From Zen kenkyūjo nenpō 禅研究所年報 3 (1992), endmatter pp. 1-17.

 

DŌGEN STUDIES IN AMERICA:

THOUGHTS ON THE STATE OF THE FIELD

 

Carl Bielefeldt

Stanford University

 

 

I have been asked to take as my subject here the “state of the field” of Dōgen studies in America.  This I shall try to do.[1]  However, in taking up this subject, I should warn you in advance on two points.  First, although I have myself done some study of Dōgen, my own academic interests stand somewhat outside most American work in this field, and I am not particularly expert in, or even in many cases familiar with, this work.  I shall not, therefore, try to give you here either a comprehensive bibliography of the literature or a detailed appraisal of individual examples; rather, I shall restrict my remarks to a brief historical survey of English-language publications and a more general overview of the ways that Dōgen has been and is being treated in America.[2]   Second, although we may of course in a loose sense speak of a “field” of American Dōgen studies, from what I know of the work on Dōgen, my own feeling is that it may be misleading — both historically and analytically — to speak as if what we have in America represents anything so imposing as a “field” of Dōgen studies — at least if we mean by this much more than a collection of books and articles on certain aspects of Dōgen.  I shall try in what follows to explain why I say this.

There is no doubt that American interest in Dōgen has increased remarkably in recent years.  A frequenter of the book shops of Jinbōchō, I note that the “Dōgen boom” in Japanese publication that began some years ago has not yet run its course.  American book stores may not have anything quite like the daunting “Dōgen” sections we find in Tokyo, but I venture to say that there are now more books in print in America on Dōgen than on any other single figure in the history of Zen or even, I suspect, in the history of East Asian Buddhism as a whole.[3]  As a result of these books, Dōgen (at least the name “Dōgen”) is now familiar not only to specialists in Zen or East Asian Buddhism but to many scholars in other fields and even to many among the general public with interest in Asian culture.

Nevertheless, if Dōgen has grown quickly to become America’s favorite Zen master, he has done so with surprisingly little help from American scholarship.  Most of the Dōgen titles are trade books, intended for a popular audience; most of them are translations, few of which reflect significant research in primary sources.  Many of them are not by scholars and not by Americans.  If we look beyond the covers of these books for examples of original American scholarship on Dōgen, the list is much less impressive.  In fact, the academic study of this Zen master remains in its infancy — remains, that is, not only young but small, weak and immature.  Thus, historically speaking, it may simply be premature to imagine an academic “field” of Dōgen studies in America.  It may even be premature to predict that the considerable American interest in Dōgen is leading toward such a field.  My own sense, at least for the immediate future, is that it is not.

I shall come back to the future at the end.  Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that it is not only the age and size but also (and more importantly) the shape of American work that makes me reluctant to speak of something as broad as Dōgen studies in America.  Insofar as there has been American scholarly work on Dōgen, it has been for the most part concerned with only one kind of Dōgen.

When we look at Japanese scholarship in this century, we can find at least three major kinds of Dōgen:  first and most conspicuously, of course, there is “Dōgen the Zen master,” the patriarch of the Sōtō Zen school and teacher of shikan taza; second, “Dōgen the philosopher,” the metaphysician of “being-time” (uji) and the Buddha nature; and finally, “Dōgen the Japanese,” the Kamakura-period Buddhist author and religious leader.  Each of these Dōgens has his own origins:  the Zen master Dōgen was largely inherited by modern scholarship from the sectarian studies (shūgaku) of the Edo period; the philosopher Dōgen was born from the pre-war Japanese encounter with Western thought; the Japanese Dōgen has been created largely by post-war historiography.  Similarly, each of these images of Dōgen appears against and becomes defined by the background of his own setting:  the Zen master belongs to the religious history of Zen tradition; the philosopher seems to move in the abstract atmosphere of timeless, universal truths; the Japanese is bound to the specific circumstances of medieval society and culture.

Of course, this kind of simple tripartite typology is too crude to do real justice to the varied, complex, and shifting styles of Dōgen studies in Japan (and I welcome your corrections to it).  The categories are by no means clearly bounded but overlap to such a degree that perhaps most scholarship cannot be fairly embraced by any single one alone.  The line, for example, between the Zen master as thinker and the philosopher as Buddhist is obviously not easy to draw.  Indeed the study of what I am calling “Dōgen the Zen master” is a field of such proportions that it reaches from what in another context we would call “constructive theology” to highly revisionist (and sometimes quite positivistic) historiography.  In the end, perhaps what such extremes have in common is only that they treat Dōgen in terms of the history and thought of Zen tradition.