Shōbōgenzō

The Shōbōgenzō is the principal work of the Japanese monk Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. It is a collection of essays written between 1231 and 1253, the year of its author's death, and is widely regarded as one of the summits of Mahāyāna Buddhist literature. Because other works by Dōgen share the same title, it is often called the Kana Shōbōgenzō, the "kana" referring to its composition in Japanese rather than in Classical Chinese, the language of his Eihei Kōroku or his Shinji Shōbōgenzō.

The title refers to the "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye". In general Mahāyāna usage it denotes the Buddha's teaching; in Zen it points to a direct realization of Buddha nature that is not contained in the written words of the sutras. Zen tradition traces this transmission back to the Buddha, who, holding up a flower, is said to have passed on his teaching to Mahākāśyapa without recourse to words. The Chinese master Dahui Zonggao, a popularizer of kōan in the twelfth century, had earlier used the same title for a kōan collection, and Dōgen seems to have drawn on that model, though with a different approach: rather than simply recording stories, he wrote extended commentaries on them.

The essays were originally delivered as sermons in a less formal register than Dōgen's Chinese-language talks. Some were recorded by Dōgen himself, others by his disciples. He rearranged and revised the fascicles several times during his lifetime, and after his death various editors added and removed material, producing a number of early versions with 60, 75, 12, 28, 84 or 89 fascicles. The modern standard edition, based on a late seventeenth-century compilation, contains ninety-five. Dōgen himself thought that only twelve of the chapters were complete, a detail that hints at the work's unusually unsettled textual history.