Dogen has come a long way. When Zen first got hot in the U.S. during the 1960’s, Dogen was just another obscure Japanese master in the writings of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and the American version of Dogen’s Soto Zen school was just a handful of kids in San Francisco doing zazen at Sokoji with Shunryu Suzuki. These days, Soto Zen is all over the country and Dogen’s name is all over Amazon (780 hits). Dogen must be by now our most famous Zen master, ranking up there in the pantheon of Buddhist authors with stars like Nagarjuna (664 hits).

Dogen’s rise to stardom may be partly a function of the spread of his school in America, but his reputation as a Buddhist author goes beyond his status as founder of the Japanese Soto Zen tradition. Like Nagarjuna, and unlike most Zen masters, he is seen as a philosopher. Unlike Nagarjuna and most Zen masters, he is seen as a philosopher with important things to say about Buddhist practice—both how we should think about it and what we should do about it.

As a philosopher, Dogen is probably best known for his emphasis on what might be called the temporality of the absolute, what he likes to call “the koan of realization”—the claim that the ultimate truth is not a timeless principle but what is actually going on around us; or, to put it from the other side, that what is going on is not just one damned thing after another but the welling up of enlightenment in the world.

As a theorist of the Buddhist religious life, Dogen is known for his doctrine of “the unity of practice and verification”—the view that the goal of Buddhism is not a future state of enlightenment achieved through practice but in the present engagement in practice itself; or, to put it more simply, that the Buddhist life is its own reward, beyond which there is no enlightenment.

As a teacher of Buddhist practice, Dogen is known for his emphasis on attention to the details of whatever we do—a style summarized in the Soto saying, “Buddhism is deportment”—and for a particular approach to meditation, in which the practitioner is encouraged to “cast off body and mind,” abandon efforts to “make a buddha,” and “just sit” as the “embodiment of a buddha.”

These teachings and their author are now well known, in both Japan and the West, but throughout most of Japanese history, they appear to have had little impact outside the monasteries of the Soto Zen tradition. Dogen (1200-1253), though the son of a prominent aristocratic family, seems to have been something of an outsider in Japanese Buddhist circles, and his Soto school, though highly popular in the countryside, played relatively little role in the development of medieval Zen culture.

It is really in the twentieth century, with the wide distribution of his writings in Japan, that Dogen emerged from the cloister into the public eye. Among these writings, by far the most famous is the Shobogenzo (“Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma”), a collection of vernacular essays that typically take the form of comments on passages in Chinese Zen texts. Widely considered one of the masterpieces of Japanese Buddhist literature, the collection has been translated into English several times.

By Carl Bielefeldt, professor of religious studies and co-director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University