There is an obvious sense in which such developments do not bode well for Dōgen studies, which has been after all, both in Japan and America, a prime example of the “old ways” of the humanities.  Certainly the new religious studies environment will not be conducive to the study of Dōgen as philosopher; for the time being, it may be difficult for such study to find a comfortable home in at least the more up-to-date institutions.  But the study of Dōgen as Zen master, at least as this study has traditionally been approached, is also not likely to flourish:  if American Zen students were unattracted to such study in the earlier Buddhist studies environment (where they were at least expected to read the great books of the tradition), it is difficult to see what in the new environment will encourage them to the years of textual work involved in fitting Dōgen into Zen tradition.  We should probably not expect soon to see many American specialists in such subjects as the Chinese sources of Dōgen’s doctrine or the textual history of the Shōbōgenzō.  On the other hand, since Japanese scholarship is so good at such subjects, perhaps we do not need many of these American specialists.

If there is a bright spot in this rather gloomy forecast, I suspect it may lie in the study of the last of my three Dōgens, the medieval Japanese.  To be sure, in a narrow sense and over the short term, a redirection of our attention from the great figures of the past to their historical contexts will make the great figure of Dōgen as Kamakura cultural hero less immediately attractive as an object of study; similarly, a preference for social history and culture studies over the history of ideas will not encourage an appreciation for such obvious subjects as the place of Dōgen’s doctrine in the history of Japanese Buddhist thought.  Topics like “Dōgen and Shinran” or “Dōgen and hongaku thought” are not likely to be central to the concerns of the next generation of American scholarship.  In a broader sense, however, and over the longer run, the new directions of religious studies should help to liberate Dōgen from such topics and make him more attractive to a wider range of American scholarship.

As Zen students are led from the sanctuary of traditional Buddhist studies into the fray of Asian religious and cultural life, the flood of historical realities they will encounter should work to erode the old Buddhological prejudices against Zen as alien and Japan as marginal.  As American Zen studies becomes more sensitive to the varied cultural contexts of Zen, the specific historical instantiations of the religion will take center stage, and the particular features of Zen in Japan may begin to get the attention they have so far not enjoyed.  Given what I have suggested here are his several handicaps as an object of such attention, I doubt that this process will start with Dōgen; but eventually American scholarship should rediscover his value, less now perhaps as universal philosopher or enlightened Zen patriarch than as an important expression of — and therefore a major resource for understanding — the religious life of medieval Japan. 

At the moment, I can think of no young scholar at a major American university who plans to specialize in Dōgen.  I can think, however, of several — at my own university and elsewhere — who have particular interest in the later history of Sōtō Zen, both medieval and modern.[34]  Research in this history (especially of Edo and Meiji) could do much to help Americans understand the historical origins and ideological characteristics of our current images of Dōgen and thus indirectly spark renewed curiosity about the person and the books that may (or may not) stand behind these images.  Perhaps from among these scholars, perhaps from among their students, will come a new generation of Dōgen studies in America.

 

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But enough of such daydreaming about the future; let me close here with one brief final point less speculative and more urgent.  Whatever direction American Dōgen studies is to take, if it is to flourish it will need considerably better access to Dōgen’s own writings than it now has in English.  I need hardly point out to this audience the difficulties presented the reader by much of Dōgen’s corpus, with its unusual style, surprising linguistic play, obscure allusion to the literature of Chinese Zen, and so on.  Of course, for most serious Dōgen scholarship, there can be no real substitute for work in the original texts, but the texts are sufficiently difficult that even the specialist can benefit greatly from scholarly translation.

With all due respect to their authors, and appreciating the considerable variety (and often high quality) of our current translations, I think it fair to say that few have been done with the scholarly reader in mind.  Hence, they have tended to make Dōgen, as it were, too “easy” — covering over what is obscure in the original with a good guess, resolving what is ambiguous or multivalent with a single reading, often smoothing the exotic imagery and striking metaphor into a bland abstraction, sometimes masking (or even omitting) what seems irrelevant to the message or might be distasteful to the audience.  Such translation surely has its purposes and its value, and no doubt it has made Dōgen more accessible to many readers; but it is too far from the original to serve as an adequate resource for many (I would say most) scholarly purposes.  Thus perhaps the prime desideratum for American Dōgen studies today is a set of authoritative English versions of at least his major writings (including the Eihei kōroku, which has so far received far too little attention) — versions that are sensitive not only to the texts themselves but to the wealth of commentary and scholarship that has been done on them, versions that provide full annotation to the textual features, historical background and literary sources of the originals.