The entire universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.

Dōgen develops the statement as an account of the relation between practitioner and world. Rather than treating the pearl as a hidden substance or as a symbol of underlying metaphysical unity, he uses it to challenge the assumption that self and world are independently constituted domains. “One bright pearl” thus names the totality of experience and existence in Dōgen’s account.

Frontispiece of the Devadatta chapter scroll (chapter 12 of the Lotus Sutra) in the Heike Nokyo, a 12th-century set of sutra scrolls. The dragon king’s daughter Longnü offers her priceless jewel to the Buddha. In Buddhist art and literature, the jewel commonly signifies the preciousness of the Dharma, enlightenment, or reality. The image provides a visual parallel to Dōgen’s Ikka myōju, where the bright pearl names the whole universe without becoming a separate luminous substance. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

The fascicle develops this image through its dialogue with Gensa Shibi, its treatment of the pearl as the entire universe, and its inclusion of doubt, confusion, and ordinary experience within that scope. It also relates to suchness, emptiness, non-self, and Dōgen’s broader account of practice and realization. In this post, we take a closer look at this fascicle and the ways in which Dōgen develops the image of the bright pearl.

Introduction

Ikka myōju (一顆明珠), usually translated as One bright pearl, is one of the early fascicles of Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. It was presented in 1238 at Kannondōri-kōshō-hōrin-ji and later copied by Ejō in 1243. The title consists of ikka, “one”, myō, “bright” or “luminous”, and ju, “pearl”. The phrase therefore means “one bright pearl”. The fascicle centers on a saying by the Chinese Chán master Gensa Shibi:

The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.

Dōgen valued this statement so highly that he devoted an entire fascicle to it. The sentence is short, but its implications are vast. It does not merely say that the universe is beautiful, pure, or radiant. It says that the whole universe, in all ten directions, i.e., in all of its dimensions and aspects, is one bright pearl. The world is not a collection of separate things externally assembled into a whole. It is one luminous reality, one complete field of manifestation, one round and unobstructed Dharma-expression.

This makes Ikka myōju a natural companion to several of Dōgen’s other texts. Inmo uses the ordinary word “it” to point toward suchness, reality as already this. Uji says that all being is time. Busshō interprets Buddha-nature as the whole of existence rather than a hidden inner essence. Sansuikyō says that mountains and waters are themselves a sutra. Ikka myōju expresses the same world from another angle: all of it is one bright pearl.

The pearl gives this account of the world a specific visual form. Its roundness suggests completeness without an external boundary, while its luminosity and reflective surface allow multiplicity to appear without dividing the pearl into separate parts. Dōgen does not, however, use it to posit a mystical object or a hidden reality behind phenomena. The “one bright pearl” designates the universe in its concrete differentiation: Body and mind, grasses and trees, mountains and rivers, life and death, coming and going, confusion and clarity, and even the effort to understand. The universe is therefore not merely compared to a pearl. In Dōgen’s interpretation, the image serves to deny that the many phenomena of the world exist as fully independent entities or that they conceal a separate reality behind them.

The structure of the text

Like other fascicles in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, Ikka myōju unfolds through linked reflections rather than a linear argument.

First, Dōgen introduces Gensa Shibi. Before becoming a monk, Gensa was a fisherman. At the age of 30, he suddenly felt the urge to leave ordinary life, entered the mountains, and became a student of Seppō. Dōgen uses these details to characterize Gensa as a practitioner defined by decisive commitment rather than as a thinker detached from religious practice.

Second, Dōgen recounts the episode in which Gensa injures his toe on a stone while preparing to leave and seek other teachers. The pain makes him reflect on the Buddhist claim that the body is not ultimately real. If the body does not truly exist, where does pain come from? He turns back and remains with Seppō. This becomes a decisive moment of realization.

Third, Dōgen presents Gensa’s famous saying (i.e., “The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.”), the central statement of the fascicle.

Fourth, Dōgen recounts an exchange between Gensa and a monk. The monk asks how to understand the saying. Gensa replies, “The whole universe is one bright pearl. What use is it to understand this?” Later, Gensa asks the monk how he understands it. The monk repeats the master’s earlier words, and Gensa criticizes him for struggling to enter the devil’s cave in a black mountain. This exchange shows that repeating the correct phrase is not the same as realizing it.

Fifth, Dōgen analyzes the meaning of “the whole universe in the ten directions”. It is not merely large or small, round or square, active or clear. Because it is beyond life and death, coming and going, it is precisely real life and death, coming and going. The universe is not a static totality but the ongoing activity of self and world.

Sixth, Dōgen interprets “one bright pearl”. The body and mind now living are the bright pearl. Grasses, trees, mountains, rivers, and all directions are the bright pearl. The pearl passes directly through ten thousand years. It includes past and present without being confined by them.

Seventh, Dōgen returns to the monk’s mistaken repetition. Yesterday Gensa expressed the general principle. Today he asks about the concrete situation. The monk repeats the phrase but does not embody it. Dōgen therefore distinguishes living realization from conceptual imitation.

Eighth, Dōgen expands the pearl image. The whole universe is the one true Dharma-eye, the true body of reality, one phrase, luminous clarity, and the whole universe itself. The pearl rolls freely and is not obstructed by itself. It may appear in empty space, under clothing, under a dragon’s chin, or braided into hair. It changes its appearance, but remains one bright pearl.

Finally, Dōgen concludes that even doubt, worry, thoughts, non-thoughts, forward steps, backward steps, and the devil’s cave in a black mountain are not separate from the bright pearl. The pearl is not only clarity. It includes the very confusion that tries to grasp or deny it.

Taken together, Dōgen constructs the fascicle by using Gensa’s biography, sayings, and encounters as successive stages of interpretation. The account of Gensa’s injured toe first connects the teaching with bodily experience and with the refusal to accept inherited formulations uncritically. The dialogue with the monk then allows Dōgen to distinguish between repeating a statement, understanding it conceptually, and responding to it within a concrete situation. He subsequently takes individual phrases from the exchange and extends their implications to body and mind, temporal change, perception, doubt, and ordinary action. In this way, the inherited stories provide the structure through which Dōgen develops his account of the Dharma: Reality cannot be divided into a self that observes and a world that is observed, nor can realization be separated from the changing conditions in which body, thought, action, error, and understanding occur. His method gradually removes increasingly subtle forms of separation, first between practitioner and world, then between conceptual understanding and practical realization, and finally between experiences regarded as obstacles to awakening and the actual circumstances in which practice takes place.

Ikka myōju

The full text follows:

In-depth analysis of the text

Ikka myōju is built around a single sentence, but Dōgen treats that sentence as an entire universe of practice:

The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.

The analysis below follows the main tracks of the fascicle: Gensa’s biography, the pain of the body, the meaning of the pearl, the failure of mere repetition, and the inclusion of doubt, confusion, and the six worlds within the pearl itself.

Gensa Shibi: From fisherman to Zen master

Dōgen begins with Gensa’s life before monastic practice. Gensa was not originally a learned monk. He was a fisherman who drifted on the Nantai River. Dōgen emphasizes that he had not studied sutras and scriptures in any ordinary scholastic sense. Yet he became one of Seppō’s most outstanding disciples. This biographical opening is not decorative. It makes a point about practice. Gensa’s awakening does not depend on literary learning or institutional prestige. It depends on strong resolve:

If the most important thing is that the will to truth be strong and not superficial, his extraordinary determination is revealed here.

This links Ikka myōju with several other Dōgen texts. In Keisei sanshiki, valley sounds and mountain colors become occasions of realization within an established practice. Shinjin gakudō describes the Way as studied through body and mind. In Ikka myōju, Gensa’s lack of scholastic background does not hinder him because his body and mind are directed toward the Dharma.

The pearl is therefore not a doctrine of detached contemplation. The fascicle presents it through practice, resolve, and bodily immediacy.

Pain, body, and the impossibility of being deceived

The decisive episode occurs when Gensa strikes his toe against a stone:

It is said that this body does not truly exist. Where does the pain come from?

The episode confronts a doctrinal claim about the non-substantiality of the body with the immediate fact of physical pain. If one understands emptiness only conceptually, pain appears as a problem. If the body does not truly exist, why does it hurt? Gensa does not solve this by theoretical explanation. Instead, he abandons his plan to seek other teachers and returns to Seppō. He responds to him:

Ultimately, I cannot let myself be deceived by others.

This does not mean that Gensa rejects Buddhist teaching. Rather, the account denies the adequacy of second-hand understanding: Inherited doctrine cannot be repeated without being tested against direct experience. The stone, toe, pain, body, and teaching become inseparable elements of the episode’s realization.

This passage is important for understanding Dōgen’s attitude toward emptiness. Emptiness is not a denial of concrete experience. The body may be empty of independent essence, but pain is not dismissed. Reality is neither grasped as substantial nor denied as unreal. It is encountered as the bright pearl.

Bodhidharma did not come east

When Seppō asks why Gensa does not leave to deepen his experience, Gensa answers:

Bodhidharma did not come to the eastern land, and the second ancestor did not travel to the western heaven.

What Gensa here does, is to deny that the Dharma could be reached somewhere else than where one already is. Historically, Bodhidharma did travel from India (=the West) to China (=the East). A famous kōan was developed around this story, asking:

What is the meaning of coming from the West?

A kōan destabilizes habitual assumptions and inherited interpretations by bringing them into doubt. Here, the question unsettles the certainty that Bodhidharma simply came from the West and that the journey conceals a deeper meaning. Its force lies in the possibility that no hidden meaning awaits discovery. Gensa’s statement responds directly to this challenge. He adds that the second ancestor, Taiso Eka (Chinese: Huike), did not travel to India to seek the Dharma there. The account consequently rejects the location of the Dharma elsewhere, whether in a distant land or in a teacher who possesses it. In the logic of the “one bright pearl,” the Dharma cannot be divided into here and there.

Gensa’s decision to remain with Seppō does not contradict the claim that the Dharma is not tied to a particular place. Leaving the mountain would not in itself bring him closer to realization. After the incident with the stone, Gensa no longer treats travel as a necessary step in deepening his practice. He remains with Seppō because the decisive question is not where the Dharma can be found, but how it is realized where one already is. This also resonates with Inmo, where the practitioner seeks it because they are already a person of it.

The whole universe in the ten directions

Dōgen further analyzes Gensa’s phrase:

The whole universe in the ten directions is neither wide nor large, neither tiny nor small, neither square nor round; it is not the middle way and not the right way, it is not powerful activity and not stainless clarity.

Thus, the whole universe cannot be captured by spatial or doctrinal categories. It is not simply vast, not simply small, not merely round like a pearl in a physical sense, not merely “middle way”, not merely “right way”, not merely activity, not merely clarity. Dōgen negates all these because the pearl is not a concept. He continues:

Because it is completely beyond life and death, coming and going, it is real life and death, coming and going.

Dōgen does not place the bright pearl outside life and death as a separate or higher reality. To say that it is “beyond” life and death means that it cannot be reduced to either one as an independent state. Life and death, coming and going, are not excluded from it, but are the concrete forms in which reality occurs. This reflects a broader pattern in Dōgen’s thought: Realization does not require leaving the world of change, but understanding change itself as an expression of suchness. The same logic appears in Uji, where being-time is not outside past and present, but the real temporal structure of existence. In Ikka myōju, the pearl is not outside the universe. It is the universe as one luminous reality.

Subject and object within the pearl

Dōgen writes:

“The whole universe” describes the never-ending movement of making objects into ourselves and ourselves into an object.

Dōgen uses this formulation to challenge a model in which a self first exists independently and then encounters an equally independent external object. His wording instead presents self and object as mutually constituted within perception and action. To “make objects into ourselves” can be read as the incorporation of what is encountered into experience, while making “ourselves into an object” points to the way the practitioner also becomes perceptible, situated, and involved in what occurs. The sentence therefore does not describe the universe as a container holding already completed subjects and objects. It describes their distinction as something continuously produced within concrete activity. Dōgen extends this argument to mental and bodily processes:

Rising feelings and the discriminating intellect, which we regard as separate from the whole, are as real as turning the head, changing the expression of the face, doing things, and throwing ourselves into the moment.

The qualification “regarded as separate from the whole” is central to the passage. Dōgen does not reject feeling or discriminating thought in themselves. He criticizes their interpretation as activities of an isolated inner subject standing apart from the rest of experience. By placing emotion and conceptual discrimination beside facial movement, bodily action, and practical involvement, he refuses to divide cognition from embodied activity or assign it to a separate mental domain.

Within the argument of the fascicle, the pearl therefore does not designate a purified condition from which thought, emotion, and discrimination have been removed. Dōgen includes these processes while distinguishing their occurrence from the mistaken belief that they belong to an independently existing self. His interpretation of Gensa’s saying is directed less against conceptual thought itself than against the subject-object framework through which thought is commonly understood.

The pearl passes through ten thousand years

Dōgen says:

The “one pearl” passes directly through ten thousand years. The eternal past is not yet finished, and the eternal now has already begun.

Dōgen uses the image of the pearl to reject the idea that the whole universe exists only at a single point in a linear sequence of time. The expression “ten thousand years” does not assign an immeasurably long lifespan to an object called the pearl. It extends Gensa’s saying across past and present, so that neither can be treated as a self-contained temporal unit. The past continues to participate in the present, while the present is not an isolated instant without temporal depth. This resembles Dōgen’s treatment of time in Uji, where moments are distinct but cannot be reduced to points arranged in a simple chronological line.

Dōgen then applies this temporal interpretation to body and mind:

Although our body now lives and our mind now exists, they are “one bright pearl”.

The statement does not describe body and mind as observers of a reality represented by the pearl. Nor does it present the pearl as an object possessed by them. Dōgen identifies the presently living body and the presently functioning mind with what Gensa’s phrase designates. His interpretation therefore shifts the saying away from cosmological speculation and toward the practitioner’s immediate existence.

When Dōgen adds that body and mind are neither “this” nor “that”, like grasses, trees, mountains, and rivers, he is not denying their differences. He is rejecting the attempt to determine their relation to the whole universe by assigning them fixed identities as separate entities. Within this reading, suchness does not mean that all phenomena become identical. It means that body, mind, grasses, trees, mountains, and rivers cannot be separated from the concrete conditions in which each exists.

What use is it to understand?

The monk asks:

How should we students understand this?

Gensa replies:

The whole universe is one bright pearl. What use is it to understand this?

Gensa’s reply does not amount to a general rejection of understanding. Dōgen himself subjects the phrase to extensive interpretation. The exchange instead questions a particular model of understanding in which the student stands outside the teaching and attempts to acquire its correct conceptual meaning. If the saying includes the student, the question, and the act of asking, it cannot be understood solely as an external proposition. Dōgen nevertheless refuses to dismiss the monk’s question as worthless. He writes that the question appears to arise from karmic consciousness, but that the activity of the Dharma is also expressed through it. The distinction is therefore not between a false question and a true answer. The question itself belongs to the situation through which the teaching is examined, even though the student’s initial approach still treats understanding as something to be obtained.

Dōgen also presents Gensa’s reply as part of the teaching transmitted through the Buddhist lineage, from one Buddha to another and from one ancestor to the next. He thus treats Gensa’s words as continuous with the inherited tradition of Buddhist teaching and practice. Their authority does not rest only on transmission, however: In the fascicle, they are understood and expressed anew within each concrete situation rather than repeated as fixed formulations.

The passage parallels Dōgen’s Inmo. In both fascicles, a practitioner seeks to acquire what has never been separate from them. The problem is not conceptual activity itself, but the assumption that realization can be possessed as knowledge about an external object.

Repetition is not realization

The next day, Gensa reverses the situation and asks the monk:

The whole universe is one bright pearl. How do you understand this?

The monk repeats Gensa’s earlier answer:

The whole universe is one bright pearl. What use is it to understand this?

Gensa responds:

I see that you are struggling to enter the devil’s cave in a black mountain.

The monk’s response reproduces Gensa’s wording accurately, but Gensa rejects it because the function of the words has changed. On the previous day, they answered the monk’s question. On the following day, the monk uses them as a ready-made response to Gensa’s question. The same sentence therefore does not retain the same force merely because its wording remains unchanged. Dōgen explains this shift by distinguishing between the “general principle” expressed yesterday and the “present concrete situation” addressed today:

Yesterday Gensa taught the general principle, but today he takes up the present concrete situation, which is not the general principle.

Dōgen is not opposing abstract doctrine to a supposedly wordless experience. He is showing that Buddhist language functions within particular encounters. The monk fails not because he speaks, but because he treats an earlier statement as a formula that can be detached from the circumstances in which it was first used. The exchange therefore illustrates Dōgen’s broader approach to inherited Chán language. He preserves traditional sayings while refusing to treat them as self-sufficient answers. Their meaning depends on how they are used, who speaks them, what question they address, and whether they continue the inquiry or merely reproduce its vocabulary. Repetition becomes inadequate when it replaces a response to the present situation.

The devil’s cave in a black mountain

Gensa describes the monk as “struggling to enter the devil’s cave in a black mountain.” Within the dialogue, the expression characterizes the monk’s attempt to answer by repeating a statement whose wording he has learned but whose use he has not understood. It does not name a separate metaphysical condition, but describes the confusion produced when inherited language is mistaken for an adequate response.

Dōgen adds a saying attributed to Yakusan:

Even if I say that the sixth lunar month is a beautiful hot time of year, I should not say as a monk that my family name is “Hot”.

The example distinguishes between describing something and identifying oneself with the description. Calling the sixth month hot does not make “Hot” one’s family name. In the same way, repeating the phrase “the whole universe is one bright pearl” does not establish that the speaker has understood how Gensa uses it. Dōgen is criticizing the conversion of a situational statement into a fixed identity or doctrinal possession.

Later, at the end of the fascicle, Dōgen returns to Gensa’s image:

Thus even the steps forward and backward in the devil’s cave in a black mountain are the bright pearl.

Dōgen therefore retains Gensa’s criticism of the monk while refusing to place the monk’s confusion outside the scope of Gensa’s saying. The repeated answer remains inadequate, but the doubt, conceptual struggle, and mistaken use of inherited words still occur within the reality described as the bright pearl. The monk’s answer remains mistaken. Dōgen’s point is that even this mistake, together with the doubt and confusion behind it, occurs within the same reality described by Gensa’s saying. The “devil’s cave in a black mountain” is not a separate realm of error, but one of the many forms in which the bright pearl appears.

Not two or three pearls

Dōgen writes:

Master Gensa does not speak of two or three pearls.

Dōgen emphasizes the word ikka, “one”, in order to prevent Gensa’s saying from being interpreted as a collection of separate beings that each possess their own pearl-like nature. The singular does not erase differences among phenomena, but it rejects the assumption that those differences divide the universe into independently existing units.

Dōgen then presents a series of formulations:

The whole universe is the one true Dharma-eye, the whole universe is the true body of reality, the whole universe is one spoken or written phrase, the whole universe is radiant clarity, and the whole universe is the whole universe itself.

These are not descriptions of several properties possessed by a cosmic object. Dōgen places different expressions from Buddhist teaching in parallel and applies each of them to “the whole universe”. The sequence prevents any one formulation from becoming a final definition. The universe can be described in terms of perception, embodiment, language, clarity, or simply as itself, but none of these terms establishes a separate essence behind phenomena. The final phrase, “the whole universe is the whole universe itself”, is especially important because it interrupts the accumulation of doctrinal language. After identifying the universe with the Dharma-eye, the body of reality, a phrase, and clarity, Dōgen returns to a formulation that adds no further predicate. This limits the tendency to treat the preceding expressions as explanations of what the universe ultimately is. Dōgen continues:

When the whole universe is the whole universe, it is not obstructed by itself, but it has the perfect roundness of a pearl that rolls and rolls.

