In any case, I trouble you with this crude typology here only as a heuristic device to help me emphasize the particular character of American academic interest in Dōgen.  If you can grant me for the moment at least something like my three “ideal types” of Dōgen in Japanese scholarship, I want to suggest that it is only my second type, the philosopher (or perhaps the philosophical theologian), that has so far shown signs of flourishing in the American environment.  Of the Zen master, and especially of Dōgen the Japanese, we have yet to see very much.  First, let me give you a brief historical sketch of English-language publications on Dōgen; then I shall step back to reflect a bit on the academic “sociology,” as it were, within which my various Dōgens are (and are not) being studied in America.

 

*  *  *  *  *

If the various Dōgens of Japanese scholarship were born at very different times — Edo, pre-war and post-war — the Dōgens in America (insofar as we can find a plurality) are very young.  When I first began to read about and practice Zen as a philosophy student in San Francisco in the 1960’s, Dōgen existed in America almost only as a Zen master — and this perhaps less on paper than in the imaginations of a few zazen students at the San Francisco Zen Center and other such Sōtō-related Zen communities.  Our books on Zen Buddhism at the time were mostly by, or influenced by, D. T. Suzuki; and, as you know, the Rinzai professor Suzuki did not much appreciate the Sōtō patriarch Dōgen.

I confess that, except for occasional flashbacks, my picture of the 1960’s has long faded, but I recall from this decade only three significant English sources on Dōgen.[4]  The first was The Sōtō Approach to Zen, an obscure little collection of essay and translation by the late professor of this university Masunaga Reihō.[5]  Early in the decade, A History of Zen Buddhism, by the Sophia University professor Heinrich Dumoulin was translated into English from the German.[6]  This book, which contained a lengthy chapter on Dōgen’s life and thought, was for many years the most extended and substantial treatment of Zen history in English and served to introduce Dōgen to a wide American audience; it has been superseded only by Prof. Dumoulin’s own recent revised and enlarged two-volume version, Zen Buddhism:  A History.[7]  In 1967, Jiyu Kennet, the English Sōtō nun trained at Sōjiji, published a collection of Sōtō Zen materials, including some of Dōgen’s writings.[8]  These three early treatments of Dōgen, though very different, had at least three things in common:  first, none was written by an American; second, all (albeit in different senses and degrees) were products of and sympathetic toward Sōtō tradition; and therefore, finally, all took as their object some version of what I am calling Dōgen the Zen master.[9]

Thus, in the early 1970’s, when I started graduate Buddhist studies at Berkeley, the American Dōgen was still only a Zen master, and Zen masters were still only on the margins of academic Buddhist studies, which tended to look down from its scholarly heights on the popular American literature on Zen and the unlettered enthusiasms of American Zen students.  By the early 1980’s, however, when I finished my dissertation, Zen studies was becoming recognized as a legitimate, even vital new area of academic Buddhist studies, and Dōgen was beginning to develop an established academic identity.  Interestingly enough, this new identity has developed for the most part outside of Buddhist studies.

The 1970’s saw a large leap in the English resources on Dōgen, with a good number of his writings being re-translated or newly rendered.  In 1971, for example, Prof. Masunaga’s translation of the Shōbōgenzō zuimon ki appeared from the University of Hawaii Press, a publisher that has been particularly active in Dōgen studies and Zen studies in general.[10]  Yokoi Yūhō translated the Eihei shingi,[11] as well as the Fukan zazen gi, Gakudō yōjin shū, and the twelve-fascicle (jūni kan bon) Shōbōgenzō.[12]  The first volume of Nishiyama Kōsen’s complete translation of the Shōbōgenzō appeared in 1975.[13]  Particularly welcome during this period, though never to my knowledge brought together in a single volume, were the careful, annotated translations of the Shōbōgenzō and other texts, published throughout the decade in the journal The Eastern Buddhist, by Norman Waddell, often in collaboration with Abe Masao.[14]  In addition to these works of translation, the 1970s also saw the publication of Hee-jin Kim’s important Kigen Dōgen:  Mystical Realist.  This book, produced in 1975, was the first (and even today, over fifteen years later, remains the only) general academic study in English of Dōgen’s life and thought; it has continued to serve over the years as America’s best single introduction to Dōgen.[15] .