Dogen: Just Sitting and the Philosophy of Being-Time

Part III: Medieval Philosophy ／ 2026-08-06

Introduction: Dōgen as Philosopher

Dōgen (1200–1253) was the founder of the Japanese Sōtō school of Zen and has long been regarded as the most philosophical thinker in the history of Japanese thought. For centuries, however, he was venerated chiefly within his own sect as a patriarch, and his major work, the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), was treated as an esoteric text of sectarian doctrinal study. What transformed the situation was Watsuji Tetsurō's essay "Shamon Dōgen" ("Dōgen the Śramaṇa"), published in the 1920s and later collected in Studies in the History of the Japanese Spirit. Watsuji declared that Dōgen's texts should be read not as the writings of a sectarian founder but as those of "a Dōgen who belongs to humanity," and thereby drew him onto the terrain of philosophy as a first-rank thinker produced by Japan. Tanabe Hajime followed with My Philosophical View of the Shōbōgenzō (1939), confronting Dōgen's thought directly with Western philosophy. From then on, the philosophers of the Kyoto School and, subsequently, scholars abroad have repeatedly reread Dōgen as a philosopher.

Indeed, the themes the Shōbōgenzō addresses—being and time, self and world, practice and realization, language and truth—overlap to a startling degree with the problem-clusters that Western philosophy thematized from the modern period onward. The treatment of time in the fascicle "Uji" ("Being-Time") in particular has continually invited comparison with Heidegger's Being and Time. Yet one must not forget that Dōgen himself was not attempting to write "philosophy." His entire body of reflection issues from a single practice—seated meditation—and returns to it. This inseparability of thought and practice is both the starting point for reading Dōgen and the greatest difficulty he presents. This essay traces Dōgen's life, then examines in turn the doctrines of honshō myōshu (original realization and wondrous practice), shikantaza (just sitting), and shushō ittō (the oneness of practice and realization); the world of the Shōbōgenzō—Genjōkōan, uji, buddha-nature, and dōtoku—and finally surveys the present state of the dialogue between Dōgen and contemporary philosophy.

Life: From Doubt on Mount Hiei to Eihei-ji

Dōgen was born in Kyoto in 1200 (Shōji 2). According to the traditional biographies, his father was the Inner Minister Koga Michichika and his mother was Ishi, a daughter of the regent and chancellor Fujiwara no Motofusa (another account holds that his father was Michichika's son Michitomo). Though born into a family of the highest aristocracy, he lost his father in early childhood and his mother at the age of eight, and is said to have felt the impermanence of the world with great intensity. In 1212 (Kenryaku 2) he visited his uncle Ryōken, who lived at the foot of Mount Hiei, and declared his intention to leave home; the following year, 1213 (Kenpō 1), he had his head shaved and received the precepts under Kōen, the Tendai abbot.

On Mount Hiei, Dōgen ran up against the doubt that would shape his whole life. According to Tendai doctrine—especially the hongaku (original enlightenment) thought current at the time—human beings are originally endowed with the nature of awakening and are, from birth, nothing other than buddhas. But if that is so, why did the buddhas of past, present, and future arouse the aspiration for awakening anew and undergo the hardships of practice? If one is already a buddha, practice should be unnecessary; and if practice is necessary, then the teaching that one is "originally a buddha" must be empty words. Unable to find within the monastery any answer to this doubt—recorded in the biography Kenzeiki—Dōgen descended the mountain, entered Kennin-ji, and became a student of Myōzen, a disciple of Eisai. Then, in 1223 (Jōō 2), he crossed to Song China together with Myōzen.

In China he studied under Wuji Liaopai at Mount Tiantong and then made a pilgrimage among various monasteries, but the years passed without his meeting a true master. The turning point came in 1225 (Hōkyō 1), with his encounter with Tiantong Rujing, the newly installed abbot of Mount Tiantong. Dōgen revered Rujing as the one and only "former master" of his life, and it was under him that he had his decisive experience. During seated meditation at dawn, he heard Rujing rebuke a dozing monk with the words that practicing Zen must be "the dropping off of body and mind," whereupon he attained great awakening and is said to have received Rujing's seal of approval for shinjin datsuraku—dropping off body and mind. Returning to Japan in 1227 (Antei 1), Dōgen went back to Kennin-ji and in that same year composed, in Chinese, the Fukan zazengi (Universal Recommendation of the Principles of Zazen), setting out the meaning and method of seated meditation for all people. What he brought back from China was neither scriptures nor images of the Buddha, but the correctly transmitted practice of seated meditation itself.