The movement of the pearl allows Dōgen to describe the whole universe as undivided without presenting it as static. Its unity does not require temporal or material immobility. His interpretation therefore resists two possible readings: That unity depends on a fixed substance, or that change necessarily separates reality into unrelated parts. The rolling pearl represents a whole that remains continuous while its forms and conditions change.

The pearl appears in many places

Dōgen writes:

Exactly in this moment, everything in the whole universe is “one bright pearl”: sometimes it likes to hang openly in empty space or to be hidden under clothing, and sometimes it likes to be hidden under the dragon’s chin or braided into the hair.

Dōgen brings together several established stories and images involving precious pearls. One pearl hangs in empty space, another is concealed inside clothing, another lies beneath a dragon’s chin, and another is placed in the hair. He does not explain these images as parts of a single allegorical system. Instead, he applies Gensa’s phrase to each of them and thereby extends the “one bright pearl” across a range of inherited Buddhist and Chinese motifs.

He then warns:

Do not say that it is on the clothing when it is hanging under the clothing.

The statement continues Dōgen’s treatment of these traditional images. The pearl concealed inside clothing is not extracted and displayed elsewhere, just as the pearl beneath the dragon’s chin or in the hair remains in its setting. Dōgen does not search behind the stories for a purer pearl existing independently of them. He treats the pearl as present in each image exactly in the form that image describes. The passage thus shows how he works with inherited material: It preserves the differences among traditional pearl stories while interpreting them through Gensa’s statement. “One bright pearl” is not a separate object shared by the stories, but the term through which Dōgen brings their distinct situations into his account of the whole universe.

The pearl and the self

Dōgen writes:

Having the pearl in your possession, you should never doubt that you yourselves are the pearl, even if you think: “I cannot be the bright pearl.”

The sentence combines two apparently different relations to the pearl: Possessing it and being it. Dōgen does not resolve this tension by choosing one formulation and rejecting the other. Instead, the contradiction undermines the assumption that a stable self could possess or lack the pearl as an object. The identification of the person addressed with the pearl does not affirm ego as an absolute or inherently luminous substance. The fascicle has already identified body, mind, mountains, rivers, thoughts, and actions with what the pearl designates. The practitioner is included on the same basis rather than elevated above the universe. This is consistent with non-self: If self is not an independent essence, the relation between self and pearl cannot be modeled as ownership between two separate entities. The sentence challenges the position from which a practitioner asks whether they possess or qualify as the pearl. It also resembles Inmo, where the seeker is already described as a person of it. In both cases, Dōgen does not abolish practice or doubt, but questions the assumption that practice begins from complete separation between seeker and sought.

Doubt, opinion, and the narrow intellect

Dōgen warns:

It is only a limited view when you form opinions voluntarily or involuntarily, when you doubt, cling to things, or reject them. This is nothing other than the attempt to adjust the pearl to the narrow intellect.

Dōgen does not condemn all thought, interpretation, or doubt. Elsewhere in the fascicle he explicitly includes thoughts and non-thoughts within the scope of the pearl. His criticism concerns the attempt to make Gensa’s saying conform to categories that are treated as complete and authoritative in advance. The “narrow intellect” therefore does not simply mean rational thought. It refers more specifically to an interpretive stance that reduces the whole universe to a proposition that can be accepted, rejected, possessed, or classified. Opinions, doubt, attachment, and rejection become restrictive when they are used to force the saying into a fixed conceptual scheme. This warning also applies to philosophical interpretations of the fascicle. The phrase “one bright pearl” can easily be recast as a doctrine of cosmic unity, an assertion of universal consciousness, or a claim about an underlying luminous substance. None of these interpretations follows necessarily from Dōgen’s text. His repeated reformulations instead frustrate the attempt to stabilize the pearl as one explanatory concept.

Dōgen then asks:

How could you not love the bright pearl?

The language of love and references to limitless color and light belong to Dōgen’s affirmative rhetoric, rather than establishing a hidden metaphysics of luminosity. After criticizing conceptual restriction of the pearl, he shifts to appreciation of the inexhaustible phenomena included in Gensa’s saying.

The six worlds are the pearl

Dōgen writes:

Do not worry about falling or not falling into the six worlds of cause and effect. The six worlds themselves are the original state, right from beginning to end and never unclear, and they have the bright pearl as their face and eye.

The passage extends Gensa’s saying to the six worlds of rebirth and suffering. Dōgen thereby prevents the pearl from being restricted to purified, awakened, or pleasant forms of existence. States conventionally associated with samsaric existence belong to the same account. “Original state” need not imply an eternal substrate beneath the six worlds. In context, it indicates that they are not deviations from a separate reality represented by the pearl. Dōgen treats them as present from beginning to end within the conditions described by Gensa’s statement. This neither erases ethical distinctions nor makes suffering insignificant. His point is narrower: Samsaric existence cannot be assigned to one domain and the pearl to another. The distinction between delusion and realization remains relevant without dividing existence into independently constituted realities. This is compatible with a central Mahāyāna refusal to locate Nirvana in a separate world outside samsara.

Mind beyond personal possession

Dōgen concludes:

Thanks to Master Gensa’s Dharma words, you have heard, recognized, and clarified the real state of body and mind, that it has already become the bright pearl. After this, the mind is not something that belongs to you personally.

Dōgen uses Gensa’s saying to challenge the treatment of mind as private property located inside an independent subject. The phrase “does not belong personally” does not deny that individual mental processes occur. It rejects the assumption that thoughts, perceptions, and feelings originate within a self-contained owner standing apart from the rest of the world. This conclusion follows from the earlier discussion of making objects into ourselves and ourselves into an object. If self and object arise relationally within perception and action, mind cannot be isolated as a private interior domain. Dōgen’s argument is directed against ownership and separation, not the existence of mental activity. He then asks:

Why, then, should you worry about whether it is or is not the bright pearl?

The question resembles the reasoning of Inmo. A practitioner worries whether body and mind satisfy a condition from which they are already described as inseparable. Dōgen does not answer by proving that an individual possesses a special nature. He questions the conceptual position that divides body and mind from the whole universe before asking how they can be reunited.

Dōgen finally includes opinions, worries, actions, and thoughts within the scope of Gensa’s statement:

Even opinions and worries do not differ from the bright pearl. No action and no thought has ever been caused by anything other than the bright pearl.

The passage does not establish fatalism or a cosmic agent causing every event. Dōgen does not identify the pearl as a causal substance. He denies that thoughts and actions originate from an independent source outside the conditions described as the whole universe. Opinions and worries can remain confused or limiting, but they do not arise from a separate self-standing domain. Even the monk’s mistaken repetition and movement within the “devil’s cave” remain part of the situation Dōgen analyzes.

Ikka myōju in a nutshell

The central arguments of Ikka myōju can be summarized as follows:

• Gensa’s pearl serves as a model for the relation between the individual and the whole universe.
  Dōgen interprets the phrase “one bright pearl” as a denial that the practitioner and the surrounding world exist as independently constituted domains.
• The pearl does not refer to a hidden substance behind phenomena.
  Dōgen applies the image to body, mind, natural objects, actions, thoughts, and temporal change. It therefore functions as a description of concrete existence rather than of a separate metaphysical reality.
• The word “one” does not erase differences among phenomena.
  Dōgen rejects the idea that the universe consists of isolated entities, but he does not claim that all things are identical. Particular bodies, places, events, and states remain distinguishable within the unity expressed by Gensa’s saying.
• Unity is compatible with change.
  The image of the rolling pearl allows Dōgen to describe the universe as undivided without making it static. Temporal and material transformation do not require reality to fragment into unrelated parts.
• Body and mind are included within what the pearl designates.
  They are not presented as observers standing outside the universe or as owners of a truth represented by the pearl. Dōgen uses the image to question this subject-object division.
• The episode of Gensa’s injured toe tests doctrine against bodily experience.
  The story challenges an interpretation of emptiness that would reduce the body and pain to mere unreality. Gensa refuses to accept inherited teaching without examining how it applies to concrete experience.
• Conceptual understanding is necessary but insufficient.
  Gensa’s question does not reject interpretation as such. It criticizes the assumption that the teaching can be possessed as knowledge about an object external to the practitioner.
• The meaning of inherited words depends on their use in a concrete situation.
  The monk repeats Gensa’s earlier response accurately, but the same words no longer answer the new question. Dōgen thereby distinguishes active engagement with inherited language from mechanical repetition.
• Mistaken understanding remains part of the situation being analyzed.
  Dōgen criticizes the monk’s confusion without assigning it to a separate reality outside the scope of Gensa’s saying. Error remains error, but it still occurs within the world under discussion.
• Doubt does not establish separation from the Dharma.
  The thought “I cannot be the bright pearl” expresses uncertainty, but it does not create an independent self outside the conditions described by the phrase.
• The six worlds are not excluded from Dōgen’s account.
  Cause and effect, suffering, and the six realms cannot be assigned to one reality while awakening belongs to another. This does not abolish ethical or practical distinctions between delusion and realization.
• Mind is not treated as the private possession of an independent self.
  Dōgen’s statement that mind does not belong personally to the practitioner challenges the model of an isolated inner subject from which thoughts and perceptions originate.
• The fascicle expands Gensa’s saying until it includes its own misunderstanding.
  By returning at the end to the “devil’s cave in a black mountain”, Dōgen shows that conceptual confusion and failed responses do not stand outside the reality to which the saying refers, even though they remain subject to criticism.

Ikka myōju and core Buddhist concepts

Dōgen does not organize Ikka myōju as a systematic discussion of Buddhist doctrine. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Gensa’s saying can be related to several central Buddhist concepts:

• Suchness (tathatā)
  Dōgen does not present the bright pearl as a reality concealed behind appearances. He applies Gensa’s phrase directly to body, mind, mountains, rivers, actions, thoughts, and changing situations. The image can therefore be read as a way of describing phenomena without separating them from a supposedly more authentic reality behind them.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  The pearl is not described as an independently existing cosmic substance. Dōgen repeatedly identifies it with changing bodies, thoughts, actions, temporal relations, and forms of experience. This makes an essentialist interpretation difficult, although the fascicle does not present a formal analysis of emptiness.
• Non-self (anattā)
  Dōgen rejects the model of an independent self that observes, possesses, or stands outside the reality designated by the pearl. His statement that mind does not belong personally to the practitioner challenges the idea of a self-contained owner of thought and experience.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  By connecting the pearl with past and present, life and death, and coming and going, Dōgen includes temporal change within his interpretation of Gensa’s saying. The unity expressed by the pearl is therefore not based on permanence or immobility.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Dōgen’s description of making objects into ourselves and ourselves into an object can be read in relation to dependent arising because it presents self and object as mutually constituted rather than independently given. The fascicle does not explicitly explain this process through the classical formula of dependent origination, so the connection remains interpretative.
• Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)
  Dōgen’s interpretation resembles his argument in Busshō, where Buddha-nature is not treated as a hidden property inside beings. In both cases, he resists an essentialist distinction between an ordinary world of appearances and a concealed awakened nature behind it.
• Practice-realization
  The exchange between Gensa and the monk shows that preserving the correct words does not by itself constitute realization. Dōgen distinguishes between repeating an inherited statement and responding adequately within the present situation.
• Dharma-position
  Dōgen’s treatment of the different pearl stories preserves their specific settings rather than reducing them to interchangeable examples of one abstract object. This resembles his broader emphasis on each phenomenon occurring in its particular temporal and relational position.
• Samsara and nirvana
  By including the six worlds of cause and effect within the scope of Gensa’s saying, Dōgen rejects a simple division between a defiled world of suffering and a separate purified reality. This does not make samsara and awakening equivalent or eliminate the practical need for liberation.
• Middle Way
  Dōgen’s interpretation avoids presenting the pearl either as a material object encompassing the universe or as a spiritual essence underlying it. The image instead allows him to reject both an account based on independently existing things and one based on a hidden metaphysical unity.

Philosophical implications

Ikka myōju is philosophically interesting because it gives Dōgen’s nondual account a precise image. The whole universe is one bright pearl, but this neither reduces all things to a single substance nor presents them as separate entities externally related. The pearl includes grasses, trees, mountains, rivers, body, mind, life, death, coming, going, doubt, worry, and conceptual failure. It thus expresses non-obstruction: The universe remains whole without erasing differences, dynamic without becoming fragmented, and luminous without standing apart from confusion. Even the six worlds and the devil’s cave belong to the pearl. The fascicle consequently does not locate realization in a pure realm outside ordinary existence, but within ordinary existence without treating it as an object of possession.

The episode of Gensa’s injured toe prevents a false reading of emptiness. Although body is empty of independent essence, the fascicle does not dismiss pain as illusion. Gensa’s insight occurs when doctrinal language about non-existence meets physical pain. The body is neither fixed substance nor nothing, but the bright pearl as bleeding toe, pain, stone, and return to the teacher.

The exchange between Gensa and the monk also clarifies Dōgen’s understanding of Zen language. Correct words become inadequate when repeated without realization. Yesterday’s answer is not necessarily today’s answer. The Dharma is not transmitted as a formula, but through a phrase arising from a concrete situation. This explains Dōgen’s criticism of the monk’s repetition of Gensa’s answer: The monk has the words but not the pearl.

Finally, the fascicle deepens Dōgen’s critique of personal ownership. Mind is not private property, and body and mind have already become the bright pearl. The question of whether a self is the pearl already misconstrues the issue because the questioner is not outside the pearl. Even worry about being the pearl belongs to the pearl. This is not a doctrine of reassurance but a critique of reducing the universe to the narrow intellect.

Conclusion

In Ikka myōju, Dōgen takes Gensa’s statement,

The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl

and develops it into an account of the relation between practitioner and world. The image rejects two opposing models: A universe composed of fully independent entities and a hidden unity behind observable phenomena. Dōgen instead applies Gensa’s phrase to body and mind, natural objects, temporal change, bodily pain, thought, doubt, and the six worlds. The pearl functions less as the description of a cosmic object than as an instrument for questioning the divisions through which these phenomena are usually understood.

The fascicle also clarifies how Dōgen approaches suchness. Suchness does not name a more authentic reality concealed behind appearances. It concerns the concrete occurrence of body, mind, perception, action, pain, life, death, and change without assigning them to separate ontological domains. Dōgen neither abolishes distinctions among these phenomena nor identifies confusion with realization. He rejects the assumption that their differences require an independent self on one side and an external world on the other.

Dōgen develops this argument through inherited Chán stories rather than systematic definition. Gensa’s injured toe tests doctrine against bodily experience. The dialogue with the monk distinguishes a response to the present situation from mechanical repetition. And the inclusion of doubt, opinion, and the “devil’s cave” prevents mistaken understanding from being assigned outside the reality under discussion. In each case, inherited material challenges another form of separation.

The practical implication is not that conceptual understanding is worthless, but that it cannot function as possession of the Dharma. Words remain necessary, as Dōgen’s extended analysis demonstrates, but their adequacy depends on their use within practice. Ikka myōju therefore presents realization not as access to another reality, but as a change in how the relations among self, world, thought, embodiment, and experience are understood and enacted.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

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Regarding the latter, the last time I visited the museum was when I was a school kid. Since then, the museum has been completely rebuilt and modernized, and it was a very interesting experience to see how the museum has changed over the years. I think, it’s really worth a visit, especially as now, not only the museum itself is considered of being part of a visit, but also the surrounding landscape, which includes the Neanderthal valley and the location where the first Neanderthal fossil was found. At that location, a high tower has been built, which allows to have a good overview of the valley and the surrounding landscape. The museum itself is very modern and interactive, and it provides a lot of information about the Neanderthals and their way of life. Overall, it was a very interesting experience, and I would definitely recommend a visit to the museum and the surrounding area.

Apart from that, we also enjoyed the August 12 2026 solar eclipse, which was visible at our location here in Cologne. We watched it at the physics campus and it was the last visible solar eclipse in Germany for a while, so it was a very special experience. We watched it with special glasses and it was really amazing to see the moon covering the sun. I tried to take some photos with my smartphone. Check out my Mastodon accountꜛ, where I posted some of them.

The images are currently part of an on-going album on flickrꜛ. They will be available here soon.

Picture No. 9 of the so-called Oxherding Pictures (十牛図, jūgyūzu), a series of ten images depicting stages of cultivation in Zen Buddhism. Painted by the Japanese Rinzai Zen monk Shubun in the 15th century after lost 12th-century originals, it is titled “Returning to the source” and shows a river running along a wooded bank. I’ve chosen the image for this post as it offers a visual parallel to Inmo in my view: Dōgen examines an ungraspable “it” that cannot be attained as an object, while the return-to-the-source motif suspends the distinction between a seeker and a reality to be recovered. What remains is not the discovery of something hidden elsewhere, but the ordinary world appearing as it already is. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

The fascicle uses this ordinary expression to approach suchness without treating it as a separate metaphysical reality. It asks why we seek what we already are, how body and mind can be present without belonging to a fixed self, and how ground, emptiness, movement, perception, wisdom, and doubt can all belong to the same ungraspable field.

In this post, we therefore take a closer look at Dōgen’s Inmo and examine how the fascicle approaches suchness without turning it into a fixed concept or metaphysical principle.

Introduction

Inmo (恁麼), sometimes rendered as “it”, “this”, “thus”, “such”, “what”, or “how”, is one of the most elusive terms in Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. It was an everyday expression in Song-dynasty China, used to indicate something obvious, something that does not require explanation, or something referred to simply as “this” or “that”. Chinese Chán masters adopted the term to point toward the truth or reality that cannot be grasped by concepts and does not call for explanation as an object. This makes Inmo one of Dōgen’s most direct reflections on suchness, although the text does not present suchness as an abstract doctrine. Dōgen does not define inmo once and for all. He circles around it through sayings, stories, paradoxes, and concrete images: being already a person of it, falling to the ground and getting up from the ground, the bell and wind, the moving flag, the wisdom that comes to wisdom, the sixth ancestor hearing the Diamond Sutra, and the question, “What is this something that has thus come?”

The difficulty of Inmo lies in the fact that the term points to what is closest and most immediate. It does not name a remote metaphysical principle. It points to reality as it is already present, before it is turned into an object of thought. It is the “such” of suchness, the “this” of this body and mind, the “it” of what is already here, the “thus” of what has come just as it is. Yet precisely because it is so near, it cannot be grasped by ordinary conceptual thought.

Inmo therefore belongs together with several of Dōgen’s other central texts. Uji says that being is time. Busshō says that Buddha-nature is not a hidden essence but the whole of existence. Sansuikyō says that mountains and waters are a living sutra. Keisei sanshiki says that the valley’s voice and the mountains’ form disclose the Dharma. Inmo asks how all of this can be understood when reality is simply “it”, already so, already such, already beyond possession and explanation.

The structure of the text

As for the entire Shōbōgenzō, Inmo unfolds through a series of connected reflections rather than through a linear argument.

First, Dōgen introduces the saying of Master Ungo Dōyō:

If you want to attain the thing that is “it”, you must be a person who is “it”. Since you are already a person who is “it”, why should you worry about attaining the thing that is “it”?

