The Heart of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō

Book excerpt: The Heart of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō provides exhaustively annotated translations of the difficult core essays of Shōbōgenzō, the masterwork of Japanese Zen master Dōgen Kigen, the founder of Sōtō Zen. This book is centered around those essays that generations have regarded as containing the essence of Dōgen's teaching. These translations, revised from those that first appeared in the 1970s, clarify and enrich the understanding of Dōgen's religious thought and his basic ideas about Zen practice and doctrine. Dōgen's uncommon intellectual gifts, combined with a profound religious attainment and an extraordinary ability to articulate it, make Shōbōgenzō unique even in the vast literature the Zen school has produced over the centuries, securing it a special place in the history of world religious literature.