In 1231 (Kanki 3), at An'yō-in in Fukakusa, he wrote his first work in Japanese, the Bendōwa (Discourse on the Wholehearted Practice of the Way), and in 1233 (Tenpuku 1) he founded Kōshō-ji in Fukakusa, establishing Japan's first full-fledged Zen monks' hall. It was during these Kōshō-ji years that he began composing the fascicles of the Shōbōgenzō in earnest, beginning with "Genjōkōan." Tension with the established Buddhist institutions, however, contributed to his move in 1243 (Kangen 1) to Echizen (present-day Fukui Prefecture) at the urging of his lay disciple Hatano Yoshishige. The following year he founded Daibutsu-ji, which in 1246 (Kangen 4) he renamed Eihei-ji. In his later years, Dōgen devoted himself to building a rigorous practice community deep in the mountains, drawing up monastic regulations that governed even washing the face and taking meals as forms of practice. In 1247 (Hōji 1) he traveled to Kamakura at the invitation of the regent Hōjō Tokiyori, but returned to Eihei-ji after roughly half a year. He eventually fell ill and, in 1253 (Kenchō 5), died in Kyoto, where he had gone to seek treatment. He was fifty-four. The Shōbōgenzō was left as an unfinished magnum opus, entrusted to Ejō and his other disciples.

Original Realization and Wondrous Practice: An Answer to "Why Practice If One Is Already a Buddha?"

The answer to the doubt that had set Dōgen on his way from Mount Hiei—if one is originally a buddha, why is practice necessary?—is given in the Bendōwa. It is the doctrine later known as honshō myōshu, original realization and wondrous practice. For Dōgen, practice is not a means for acquiring awakening. If practice were a means and awakening its result, then the sentient being before awakening and the buddha after it would be two different things, and practice would amount to an investment made by one who is not yet a buddha in order to become one. Dōgen rejects this entire schema. As the Bendōwa puts it, to suppose that practice and realization are not one is the view of non-Buddhists; in the Buddha Dharma, practice and realization are one and the same. To conceive practice (shu) and realization (shō) as separate things is precisely a view lying outside the Buddha Dharma.

From this standpoint, the original doubt is transformed at the level of its very formulation. Practice is not the enterprise of obtaining an awakening one does not yet possess; it is the wondrous functioning (myōshu) by which original realization (honshō) manifests itself. One practices precisely because one is already a buddha, and if one does not practice, original realization appears nowhere at all. It is neither that awakening comes first and practice follows, nor that practice comes first and awakening arrives afterward: in the very place where one sits in meditation, original realization is actually being enacted. Thus the question "why practice if one is already a buddha?" is reversed into the answer "to be already a buddha can exist only in practicing." Where hongaku thought threatened to slide toward the dispensability of practice, Dōgen preserved the standpoint of original enlightenment while establishing the necessity of practice—one of the sharpest theoretical achievements in medieval Japanese thought.

Shikantaza: Seated Meditation That Is Not a Means

The concrete form taken by the doctrine of original realization and wondrous practice is shikantaza—"just sitting," sitting with nothing else. The Zen that Dōgen inherited from Rujing differs in character from the mainstream Zen of the time (kanna Zen, the Zen of contemplating the kōan), which aimed at an experience of awakening through work on kōan. Rujing taught that practicing Zen is the dropping off of body and mind, and he made use of neither incense offering nor prostrations, neither nenbutsu nor penance rites nor sutra reading, teaching only the single practice of sitting. Seated meditation is not a means to the end of awakening; it is itself the dropping off of body and mind, and it is itself the conduct of a buddha. The Fukan zazengi expresses this by saying that the seated meditation in question is not the learning of meditation but simply the dharma-gate of ease and joy. Zazen is not the acquisition of a technique of concentration; it is the "dharma-gate of ease and joy" in which a buddha enacts the fact of already being a buddha.

