Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Dōgen
Summary
Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師; 26 January 1200 – 22 September 1253), also known as Dōgen Kigen (道元希玄), Eihei Dōgen (永平道元), Kōso Jōyō Daishi (高祖承陽大師), or Busshō Dentō Kokushi (仏性伝東国師), was a Japanese Buddhist priest, writer, poet, philosopher, and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan.
Originally ordained as a monk in the Tendai School in Kyoto, he was ultimately dissatisfied with its teaching and traveled to China to seek out what he believed to be a more authentic Buddhism. He remained there for four years, finally training under Tiantong Rujing, an eminent teacher of the Caodong lineage of Chinese Chan. Upon his return to Japan, he began promoting the practice of zazen (sitting meditation) through literary works such as Fukanzazengi and Bendōwa.
He eventually broke relations completely with the powerful Tendai School, and, after several years of likely friction between himself and the establishment, left Kyoto for the mountainous countryside where he founded the monastery Eihei-ji, which remains the head temple of the Sōtō school today.
Dōgen is known for his extensive writing including the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, considered his magnum opus), the Eihei Kōroku (Extensive Record, a collection of his talks), Japanese poetry, commentaries, and the Eihei Shingi, the first Zen monastic code written in Japan.
Dōgen was probably born into a noble family, though as an illegitimate child of Minamoto Michitomo, who served in the imperial court as a high-ranking ashō. His mother is said to have died when Dōgen was age 7.
At some later point, Dōgen became a low-ranking monk on Mount Hiei, the headquarters of the Tendai school of Buddhism. According to the Kenzeiki (建撕記), he became possessed by a single question with regard to the Tendai doctrine:
As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Dharma-nature by birth.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.