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Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. Translated by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura. Edited by Taigen Dan Leighton. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Pp. xv + 722.
To date, most scholarship on Dogen (1200-1253) has focused on his Shobo-genzo (Correct dharma eye treasury), and Dogen's translators have directed their efforts at this text and several shorter pieces. With the publication of Dogen's Extensive Record, Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura have made available an excellent translation of Dogen's other major work, the Eihei Koroku, and have thereby opened up a rich resource to readers lacking facility with East Asian languages.
In his substantial introduction, Leighton outlines Dogen's life, the significance of the Record in Dogen's corpus, Dogen's main disciples, and the use of the text in Zen practice. In an essay on the significance of the Record and its translation, prominent Dogen scholar Steven Heine compares the Record and the Shobo-genzo and highlights several doctrinal themes in the Record. The initial section of the book also features a short foreword by Tenshin Reb Anderson of the San Francisco Zen Center, comments by John Daido Loori of Zen Mountain Monastery on Dogen's and his own use of koans, and a previously published rendering of a poem by Ryokan (1758- 1831) on reading the Record.
The Extensive Record itself consists of ten sections, including formal talks for students in the Dharma hall, longer informal talks given to smaller groups of students in the abbot's quarters, ninety koans with Dogen's comments in verse, and a collection of Dogen's poems. Leighton and Okumura deserve praise for taking on the daunting task of translating...