Concerning the state of consciousness in seated meditation, Dōgen invokes the story of Yaoshan Weiyan to expound hishiryō, "non-thinking." Zazen is neither thinking about something nor forcibly extinguishing thought. To "think the not-thinking"—to sit on a horizon prior to the opposition of thinking and not-thinking—is non-thinking. It is not the pursuit of some special state of consciousness but the whole-bodied act of settling the body, settling the breath, and simply sitting. For Dōgen, awakening is not a content of consciousness; it is realized in the bodily comportment of sitting. In this sense, the doctrine of shikantaza can also be read as a philosophy of the body that does not presuppose mind-body dualism. The structure of shikantaza—an act released from the nexus of means and end, an act whose meaning is fully present within itself—has a reach that resonates with contemporary theories of action concerned with play and with art.

The Oneness of Practice and Realization

The doctrine of the oneness of practice and realization does more than assert the identity of practice and awakening; it contains a distinctive philosophy of time and praxis. The Bendōwa goes on to say that since this is the realization of practice, realization has no limit, and since this is the practice of realization, practice has no beginning. If practice is itself the manifestation of awakening, then awakening has no end, and practice grounded in awakening has no beginning. Awakening is not a state one reaches and completes, and practice is not a preparatory stage from which one graduates. The Buddha Way exists only as unceasing practice without starting point or terminus. That Dōgen emphasized gyōji—the sustained continuity of practice—right up to his final years, devoting a fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō to it in praise of the untiring conduct of buddhas and patriarchs generation after generation, is the consequence of this logic. The Way forms a circle and is enacted without cease.

This doctrine is also a rejection of teleological time. On the view that treats practice as a means, meaning is borrowed from a future end, and the present is demoted to a way station serving that future. On the standpoint of the oneness of practice and realization, this one sitting, here and now, is itself the whole of the Buddha Way, and the present is not a means to anything. A day of seated meditation is a day of being a buddha; an hour of practice is an hour of being a buddha. This sense of time, which condenses infinite meaning into the present instant, is nothing other than the practical soil of the philosophy of uji discussed below. The oneness of practice and realization also carries important ethical implications. Dōgen does not accept the notion that one who has attained a good state no longer requires effort. Being a buddha is not a credential one possesses but an event that is continually realized anew in action.

The Shōbōgenzō as a Book: Philosophical Prose in Japanese

The Shōbōgenzō is Dōgen's major work, written and added to over more than twenty years, from around 1231 until just before his death. He did not complete its plan in his lifetime, and various recensions survive—the seventy-five-fascicle and twelve-fascicle lineage, which adds twelve late fascicles to the seventy-five earlier ones, as well as a sixty-fascicle version and others; in the Edo period a widely circulated edition arranged in ninety-five fascicles was also produced. Each fascicle takes up a theme—"Genjōkōan," "Buddha-Nature," "Uji," "Sustained Practice," "Expressing the Way"—and, drawing freely on sutras and the recorded sayings of Chinese Zen, reads them in boldly transformed ways. The work is famous for its difficulty, but that difficulty is nothing other than the density of its thinking. Separately, the Shōbōgenzō zuimonki, in which the disciple Ejō recorded Dōgen's everyday talks, has long been widely read as a book conveying Dōgen the man and his teaching in accessible language.

What deserves special note in the history of thought is the fact that the Shōbōgenzō is written in Japanese. At the time, it was taken for granted that works discussing Buddhist doctrine would be written in classical Chinese. Dōgen himself composed the Fukan zazengi and the record of his formal lectures, the Eihei kōroku, in Chinese. In the Shōbōgenzō, however, he deliberately chose a Japanese prose mixed with kana, seeking to articulate the utmost reaches of the Buddha Dharma in the Japanese language. This was among the earliest events in which Japanese became a language of full-fledged speculation, and the Shōbōgenzō is often called "the first philosophical work written in Japanese." Its style, moreover, is highly original. He dismantles Sino-Japanese compounds and rereads them, turns nouns into verbs, inverts normal word order, and piles up the same words in reversed configurations—Dōgen reforged the very grammar of Japanese into an instrument of thought. This linguistic experiment was a necessity imposed by the task of saying what established language could not say, and it forms two sides of a single coin with the philosophy of language discussed below.