This is the central statement of the fascicle. The practitioner seeks it, but the seeker is already a person of it. The anxiety of attainment is therefore itself misplaced, although even that anxiety is not outside it.

Second, Dōgen reflects on body, mind, impermanence, and the awakening of bodhi-mind. In his argument, body and mind are manifested throughout the world without belonging to an independent self. Life moves too quickly to be grasped, and even the pure mind does not remain still. Yet something awakens and seeks the Dharma. This seeking shows that the seeker is already a person of it.

Third, Dōgen develops the image of falling to the ground and getting up from the ground. Rising occurs where falling occurs. Dōgen then radicalizes the image: Neither ground nor emptiness alone is sufficient for rising. The image brings together materiality and emptiness, body and openness, concrete support and ungraspability.

Fourth, Dōgen discusses the story of Samghanandi and Geyata, in which the sound of a bell moved by the wind is attributed neither simply to the wind nor to the bell, but to “my mind”. Dōgen rejects the interpretation that sound is merely produced or recognized by an observing mind. Instead, the story questions the separation between perceiver, perceived object, and event: wind, bell, hearing, and ringing belong to one concrete occurrence and cannot be reduced to any single component.

Fifth, Dōgen analyzes the famous story of the sixth ancestor and the moving flag. The sixth ancestor attributes movement to mind rather than wind or flag. Dōgen refuses a psychological interpretation in which only a personal mind moves. Instead, the universal mind is wind, flag, and movement; the text accordingly identifies the person addressed with movement.

Sixth, Dōgen presents the sixth ancestor, Huineng as an example of wisdom directly meeting wisdom. Huineng hears the Diamond Sutra without prior training and awakens. This is not because wisdom comes from outside or from inside. Wisdom transmits wisdom directly. We will see what he means by this when we look at the story of transmission between the fifth and sixth ancestors.

Seventh, Dōgen reflects on wisdom, doubt, and change. Seasonal images such as spring pines and autumn chrysanthemums illustrate that suchness is not a fixed state but the concrete reality of things as they appear under changing conditions. Wisdom and non-wisdom are therefore not treated as two completely separate domains: Both arise within the same field of experience and are included in what Dōgen calls inmo.

Eighth, Dōgen recounts the transmission between the fifth and sixth ancestors. The episode takes place during Huineng’s work pounding rice and is communicated through a sequence of gestures rather than explicit doctrinal explanation. Dōgen uses the story to show that Dharma transmission cannot be reduced to the transfer of verbal knowledge: It is enacted and recognized within a concrete relationship between teacher and student, even when its meaning is not fully available to ordinary reflective awareness.

Finally, Dōgen presents two dialogues that address the limits of conceptual description. Nangaku tells Yakusan that inmo cannot be grasped either by affirming that it is “so” or by denying that it is so. Daikan’s question to Nangaku, “What is this something that has thus come?””, then shifts attention from defining reality to encountering each concrete phenomenon as it appears. Suchness is therefore not presented as an underlying substance or principle, but as the ungraspable yet concrete character of things as they are.

Inmo

Before we continue, here’s the full fascicle:

In-depth analysis of the text

Inmo is among Dōgen’s compact but philosophically far-reaching Shōbōgenzō fascicles. It asks how reality can be indicated when it is already present and functioning, yet cannot be grasped as an object. The ordinary word inmo becomes Dōgen’s means of speaking about what is closest, most evident, and most resistant to explanation.

The following sections trace the fascicle’s key themes and images in the order in which they develop.

Inmo as the obvious and ungraspable “it”

The term inmo comes from ordinary Chinese usage. In everyday speech, it identifies something already established by context rather than explaining it. Chán/Zen masters employ the expression for the Dharma precisely because the Dharma cannot be captured by abstract definition. In Dōgen’s use, this is not vagueness but concreteness: Body, mind, sound, movement, question, doubt, falling, and rising all belong to its range. His inmo is consequently close to suchness, without naming a metaphysical substance behind things. It indicates phenomena prior to the conceptual division of subject and object, being and non-being, attainment and lack, or worry and freedom from worry.

Inmo and attainment

The central saying of the text comes from Ungo Dōyō, the 39th ancestor in the Sōtō Zen lineage and a Dharma successor of Tōzan Ryōkai, the 13th ancestor and actual founder of the Sōtō school. He says:

If you want to attain the thing that is “it”, you must be a person who is “it”. Since you are already a person who is “it”, why should you worry about attaining the thing that is “it”?

This saying establishes the basic structure of Dōgen’s argument. The desire to attain it already arises in someone who is a person of it. The fascicle therefore does not present the Dharma as an external object of acquisition; seeking takes place within the field it seeks to attain. Dōgen writes:

You know it because you long to attain it.

The longing functions as evidence rather than as a merely private project: The fascicle treats it as it in the mode of seeking. The desire to hear or experience what is not yet known is thereby presented as a manifestation of suchness, not as proof that realization has been completed. Practice begins within reality rather than outside it. Dōgen also writes:

Since the worry itself is also “it”, “it” is beyond worry.

The formulation places worry about attainment within suchness. Anxiety, doubt, and confusion are not separate from it, but neither do they define it. This resembles Dōgen’s treatment of doubt in Uji, where doubt belongs to the temporal movement of reality. Inmo is not a state of worry or freedom from worry, but the field in which both arise.

Body and mind beyond possession

Dōgen frames the question of how it exists as follows:

We know it because our body and mind manifest themselves throughout the whole world, but neither body nor mind belongs to us.

This sentence links Inmo directly to non-self. Body and mind appear without being owned by an independent self. The body cannot be possessed because life moves too quickly for possession:

Not even the body is ours, because its life flies by like an arrow and we cannot stop it for even a moment.

Dōgen makes this claim through concrete examples: The rosy face of childhood vanishes, past moments cannot be recovered, and the pure mind comes and goes moment by moment. This is not a pessimistic claim, but a basis for suchness. Since body and mind cannot be owned, they manifest throughout the world and belong to the field of the Dharma. Inmo is thus not an object grasped by a self, but what body and mind already are when possession is relinquished.

Awakening does not rest only on personal will

Dōgen writes:

Once this mind awakens, we end our “games” and want to hear what we have never heard and experience what we have never experienced. This does not rest only on our own will.

The awakening of bodhi-mind is not merely an act of personal decision. It arises through conditions, yet cannot be reduced to calculation. The fascicle describes a practitioner as drawn toward the Dharma by a movement that is not owned by a self. Inmo thereby avoids both self-power and passivity: The wish for the Dharma is it functioning as the wish for the Dharma. In the vocabulary of dependent arising, awakening arises through causes and conditions. In Dōgen’s terms, it arises because someone is already a person of it.

Falling to the ground and getting up from the ground

Dōgen introduces a traditional saying:

When someone falls to the ground, they also get up again from the ground. If they wanted to get up without using the ground, this would ultimately be impossible.

The image is both practical and direct: Rising occurs where falling occurs. In Buddhist terms, Dōgen does not locate the resolution of delusion outside the concrete situation in which it appears. The ground of falling becomes the support for rising. He interprets the image as a principle of realization:

If someone asks you what the principle is by which all Buddhas realized the truth, you can say that “it” is like someone falling to the ground and standing up again from the ground.

This is a concrete account of practice. The Dharma is not realized by abandoning the ground of body, karma, confusion, and situation. The same ground makes rising possible. Fall and ground are therefore not outside the path or separate from awakening.

Dōgen then expands the image:

The great awakening, non-awakening, falling back into delusion, or the ceasing of delusion are nothing other than awakening just as it is and nothing other than delusion just as it is.

This is not a careless equivalence of delusion and awakening. The passage treats each in its suchness: Awakening as awakening, delusion as delusion, falling as falling, and rising as rising. Each is inmo, just so.

Ground and emptiness

Dōgen then qualifies the traditional formulation: Rising cannot rely on the ground alone.

One who has fallen and supports themselves on the ground can get up only if they also support themselves on emptiness. Conversely, one who supports themselves on emptiness after falling can get up only if they also support themselves on the ground.

This passage brings together ground and emptiness. Ground denotes concrete material support. Emptiness denotes the ungraspable openness of all dharmas. Dōgen refuses an exclusive reliance either on material ground or on emptiness, thereby rejecting the corresponding extremes of materialism and abstraction. The Buddha Way holds the concrete and the empty together without making them separate domains or possessions. His claim that emptiness is infinitely far from the ground prevents their easy identification: Ground remains ground, and emptiness remains emptiness, while rising depends on both. The passage thus provides a practical interpretation of the Middle Way.

This may find a surprising parallel in the thought of Meister Eckhart, especially in his concept of the Grund, the “ground” of the soul. At least at first glance. Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic who also used the image of ground to describe the deepest level of spiritual reality. For Eckhart, the Grund is the innermost, undifferentiated depth of the “soul”, where the distinction between the soul’s ground and God’s ground is overcome. It is not ordinary material ground, but the imageless and detached depth in which the divine birth occurs and in which the soul is united with the Godhead. Dōgen’s ground, by contrast, is not an inward metaphysical foundation of the self and does not designate a hidden spiritual depth beneath appearances. It is the concrete ground on which one falls, while emptiness refers to the absence of independent essence in all dharmas. Both thinkers use the image of ground to challenge the idea of an isolated and self-sufficient ego, but they do so within different philosophical frameworks. Eckhart leads the self beyond its created individuality into the ground shared with the divine. Dōgen shows that neither concrete existence nor emptiness can function as an independently graspable foundation. Eckhart’s Grund belongs to a Christian metaphysics of divine unity. Dōgen’s relation between ground and emptiness belongs to a Buddhist account of dependent arising and non-substantiality. The concepts are therefore comparable at the level of self-transcendence, but they are not equivalent.

The ringing of wind, bell, and mind

The story of Samghanandi and Geyata begins with a ringing bell moved by wind:

Is this the ringing of the wind or the ringing of the bell?

Geyata answers:

Neither the wind nor the bell rings. It is my mind that rings.

This answer could be read as the claim that sound exists only in the mind, but Dōgen explicitly rejects that interpretation. For him, “my mind rings” does not describe a personal consciousness attending to sound. It displaces the ordinary separation of ringing, wind, bell, mind, stillness, and all dharmas. Geyata explains:

It rings because everything is still.

The statement is paradoxical only if ringing and stillness are treated as opposites. Dōgen writes:

When just one dharma is still, the ten thousand dharmas are still. When the blowing of the wind is still, the ringing of the bell is also still.

Ringing is not opposed to stillness but constitutes its ringing. Stillness is not an absence of sound, but the settled suchness of each dharma. This recalls the logic of Sansuikyō, where mountains are still and moving at once.

Dōgen then says:

The ringing of mind is not the ringing of wind; the ringing of mind is not the ringing of the bell, and the ringing of mind is also not the ringing of the ordinary mind.

The formulation negates simple identifications before allowing a further formulation:

The wind rings, the bell rings, the blowing rings, and the ringing rings.

The point is not a reduction of everything to mind. Each dharma rings as itself: Wind as wind, bell as bell, blowing as blowing, and ringing as ringing. This is inmo: Each thing is just so.

The moving flag and the moving mind

The famous flag story is similar. Two monks argue whether the wind or the flag is moving. The sixth ancestor says:

Neither the wind nor the flag moves. You are the mind that moves.

Again, Dōgen rejects the idea that the phrase “mind moves” merely denotes a personal mind experiencing movement. He writes:

With this statement, the sixth ancestor means that the universal mind is both the wind and the flag and the movement.

Wind, flag, and movement are neither external objects observed by an inner mind nor mere projections of subjective consciousness. Mind here is not personal mind, but the field in which wind, flag, movement, and the person addressed appear.

Dōgen then radicalizes the phrase:

We can leave the words “you are the mind that moves” as they are, but we could just as well say: “You are the movement.”

This is a strong expression of non-self and process. The self is not a fixed observer to which motion is added, but movement. The person is the movement of the Dharma. Dōgen explains:

Because movement is movement, and because you are you. We say this because you are already people who are “it”.

Movement is not reduced to a person, nor is a person reduced to movement. Each remains itself, while suchness permits the identification of the person addressed with movement. This is the grammar of inmo.

Wisdom directly transmits wisdom

The section on the sixth ancestor turns to the question of immediate awakening. The sixth ancestor was an uneducated woodcutter who heard the Diamond Sutra and awakened. Dōgen uses this story to discuss wisdom:

Such wisdom is not obtained from others, and it does not come from oneself. Rather, wisdom directly transmits wisdom, and wisdom comes directly to wisdom.

This sentence rejects both externalism and internalism. Wisdom does not arrive from outside as a possession transferred to a self, nor does it arise from a self as private property. Wisdom meets wisdom. The Dharma recognizes the Dharma. Dōgen extends the claim to fish and bats who hear the Dharma and immediately understand. Wisdom is consequently not limited by ordinary assumptions about intelligence, education, or self-generated effort.

Wisdom does not come, and you do not enter into it. It is like the spirit of spring, which is a complete unity with spring.

Wisdom is not a thing moving from one place to another. It is not an object entered by a subject. It is like spring being spring. Spring does not enter spring. Spring does not receive spring from elsewhere. Spring is the suchness of spring.

This is a particularly clear connection between Inmo and suchness. Wisdom is not a possession but reality’s direct functioning as itself.

The jewel in the stone

Dōgen gives the image:

It is like a jewel enclosed in a stone. The jewel does not know that it is hidden in the stone, and the stone does not know that a jewel is enclosed in it. A human being can recognize the jewel and can remove it.

The image could suggest a doctrine of hidden essence, but Dōgen’s interpretation prevents that reading. Neither jewel nor stone knows, and recognition arises neither from the thought of the jewel nor from the stone’s knowledge. This does not imply that each person contains a fixed spiritual jewel. Dōgen has already rejected such essentialist readings in Busshō. Here, the image stages the relation of wisdom and ignorance: Wisdom may already be present without being self-owned or self-produced.

Spring pines and autumn chrysanthemums

Dōgen writes:

There is the wisdom of the being of a moment of the pine in spring, and there is the wisdom of the without-something-being of the chrysanthemum in autumn.

This sentence connects Inmo to Keisei sanshiki and Sansuikyō. Natural forms do not illustrate wisdom but express it as seasonal specificity: The spring pine has the wisdom of being, and the autumn chrysanthemum that of being without something. Dōgen does not reduce this relation to symbolic contrast. Spring pine is spring pine, autumn chrysanthemum is autumn chrysanthemum, and each is inmo.

He continues:

Since all this is already “it”, there is wisdom and non-wisdom, and there is the face of the sun and the face of the moon.

Wisdom and non-wisdom are both within it. Sun-face and moon-face, a phrase known from Zen literature, refer to a long-lived Buddha and a Buddha who lives for only one day and one night. They therefore express long and short life, health and illness, and life and death without ranking them as absolute opposites. Suchness includes both.

Transmission without ordinary awareness

Dōgen recounts the secret transmission between the fifth and sixth ancestors. The fifth ancestor strikes three times with the rice pestle. The sixth ancestor sifts rice three times. Dōgen comments:

It is said that the truth of the master and that of the student joined in this moment. They themselves were not aware of it, and others could not understand it, and yet the Dharma and the robe were transmitted exactly in this moment.

Transmission occurs, but not as an object of ordinary consciousness. The master and student do not possess it as knowledge. Others cannot recognize it. Yet it happens. This is another form of inmo: it is simply so.

The rice-pounding scene is also important because transmission occurs through bodily action. Striking, sifting, rice, night, labor, and silence become the field of Dharma-transmission. This links Inmo to Shinjin gakudō, where the Way is studied with body and mind. Suchness is not only thought. It is enacted.

“So” and “not so” are both ungraspable

Yakusan asks Nangaku about the teaching that points directly to the human heart so that one may see one’s nature and become Buddha. Nangaku replies:

That “it” is so cannot be grasped, and that “it” is not so also cannot be grasped. Either way, “it” is completely ungraspable. What do you think of this?

This is one of the fascicle’s most direct philosophical statements. It cannot be grasped either as “so” or as “not so”: Both affirmation and negation fail. Yet Dōgen does not leave the matter in abstraction. He writes:

Because “it” is truly completely ungraspable, one cannot say that it is so or not so. Suchness describes it.

This is close to Madhyamaka logic, but Dōgen makes the ungraspable a matter of practice rather than a logical formula. He writes:

You should learn “it” in the ungraspable itself, and you should investigate the ungraspable by being “it” yourselves.

This passage states the fascicle’s central logic. Suchness cannot be grasped as an object, but is enacted through being it. The study of inmo therefore does not consist in definition. It concerns the ungraspable in body, mind, action, and world.

“What is this something that has thus come?”

The final dialogue concerns Nangaku and the sixth ancestor:

What is this something that has thus come?

This question is among the most famous in Dōgen’s tradition. It asks about “this something”, but does not define it. It points to what has come thus, as it is. Dōgen comments:

Because it is “something”, you should experience and investigate for yourselves that the ten thousand things are in reality always “something”. You should experience and investigate for yourselves that each individual thing is in truth “something”. This ungraspable “something” is beyond all doubt: it has thus come.

This is Dōgen’s final formulation of inmo. The ten thousand things are each “something,” not in the sense of fixed substance but as concrete suchness. Each has thus come: It is neither nothing, mere concept, nor mere appearance, and it has no independent essence. It is this ungraspable something.

This final question also resonates with tathāgata, “thus come” or “thus gone.” The reality of each thing is its thusness: It has come as such and cannot be captured by calling it so or not so. It is simply inmo.

Inmo in a nutshell

The central aspects of Inmo can be summarized as follows:

• Inmo means “it”, “this”, “thus”, or “such”.
  It is an ordinary word used by Zen masters to point to what is obvious, immediate, and ungraspable.
• Seeking presupposes already being it.
  The fascicle treats longing for the Dharma as evidence that the seeker is already a person of it.
• Worry and doubt are also it.
  Anxiety about attainment is not outside suchness, but suchness is not defined by anxiety.
• Body and mind do not belong to the self.
  Body and mind manifest throughout the whole world but cannot be owned by an independent self.
• Rising occurs where falling occurs.
  Delusion and awakening take place on the same ground. The concrete situation is not abandoned in order to awaken.
• Ground and emptiness are mutually necessary.
  The Buddha Way avoids both materialism and abstract emptiness. Rising depends on ground and emptiness together.
• Mind is not personal subjectivity.
  In the bell and flag stories, “mind” is not an inner observer. It is the field in which wind, bell, flag, movement, and self appear.
• Each dharma expresses itself as itself.
  Wind rings, bell rings, blowing rings, and ringing rings. In the fascicle’s idiom, movement is movement and the person addressed is movement.
• Wisdom directly transmits wisdom.
  Wisdom does not come from outside or from the self. It recognizes itself through the Dharma.
• Nature expresses wisdom.
  The pine in spring and the chrysanthemum in autumn are not symbols added to wisdom. They are wisdom as seasonal suchness.
• Transmission can occur beyond ordinary awareness.
  The fifth and sixth ancestors transmit the Dharma through bodily action that they do not possess as ordinary knowledge.
• So and not-so are both ungraspable.
  Inmo cannot be captured by affirmation or negation.
• Each thing is an ungraspable something.
  The ten thousand things have thus come. Each is suchness as concrete reality.

