Dōgen founded the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism in Japan and, in his masterwork the Shōbōgenzō, argued that zazen ("just sitting") meditation is not a means toward enlightenment but is itself the enactment of enlightenment—a unity he called "practice-realization" (shushō-ittō). He also developed a distinctive account of "being-time" (uji), on which temporality is not a container for existence but the very mode in which each being occurs.
Intellectual setting
Dōgen wrote after returning from Song China convinced that Japanese Buddhist institutions had become entangled with court politics and lax practice, and he withdrew to found Eiheiji in the mountains of Echizen specifically to establish a monastic community centered on rigorous zazen practice, apart from the older Kyoto and Nara schools.
Key ideas
Practice-realization and shikantaza
Dōgen rejected the view that meditation is a technique for achieving a separate future state of enlightenment, teaching instead that "just sitting" (shikantaza) without seeking any goal is itself the direct enactment of Buddha-nature, so that practice and realization are one and the same activity.
Being-time (uji)
In the Shōbōgenzō chapter "Uji," Dōgen argued that time and being are inseparable—each existing thing is itself a temporal event—rejecting the view of time as a uniform medium flowing past fixed things.
Legacy
Dōgen is regarded as one of Japan's most original religious philosophers; the Shōbōgenzō is studied as a major work of Japanese philosophical prose, and his treatment of time and being drew sustained attention from twentieth-century Kyoto School philosophers and from Western phenomenologists working on comparable questions in Heidegger.
Scholarly notes
Recensions of the Shōbōgenzō · contested
The Shōbōgenzō survives in several recensions of different lengths and arrangements, so which fascicles belong to it and in what order is an editorial decision rather than a given; the version that reached twentieth-century philosophy was also shaped by Watsuji's rediscovery.