Reading "Genjōkōan": Being Realized by the Myriad Things

Placed at the head of the seventy-five-fascicle version, "Genjōkōan" may be called the introduction to the Shōbōgenzō as a whole, and it condenses the essence of Dōgen's thought. "Genjōkōan" may be understood to mean that all beings (the myriad things, banpō) are appearing and coming to completion here and now, and that this very fact is absolute truth (the kōan). Truth is not concealed behind phenomena but is realized right before one's eyes—and the fascicle articulates this state of affairs as a reversal in the relation between self and world.

Its centerpiece is the following passage: to study the Buddha Way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be realized by the myriad things. Study of the Buddha Way is inquiry into the self, but that inquiry culminates not in the establishment of the self but in forgetting the self, and to forget the self is to be attested from the side of the myriad things—all beings. Dōgen also says that carrying the self forward to practice and realize the myriad things is delusion, while the myriad things advancing to practice and realize the self is awakening. To place the self at the center and confer meaning on the world is delusion; for the world to come forward and illuminate the self is awakening. Here is a fundamental transformation of self-understanding that turns inside out the structure of modern epistemology, in which a subject constitutes an object. The self is not a subject prior to the world but an event that is realized together with the myriad things.

"Genjōkōan" goes on to indicate a transformed view of time through the metaphor of firewood and ash. Firewood becomes ash, Dōgen writes, and it cannot turn back and become firewood again. We think that firewood burns and becomes ash, but according to Dōgen, firewood abides in the dharma-position of firewood and ash abides in the dharma-position of ash. Although there is a before and an after, before and after are cut off from each other. What appears as a continuous change from firewood into ash is in fact a completed realization in each respective "now." The transition from life to death is likewise: life is whole in life, and death is whole in death. This idea of the severance of before and after leads directly into the philosophy of time in "Uji," which we examine next.

Uji: The Philosophy of Being and Time

Written in 1240 (Ninji 1), the fascicle "Uji" is the text within the Shōbōgenzō most charged with philosophical tension, and its treatment of time is what inscribed Dōgen's name in world philosophical history. Near the opening Dōgen declares that so-called being-time means that time is already being, and that all being is time. In ordinary usage, uji is simply the everyday expression "at a certain time," but Dōgen rereads it as "being = time." Time is already being, and all being is time. Time is not a container or coordinate axis within which things occur; rather, to be is precisely to time. Hence "the mountain too is time, the sea too is time"—mountains and seas are not in time; being a mountain and being a sea are themselves modes of time.

Dōgen also rejects the everyday understanding of time as something that passes away: time is not to be understood as merely flying past. If time were nothing but what flies away, a gap would open between the self of this moment and time. In fact, however, the totality of all beings (the exhaustive world) is realized in the nikon, the "right now," in which I live the present. On this basis, Dōgen uses the concept of kyōryaku, "passage," to show that time is not a series of isolated instantaneous points. Being-time does not merely flow from today to tomorrow; it also passes from today to yesterday, from yesterday to today, from today to today, communicating in every direction and functioning while containing one another. The past is not a nothingness that is finished and gone, nor is the future a nothingness that has not yet come; both live and function within the being-time of the right now. Before and after are severed, and yet there is passage—the incomparable depth of this philosophy of time lies in its asserting, in one breath, both the absoluteness of the instant and the mutual interpenetration of times.