Inmo and core Buddhist concepts

Inmo gives a distinctively “Dōgenian” form to several central Buddhist ideas:

• Suchness (tathatā)
  Inmo is one of Dōgen’s most direct ways of speaking about suchness. It points to reality as “this”, “thus”, or “it”, without turning it into an object.
• Non-self (anattā)
  Body and mind manifest throughout the world without belonging to an independent self. The personal self cannot own body, mind, wisdom, or awakening.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  The falling body, the ringing bell, the moving flag, and the changing seasons all express impermanence. Yet they are not reduced to impermanence. They are each “something” that has thus come. At the same time, inmo is not static essence and undergoes change. However, this is the true nature of reality: process-driven and ungraspable, yet concrete and real.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  Rising depends on both ground and emptiness. Emptiness is not separate from concrete support, and concrete support is not sufficient without emptiness.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Awakening of bodhi-mind does not rest only on one’s own will. It arises through conditions that cannot be reduced to a self.
• Practice-realization
  Inmo is not a theory to possess. In Dōgen’s formulation, it is enacted as it through body, mind, action, and the ungraspable.
• Wisdom (prajñā)
  Wisdom comes directly to wisdom. It is neither internal nor external, neither conscious nor unconscious, neither large nor small.
• Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)
  Inmo avoids treating Buddha-nature as a hidden essence. Suchness is not possessed. It is already expressed as the ten thousand things.
• Dharma-position
  Each thing is an ungraspable something that has thus come. Each occupies its own concrete position as suchness.
• Middle Way
  Dōgen avoids the extremes of ground-only materiality and emptiness-only abstraction, affirmation and negation, so and not-so.

Philosophical implications

Inmo is philosophically important because it shows how Dōgen speaks about reality without turning it into a concept. The word inmo does not define reality but indicates it: “this,” “it”, “thus”, or “such”. Dōgen retains ordinary language while using it against objectification.

The fascicle also clarifies Dōgen’s relation to suchness. Suchness is not a metaphysical substance behind phenomena, but the concrete thusness of each thing. Falling body, ground, emptiness, wind, bell, flag, movement, rice, pestle, spring pine, autumn chrysanthemum, sun-face, moon-face, and every individual thing are each “something” that has thus come. The treatment of ground and emptiness is especially significant: Buddhist emptiness can be misconstrued as a denial of concrete reality, while Dōgen keeps the material and empty distinct without separating them in practice. Form is form and emptiness is emptiness, but neither can be grasped independently.

The stories of the ringing bell and moving flag challenge psychological interpretations of Zen. “Mind” is neither subjective consciousness nor an inner observer producing or attending to external phenomena. In Dōgen’s reading, wind, bell, flag, movement, and self are expressions of a wider field. “Mind moves” does not deny wind and flag. It exposes the inadequacy of the division between inner subject and outer object.

Finally, Inmo addresses the problem of attainment. Seeking what one already is does not make practice unnecessary. Rather, the fascicle presents practice as the mode in which it becomes evident. Longing for the Dharma, anxiety about attainment, falling, rising, bell, flag, body beyond self-possession, and wisdom meeting wisdom all belong to the same field of suchness.

Conclusion

Inmo is one of Dōgen’s most precise texts on suchness. Its central word means “it”, “this”, “thus”, or “such”, although none of these translations fully exhausts its force. Inmo points to reality as already present and functioning, yet beyond possession. It cannot be grasped by the thought of a Buddha, mind, the Dharma-world, or the whole universe. Dōgen’s central claim is that it is not sought from outside: The wish to attain the Dharma, worry, doubt, body, mind, falling, rising, wind, bell, flag, movement, wisdom, spring pine, and autumn chrysanthemum are all already it. Practice therefore begins within suchness rather than outside it.

The fascicle’s concrete images and stories lend determinate form to an otherwise abstract discussion of suchness. Ringing bell, moving flag, falling body, rising effort, jewel in stone, spring pine, and autumn chrysanthemum are not mere metaphors, but expressions of inmo in everyday life. Dōgen uses them to articulate the inseparability of ground and emptiness, the non-duality of subject and object, and the immediacy of wisdom. Rising from ground depends equally on emptiness, and rising from emptiness on ground. Dōgen thereby refuses both materialism and abstract emptiness. The Buddha Way is neither escape from nor attachment to the concrete, but the practice of ground and emptiness together.

The final question, “What is this something that has thus come?”, gives the fascicle its most concentrated formulation. Each thing is such a “something”: not a fixed substance, empty nothing, or private mental object, but an ungraspable concrete reality that has thus come. The study of Inmo is consequently not a matter of definition, but of enacting this suchness.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines (靜聽松風圖), by Ma Lin, before 1246, ink and color on silk. Nature is a central theme in Dōgen’s Keisei sanshiki, and this painting by Ma Lin (馬麟, active 1222–1280) captures the essence of the natural world with a focus on the interplay between sound and silence. The painting depicts a scholar sitting quietly under a pine tree, listening to the wind rustling through the branches. This emphasizes the harmony between the human figure and the natural environment, reflecting the themes of awakening and realization that are central to Dōgen’s text. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

Introduction

Keisei sanshiki (谿声山色), usually translated as Valley sounds and mountain colors or The voice of the valley and the form of the mountains, is one of Eihei Dōgen’s most poetic and practice-oriented reflections on nature as a manifestation of the Buddha-Dharma. The title is built from four terms: kei (谿), valley or rocky gorge; sei (声), voice or sound; san (山), mountain; and shiki (色), form, color, or visible appearance. The title therefore names two dimensions of natural experience: The audible voice of the valley and the visible form of the mountains. In Buddhist language, these are not merely poetic images. It is said that the valley’s voice is the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, and the mountains’ form is his pure body. What this means: The physical world expresses the Dharma not as a metaphor added by human interpretation, but as one side of reality itself. The sounds, colors, forms, seasons, rivers, valleys, flowers, and mountains reveal the cosmic order of the Dharma day after day.

This makes Keisei sanshiki a close companion to Sansuikyō we have discussed in the previous post. Sansuikyō presents mountains and waters as a sutra: Mountains move, waters see themselves, and different beings encounter water in different ways. Keisei sanshiki approaches the same insight from another angle, examining how natural phenomena become occasions of awakening. The sound of a valley stream, the strike of a tile against bamboo, or the sight of peach blossoms can disclose the Dharma within conditions formed by study, practice, failure, humility, and resolve.

The text does not establish a romantic celebration of nature as automatically spiritual. Dōgen presents nature as teaching, even when its voice remains unheard and its forms unseen for many years. The decisive issue is not whether the natural world expresses the Dharma, but the conditions under which a practitioner receives and enacts that expression. Body, mind, discipline, and bodhi-mind are central to those conditions.

The structure of the text

The structure of Keisei sanshiki unfolds through several closely related tracks.

First, Dōgen begins with the transmission of the Way by Buddhas and ancestors. He recalls intense examples of devotion to the Dharma, such as cutting off an arm or covering mud with one’s hair. The opening establishes that awakening does not arise through casual appreciation, but through serious practice and the shedding of fixed views.

Second, Dōgen presents the story of the layman Tōba, better known as Su Shi, who awakened upon hearing the sound of a valley stream at night. His poem identifies the valley’s voice as the Buddha’s long and broad tongue, and the mountains’ form as the Buddha’s pure body. This story gives the fascicle its title and central theme.

Third, Dōgen reflects on how Tōba’s awakening occurred. He had previously asked a Zen master how insentient beings preach the Dharma. The master’s teaching did not immediately transform him, but later the sound of the valley opened the matter. Dōgen therefore asks whether it was the valley, the teacher’s words, or both together that awakened him.

Fourth, Dōgen tells two further awakening stories: Kyōgen Chikan, who awakened when a tile struck bamboo, and Reiun Shigon, who awakened upon seeing peach blossoms after thirty years of practice. These stories show that natural or ordinary phenomena can trigger realization, but only after long preparation and the exhaustion of conceptual effort.

Fifth, Dōgen discusses several dialogues about mountains, rivers, and earth. Chōsa, a Zen master, asks how mountains and rivers can be one with oneself. The master answers that mountains and rivers are one with oneself, but the questioner does not understand. This reverses the question of how to make mountains and rivers one with oneself. Rōya Ekaku repeats a philosopher’s question about how mountains and rivers arise from original purity. These dialogues prevent the reader from turning nature into either an external object or a metaphysical problem.

Sixth, the text shifts into a strong exhortation. Dōgen criticizes those who become monks for fame and profit, who do not truly seek the Dharma, and who doubt the true dragon when it appears. This section gives the text a moral and institutional dimension.

Seventh, Dōgen formulates a vow to hear and receive the true Dharma in this and future lives. The voice of the valley and the form of the mountains become available through vow, confession, pure faith, and the dissolution of karmic obstacles.

Finally, the text ends by connecting confession, trust, body, mind, and nature. If one does not hold on to fame, profit, body, or mind, the valleys and mountains will withhold nothing. The full teaching of the valley and mountains is therefore not an aesthetic experience alone. It is inseparable from practice, humility, and the release of self-centered grasping.

Keisei sanshiki

The following translation provides the full text attributed to Dōgen:

In-depth analysis of the text

Keisei sanshiki develops one of Dōgen’s central ideas: The Dharma is not restricted to scriptures, teachers, doctrines, or human speech. Valleys, mountains, tiles, bamboo, peach blossoms, rivers, and seasonal forms can preach the Dharma. Yet the text also insists that this natural preaching is not automatically received. It becomes transformative only for those whose practice has matured.

The Dharma is not gained through casual appreciation

Dōgen begins with demanding examples of earlier practitioners:

You should learn from the ancient ancestor who cut off his arm for the Dharma, and you should not depart from that bodhisattva who covered the muddy puddle with his own hair.

The first example recalls Huike, the second ancestor of Zen, who is said to have cut off his arm to demonstrate his resolve before Bodhidharma. The second recalls the bodhisattva who covered mud with his hair so that a Buddha could pass. These examples place the text within a tradition of radical dedication. They are not literal models for imitation. Their function is to establish that the Dharma is not received through half-hearted interest. This matters because the fascicle concerns awakening through natural phenomena. Without the opening, Keisei sanshiki could be misread as a poetic celebration of nature. Dōgen instead presents hearing the valley and seeing the mountains as inseparable from serious practice. The valley’s voice is not entertainment, nor are mountain forms mere scenery: Both are Dharma. He writes:

When each of you removes your husk, you are no longer restricted by former views and judgments, and things that have been unclear for long ages suddenly reveal themselves.

The “husk” is the shell of previous views, judgments, and self-protective habits. The valley and mountains may have always been speaking, but the practitioner remains unable to hear until this husk breaks open. Awakening is not produced by nature alone. It occurs when nature, teacher, practice, and the release of fixed views meet in one concrete moment.

Tōba and the voice of the valley

The first major example is the layman Tōba, the Chinese poet Su Shi. Dōgen presents him as both a literary genius and a serious Buddhist practitioner. His awakening occurs when he hears a valley stream at night:

The voice of the valley is Buddha’s broad and long tongue,
the form of the mountains nothing other than his pure body.
Eighty-four thousand verses resound in the night,
how can I tell this to people on another day?

This poem gives the fascicle its title. The valley’s sound is Buddha’s tongue. The mountains’ visible form is Buddha’s body. The night resounds with eighty-four thousand verses, a traditional number for the immeasurable teachings of the Dharma. The problem is not that there is too little teaching. The problem is how to communicate what has been heard.

Dōgen does not treat Tōba’s experience as isolated. Tōba had asked Master Jōsō about the Dharma-preaching of insentient beings the day before. The master’s words did not immediately transform him, but later the valley’s voice completed the process. Dōgen therefore asks:

Was it ultimately the layman Tōba who awakened to the truth, or were it the mountains and rivers that awakened to the truth?

This is a typical Dōgen question. It unsettles the assumption that awakening belongs only to an individual subject. Tōba awakened, but perhaps the mountains and rivers awakened as well. Or perhaps awakening is not a private event at all, but a relational event in which human practitioner, teacher’s words, valley sound, mountain form, night, and previous practice converge.

This connects Keisei sanshiki to Sansuikyō. In Sansuikyō, mountains and waters practice and investigate themselves. Here, mountains and rivers may awaken. Nature is not passive material. It participates in the event of the Dharma.

Insentient beings preach the Dharma

Tōba’s question to Jōsō concerns the Dharma-preaching of non-sentient beings. This is a major Mahāyāna and Zen theme. If only human teachers can preach, the Dharma remains restricted to language and consciousness. If valleys and mountains can preach, the whole world becomes a field of teaching. Dōgen writes:

We can rejoice that there are moments, causes, and conditions in which mountains and rivers make themselves known. The manifesting tongue of Buddha never grows tired; how could the form of his body once exist and then disappear?

The Buddha’s tongue and body are not limited to the historical body of Siddhartha Gautama. The valley’s voice and the mountains’ form are continuing manifestations of the Buddha’s preaching. The Dharma is not locked in the past. It resounds now. Yet Dōgen also insists that Tōba had failed to hear this many times before:

It is regrettable that this form of teaching, in which the body of valleys and mountains reveals itself in order to preach the Dharma, had failed to reach him so many times before.

The Dharma is constantly present, but its reception is conditioned. The valley may speak without being heard, and mountains may reveal without being seen. Practice is therefore configured as a transformation of hearing and seeing. The fascicle does not present nature as a magical source of awakening, nor does it make awakening a result of practice alone. The valley’s voice and mountain forms are not rewards for practice. They are the Dharma and belong to the process of awakening itself.

Kyōgen, the tile, and the end of conceptual dependence

The second major awakening story concerns Kyōgen Chikan. His teacher, Dai-i, asks him to describe the state before the birth of his parents without quoting scriptures. Kyōgen cannot answer. He searches his books and finds nothing. Finally he burns them and says:

A picture of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger.

“A picture of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger” is frequently quoted in Zen. It figures the limits of conceptual understanding: A picture can represent food but cannot feed. In the same way, scriptural knowledge can represent the Dharma without replacing realization. Kyōgen does not reject the Dharma but his reliance on borrowed words. His later awakening occurs while sweeping:

One day, while he was sweeping the path, a piece of tile came loose and struck the bamboo with a blow. When he heard this sound, Chikan realized the great awakening.

The sound of tile striking bamboo becomes the valley’s voice in another form. It is not only beautiful nature that teaches. A broken tile and bamboo can preach the Dharma. The event is ordinary, almost accidental, but it becomes transformative because Kyōgen’s previous conceptual structures have collapsed. Kyōgen then thanks his teacher for not explaining too soon:

Had you told me before, how could this have happened now?

This sentence even adds a pedagogical meaning to the story. The teacher’s silence was not neglect. It preserved the student’s possibility of direct realization. Had Dai-i given him a conceptual answer, Kyōgen might have possessed the answer without realizing the Dharma. The tile against bamboo could then not have opened the matter.

This story shows that nature’s teaching is not opposed to teacher-student transmission. The teacher’s refusal and the sound of bamboo belong together. The Dharma can be heard in bamboo because the student has been prepared by the teacher, failure, humility, and work.

Reiun and the peach blossoms

The third major example is Reiun Shigon, who awakened after thirty years of practice when he saw peach blossoms:

For thirty years a wanderer searching for a sword.
How many times did leaves fall and buds bloom?
All at once, when I saw the peach blossoms,
I arrived directly in the now and have no more doubts.

The image is simple. A practitioner sees peach blossoms in spring. Yet after thirty years of searching, this ordinary sight becomes decisive. The blossoms do not produce awakening mechanically. They appear within a life of practice. The same blossoms may have been seen many times before. Only now are they fully seen. Dai-i confirms him:

Someone who enters through the outer world will never fall back or hesitate.

“Outer world” here does not mean something inferior to inner mind. It means that awakening can occur through the world that surrounds the practitioner. The outer is not outside the Dharma. The form of the mountains, the peach blossoms, and the valley voice are the Buddha’s pure body. And Dōgen asks:

If the form of the mountains were not Buddha’s pure body, how could such a thing happen?

This is the central thesis of the text. Natural forms do not merely remind the practitioner of doctrine. They are the body of the Buddha. Awakening through peach blossoms is possible because the blossoms are not outside the Dharma. And this accounts for all dharmas.

Mountains, rivers, earth, and the question of self

Dōgen then presents a dialogue:

A monk asked Zen Master Chōsa: “How can we make the mountains, rivers, and earth one with ourselves?”
Master Chōsa said: “How can we make ourselves one with the mountains, rivers, and earth?”

The monk assumes a self positioned to unite with nature. Chōsa reverses the direction: Rather than incorporating mountains and rivers into the self, the dialogue asks how the self is already implicated in mountains, rivers, and earth. Dōgen explains:

We are already naturally ourselves. Although we also are the mountains, rivers, and earth, we should not allow ourselves to be restricted by being one with them.

This prevents two misunderstandings. First, Dōgen rejects separation: Selves are not isolated from mountains, rivers, and earth. Second, he rejects fusion: Being one with mountains and rivers cannot become a fixed identity. The point is neither separation nor mystical merger, but the dynamic suchness of self and world. A second dialogue sharpens the point. A philosopher asks:

How does it happen that mountains, rivers, and earth suddenly arise from original purity?

Master Kōshō repeats the same question back to him. Dōgen interprets this as a correction:

We must not confuse the mountains, rivers, and earth, which are original purity, with the terms “mountains, rivers, and earth”.

The philosopher assumes original purity as one thing and mountains, rivers, and earth as another that somehow arise from it. Dōgen rejects this structure. Mountains, rivers, and earth are original purity, but cannot be reduced to the names “mountains, rivers, and earth.” Again, the problem is neither nature nor purity, but conceptual separation.

The world realizes the truth together

Dōgen writes:

Precisely because the voice of the valley and the form of the mountains possess this virtue, “the earth and all living beings realize the truth together”.

This sentence is one of the most important in the fascicle. Awakening is not only an individual psychological event. The earth and all living beings realize the truth together. This does not erase the practitioner’s responsibility. It means that awakening is relational and cosmic. The practitioner awakens with the world, not apart from it. Dōgen links this to the bright morning star:

There are many Buddhas who awaken when they see the bright morning star.

This recalls the awakening of Siddhartha Gautama. Seeing the morning star is not a private visual event. It is the world disclosing itself. The star, the body, the night, the resolve, the earth, and the practitioner all participate in awakening. This is why Dōgen insists on determination:

The old masters who attained the truth were human skin bags whose will to investigate the Dharma was unwavering.

The phrase “human skin bags” is blunt, as often in Zen texts. It prevents idealization. The old masters were bodies. What distinguished them was unwavering resolve. Natural phenomena can awaken, but only a practitioner with resolve can receive their teaching.

Against fame and profit

After the poetic stories, the text becomes sharply critical. Dōgen laments that many people become monks but use the Buddha-Dharma for reputation and wealth. He writes:

Although they have received life, they have no desire to seek the Dharma for the sake of the Dharma.

This section belongs to the central argument. Dōgen presents attachment to fame and profit as incompatible with receiving valley sounds and mountain colors as Dharma. Self-interest blocks the hearing of the valley, and attachment to status prevents recognition of the true dragon. He writes:

When they see the true Dharma, they will doubt the real dragon, and when they encounter the true Dharma, they will not like it.

This recalls the story of the person who loved images of dragons but feared the real dragon. Dōgen used the same image in Fukan zazengi. Here, the real dragon is the actual Dharma. People may love the image of Zen, the poetry of mountains, the prestige of religion, or the appearance of practice. But when the real Dharma appears, they resist it. This is an important warning for any aesthetic reading of Keisei sanshiki. One can enjoy the idea that mountains and valleys preach the Dharma while still avoiding the Dharma itself. Dōgen’s critique of fame and profit prevents the text from becoming mere nature mysticism. The voice of the valley is not for spiritual entertainment. It demands transformation.

