The early direction of academic Zen studies in America was particularly influenced by two books published in 1967:  Yanagida Seizan’s Shoki zenshū shisho no kenkyū,[31] which became a kind of “bible” of the field during its inception in the 1970’s; and Philip Yampolsky’s The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch,[32] which, as the first scholarly study of a Zen text by an American academic became a standard against which the field could measure itself.  Both these books, of course, dealt with the origins of Zen in the T’ang dynasty, and both sought to reevaluate Zen tradition through the techniques of modern textual and historical scholarship.  Subsequent American Zen studies has tended to favor this same subject and these same techniques.

Although we are now beginning to get some excellent original American studies of T’ang-dynasty Zen, the field remains weaker for later periods and for Japan (not to mention Korea and Viet Nam).  Profs. Yanagida and Yampolsky have themselves moved on from their earlier studies to consider topics in Japanese Zen, and recent American Zen studies shows some signs of following suite; but the fact remains that most areas of Japanese Zen have yet to be explored.  This is unfortunately true not only within Zen studies but also in other fields of Japanese studies from which we might have hoped for scholarship on Dōgen as medieval Japanese figure.  In fact, this last of my three Dōgens is the least known in America. 

While the study of Japanese Zen (and, apart from some notable exceptions, of Japanese Buddhism more broadly) has lagged behind work on China, American scholarship has made significant advances in Japanese history, literature, and religion.  Yet this scholarship has not, for the most part, been attracted by the technicalities of Buddhist thought and has, therefore, largely stayed clear of the “great thinkers” of Kamakura Buddhism — the Dōgens, Shinrans and Nichirens — preferring to leave such towering figures to the specialists in Buddhist studies.  Since American Buddhist studies has not yet been ready to accept the challenge, we still have nothing approaching an adequate history of Kamakura Buddhism within which to place Dōgen and, therefore, little sense of him as a participant in and creator of medieval Japanese religious culture.

In short, then, it seems that the conditions of the American academic community have so far not been very conducive to the development of the study of Dōgen as an historical figure, either within Zen tradition or the Japanese past.  If we can take as representative of American scholarship the collection of papers, entitled Dōgen Studies, published in 1985 as a result of the first Kuroda Institute conference on Dōgen, it is still almost entirely Dōgen’s ideas that preoccupy us.[33]  Yet conditions are rapidly changing, and I would like to close with a few thoughts on the future of Dōgen studies in America.

 

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Among the most general changes that may effect this field is the increasing incorporation of Asian humanities into American university education.  One sign of this change is the recent graduation of Buddhist studies from the relative isolation of Asian language programs into religious studies departments.  If this move may be tending to increase the distance of Buddhologists from their colleagues in Asian philology and classical languages, it is also bringing them into much closer contact with the interests and methods of new colleagues and thereby breaking down the old barriers, almost as daunting in America as in Japan, between the disciplines of Buddhist studies and religious studies.  How might such contact affect the future careers of my three Dōgens?

At first glance, religious studies would seem the ideal environment for further development of scholarship on Dōgen as religious philosopher, providing an intellectual setting in which he can be viewed alongside, and in conversation with, the great thinkers of the world’s religions.  Some American academic institutions may in fact provide such a setting.  But it must also be realized that the discipline of religious studies in America has itself been undergoing considerable change in recent years, moving from earlier emphases on theology, intellectual and church histories, history and phenomenology of religions, and so on, toward increasing concerns for recent developments in hermeneutics and critical theory, culture studies and social history.  In this new environment, the old ways of doing the humanities, with their focus on the cultural products of the social elite, are being called into question; and in religious studies departments deeply influenced by this environment, the study of the “great” religious traditions and of the great religious thinkers of the past is giving way to new interests in popular religious “mentalities” that are best discovered in the ordinary beliefs and everyday practices of the community.