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Did Dogen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It. By Steven Heine. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 298. Hardcover $99.00. Paper $35.00.
Over the last thirty years Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of Zen's Soto school, has become, in the West, among the most renowned and most studied figures in Buddhist history. His brilliant and voluminous writings have now largely been translated into English, accompanied by a growing body of learned commentaries and penetrating historical-critical studies. The English-speaking world is just beginning to appreciate what Japanese scholars have argued for nearly a century: that Dogen is Japan's finest religious thinker, one who probed the nature of religious experience with philosophic profundity and startling poetic originality.
Steven Heine, professor at Florida International University and director of its Institute for Asian Studies, has been at the forefront of Zen and of Dogen studies for over twenty years. His earlier, pathbreaking Dogen and the Koan Tradition (SUNY, 1994) exploited postmodern literary methodologies to chart Dogen's unique approach to koans-that is, as dharma-charged words that disentangle hearers by entangling them in polysemous overflows of meaning. In this new study, Did Dogen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It, Heine introduces Western readers to the many-layered tangle of issues that surround Dogen's biography and his vast literary output. The broad, ambitious scope of this investigation is not fully apparent from the book's title. The title, in fact, may look a little odd, but its aptness unfurls upon reading. Heine is not questioning whether Dogen went to China. Instead, he probes how China figured both in Dogen's presentation of Buddhism and in Dogen's self-presentation as "a dharma-transmitter who traveled to Sung China." Dogen's genius sprang, in good measure, from the way he absorbed Chinese Ch'an Buddhism, both its revered monastic traditions and its vast transmission-of-the-lamp literature, and, in turn, from the way he transmuted this inheritance to create, back in Japan, what we now know as Zen. Heine argues that by charting Dogen's many, varied, and shifting appeals to China, one discovers the linchpin for a comprehensive interpretation.
Dogen's career (not unlike that of Augustine of Hippo) was marked by a series of seismic shifts, both of locale...