The vow to hear the true Dharma

Dōgen then gives a vow:

I sincerely ask that I, together with all living beings, may hear the true Dharma in this and all future lives. If I may hear it, I will never doubt it or be unbelieving. If I encounter the true Dharma, I vow to renounce worldly things and receive and preserve the Buddha-Dharma, so that the earth and living beings may in the end realize the truth together.

This vow is in principle the practical conclusion of the text. It is not a general statement of faith, it is a specific vow to hear the true Dharma in all facets of life, including the voice of the valley and the form of the mountains. And the vow is not a passive wish. It is an active commitment to receive the Dharma when it appears. This requires openness, trust, renunciation of worldly grasping, and willingness to receive and preserve the Dharma.

The vow also returns to the phrase “the earth and living beings realize the truth together”. The practitioner’s awakening is not private. The vow is made together with all living beings and for the realization of earth and beings together. This gives the text an actual bodhisattva orientation. Nature’s teaching is received as part of a vow to participate in the liberation of all beings. Dōgen adds:

If you make such a vow, the causes and conditions for true awakening to the bodhi-mind will arise of themselves.

This does not mean that practice becomes automatic and the vow is some kind of magic formula one just needs to speak out. It means that this (or any other Buddhist) vow reshapes conditions. The mind that vows to hear the true Dharma begins to inhabit a different causal field. The valley’s voice can then become audible.

Hearing with the body, mind, and eyes

Dōgen writes:

Wherever you meet him, he lets sentient and insentient beings speak the truth. You listen to him with your body and with your mind. To hear with the ears is everyday like drinking tea and eating, but to hear a voice with the eyes is manifold and not fixed.

A true teacher makes both sentient and insentient beings speak the truth. The teacher does not replace the valley’s voice. The teacher opens the practitioner’s ability to hear it. Listening is not merely auditory. One listens with body and mind, and even with the eyes. “To hear a voice with the eyes” means that perception is not confined to ordinary sensory categories. Mountain form can be heard. Valley sound can be seen. The Dharma is not limited to one sensory channel. This does not mean fantasy or synesthetic mysticism in a loose sense. It means that the whole body-mind becomes receptive to the Dharma.

Dōgen continues:

The great and the small Buddhas are what you recognize in the moment as the form of the mountains and the voice of the valley.

Buddhas are not only figures in scripture or images in temples. They are encountered as the mountains’ form and the valley’s voice. This is not a reduction of Buddha to nature. It is a statement that the Buddha’s body and tongue are manifest in the natural world when perceived through practice.

Confession and the purification of perception

In the later part of the fascicle, Dōgen turns to confession:

When mind or flesh become sluggish and you doubt, you should sincerely confess before Buddha. If you do this, the power and virtue of confession before Buddha will free and purify you.

At first, confession may seem unrelated to valley sounds and mountain colors. But it is deeply connected. The problem is not that the Dharma is absent. The problem is that karmic obstacles, doubt, sluggishness, pride, and self-attachment prevent one from receiving it. Confession is therefore a practice of removing the obstructions that make one deaf and blind to the Dharma. Dōgen says:

Once pure trust reveals itself, you yourselves and the world are equally transformed, and this merit pervades sentient and insentient beings everywhere.

This is another relational statement. Confession transforms not only the practitioner but the world as encountered. When trust appears, self and world change together. Sentient and insentient beings are included. The valley’s voice and the mountain’s form become available because perception, body, mind, and conditions are purified.

The confession formula asks the Buddhas and ancestors to dissolve karma and remove obstacles to studying the truth. This is not a denial of personal responsibility. It is a recognition that practice is relational. One receives support from Buddhas and ancestors, from teachers, from valleys and mountains, from body and mind, and from the whole Dharma-world.

Before awakening and after awakening

Dōgen quotes Master Ryūge:

Before awakening, the eternal Buddhas were like the people of today. After awakening, the people of today will be eternal Buddhas.

This sentence prevents both despair and arrogance. The Buddhas were once like present practitioners. Present practitioners can become Buddhas. Yet the transformation depends on practice, vow, confession, trust, and the release of worldly grasping. Dōgen interprets confession as direct experience of Buddha:

If you confess in this way, the mystical support of the Buddhas and ancestors will surely become effective.

The term “mystical support” does not denote magical intervention in a crude sense. It expresses the power of entering the transmitted field of practice. Confession, vow, and trust open the practitioner to the working of the Dharma that was previously blocked.

The valleys and mountains withhold nothing

The final lines return to the title:

If you practice in this way, the voice and form of the valley, and the form and voice of the mountains, will withhold none of the eighty-four thousand verses from you.

This is the resolution of the text. The valley and mountains have always been speaking, but they withhold nothing only when the practitioner stops holding back. Dōgen adds:

If you do not keep fame or wealth, body or mind, for yourselves, the valleys and mountains will also withhold nothing.

The condition is not intellectual brilliance. It is non-appropriation. If one does not keep fame, profit, body, or mind as self-possession, the Dharma is no longer blocked. The valley speaks. The mountains reveal. The eighty-four thousand verses are available in the night. This final statement also returns to non-self. The self that grasps fame, wealth, body, and mind cannot hear the valley. The self that releases possession can receive the Dharma of the world.

Keisei sanshiki in a nutshell

The central arguments of Keisei sanshiki can be summarized as follows:

• The natural world is included within the communicative field of the Dharma.
  Dōgen interprets sounds and visible forms in nature as possible expressions of the Dharma, rather than as spiritually neutral objects onto which human beings merely project religious meaning.
• Natural phenomena do not produce awakening by themselves.
  The experiences of Tōba, Kyōgen, and Reiun occur within long processes of study, practice, questioning, failure, and preparation. The stream, the sound of tile striking bamboo, and the peach blossoms become decisive only within these developed conditions.
• Awakening arises through interacting conditions.
  Tōba’s experience cannot be attributed exclusively either to Jōsō’s teaching or to the sound of the valley. Dōgen presents realization as emerging from the interaction of teacher, practitioner, prior inquiry, environment, and a particular moment.
• Direct realization cannot be replaced by conceptual knowledge.
  Kyōgen’s learning and familiarity with Buddhist texts do not provide an adequate response to his teacher’s question. The text distinguishes intellectual knowledge about the Dharma from its realization in practice.
• Ordinary sensory events can become conditions of realization.
  Awakening does not require a supernatural vision or an extraordinary environment. Familiar sounds and forms can transform perception when the practitioner’s conditions have matured.
• The world encountered through perception is not external to the Way.
  Mountains, rivers, blossoms, sounds, and material objects belong to the field of Buddhist practice. Dōgen rejects a division between an inner domain of realization and an outer world lacking spiritual significance.
• The relation between self and world cannot be reduced to either separation or unity.
  The reversal of the question about becoming one with mountains, rivers, and earth challenges the assumption of an independent self confronting an external world. At the same time, Dōgen does not replace separation with a fixed doctrine of universal oneness.
• Ethical and motivational orientation affects the potential for realization.
  Attachment to fame, wealth, status, and recognition redirects practice toward self-interest. For Dōgen, this orientation prevents practitioners from receiving the Dharma even when they encounter authentic teachings.
• Bodhi-mind, vow, and confession reshape the conditions of practice.
  The determination to seek and preserve the true Dharma, together with confession and the acknowledgment of karmic obstacles, prepares the practitioner to receive teachings that had previously remained inaccessible.
• Perception becomes part of embodied practice.
  Hearing and seeing are not treated as passive reception of sensory information. The whole body-mind participates in the encounter, and ordinary distinctions between sensory channels are loosened in Dōgen’s description of hearing with the eyes and receiving visible form as teaching.
• Awakening is relational rather than exclusively private.
  The realization of the practitioner occurs together with teachers, environmental conditions, inherited practices, and the wider world. The statement that the earth and living beings realize the truth together presents awakening as more than an isolated psychological event.
• The availability of the Dharma depends on the relinquishment of appropriation.
  The valleys and mountains do not become meaningful only after the practitioner assigns them a Buddhist interpretation. Rather, Dōgen argues that their teaching becomes accessible when attachment to fame, wealth, body, mind, and personal possession no longer determines perception.

Keisei sanshiki and core Buddhist concepts

Keisei sanshiki is a Zen text about nature, but its deeper structure, like that of Dōgen’s other texts, is rooted in core Buddhist ideas:

• Suchness (tathatā)
  Valleys and mountains express the Dharma by being valleys and mountains. Their voice and form reveal suchness directly, without needing to become something else.
• Non-self (anattā)
  The practitioner hears the Dharma when fame, wealth, body, and mind are no longer held as self-possessions. The valley’s voice becomes audible when self-clinging loosens.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  The sound of the stream, the strike of tile and bamboo, and peach blossoms in spring are transient events. Their very impermanence becomes the occasion of awakening.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Awakening arises through conditions: teacher, question, prior study, failure, natural sound, seasonal form, vow, confession, and practice.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  Mountains, rivers, self, and world cannot be fixed as separate entities or collapsed into a single identity. They are empty of independent essence and function relationally.
• Bodhi-mind
  The will to seek the Dharma for the sake of the Dharma is central. Without bodhi-mind, nature may be admired but not received as Dharma.
• Practice-realization
  Awakening through valley sound or peach blossoms is not accidental inspiration. It is practice-realization becoming manifest through concrete conditions.
• Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)
  The form of the mountains as Buddha’s pure body and the voice of the valley as Buddha’s tongue show that Buddha-nature is not hidden behind the world but disclosed as the world.
• Confession and purification
  Dōgen integrates natural awakening with confession. The ability to hear nature depends on the purification of karmic obstacles and the growth of pure trust.
• Interpenetration
  The earth and all beings realize the truth together. The valley, mountains, teacher, practitioner, and all beings participate in one Dharma-event.

Philosophical implications

Keisei sanshiki gives one of Dōgen’s clearest accounts of nature as Dharma-expression. The physical world does not merely symbolize Buddhist truth. In the fascicle it teaches. The valley’s voice is not a metaphor for scripture but Buddha’s tongue, and the form of mountains is not a metaphor for purity but Buddha’s pure body. This does not make every natural experience an automatic awakening. Rather, the text presents the world as capable of preaching the Dharma while making its reception conditional. It thereby avoids both romantic naturalism, in which nature saves by itself, and doctrinalism, in which awakening depends on concepts, scriptures, and explanations alone. Tōba, Kyōgen, and Reiun awaken through natural or ordinary phenomena only within long histories of study, questioning, failure, humility, and teacher-student relations. The Dharma appears in water, a tile hitting bamboo, and peach blossoms without being reducible to any of them.

The text also deepens Dōgen’s account of perception. Seeing and hearing are not merely sensory functions but forms of practice. His formulations of hearing with the eyes, body, and mind do not simply confuse the senses. They dislodge the habitual boundaries of perception. Mountain form can teach as voice, and valley sound can reveal as body.

The critique of fame and profit identifies what obstructs the reception of the Dharma. The obstacle is not an absence of teaching but self-centered orientation. Dōgen presents the use of the Dharma for reputation and gain, or the possession of body and mind, as conditions that block the valley’s voice and mountain forms. His account of non-human Dharma-preaching is therefore inseparable from ethics and practice.

Finally, the text presents awakening as relational. Tōba awakens through the valley and Jōsō’s prior teaching; Kyōgen through bamboo and Dai-i’s refusal to explain; Reiun through peach blossoms after thirty years of searching. The claim that earth and all beings realize truth together displaces awakening from a private mental event into a convergence of world, teacher, practitioner, vow, body, mind, and the speaking of sentient and insentient beings.

Conclusion

Keisei sanshiki is one of Dōgen’s most sustained statements on the Dharma of nature. Valleys and mountains are not mute objects: The valley’s voice is Buddha’s long and broad tongue, and the mountains’ form is Buddha’s pure body. The fascicle extends Dharma-preaching beyond scriptures, teachers, and rituals to streams, bamboo, tiles, peach blossoms, mountains, and seasonal forms. It does not, however, make nature an easy substitute for practice. Tōba’s awakening follows prior questioning and Jōsō’s instruction. Kyōgen’s follows the collapse of dependence on books and years of work. Reiun’s follows thirty years of practice. The text therefore presents natural phenomena as disclosing the Dharma within the conditions of body, mind, practice, and resolve.

This makes Keisei sanshiki a direct continuation of Sansuikyō. In Sansuikyō, mountains and waters function as a sutra. In Keisei sanshiki, that sutra is heard and seen as awakening. Together, the two texts show that Dōgen’s Zen is not confined to formal sitting or doctrinal study, though it does not abandon disciplined practice. The world itself becomes the field of practice.

Keisei sanshiki closes by reversing the question of whether valleys and mountains are willing to teach. In Dōgen’s account they already withhold nothing. The decisive issue is what a practitioner continues to withhold through attachment to fame, wealth, body, mind, recognition, and fixed understanding. When self-protective grasping loosens, the eighty-four thousand verses are not projected onto the landscape by interpretation but heard in the valley’s voice and seen in mountain forms. The fascicle thus presents the living Dharma not as an escape from ordinary reality but as its concrete expression.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

Landscape (紙本墨画淡彩山水図, shihon bokuga tansai sansuizu), hanging scroll, 108 cm x 32.7 cm, ink and light color on paper. Located in the Nara National Museum, Nara, Japan. Mountains and waters are central themes in East Asian art and culture, and they are especially important in the context of Zen Buddhism. This painting by Tenshō Shūbun (天章周文, 1414–1463) is a classic example of the sansui (山水, mountains and waters) genre, which was deeply influenced by Chinese landscape painting and Zen aesthetics. The painting captures the essence of the natural world with minimal brushstrokes and a monochromatic palette, evoking a sense of tranquility and timelessness that resonates with the themes of Dōgen’s Sansuikyō. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

In this post, we examine why Dōgen calls mountains and waters a sutra, how their ‘movement’ and self-expression articulate the Dharma, and how the fascicle relates these examples to perception. We also situate Sansuikyō in relation to broader Buddhist topics such as emptiness, dependent arising, suchness, and the non-anthropocentric scope of Buddhist practice.

Introduction

Sansuikyō (山水經), often translated as The mountains and waters sutra, is one of the most striking fascicles of Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. It was presented in 1240 at Kannondōri-kōshō-hōrin-ji, the same year as Uji, and it belongs to the same broad period in which Dōgen developed some of his most radical interpretations of practice, time, body, mind, and the concrete world. The title itself is programmatic: Sansui means mountains and waters, kyō means sutra or scripture. Dōgen is therefore not merely writing about mountains and waters as poetic symbols, he treats them as a sutra, as a direct expression of the Dharma. Mountains and waters do not merely illustrate Buddhist truth, they preach it. They enact it. And, in Dōgen’s view, they are the living activity of the Buddha Way.

This makes Sansuikyō an important companion to Dōgen’s other central texts we have encountered so far. Genjō Kōan, for instance, shows how reality becomes manifest in ordinary perception and action. Uji argues that all being is time. Busshō interprets Buddha-nature as the whole of existence rather than as a hidden inner essence. Sansuikyō adds a decisive ecological and cosmological dimension: Mountains and waters are not passive scenery. They are active, practicing, expressing, and realizing the Dharma.

At first glance, the text may appear to be about nature. Yet Dōgen’s mountains and waters are neither romantic landscapes nor symbols of purity opposed to human society, and they are not metaphors for psychological states. They are concrete dharmas that enable him to question ordinary categories. Mountains move, waters see themselves, mountains flow, and water is not exhausted by wetness; different beings perceive water differently. The later claim that mountains belong to those who love them belongs to the same reconfiguration of relations between beings and places. Throughout the fascicle, mountains and waters serve as exemplary cases for a broader account in which all dharmas are free and abide nowhere, while each occupies its own Dharma-position.

The central problem of the text is therefore epistemological and practical at the same time. It concerns the status of mountains, waters, and other dharmas when they are apprehended through ordinary human categories, names, forms, and functions. Dōgen’s argument is that Buddhist practice transforms the conditions under which the world is perceived. His concluding formulation, “mountains are mountains, water is water”, does not endorse naive realism. It describes the realization of particular dharmas without reducing them to objects, symbols, or human-centered functions.

The structure of the text

Like other fascicles in the Shōbōgenzō, Sansuikyō is not a systematic treatise in the modern sense. It unfolds through several closely connected movements.

First, Dōgen introduces mountains and waters as the present realization of the words of the eternal Buddhas. Mountains and waters occupy their Dharma-position and complete all-inclusive virtues. This opening establishes the central claim: mountains and waters are not inert objects. They are living Dharma-activity.

Second, Dōgen analyzes the saying of Master Fuyō Dōkai:

The blue mountains are constantly moving. The stone woman gives birth to her child at night.

This becomes the basis for Dōgen’s most famous claim in the text: Mountains move. Their movement is not the movement of ordinary human beings, but it is real. To doubt the movement of mountains is, for Dōgen, to misunderstand one’s own movement.

Third, Dōgen discusses the statement of Yunmen:

The East Mountain walks over the water.

He defends this saying against those who dismiss such Zen statements as meaningless or irrational. Dōgen strongly criticizes this attitude, especially among certain Song-dynasty Chan monks. For him, Zen language is not meaningless speech. It must be studied and practiced.

Fourth, the text turns to water. Dōgen rejects ordinary assumptions that water is simply wet, flowing, or physically measurable. Water is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither moving nor still, neither existent nor non-existent. Water sees itself, practices itself, and expresses itself.

Fifth, Dōgen develops a perspectival analysis of water. Humans see water as water, but other beings may see it as jewels, flowers, flames, pus, blood, palaces, towers, trees, walls, Dharma-nature, or the true body of the human being. This passage is one of Dōgen’s most important reflections on conditioned perception.

Sixth, Dōgen examines the freedom and placelessness of all dharmas. He quotes the Buddha:

All dharmas are ultimately free and abide nowhere.

Yet this does not mean that dharmas are nowhere in a nihilistic sense. They are free, but they have their place. This is one of the key tensions of the fascicle: All things are unbound, but each thing fully occupies its own Dharma-position.

Seventh, Dōgen returns to mountains as places of practice and realization. Mountains are the dwelling of sages and Buddhas, but not because they are merely scenic or symbolic. They are beyond ordinary human control. They are loved by sages and love sages in return.

Eighth, the final section brings mountains and waters together. Water is not merely flowing, mountains are not merely still. If one understands the flowing and non-flowing of a single drop of water, one realizes the mastery of the ten thousand dharmas. The text ends with the famous saying:

Mountains are mountains, water is water.

This does not mean that conventional names are sufficient. It means that mountains must be realized as mountains, and water as water, without reducing them to concepts, symbols, objects, or human-centered functions.

Sansuikyō

To get a direct impression of the text, let us read it in full:

In-depth analysis of the text

The following analysis does not attempt to explain every line of Sansuikyō. Dōgen’s texts are deliberately dense and often work by overturning ordinary assumptions. It reconstructs one philosophical and religious reading of the fascicle: How Dōgen uses mountains and waters as exemplary dharmas, how he relates them to perception and practice, and how these examples bear on his account of the Dharma. Our interpretation tries not to treat the fascicle’s claims as self-evident metaphysical descriptions; we want to identify the conceptual work these claims perform within Dōgen’s Zen Buddhism.

