Dogen

Born into the Kyoto nobility and orphaned young, Dogen became a Tendai monk, traveled to Song China in 1223, and received Dharma transmission from the Caodong master Rujing; back in Japan he founded Eiheiji and the Soto school. His Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) teaches shikantaza, “just sitting,” on the ground that practice and realization are one: zazen is not a means to enlightenment but enlightenment itself enacted, so that the question that drove him, why practice if all beings are Buddha-nature, is answered by practice. Essays such as “Genjokoan,” “Uji” (Being-Time) and “Bussho” (Buddha-Nature) read impermanence itself as Buddha-nature, and his monastic rules (Eihei Shingi) make cooking, washing and bowing the same practice as sitting.

Why he matters: Dogen is the Zen thinker Catholic monks have read most closely: Thomas Merton, Heinrich Dumoulin SJ and Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle SJ, and later Jesuits such as Robert Kennedy and Benedictines in the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, learned from Soto practice a discipline of silence and bodily attention that they compared with the Rule of Benedict and the Jesus Prayer. His insistence that body and mind are one, against the “Senika heresy” of a mind that survives the body's death, is a surprising ally on the unity of the person.