Dogen 1200 – 1253

Eihei Dogen was a 13th-century Japanese Zen Buddhist priest and philosopher, the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan. After studying in China and returning to Japan in 1227, he established Eihei-ji monastery in Echizen Province, which remains one of the two main temples of the Soto school today. His monumental work the Shobogenzo or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye is a vast philosophical and religious text exploring the nature of being, time, practice, and enlightenment. His teaching that practice and enlightenment are inseparable, that sitting meditation is itself the realisation of awakening, defined the subsequent Soto Zen tradition. His treatment of being-time, in the chapter Uji, has attracted comparison with the work of Heidegger and other 20th-century philosophers of time.

Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253) was the founding figure of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Japan and one of the most original Buddhist philosophers of the medieval period. Born to an aristocratic Kyoto family and orphaned young, he was ordained as a Tendai monk on Mount Hiei before traveling to China in 1223 in search of a more authentic Buddhist transmission. He returned in 1227 with the certification of his Chinese Caodong (Sōtō) master.

Dōgen's masterpiece, the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), is a collection of ninety-five fascicles composed over the last twenty-five years of his life. The work develops a sustained philosophical-poetic exploration of practice-realization, time, and the nature of awakening. Dōgen's most distinctive doctrines — the unity of practice and realization, the time-being (uji), the validation of the practice of zazen as itself the fullest expression of awakening — give Sōtō Zen its philosophical character.

Dōgen founded Eiheiji, the principal Sōtō monastery, in 1244 in the remote mountains of present-day Fukui Prefecture. He died in Kyoto in 1253 at fifty-three. The full philosophical recovery of Dōgen has been a relatively recent development; the Kyoto School (Nishida, Nishitani) brought Dōgen into philosophical conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy, and his influence on contemporary Western Buddhist thought has continued to grow.