Mountains and waters as the words of the eternal Buddhas

Dōgen opens with a striking claim:

The mountains and waters of the present are the realization of the words of the eternal Buddhas. Both remain in their Dharma-position and complete all-inclusive virtues.

Mountains and waters are not described as signs pointing to the Dharma. Within the fascicle, they realize the words of the eternal Buddhas. This shifts the argument away from symbolism: They do not merely represent Buddhist teaching, but are presented as its enactment. The phrase “Dharma-position” is central here. A mountain need not become something else in order to express the Dharma, and water need not be translated into doctrine before it has significance. Each remains in its own position and, precisely there, completes its virtues. This recalls the logic of Genjō Kōan, where firewood is fully firewood and ash fully ash. In Sansuikyō, mountains and waters perform the same argumentative function as exemplary dharmas.

Because they are life before the age of emptiness, they are powerful activity in the present. Because they are the self before the arising of things, they are realized freedom.

This is not a claim about chronological antiquity. Within Dōgen’s idiom, “before the age of emptiness” and “before the arising of things” indicate a register prior to conceptual separation. Mountains and waters are not first constituted as objects and only subsequently interpreted as Dharma. The passage presents their activity as preceding the dualisms of self and object, nature and doctrine, and stillness and motion. Its designation of them as “powerful activity in the present” therefore contests their treatment as passive objects in space.

The blue mountains are constantly moving

The first major saying that Dōgen analyzes is:

The blue mountains are constantly moving. The stone woman gives birth to her child at night.

The ‘movement’ of mountains is one of the most famous claims in Sansuikyō. Dōgen writes:

The mountains possess all the qualities they should possess. Therefore they dwell continuously in stillness and are at the same time constantly in motion.

Dōgen does not deny the apparent stillness of mountains, nor does he claim that they move in the same way as animals or human beings. Rather, he refuses to make immobility their definitive predicate. Geological change, weathering, or erosion can illustrate why a mountain need not be conceived as static, but they do not exhaust or explain Dōgen’s claim. His concern is the conceptual opposition of motion and stillness and the assumption that human movement provides its standard. He insists:

Never doubt that “the mountains move”, even if their movement is not like that of human beings.

The argument is epistemological. Human beings commonly define movement according to their own scale, perception, and bodily experience. What does not move like a person is then classified as still. Dōgen challenges this anthropocentric measure by attributing a distinct mode of movement to mountains. The passage consequently redirects the question from whether mountains meet a human definition of motion to the limits of the definition itself. Dōgen then extends the critique to human self-understanding:

If you doubt the movement of the mountains, you do not yet know your own movement. Your own movement truly exists, but you do not yet know it and have not yet clarified it.

This reverses a familiar assumption: Human movement is usually treated as self-evident, while the movement of massive or slow-moving objects is doubted. Dōgen makes doubt about the mountain evidence that the human subject has not understood its own movement either. Human movement is, on this account, conditioned by karma, habit, perception, embodiment, aging, thought, and time. The passage thus displaces the image of a fixed observer confronting a static world with an account of both observer and object as dynamic processes.

Movement and stillness are not opposites

Dōgen writes:

Precisely because they move, they are constant.

This sentence condenses a key claim of the fascicle: Constancy is not opposed to movement. The mountains are constant because they move as mountains. Their constancy is not frozen immobility but the continuity of their activity. This parallels Dōgen’s account of practice and realization, in which practice is not merely movement toward a later realization but its ongoing enactment. The same structure appears in the passage on forward and backward movement:

Going forward never ceases, and going backward never ends. The moment of going forward does not obstruct going backward, and the moment of going backward does not obstruct going forward. This virtue we call “the mountains flow” and “flowing mountains”.

Forward and backward are not treated as mutually exclusive in an absolute sense. Each has its own moment, and neither obstructs the other. This resembles Dōgen’s treatment of temporal positions in Uji, where one moment does not obstruct another. Movement is therefore not presented as a single linear progression, but as a field of distinct and non-obstructing activities. “Flowing mountains” destabilizes the conventional pairing of mountain with solidity and stillness and water with motion and flow. The examples thereby show that dharmas cannot be fixed by the categories ordinarily assigned to them.

Mountains are neither sentient nor insentient

Dōgen states:

The blue mountains are neither sentient nor insentient. You yourselves are neither sentient nor insentient.

Here, Dōgen is not claiming that mountains are secretly sentient beings in a human sense, nor that they are merely dead matter. Instead, the passage renders the distinction between sentient and insentient inadequate to its subject matter. Mountains are not adequately captured by either pole of this binary. This formulation connects with Dōgen’s account of Buddha-nature in Busshō, where grasses, trees, lands, walls, tiles, and pebbles also enter the field of Buddha-nature. In both fascicles, the extension is not an anthropomorphization of things, it dislodges human categories from their role as final ontological measures.

When Dōgen adds that human beings are also neither sentient nor insentient, the critique turns back onto the human subject. In his account, the category “sentient being” does not fully describe the self either, which is understood as a conditioned, temporal, embodied process rather than a fixed entity possessing consciousness. The human being and the mountain are therefore both more complex than the binary suggests.

The journey of the mountains

Dōgen writes:

Without ever changing their body and mind, their mountain-face and their mountain-eyes, the mountains undertake their journey of experiencing and investigating.

This sentence illustrates Dōgen’s non-symbolic use of language. By attributing body and mind, face and eyes to mountains, he is not simply personifying a natural object or presenting mountains as humans in disguise. Rather, he describes them as active dharmas through the vocabulary of “experiencing and investigating”, a vocabulary he otherwise uses for Buddhist practice. The transfer is consequential, as it expands the semantic field of practice, realization, and investigation beyond exclusively human subjectivity. Mountains do not practice as monks would. Within the text, they are said to enact practice as mountains. The passage thereby presents the world itself as dynamic Dharma-activity rather than as a passive setting for human religious activity.

Against one-sided appearances

Dōgen warns that even elevated visions of mountains are limited:

Even if there are moments when mountains appear to you adorned with the seven treasures, this is not the “true home”. Even if they appear to you as the realm of practice of the Buddha Way, you should not necessarily long for this.

This passage refuses to privilege either ordinary or visionary perception. Seeing mountains as grasses, trees, earth, stones, hedges, and walls does not constitute their whole appearance. Neither does seeing them adorned with treasures or as a realm of Buddhist practice. The target of the critique is attachment to any single appearance. Even a sacred or elevated vision remains one-sided when it is made definitive. Mountains are thus not exhausted by ordinary, aesthetic, religious, or metaphysical interpretation. Dōgen uses the example to criticize the stabilization of dharmas into concepts, names, forms, or spiritual meanings.

This also supplies a methodological caution for interpreting Sansuikyō. The fascicle does not simply substitute a symbolic Buddhist reading for a materialist one. Its claim is that no single conceptual frame, including a religious one, exhausts the mountain as dharma.

Words that are free from clinging

Dōgen writes:

Clinging to words and phrases is not the language of liberation. But there are words free from such conditions, namely: “the blue mountains are constantly moving” and “the East Mountain walks over the water”.

This sentence elucidates Dōgen’s view of language. He does not reject words as such, but clinging to words. Some utterances bind and others release. The issue is not speech itself, but its use. This is particularly important because the fascicle later rejects the dismissal of Zen statements as merely “incomprehensible”. For Dōgen, a phrase such as “the East Mountain walks over the water” is not nonsense but a Dharma-expression that calls for study and practice within a Zen tradition.

Dōgen’s language often works by disrupting ordinary categories, but this disruption is not equivalent to irrationality. It functions as a method for loosening fixed assumptions. “The blue mountains are constantly moving” is therefore not a riddle with a concealed solution. It is a statement whose implications must be worked out through the textual and practical framework of Zen.

The stone woman gives birth

The second half of Fuyō Dōkai’s saying is:

The stone woman gives birth to her child at night.

Dōgen treats the saying as a serious proposition. He asks what it means for a ‘stone’ woman to give birth, for a child to become a child of parents, and for parents to become parents through birth. The passage extends the analysis of mountains by unsettling the category “stone”, not by making a geological assertion. Its deeper concern is relational becoming: Parent and child acquire their relational identities together, so birth is not a one-sided event. This is structurally consistent with dependent arising, in which things are not self-contained essences but arise through relations.

The East Mountain walks over the water

Yunmen’s saying becomes the second major axis of the text:

The East Mountain walks over the water.

Dōgen writes:

The meaning of these words is that all mountains are the East Mountain and that all these East Mountains walk over the water.

This is not presented as an isolated paradox. In Dōgen’s reading, the East Mountain designates all mountains, and all these mountains walk over water. Mountains and waters are therefore not separate inert objects placed beside each other. The text describes them as participating in one another’s activity. The conventional opposition of mountain and water thereby loses its explanatory force. Dōgen writes:

The mountains are the heads of all waters, which always move back and forth “on the water”. Because the feet of the mountains can flow over many kinds of water and make the waters dance, they move freely through the whole universe.

The imagery is deliberately difficult, but it constructs mountains and waters as mutually active rather than hierarchically arranged. A mountain is not simply above water and water not simply below mountain. Each is described through the activity of the other. This connects the passage with interdependence. The point is not a physical model of landscape, but a challenge to the treatment of dharmas as isolated objects.

Against the cult of incomprehensibility

One of the most polemical sections of Sansuikyō is Dōgen’s criticism of certain Song-dynasty Chan monks. He writes that some people say statements such as “the East Mountain walks over the water” are incomprehensible speech and that true Zen statements are irrational or beyond thought in the sense of being meaningless. Dōgen rejects this sharply:

What such so-called monks call “incomprehensible statements” is incomprehensible only to them, not to the Buddhas and ancestors.

This polemic is an important corrective to interpretations of Zen as programmed irrationality. Dōgen does not value Zen statements because they are meaningless. Rather, he holds that they must be understood within the modes of study and practice associated with Buddhas and ancestors. Their apparent unintelligibility is thus attributed to the reader’s limited framework rather than to a principled absence of meaning. He adds:

They do not know that thoughts are also words, and they do not know that words are free from thoughts.

This sentence refuses a simple opposition between words and direct experience. Words are not necessarily conceptual traps, thought is not outside language, and language may be free from discursive fixation. This position is consistent with Dōgen’s own dense and difficult writing, where language functions as a medium of practice rather than a mere obstacle to it.

Dōgen’s criticism also clarifies his difference from an interpretation of kōan practice that treats disruption as an end in itself. He does not reject kōans or sharp Zen expressions. He rejects the view that their significance consists in mere irrationality. Zen speech requires study, experience, and mastery, rather than functioning as a license for obscurity.

Water beyond ordinary categories

Dōgen then turns to water:

Water is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither moving nor still, neither cold nor warm, neither existent nor non-existent; it is neither delusion nor awakening.

This list dismantles ordinary definitions. Water may seem obviously wet, flowing, and fluid, but Dōgen treats these as one human mode of apprehension rather than exhaustive predicates. His examples of frozen and melted water show that a fixed description cannot account for the range of properties conventionally attributed to water.

The passage does not deny empirical qualities. Water can be wet, cold, fluid, frozen, soft, or hard, but none of these predicates exhausts it. Dōgen’s argument is not that water lacks qualities, but that it cannot be confined to a fixed conceptual identity.

The argument has broader Buddhist implications. A dharma is not treated as a substance with permanent qualities, but as appearing through conditions. Water is consequently presented not as an unchanging essence, but as realizing itself through multiple conditions, forms, and perspectives.

Water sees itself

Dōgen writes:

This does not mean only experiencing and investigating the moment when humans and gods see water. It means experiencing and investigating the moment when water sees itself. And because water practices itself and experiences itself, there is the experience and mastery of water expressing itself as water.

This is one of the most radical passages in the text. Dōgen writes that water sees, practices, experiences, and expresses itself. These formulations should not be reduced to personification or to the attribution of human consciousness to water. Instead, they deny that human subjectivity is the exclusive measure of experience or expression. “Water’s self-expression” names water’s own functioning as water, rather than a mental image formed by a human observer.

This formulation connects with the logic of Busshō, where Buddha-nature is not hidden behind phenomena but appears as phenomena. Water is therefore not an object awaiting human cognition. It realizes itself as water. Within Dōgen’s Buddhist framework, studying water means attending to this self-expression rather than reducing water to human use or conceptual classification.

The perspectival plurality of water

Dōgen then gives a striking catalogue of how different beings see water:

There are beings who see what we call water as a string of pearls.
There are beings who see water as beautiful blossoms.
Demons see water as consuming flames, as pus, and as blood.
Dragons and fish see it as a palace or a tower.
Some see it as pure and free Dharma-nature.
Others see it as the true body of the human being.

This passage is one of Dōgen’s clearest analyses of conditioned perception. What appears as water to humans may appear as something else to other beings. This is not simply relativism. Dōgen does not say that water is whatever anyone imagines. He asks a more difficult question:

Is it the case that one and the same thing can be seen in different ways? Or is it an error when we take the different appearances to be one and the same thing?

The question is philosophically consequential: If different beings perceive “water” in radically different ways, is there one underlying thing that appears differently, or is that assumption itself a human construction? Dōgen does not resolve the issue by choosing one side. Rather, the passage dislodges the assumption that human perception reveals a final form of reality.

This argument can be related to emptiness. Water does not have a fixed essence simply identical across all perspectives, but the text does not infer that it is unreal. Instead, water is construed as a relational, conditioned, self-expressing Dharma: Not reducible to human perception, yet not separate from appearances.

Free water-reality

Dōgen writes:

The many kinds of water connected with all beings do not rest on mind or on matter. They do not arise from karma, nor do they rely on themselves or on something else. Rather, they rest on the all-pervading, free water-reality itself.

This difficult passage appears to deny several explanatory categories: Mind, matter, karma, self, and other. Dōgen’s argument is not that these categories are always useless, but that water cannot be reduced to any one of them. It is neither merely mental nor merely material, neither karmic projection nor self- or other-produced. “Water-reality” is close to Dōgen’s account of suchness: Water is not hidden behind appearances, but no single appearance exhausts it. It is “free” because it does not abide in fixed definitions, yet it remains concrete water rather than abstract emptiness.

Dōgen continues:

Therefore water is beyond earth, water, fire, wind, space, consciousness, and so on. Therefore water is not blue, yellow, red, white, or black, and water has no form, sound, smell, taste, sensation, or property. And yet water naturally realizes itself as earth, as water, as fire, as wind, as space, and so on.

This is another example of Dōgen’s refusal of fixed categories. Water is beyond the elements, yet it realizes itself as the elements. It has no fixed color, form, taste, or property, yet it appears in concrete forms. This is the logic of emptiness and form: Not a denial of form, but a refusal to turn form into essence.

All dharmas are free and abide nowhere

Dōgen quotes the Buddha:

All dharmas are ultimately free and abide nowhere.

This is one of the central doctrinal statements of the fascicle. All dharmas are free. They do not abide in fixed places, fixed identities, fixed categories, or fixed meanings. Yet Dōgen immediately adds:

Remember that all dharmas have their place, even though they are free and without bonds.

In this context, freedom does not mean placelessness in a nihilistic sense. Each dharma has its Dharma-position: Water is free, yet water is water; mountains are free, yet mountains are mountains. This tension is central to Dōgen’s thought. Dharmas are empty of fixed essence without becoming vague or dissolved into abstraction. They retain position, activity, and concrete identity. The concluding statement, “mountains are mountains, water is water”, therefore does not negate emptiness, but articulates it concretely.

Water reaches everywhere

Dōgen rejects the idea that there are places water cannot reach:

Water reaches into the inside of flame, reaches into mind and its images, reaches into thought and into distinctions, and reaches into the realization of Buddha-nature.

This sentence expands water beyond physical liquid. Water is not merely a substance located in rivers, lakes, and oceans. It reaches into flame, thought, mind, distinctions, and Buddha-nature. The passage does not support a crude physicalist reading, because Dōgen is speaking of water-reality rather than material water alone. He also writes:

Rivers and seas realize themselves “in water”. Thus water also exists in places that do not belong to rivers and seas.

This reverses conventional thought, which locates water in rivers and seas. Dōgen instead says that rivers and seas realize themselves in water. Water is not contained by them. They are expressions of water. The same logic applies to Buddha-lands:

Countless Buddha-lands realize themselves even in a single drop of dew.

The drop is not merely small. It is a full Dharma-position. Countless Buddha-lands can be realized in it because size and container are not final categories. This connects Sansuikyō with interpenetration: The whole can appear in the part without abolishing the part.

Above and below are not fixed

Dōgen examines the Buddhist cosmological statement that fire and wind rise upward while earth and water are below. He does not deny the conventional statement, but he questions what “above” and “below” mean in the Dharma:

We think of the place where earth and water are as below. But this below is only thought by us and is not the true place where earth and water are.

Above and below are perspectival categories: useful, but not ultimate. Dōgen argues that the Dharma-world cannot be made dependent on above, below, and the four directions, even though the elements still move in concrete directions and create a temporary Dharma-world. He gives a striking example:

You should not think that the heaven of non-thinking is above and the never-ending hell below, for the never-ending hell is the whole Dharma-world, and non-thinking is the whole Dharma-world.

This overturns spatialized religious imagination. Heaven is not simply above, hell not simply below. Each is the whole Dharma-world from its own position. This again echoes Uji: Each moment is the whole of time. Here, each realm is the whole Dharma-world.

Dragons, fish, and human palaces

Dōgen writes:

When dragons and fish see water as a palace, they may be like people who see a palace and cannot recognize at all that it is flowing.

This is a perspectival reversal. The apparently implausible claim that dragons and fish see water as a palace is used to question human confidence in the apparent stability of palaces, railings, stairs, and pillars. What humans classify as stable may, within the logic of the text, be flowing in a way they do not perceive. Dōgen asks:

Why should it not be possible, then, to accept such an explanation also for the railings, stairs, and pillars of your own palaces?

This repeats the intellectual movement of “flowing mountains”. What is conventionally classified as stable, static, or object-like may be active Dharma-process. The argument is not a plea for fantasy, but a critique of the limits of a particular perceptual standpoint.

Freeing oneself from fixed views

Dōgen states:

If you do not learn to free yourselves from the limitations of fixed ways of thinking, you have not yet freed yourselves from the body and mind of ordinary people.

This sentence makes clear that Dōgen’s claims about flowing mountains and self-seeing water are not decorative paradoxes. Within the fascicle, they are directed against fixed patterns of perception: Mountain is still, water flows, humans perceive, objects are perceived, above is above, and below is below. Buddhist practice, as Dōgen presents it, investigates and loosens these assumptions. This does not require rejecting ordinary perception altogether. Humans see water as water, which remains valid within human experience. The problem arises when this view is universalized. Dōgen therefore says:

If someone who studies the Buddha-Dharma today wants to investigate and learn water truly, they should not do this only from the limited human view, but should go one step further and experience water on the Way of the Buddhas.

This is the core practice instruction of the water section. In Dōgen’s framework, studying water requires a movement beyond an exclusively human-centered perspective toward the mode in which Buddhas and ancestors are said to use water.

Mountains as sanctuaries of practice

The later part of the text returns to mountains as places of practice:

Since beginningless time, great sages have lived in the mountains. All sages and saints made the mountains their inner sanctuary, made the mountains their body and mind.