It is no accident that "Uji" has so often been compared with Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). Heidegger too criticized the vulgar concept of time as a homogeneous succession of "nows" and sought to clarify the meaning of being on the basis of temporality. In seeing being and time as one at the root, and in refusing to regard time as a container modeled on the number line, these two thinkers separated by seven centuries genuinely resonate. But the differences are equally clear. Heidegger's temporality is throughout the temporality of human existence (Dasein), and the future holds primacy in the resoluteness that runs ahead toward death. Dōgen's being-time, by contrast, is not confined to human beings: mountains, seas, pines, and bamboo are all said to be time, so that it is the time of being in general; and what holds primacy is not the future but the right now in which practice is realized. That the site of this philosophy of time is the practice of seated meditation rather than anxiety in the face of death is another decisive difference. Comparison is meaningful not for the sake of identification but precisely for bringing the contours of each body of thought into relief.

The Turn in Buddha-Nature Thought: "All Beings Are Buddha-Nature"

In the "Buddha-Nature" fascicle, Dōgen boldly rereads a fundamental proposition of East Asian Buddhism. The phrase from the Nirvana Sutra, issai shujō shitsu-u busshō, is normally read as "all sentient beings wholly possess buddha-nature"—meaning that every living thing harbors within itself the potential to become a buddha. Dōgen reads it instead as "all sentient beings—all being is buddha-nature." Shitsu-u, the whole of being, all that exists, is buddha-nature just as it is. The reach of this rereading is enormous. On the ordinary reading, buddha-nature is a seed or potential residing within sentient beings, a latency not yet actualized. On Dōgen's reading, buddha-nature is not a possession internal to individuals but the very presence of everything that exists. Buddha-nature is turned from "something to be realized someday" into "something being realized now."

This turn is a critique of the way of thinking that, by regarding buddha-nature as a future possibility, degrades present practice into a means; it is nothing other than the ontological underpinning of original realization and wondrous practice and of the oneness of practice and realization. In the same fascicle, Dōgen further takes up the saying attributed to the Sixth Patriarch Huineng that impermanence is itself buddha-nature, and expounds "impermanence-buddha-nature." Buddha-nature is not an unchanging substance transcending impermanence; the arising and perishing of plants and trees, and human birth, aging, sickness, and death—impermanence itself—are the manifestation of buddha-nature. To think of buddha-nature as a permanent substrate would be nothing but the return of the ātman (self) that Buddhism was supposed to have denied. Dōgen's assertion that impermanence is buddha-nature liberated buddha-nature thought from substantialism and reforged it into an ontology that affirms the very becoming and flux of being. Just as being and time were bound into one in "Uji," in the "Buddha-Nature" fascicle being, buddha-nature, and impermanence are bound into one. Here the full shape of Dōgen's ontology is complete.

His View of Language: Expressing the Way and Entangled Vines

Zen is known for the standpoint of "not relying on words and letters," holding that truth cannot be transmitted through language. Yet Dōgen's view of language is far from any simple distrust of words. The fascicle "Dōtoku" ("Expressing the Way") opens by declaring that the buddhas and patriarchs are expression of the Way. Dōtoku means "able to say," to be able to speak or articulate; buddhas and patriarchs are nothing other than those who have been able to express the truth. Awakening is not something lying beyond language, hidden in silence; awakening is realized in being spoken. This is of course not a naive faith in language, as though established words could copy the truth. Dōtoku is something that ripens through long years of wholehearted effort in the Way, and within the words that have been expressed, what has not been said is simultaneously at work. Speaking and the unsayable are not opposed; they belong together within expression of the Way.

The argument of the fascicle "Kattō" ("Entangled Vines") makes this view of language still sharper. Kattō—the tangle of arrowroot and wisteria vines—was in the Zen tradition a term of disparagement for the entanglement of words and concepts, the tiresome verbal snarls that ought to be cut through. Dōgen, however, commenting on the story of the transmission of the Dharma from Bodhidharma to his disciples, teaches that the Buddha Dharma is transmitted precisely by entanglement, by means of entanglement. The exchanges between master and disciple, the intertwining of sutra and commentary, the very tangle of words winding around and clinging to words—this is the succession of the Dharma's life. It is not that one cuts away the tangle of language and reaches pure experience; truth lives and is transmitted in the very midst of the tangle. That distinctive style of the Shōbōgenzō—dismantling words, rereading them, piling them up—was the practice of this view of language. This conception, which sees language as the site of the realization of being, corresponds at a deep level with philosophy after the linguistic turn of the twentieth century, which regards language not as a mere instrument of communication but as an event of world-disclosure.

