdrop of constant, esoteric reinvention of the founder’s hagiography during the medieval period, a reinvention that, just as the supposed Tokugawa recovery, served concrete needs for legitimizing sectarian practices and doctrinal innovations in the face of a changing, and often hostile, religio-political landscape. In addition, it challenges perspectives that would argue for a simple continuity between medieval and early modern hermeneutical stances by demonstrating that Dōgen’s Tokugawa rebirths were effected by reinscribing the founder’s life and thought into a new epistemological regime.