Mountains are not merely places where sages happen to live. The passage describes a reciprocal relationship in which sages make mountains their body and mind and mountains realize themselves through sages. Dōgen even says:

Although we say that mountains belong to a country, in truth they belong to the people who love them. When the mountains love their inhabitants, sages and saints unfailingly go into the mountains.

This language is relational rather than possessive. In the passage, mountains belong to those who love them and love their inhabitants in return. The claim does not offer a modern legal theory of land ownership. It places political possession in tension with affinity, practice, and reverence. It also explains why imperial power cannot compel mountain sages: Mountains are represented as lying beyond ordinary worldly authority.

The passage has an ethical dimension because it resists the reduction of mountains to resource or territory. It should not be equated with modern environmentalism: Dōgen’s language is shaped by Buddhist cosmology, monastic practice, and medieval political relations. Nevertheless, it permits a limited ecological reading insofar as it contests an exclusively instrumental relation to mountains.

Water as the palace of the true dragon

Dōgen writes near the end:

Therefore water is the palace of the true dragon, and it is beyond flowing and falling.

The “true dragon” identifies a being that belongs to water in a way ordinary humans do not. Water is therefore not merely a substance that dragons inhabit, but their palace. Dōgen then warns against reducing water to flow:

If we regard it only as flowing, you insult the water. It is as if you forced “non-flowing” upon it. But water is only the true form of water, just as it is.

This is one of the central statements in the fascicle. Dōgen treats the definition of water as only flowing as an imposition of non-flowing upon it. The apparent paradox makes a precise point: Any fixed definition, including one derived from water’s visible flow, restricts water. Water is not adequately described as flowing in opposition to not-flowing. It is water.

He concludes:

If you master the flowing and non-flowing of a single drop of water, the complete mastery of the ten thousand dharmas is realized in a single moment.

The single drop is not a trivial example. It condenses the problem of all dharmas. Within the fascicle’s logic, mastery of flowing and non-flowing without reifying either amounts to mastery of the ten thousand dharmas. This is why water is presented as a sutra: It directly articulates the Dharma.

Mountains are mountains, water is water

The text ends with the saying:

Mountains are mountains, water is water.

Dōgen immediately clarifies:

These words do not mean that mountains are so-called “mountains”, but that mountains are simply mountains.

“Mountains are mountains” does not mean that ordinary naming is sufficient or that common sense has already secured the truth. It names the result, in Dōgen’s account, of examining mountains beyond fixed views, symbolic projections, sacred fantasies, and ordinary categories. The same applies to water: It is not merely the object named by humans, a liquid, a flow, wetness, or an object of use. Water is water when realized in its full Dharma-position. This conclusion resembles the familiar Zen pattern often summarized as:

before practice, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; during practice, mountains are not mountains and waters are not waters; after realization, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters.

Dōgen’s point is not a return to naive perception. Rather, the ordinary is reconfigured without being replaced by a hidden object or a metaphorical referent. Mountains need not become symbols, and waters need not become metaphors. Their suchness is presented as the Dharma.

Sansuikyō in a nutshell

The central aspects of Sansuikyō can be summarized as follows:

• Mountains and waters function as a sutra.
  Dōgen presents them not as symbols of the Dharma, but as exemplary dharmas that express and enact it.
• Mountains move.
  Their movement is not human movement. The claim challenges the use of human-scale motion as the standard for describing dharmas.
• Movement and stillness are not opposites.
  The mountains are constant precisely because they move. Flowing and non-flowing are both Dharma-positions.
• Mountains are neither sentient nor insentient.
  Dōgen refuses both anthropomorphism and materialist reduction.
• Mountains practice and investigate.
  Dōgen extends the vocabulary of practice and investigation to mountains without making them human subjects.
• Zen statements are not meaningless.
  Phrases such as “the East Mountain walks over the water” require study and practice within Dōgen’s tradition; they are not valued as arbitrary irrationality.
• Water is beyond fixed properties.
  It is neither wet nor dry, moving nor still, strong nor weak, existent nor non-existent.
• Water sees and expresses itself.
  Dōgen refuses to make human subjectivity the final measure of water or of dharmic activity more generally.
• Different beings see water differently.
  Humans see water as water, dragons as palaces, demons as flames or blood, others as jewels or Dharma-nature. These analogies reveal the conditioned nature of perception.
• All dharmas are free and abide nowhere.
  Yet each dharma has its place. Freedom does not dissolve concrete suchness.
• A single drop of water contains the ten thousand dharmas.
  In the logic of the fascicle, flowing and non-flowing in one drop exemplify the structure of reality.
• Mountains are mountains, water is water.
  This is not naive realism. It is the realization of things in their full suchness.

Sansuikyō and core Buddhist concepts

Sansuikyō is one of Dōgen’s clearest expressions of the Buddha-Dharma as the activity of the concrete world:

• Suchness (tathatā)
  “Mountains are mountains, water is water” expresses Dōgen’s account of things in their full suchness, beyond fixed concepts and symbolic reduction.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  Mountains and waters are empty of fixed essence. Water is not reducible to wetness, flow, color, form, or human perception. Mountains are not reducible to stillness or objecthood.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Water appears differently according to the beings who encounter it. Mountain and water express each other. The world is relational, not composed of isolated substances.
• Non-self (anattā)
  The fascicle decentrally situates the human observer: Human perception is one conditioned perspective among many, and the self that sees mountains and waters is itself subject to investigation by Dōgen.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  Mountains move and waters change. But impermanence is not only loss. It is the activity through which mountains and waters realize themselves.
• Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)
  Water reaches into the realization of Buddha-nature, and mountains become Buddhas and ancestors. Buddha-nature is not hidden behind nature; it is enacted as mountains and waters.
• Practice-realization
  By attributing practice and experience to mountains and waters, Dōgen presents human practice as inseparable from the wider activity of dharmas.
• Interpenetration
  Countless Buddha-lands can be realized in a single drop of dew. Worlds exist in clouds, wind, fire, earth, grass, and walking sticks. Part and whole interpenetrate.
• Middle Way
  Dōgen avoids both naive realism and abstract idealism. Mountains and waters are neither merely physical objects nor merely symbols. They are concrete Dharma-activity.

Philosophical implications

Sansuikyō develops one of Dōgen’s most radical challenges to human-centered perception. It begins from the familiar configuration in which mountains and waters appear as objects before a human subject: Mountains are still, water flows, humans perceive, and nature stands outside. Dōgen destabilizes each element of this configuration. Mountains move, water sees itself, and different beings inhabit different water-worlds. His use of such statements does not imply that perception is simply false. Human beings do see water as water, but this perspective is neither neutral nor exhaustive. The catalogue of dragons, fish, demons, gods, and Buddhas exposes perception as conditioned by the kind of being, its situation, and its world. The fascicle therefore does not identify a single appearance as the reality behind all others. It questions whether reality can be exhausted by any one perspective.

The fascicle also revises the category of nature. Mountains and waters are not a separate natural realm outside practice or a scenic background for human awakening. They participate in the Dharma as active dharmas: Mountains become Buddhas and ancestors, water practices itself, and a drop of dew can realize countless Buddha-lands. This undermines strict separations between nature and practice, world and scripture, and object and subject. At the same time, Dōgen does not offer a romantic cult of nature. Mountains and waters are neither pure symbols opposed to human corruption nor transparent objects of ordinary perception. They are difficult dharmas whose activity exceeds the categories through which they are conventionally apprehended.

The critique of “incomprehensible Zen” is equally important. Dōgen’s unusual statements are neither irrational slogans nor puzzles with a merely intellectual solution. They must be studied in relation to the practices, lineages, and Buddhist concepts that make them intelligible. This reflects a broader feature of his method: Language can reinforce fixed distinctions, but it can also reconfigure them. “Mountains flow” is therefore a practice-statement, in the sense that it reorganizes the conditions of perception and thought. It is not a declaration of nonsense.

For this reason, Sansuikyō has been attractive for ecological readings. It does not formulate an environmental ethic in modern terms, and it should not be used to make Dōgen a modern environmental theorist. Nevertheless, the fascicle removes mountains and waters from the status of mere objects, resources, or human utilities. Its language of mutual belonging, non-human worlds, and water as the palace of the true dragon provides a historically specific, non-anthropocentric challenge to instrumental conceptions of the world.

Conclusion

Sansuikyō is central to understanding how Dōgen presents the Dharma as concrete activity. Mountains and waters are not decorative images, natural metaphors, or merely poetic symbols. They are the fascicle’s principal examples of dharmas that function as a sutra, realize the words of the eternal Buddhas, and occupy their own Dharma-position. The text’s central claim is not simply that mountains move or water sees itself. These propositions expose the limits of ordinary human categories and make mountains and waters exemplary cases for the conditioned, perspectival, and self-expressing activity of dharmas in general.

The fascicle is closely connected to Dōgen’s wider thought. Like Uji, it rejects the image of things as static entities placed in an external framework. Like Busshō, it extends Dharma-activity to mountains, rivers, grasses, walls, and ordinary forms. Like Genjō Kōan, it resists reducing reality to the observer’s categories and emphasizes the Dharma-position of particular dharmas.

The concluding statement, “mountains are mountains, water is water”, clarifies what seeing things “as they are” means in this context. It is not a return to naive realism, nor does it make conventional naming sufficient. Rather, it describes the realization of mountains and water beyond fixed views, symbolic projections, and human-centered assumptions. Suchness is thus presented as concrete, active, and self-expressing.

Ultimately, Sansuikyō presents the Dharma as an activity that does not depend on human interpretation in order to be meaningful. Mountains move, waters see and practice themselves, and the ten thousand things express their own suchness. The fascicle therefore relocates human perception within a wider field of relations, perspectives, and activities. Mountains and waters are not silent matter awaiting spiritual interpretation. In Dōgen’s account, their movement, flowing, stillness, and self-expression are themselves the living sutra of the world.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

The sixth patriarch cutting the bamboo. Huineng is said to have attained sudden enlightenment upon hearing a verse about the nature of mind. He then cut a piece of bamboo in two to demonstrate his understanding. The image represents the Chan claim that the Way is not learned through thought alone but through concrete action and embodiment. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

In this post, we reconstruct how Dōgen understands the study of the Way, that is, the Buddhist path in its doctrinal, practical, and soteriological dimensions, with body and mind. We examine how he expands both terms beyond their usual meanings: Mind is not limited to private thought or inner consciousness, while body is not reduced to the biological organism. Shinjin gakudō thereby presents Buddhist practice as involving the whole person and the surrounding world.

Introduction

Shinjin gakudō (身心學道), usually translated as Studying the Way with body and mind, is one of Eihei Dōgen’s most sustained reflections on how the Buddha-Dharma is studied. The title announces the fascicle’s central concern: Shinjin means body and mind, while gakudō denotes studying, learning, or practicing the Way. The text treats the Buddhist path as an activity of the whole person rather than as thought, belief, doctrine, or formal identity alone. It is consequently a close companion to Dōgen’s other texts on practice: Bendōwa argues that practice and realization are not two; Fukan zazengi gives the concrete form of zazen as the direct gate of the Dharma; Uji develops the temporal structure of being and practice. Shinjin gakudō adds an account in which body and mind are not fixed possessions of an isolated self.

Historical background

Dōgen delivered Shinjin gakudō in 1242 at Hōrin monastery. The text belongs to the early period of the Shōbōgenzō, but it already contains several themes that run through Dōgen’s mature thought: The relation between mind and world, the concrete role of the body, the danger of naturalistic or essentialist misunderstandings of Buddha-nature, the temporal structure of practice, and the nonduality of life and death. It is also, however, a difficult text because Dōgen does not simply give a clean doctrinal distinction between mind and body. He first speaks of studying the Way with mind, then of studying the Way with body, but both sections undo simplistic assumptions about what “mind” and “body” mean.

The text is therefore not a dualistic account in which the mind learns one part of the Way and the body learns another. Dōgen instead destabilizes both terms. Mind is not a private inner substance. It includes mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, stars, walls, tiles, and stones. Body is not merely a biological organism. It includes the whole universe of the ten directions, life and death, coming and going, action and stillness. In this sense, Shinjin gakudō expands the meaning of body and mind until they are no longer owned by an isolated self. For Dōgen, to study the Way with body and mind means to study the Way through the full field of embodied, conditioned, relational existence.

Context and central problem

Shinjin gakudō opens with a strong claim:

The Buddha-truth is such that you cannot attain it without the firm resolve to learn it. If you cannot resolve to learn the truth, it moves farther and farther away from you.

The opening rejects passivity. Although the Dharma may already be present, Dōgen presents it as unrealized without the resolve to learn and practice. This is consistent with his broader position. In Bendōwa, the Dharma is abundant but does not reveal itself without practice. In Fukan zazengi, truth is everywhere, but the slightest dualistic distinction sends it far away. Shinjin gakudō articulates the same structure through learning: Without the decision to study the Way, truth recedes. The cited saying of Zen Master Nangaku gives this opening its further structure:

It is not that practice and experience do not exist, but they must not be defiled.

The statement avoids two extremes: It does not deny practice and realization, but it warns against their defilement. Here defilement does not mean ordinary dirt. It names the self-centered appropriation of practice, realization, or the Way as a possession or identity. The passage establishes a tension that governs the fascicle: Truth is studied, but study cannot be reduced to acquisitive grasping.

Dōgen then states that there are two initial ways to study the Buddha-truth:

First, there are two ways to study the Buddha-truth: with the mind or with the body.

Dōgen develops the rest of the text around these two forms of study. But he does not present them as a simple opposition between inner thought and outer embodiment. His analysis of mind already includes the world, while his analysis of body includes the whole universe. By examining both separately, Dōgen gradually shows that neither mind nor body can be understood in the narrow sense of a private possession belonging to an isolated self.

Shinjin gakudō

The following translation provides the full text attributed to Dōgen:

Studying the Way with mind

The main text can be divided into two parts: The first concerns studying the Way with mind, the second studying it with body. The first part shows that Dōgen does not reduce the Way to a purely physical practice. Mind is not rejected as an obstacle to awakening. It is presented as a field of study and practice in its own right.

Mind is not merely thinking

Dōgen first defines studying the truth with mind:

“The mind studies the truth” means that you study it with the various kinds of mind. These kinds of mind include the thinking mind, the non-thinking mind, and the balanced mind.

The first point is that “mind” is plural and dynamic. Dōgen does not reduce mind to ordinary thought. He includes thinking mind, non-thinking mind, and balanced or ordinary mind. Zen is often misunderstood either as anti-intellectualism or as a technique for emptying the mind. Dōgen does neither. Thought is part of the field, but so is non-thinking, and so is the ordinary balanced mind.

The phrase “non-thinking” recalls the instruction in Fukan zazengi:

Think from the ground of non-thinking.

In both texts, non-thinking does not mean unconsciousness or mental blankness. It denotes a mode of awareness not governed by grasping, discursive elaboration, or self-centered conceptualization. Dōgen thereby presents the study of the Way as involving not only the production of thought but also the release of fixation on thought.

Dōgen then connects mind with the awakening of the bodhi-mind:

When you have established an intimate connection with the truth and arrived at the bodhi-mind, you take refuge in the great truth of the buddhas and ancestors.

The mind that studies the Way is therefore not detached cognition. It is the mind that turns toward awakening, takes refuge, and enters the practice of the Buddhas and ancestors. Even before the bodhi-mind is fully awakened, one studies the methods of those who have awakened before. Learning the Way means entering a transmitted field of practice.

Learning by using mind and by letting mind fall away

Dōgen writes:

You study the truth by using these various kinds of mind, and you study the truth by letting them fall away. At this time you study the truth both through thinking and through non-thinking.

Mind is neither rejected nor treated as an object of attachment. Dōgen’s paired formulation, studying with mind and letting mind fall away, avoids both affirmation and negation as fixed positions. Mind is necessary, but not a possession. This has a direct connection to non-self. If mind were treated as an inner essence, study with mind would become a subtle form of self-grasping. By holding together the use and release of mind, Dōgen presents it as an instrument, field, process, and Dharma-position rather than a permanent self.

This also explains why Dōgen can speak of studying through thinking and non-thinking. Thought is not excluded from the Way, but Dōgen refuses to make it the sovereign center. Non-thinking is not the opposite of thought in a dualistic sense. It is the release of thought from self-centered possession.

Transmission as the study of mind by mind

Dōgen then gives examples from the Zen lineage: Siddhartha Gautama transmitting the robe (Japanese: kesa) to Mahākāśyapa, Bodhidharma saying to Huike, “You have attained my marrow”, and Huineng pounding rice before receiving the robe from Hongren. Dōgen comments:

This was the study of mind by mind.

These examples show that mind is learned through concrete acts of transmission, not through abstract doctrine alone. A robe is handed on. A disciple bows. Rice is pounded. A teacher recognizes a student. Mind is studied through embodied situations. This is important because it prevents “mind” from becoming an inward psychological category. Mind is not merely what happens inside the head. Mind appears in bowing, receiving, working, shaving the head, and practicing. Dōgen writes:

Shaving the head and dyeing the clothing means changing the mind and clarifying the mind.

External acts are not merely external. They are transformations of mind. Leaving home is not only a change of location. It is a change in the structure of attachment, identity, and orientation. Dōgen even says Siddhartha Gautama :

When he climbed over the city wall and went into the mountains, he gave up one mind and entered another mind.

This sentence shows how broad Dōgen’s notion of mind is. Mind is not a hidden inner object. It is a way of being situated and acting. To leave the palace and enter the mountains is to enter another mind. To go into the mountains is “to think from the ground of non-thinking”. To leave the world is “to be beyond thinking”. These are not merely mental states. They are whole forms of life.

Mountains, rivers, and earth are mind

Dōgen then gives one of the most striking statements in the text:

In short: mountains, rivers, and the great earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars are mind.

This sentence can easily be misunderstood if read through idealism. Dōgen is not simply saying that the external world is a projection of the mind. He immediately qualifies the point:

The mountains, rivers, and the great earth mean that mountains are real mountains and rivers are real water.

The qualification establishes that Dōgen does not dissolve the world into a private mental substance. Mountains are mountains, rivers are water. The claim is not that mind imagines the world, but that mind and world cannot be separated in an ordinary dualistic way. The mind that studies the Way is not confined to an individual person but includes the whole field of manifestation. Dōgen develops this claim by multiplying the forms of mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, and stars. There are cosmic mountains, horizontal and vertical mountains, rivers of heaven and earth, oceans and ponds, earth in land, earth in consciousness, earth in the Three Treasures, and worlds where heaven functions as earth. This proliferation prevents any simple definition: “Earth,” “mountain,” and “mind” are not fixed objects. The relevant philosophical claim is that the world encountered by beings differs according to their conditions:

The views of living beings are very different, and it may be that humans and gods have a completely different view of the sun, moon, and stars.

This is close to the Buddhist analysis of conditioned perception. Things are not simply encountered from nowhere. They appear according to body, sense organs, karma, form of life, and conditions. Yet this does not make the world arbitrary. The mountains are real mountains, and rivers are real water. The point is relational, not subjective in a trivial sense.

Mind beyond inside and outside

Dōgen asks:

Should we regard them as something inside or outside, or as something that comes or goes? Is something added when they arise, or is something taken away when they perish?

These questions undo ordinary spatial and temporal assumptions. If mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, and stars are mind, then mind cannot be simply inside. But if they are real mountains and real rivers, mind cannot be simply outside either. Likewise, arising and perishing cannot be understood as the addition or subtraction of fixed substances.

