Prof. Kim’s work combines a close familiarity with Sōtō shūgaku with the author’s own interpretation of Dōgen’s thought as religious philosophy.  This interest in philosophy has been central to the work of Abe Masao, a man who has done much to spread an appreciation of Dōgen in America.  Prof. Abe’s scholarship differs markedly, of course, from that of D. T. Suzuki, but it is probably fair to say that he more than anyone else has inherited Suzuki’s mantle in America — both in the sense that he has taken on Prof. Suzuki’s mission as interpreter of Zen to the West, and in the sense that his interpretation, like Suzuki’s, is closely linked to the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy.  Unlike Suzuki, Abe has made Dōgen central to his interpretation of Zen.[16]  Especially during the decade of the 1980’s, through his publications in English, his many lectures and seminars throughout America, his ongoing dialogue with Christian theologians, he has carried Dōgen’s thought beyond the Zen centers and the academic Zen studies programs to a broad audience of American intellectuals.[17]

In any case, it has largely been Prof. Abe’s image of Dōgen the religious philosopher that has dominated American interest over the 1980s.  The decade has seen a steady stream of new translations of the Shōbōgenzō, and occasionally of other texts, by Thomas Cleary,[18] Francis Cook,[19] Hee-jin Kim,[20] Kazuaki Tanahashi,[21] Thomas Wright,[22] Yokoi Yūhō,[23]and others.  More significantly, this period has also witnessed, for the first time, the production of original scholarly studies of Dōgen by a number of young American scholars trained in Western and often Japanese philosophy, who seek to interpret Dōgen’s thought through the techniques of phenomenology, analytic and comparative philosophy, and so on.  Examples of these new interpretations can be found in books such as Tom Kasulis’s extremely popular Zen Action-Zen Person,[24] Steven Heine’s Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen,[25] David Shaner’s The Body-Mind Experience in Japanese Buddhism:  A Phenomenological Perspective of Kūkai and Dōgen[26] or Joan Stambaugh’s recent Impermanence and Buddha Nature:  Dōgen’s Understanding of Temporality.[27]  Clearly, in such books we are in the presence of a Dōgen who has transcended Sōtō Zen, not to mention Kamakura Japan, to take his place among the World Philosophers.

 

*  *  *  *  *

Culturally speaking, that it should be the transcendental philosopher who has been most successfully exported to the West should not surprise us:  he was, after all, from the beginning created with the foreign market in mind — a model first developed in pre-war Japan from imported Western ideas as a part of the project to modernize and internationalize the country’s intellectual history, in order to establish the place of the insular culture among the nations of the world.  Predictably, the nations of the world now find their own ideas reflected in the model, and many Americans now find themselves more attracted to it than to the old Zen master.  What seems more surprising is the relative neglect of a figure as famous as Dōgen by American students of Zen history, who are supposed, after all, to be attracted to old Zen masters. 

Within the specific culture of the American academy, it may well be that Dōgen’s very fame, both in America and Japan, is partly to blame for his neglect:  he is, as it were, too “big” to offer an immediately promising subject of study — at once too familiar to the American public to be academically fashionable and too imposing in the Japanese secondary literature to be easily manageable.  Hence, the student of Zen studies (who in America after all still has almost the entire field from which to lay professional claim to a specialty) is likely tempted to look around for more exotic, less overworked areas where there is greater room for original scholarship.  Nothing is so appreciated in the American academy as original scholarship.

It may also be not only the fact but the particular type of Dōgen’s fame that is to blame:  his dual status as philosophical giant and as sacred ancestor of Sōtō tradition has probably made him less, rather than more, attractive to Zen studies as it is typically done in America.  Academic Zen studies arose in America during the 1970’s largely within the environment of a “scientific” Buddhology centered in Indology and dedicated to rigorous historical and philological inquiry into ancient Buddhist texts.  As a living East Asian religion that celebrated its freedom from the texts and norms of ancient Indian Buddhism, and as a religion that was tainted by its association with popular, anti-intellectual American fads of the 1960’s, Zen was an “alien” (not to say “heretical”) subject that needed to be domesticated. 

Zen students, seeking academic styles that would distance them from Zen’s alien ways and make them respectable Buddhologists, have tended to be shy of the big ideas of Zen philosophy and embarrassed by the popular pieties of Zen religiosity.[28]  Dōgen, as object of both philosophical speculation and religious cult, has been in this sense doubly problematic for academic Zen studies.  No doubt a number of the scholars of my generation who have begun to establish the field of American Zen studies originally came to these studies, as I did, with interest in Dōgen.  I have, for some reason, been slower than most to outgrow this interest, but most of my generation has succeeded in finding more appropriate subjects.  Apart from my own little study of the Fukan zazen gi,[29] James Kodera’s work on the Hōkyō ki may be the only American book to deal with Dōgen in the context of Zen history.[30]