Illumination from Contemporary Philosophy: From the Kyoto School to Dōgen Studies Abroad

The history of Dōgen studies as philosophy coincides with the history of modern Japanese philosophy itself. The opening shot was Watsuji Tetsurō's "Shamon Dōgen," mentioned above, which won Dōgen a readership outside his sect. Tanabe Hajime, in My Philosophical View of the Shōbōgenzō, read Dōgen's thought as dialectics and judged its philosophical level sufficient to be a source of national pride. The affinity between Nishida Kitarō's philosophy and Dōgen was also noted early on; within the Kyoto School lineage, Nishitani Keiji developed a distinctive reading in the philosophy of religion in his Lectures on the Shōbōgenzō, while Abe Masao built a bridge to international philosophical dialogue through his studies of Dōgen in English. On the philological side, biographical and textual research by Ōkubo Dōshū and others, and critical editions such as the Iwanami Nihon shisō taikei volume annotated by Terada Tōru and Mizuno Yaoko, laid the groundwork for careful reading.

Abroad, English-language Dōgen studies have developed remarkably since 1975, when Hee-Jin Kim's Dōgen Kigen: Mystical Realist presented Dōgen as a comprehensive thinker. Carl Bielefeldt clarified the formation of Dōgen's teaching on seated meditation through philological study of the Fukan zazengi, and Steven Heine carried out a full-scale comparative study of uji and Heidegger's philosophy of time. English translations of the Shōbōgenzō, by Kazuaki Tanahashi and others, have also advanced, and Dōgen is today one of the most frequently cited East Asian thinkers in comparative philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Current scholarship extends well beyond comparison with Heidegger to phenomenological theories of the body, the metaphysics of time, and environmental philosophy—his view of mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees as the realization of buddha-nature is sometimes read as a precursor of deep ecology. In Japan too, scholars such as Yorizumi Mitsuko continue the attempt to reread Dōgen in the vocabulary of ethics and philosophy. At the same time, there is wariness among researchers about calling Dōgen a "philosopher" without qualification. His words are, after all, the words of practice: guidance for practice rather than the construction of a system. It is precisely in making us reconsider the boundary between philosophy and non-philosophy that the text of Dōgen shows its contemporary relevance.

Conclusion

Dōgen's thought set out from a single doubt on Mount Hiei—if one is already a buddha, why practice?—and unfolded as the answer to it. Practice and realization are one (the oneness of practice and realization); seated meditation is a means to nothing (shikantaza); original realization is realized only in practice (original realization and wondrous practice). In the Shōbōgenzō, this logic of practice unfolds into a magnificent ontology. Truth is realized not behind phenomena but before one's eyes (Genjōkōan); all being is time (uji); every being is buddha-nature just as it is (all beings are buddha-nature); and truth can be expressed in the very midst of the tangle of words (dōtoku and kattō). At the center throughout stands not attainment of some beyond, but realization in the right now. Awakening, buddha-nature, and truth are not goals promised in the future but are enacted in this body sitting now—Dōgen's philosophy was the thoroughgoing thinking-through of this one matter.

For just this reason, Dōgen, a thirteenth-century Zen monk, still casts light from unexpected angles on contemporary questions about being and time, self and world, action and meaning. As the comparison with Heidegger shows, his thought has the intensity to engage the deepest strata of Western philosophy, while at the same time standing in a place unlike any Western tradition in that its thinking is one with the bodily practice of seated meditation. The Shōbōgenzō is a text that can never be exhausted, and the discovery of Dōgen as a philosopher remains an event still under way.

On the development of medieval Japanese thought including Dōgen, see Medieval Japanese Thought; on Dōgen's place within Japanese philosophy as a whole, see Japanese Philosophy: An Overview; and on the twentieth-century ontology often compared with the philosophy of being-time, see Heidegger.

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