This connects Shinjin gakudō with Uji. Dōgen writes:

The past was only a moment of mind followed by the next moment of mind. A moment of mind followed by the next moment of mind is therefore a moment of mountains, rivers, and the great earth followed by the next moment of mountains, rivers, and the great earth.

Here mind and world are temporalized together. The sequence of mind-moments is not separate from the sequence of world-moments. Mind is not a stable observer of changing phenomena. Mind itself changes as mountains, rivers, and earth change. This is a direct challenge to any view of consciousness as a permanent witness.

Dōgen continues:

Because mountains, rivers, and the great earth are beyond being and non-being, they are neither large nor small, cannot be grasped nor not grasped, known nor not known, penetrated nor not penetrated. They change neither in awakening nor in non-awakening.

This passage follows a structure closely related to Madhyamaka. Nāgārjuna repeatedly shows that phenomena cannot ultimately be fixed within opposing conceptual categories such as being and non-being, arising and non-arising, permanence and annihilation, identity and difference, or coming and going. Any phenomenon that existed through an independent essence would have to remain what it is by its own power. It could neither arise through conditions nor change into something else. Conversely, saying that phenomena simply do not exist would deny their concrete appearance and causal functioning. Madhyamaka therefore rejects both substantial existence and nihilistic non-existence. Dōgen applies a similar logic to mountains, rivers, earth, and mind. To say that they are “beyond being and non-being” does not mean that they disappear into an ineffable realm outside reality. Mountains remain real mountains, and rivers remain real water. What is rejected is the assumption that they possess a fixed nature that can be captured once and for all by categories such as large or small, internal or external, graspable or ungraspable, known or unknown. These distinctions function conventionally, but none of them defines what a mountain, river, world, or mind is in itself.

The same applies to arising and perishing. If something with a fixed essence arose, its existence would have to be added to a previously non-existent entity. If it perished, an independently existing substance would have to be removed from reality. For Madhyamaka, both models are incoherent because phenomena arise only through conditions and therefore never possess an independent essence that could be added or taken away. Dōgen’s questions about whether anything is gained at arising or lost at perishing point in the same direction. Mountains, rivers, mind, life, and death occur as conditioned processes rather than as substances entering and leaving existence. Dōgen nevertheless does not merely repeat Madhyamaka philosophy in Zen terminology. His emphasis is practical and experiential. Nāgārjuna exposes the contradictions produced when conceptual thought attributes fixed essence to phenomena. Dōgen asks what it means to study the Way once mind and world are no longer separated into an inner observer and external objects. The emptiness of mountains and rivers does not make them abstract or unreal. It allows them to appear fully as mountains and rivers, free from the demand that they fit a permanent conceptual identity.

This also clarifies Dōgen’s statement that mountains and rivers “change neither in awakening nor in non-awakening”. Awakening does not create a new reality, while delusion does not destroy the reality already present. What changes is the way phenomena are encountered. In delusion, they are grasped as self-existing objects standing opposite a self-existing subject. In awakening, they are experienced as empty, conditioned, and relational, without ceasing to be concrete. Mountains do not become more real when awakening occurs, and they do not become less real when awakening is absent. Their suchness does not depend on whether a person conceptually understands it. The Madhyamaka-like structure of the passage therefore does not lead away from the world into a position beyond all statements. It removes the claim that any statement can capture phenomena through a fixed essence. Mountains and rivers remain available for walking, seeing, drinking, crossing, and practicing. Their emptiness is precisely what allows them to arise, change, function, and enter into relations. They are not metaphysical objects waiting to be classified, but the conditioned and concrete field in which mind studies the Way.

Walls, tiles, and stones are mind

Dōgen later states:

Because studying the truth is like this, hedges, walls, tiles, and pebbles are mind. This mind is not that the triple world or the Dharma-world is only “mind”; rather, hedges, walls, tiles, and pebbles are themselves this mind.

This passage is crucial because it explicitly rejects a simplistic “everything is mind” doctrine. Dōgen does not say that the world is merely mental. He says that concrete things themselves are mind. Hedges, walls, tiles, and pebbles are not symbols of mind. They are not objects inside mind. They are mind in their concrete thusness. This again fits Dōgen’s broader anti-essentialism. If one says “everything is mind” and imagines a universal mental substance behind things, one has created another metaphysical object. Dōgen’s point is more concrete: This wall, this tile, this stone, this hedge is the mind of the Way, not because it is absorbed into subjectivity, but because the distinction between inner mind and outer object does not hold at the level of realized practice.

He then adds images of practice:

To study the truth means to wade through the swamp of everyday life and stand in the water of difficulty, and it means to bind yourselves without a chain.

Studying the Way is not clean abstraction. It takes place in mud, water, difficulty, and self-discipline. The phrase “bind yourselves without a chain” suggests a voluntary discipline that is not imposed externally as mere constraint. Practice binds the practitioner to the Way, but not through coercion. It is the self-binding of commitment.

Bodhi-mind awakens in its own time

Dōgen turns to the awakening of the bodhi-mind:

Bodhi-mind is such that it awakens precisely in the moment of its time. In this very moment, the whole Dharma-world awakens and attains bodhi-mind, because awakening does not depend on circumstances.

This is one of the most important temporal statements in the text. The bodhi-mind here is more than the conscious intention to seek awakening. It is the awakening orientation in which Buddha-nature becomes active as resolve, practice, and realization throughout the whole Dharma-world, without constituting a hidden or permanent inner essence. It does not appear as a simple effect mechanically produced by external conditions. It awakens “in the moment of its time”. This does not mean that conditions are irrelevant. Dōgen repeatedly emphasizes conditions, practice, body, lineage, and effort. But he refuses to reduce awakening to a linear causal mechanism.

The phrase also connects Shinjin gakudō to Uji. Awakening is not merely an event in time. It is a temporal position. When bodhi-mind awakens, the whole Dharma-world awakens in that moment. This is also close to the structure found in Bendōwa, where the act of sitting is not private but involves the whole Dharma-world.

Dōgen adds:

Even in the states of hell, hungry ghosts, animals, and asuras, the bodhi-mind awakens.

This statement is striking because it universalizes the possibility of awakening. Bodhi-mind is not restricted to favorable human or monastic conditions. It can awaken even in painful and confused states of existence. This does not romanticize suffering. It means that no state is metaphysically excluded from the possibility of the Way. The bodhi-mind is not owned by a privileged class of beings.

Pure mind from moment to moment

Dōgen then explains “pure mind from moment to moment”:

“Pure mind from moment to moment” means that the mind, moment by moment, is nothing but pure mind. These words do not describe one or two moments, but the reality of moment after moment.

This passage does not support the claim that a pure permanent mind exists beneath change. The purity here is temporal. Mind is pure “from moment to moment” because each moment is itself, not because an eternal substance persists through all moments. Dōgen gives two images:

The leaves of the lotus are completely round, and this roundness is like a mirror. The shells of water chestnuts are very sharp, and this sharpness is like needles.

The lotus leaf and the water chestnut shell each have their own concrete characteristics. Dōgen nevertheless says that conventional comparisons to mirrors or needles remain, in reality, “from moment to moment”. Their shape is real in the present, but not a permanent essence. The lotus leaf is round now. The water chestnut is sharp now. Their properties function concretely without becoming fixed substances. This is a precise expression of impermanence and suchness together. Things appear with concrete qualities that are momentary, conditioned, and without fixed essence. Dōgen thus presents the study of the Way with mind without turning either permanence or emptiness into abstraction.

The ordinary balanced mind

Dōgen then discusses the “balanced normal mind”:

Yesterday goes away from here and today comes from here. When yesterday goes away, the whole sky goes away, and when today comes, the whole earth comes here. This is the balanced normal mind.

The ordinary mind is not trivial. It is the mind in which yesterday goes and today comes, the sky departs and the earth arrives. This is not ordinary mind as mere habit or dullness. It is the balanced functioning of reality in each moment. The “normal” is not opposed to the Dharma. It is the field in which the Dharma is encountered. Dōgen writes:

Words are balanced, mind is balanced, and the world is balanced. Life and action arise and perish in the moment.

This formulation shows again that mind, language, world, life, and action are not separate domains. They arise and perish together in the moment. The balanced mind is not psychological calm alone. It is the dynamic equilibrium of reality as experienced and practiced. The sentence that then follows is especially important:

Even if you do not understand it, you still advance on the Way of truth when you awaken and realize the bodhi-mind. This place already exists, no one can doubt it. Doubt is already there, and this is normal.

Doubt is not excluded. Even doubt is part of the normal functioning of the Way. This recalls Uji, where Dōgen says that doubt itself is time. The practitioner need not eliminate all uncertainty before practicing. Doubt itself can be part of the path when it is not turned into identity or avoidance.

Studying the Way with body

The second part of the text concerns studying the Way with body. It is central to Dōgen’s account of embodied practice. The body is not a mere vehicle for mind or a container for a spiritual subject. Dōgen presents the body itself as studying truth. This directly challenges dualistic separations of mind and body, spirit and matter, or practice and realization.

The body studies the truth

“The body studies the truth” means that one must study the truth with the body, that is, with this collection of red flesh. The body is based on studying the truth, and studying the truth is based on the body.

This is among Dōgen’s clearest formulations of embodied practice. The body is not merely a vehicle for mind or a container for a spiritual subject. It studies truth itself. The reference to “this collection of red flesh” makes the claim deliberately concrete. Practice is not attributed to a disembodied consciousness but to blood, flesh, posture, gesture, bowing, walking, eating, sitting, and acting.

At the same time, Dōgen does not reduce the body to biological material. He immediately cites two sayings:

The whole universe is the true body of the human being.
Life and death, coming and going, are the true body of the human being.

This expands the body beyond anatomy. The true body is not merely the physical organism bounded by skin. The whole universe is the true body. Life and death are the true body. Coming and going are the true body. The body is local and cosmic, concrete and relational, flesh and universe. This is why Dōgen warns:

Students of later ages should not hold a naturalistic view of the body like people outside the Buddha Way.

A naturalistic view here does not simply mean modern scientific naturalism. It means a reductive view that treats the body as a self-existing natural entity, originally pure, already Buddha, and therefore in no need of practice. Dōgen is not rejecting the body. He is rejecting a false view of the body as an already sufficient essence.

Against naturalistic Buddha-nature

Dōgen quotes Zen Master Hyakujō:

Whoever clings to the idea that they are originally already pure and free, by nature Buddha and one with the Way of Zen, belongs to people outside the Buddha Way who hold a naturalistic view.

This passage is extremely important for interpreting Dōgen’s approach to Buddha-nature. Dōgen strongly affirms that the Dharma is present and that beings can awaken. But he rejects the idea that “I am already Buddha by nature” can be used as a reason to abandon practice. This is the same issue that appears in Bendōwa through the story of Hōgen and Soku. The formula “mind here and now is Buddha” becomes false when it is grasped intellectually as self-assurance. Here, the idea of original purity becomes false when it produces passivity. The problem is not original purity as a doctrinal expression. The problem is clinging to it as identity. Dōgen’s critique is therefore directed against spiritual essentialism. If one believes that one is originally pure and therefore does not need practice, one has turned Buddha-nature into a subtle ātman. Dōgen rejects this. The body studies the Way not by assuming its purity, but by practicing.

The whole universe of the ten directions as the true body

Dōgen develops the body section through the phrase:

The whole universe of the ten directions means that each of the ten directions is the whole universe.

The ten directions include east, west, south, north, the intermediate directions, nadir, and zenith: All directions in the entire universe. Dōgen defines experience as the moment in which front and back, length and breadth of all ten directions are the complete whole. He adds:

The word “experience” means here that you can feel and confirm with your own body that the human body is the whole universe of the ten directions, even though it is limited by self and world.

This passage distinguishes Dōgen’s claim from a merely speculative identification of body and universe. The body is not only thought about as the universe. It is confirmed with the body. The true body is therefore presented not as doctrine alone but as felt, verified, and enacted.

This does not erase ordinary bodily limitation. Dōgen acknowledges that the body is limited by self and world. But within that limitation, the body is the whole universe. This is not a contradiction if understood through interpenetration. Each concrete body is not separate from the total field of conditions. The whole universe is not elsewhere. It is present as this body, this breath, this action, this moment. Dōgen then gives a characteristic image:

Sometimes the zazen hall and Buddha hall are built in a single speck of dust, and sometimes the whole world is built in the zazen hall and Buddha hall.

This recalls Huayan imagery, but Dōgen gives it practical force. The meditation hall is not merely a physical room. It is a field in which the whole world can be enacted. Conversely, even a speck of dust can contain the zazen hall. The point is not fantasy, but nonseparation: part and whole interpenetrate.

Bowing, acting, and resting

Dōgen writes:

Every moment in which you study the truth is undoubtedly studying it in acting and in allowing. You prostrate, bow with joined hands, and these are certainly the active and resting forms of dignified conduct.

In this passage, studying the Way with the body includes acting and allowing, movement and stillness, bowing and resting. The body studies not only in dramatic acts but in ordinary forms of conduct. Bowing is not treated as ritual alone but as bodily learning. Prostration becomes an enactment of humility, relation, and non-self.

This connects Shinjin gakudō to Dōgen’s wider emphasis on practice as enacted form. The Way is not learned only by holding correct views. It is learned through conduct: shaving the head, leaving home, bowing, practicing precepts, taking refuge, sitting, and moving. The body learns by doing.

“Acting and allowing” is especially interesting here. Practice is not only active effort. It is also allowing things to be, releasing grasping, letting body and mind drop, and allowing the Dharma to manifest. Body practice includes both exertion and receptivity.

Life and death as the true body

Dōgen then turns to life and death:

Life and death, coming and going, are the true body of the human being.

This connects the body to the deepest Buddhist problem of samsara. The true body is not a static organism that temporarily experiences life and later experiences death. Life and death themselves are the true body. Coming and going are the true body. Dōgen writes:

Life and death are the never-ending wandering of ordinary people, but also the liberation of the great sages.

This sentence shows the nondual structure of the text. Life and death are bondage when lived through ignorance and clinging. But they are also the field of liberation when realized as the Dharma. Liberation is not escape into a separate realm outside life and death. This is consistent with Dōgen’s critique in Bendōwa of the view that nirvana exists outside life and death.

Dōgen then makes the relation more precise:

Life does not obstruct death, and death does not obstruct life. Ordinary people understand neither life nor death.

This resembles the firewood and ash logic of Genjō Kōan. Life is fully life. Death is fully death. Life is not merely a step toward death, and death is not merely the negation of life. Each has its own Dharma position. Dōgen adds:

Life does not come first and death after. Death is already part of life. Death does not stand in opposition to life, and life does not depend on death.

This is not nihilism, because the passage does not make life and death meaningless. Dōgen refuses to force them into a simplistic temporal opposition. Death is not merely an external event at the end of life. It is already present as the impermanent structure of life. Life is not merely the absence of death but its own complete manifestation.

Engo on life, death, and the whole universe

Dōgen cites Zen Master Engo:

Life is the dynamic activity of the whole universe.
Death is the dynamic activity of the whole universe.
They fill the whole space.
The pure mind is always moment by moment.

This poem condenses several themes of the text. Life is not private. Death is not private. Both are the dynamic activity of the whole universe. The pure mind is not a fixed entity, but moment-by-moment. Again, Dōgen’s account joins body, mind, world, and time.

Dōgen then adds that Engo may not have known that life and death go even beyond the dynamic activity of the whole universe. This is characteristic of Dōgen’s method: He cites an authoritative saying, affirms it, and then pushes it further. Life and death are the dynamic activity of the universe, but they are not captured even by that statement. The Way cannot be enclosed by formulas, even good formulas.

The closing section returns to the demand of practice:

All this to investigate thoroughly means to study the truth. Non-thinking and the rejection of non-thinking are as real as bones and marrow. You study the truth only when you do not let yourselves be caught by theories about it.

The conclusion does not reject theory by producing no theory. Dōgen constructs a difficult philosophical text while warning against being caught by theories. Truth is studied but not possessed. It is learned with mind and body, neither of which can become fixed doctrine.

Shinjin gakudō in a nutshell

The central claims of Shinjin gakudō can be summarized as follows:

• The Way is learned.
  Dōgen presents the Buddha-truth as unrealized through passive possession; without the resolve to study and practice, it recedes.
• Practice and experience are not to be defiled.
  Practice and realization are defiled when they are turned into self-possession, pride, or fixed identity.
• The Way is studied with mind.
  Dōgen’s account of mind includes thinking, non-thinking, balanced mind, bodhi-mind, moment-by-moment pure mind, and the mind of the ancient Buddhas.
• Mind is not merely internal.
  Mountains, rivers, the great earth, sun, moon, stars, walls, tiles, and stones are mind. This does not make the world merely subjective; it dislodges the ordinary dualistic separation of mind and world.
• The Way is studied by using mind and by letting mind fall away.
  Dōgen neither rejects mind nor permits it to become a permanent essence.
• The Way is studied with body.
  The body is not a secondary vehicle for mental insight; this “collection of red flesh” studies truth.
• The true body is the whole universe.
  The body is local and concrete, yet also the whole universe of the ten directions. In the fascicle, practice is verified with the body.
• Dōgen rejects naturalistic passivity.
  The claim that one is already pure, already Buddha, and therefore need not practice is rejected as an outside view.
• Life and death are the true body.
  Life does not obstruct death, and death does not obstruct life. Liberation is presented not as escape from life and death but as their realization.
• Theory does not replace practice.
  The philosophically dense text concludes by warning against being caught by theories about truth.

Shinjin gakudō and core Buddhist concepts

Shinjin gakudō is deeply rooted in core Buddhist ideas:

• Non-self (anattā)
  The fascicle undermines the idea of a fixed inner mind or isolated bodily self. Its claims that mind includes mountains and rivers and body includes the whole universe deny that either is a separate essence belonging to a permanent self.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  Mind is described as moment-by-moment. Life and death are not opposites but temporal forms of the true body. Nothing remains as an unchanging essence.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Mind, body, world, practice, perception, conditions, and awakening arise relationally. Dōgen’s account of mountains, rivers, earth, and the ten directions constructs existence as thoroughly conditioned.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  Dōgen refuses fixed categories such as inside and outside, being and non-being, large and small, grasped and ungrasped. Mind and body are empty of fixed essence.
• Bodhi-mind
  The awakening of the bodhi-mind is central. It does not depend mechanically on circumstances; rather, it awakens in the moment of its own time and involves the whole Dharma-world.
• Suchness (tathatā)
  Mountains are real mountains, rivers are real water, lotus leaves are round, and water chestnut shells are sharp. Things appear in their concrete suchness, without becoming permanent substances.
• Practice-realization
  Studying the Way is not separate from realizing it. Dōgen presents bowing, leaving home, sitting, acting, allowing, and living through life and death as forms of embodied practice-realization.
• Middle Way
  Dōgen avoids both materialism and idealism, eternalism and nihilism, body-reduction and mind-reduction. The Way is studied through body and mind without clinging to either as essence.

Philosophical implications

Shinjin gakudō offers one of Dōgen’s most radical critiques of the ordinary separation between inner mind and outer world, and between spiritual mind and physical body. The fascicle begins with a seemingly simple distinction, study with mind and study with body, before transforming both terms. Mind is not merely thought, consciousness, or inward awareness. It includes mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, stars, walls, tiles, and stones. Body is not merely biological flesh: It is this red flesh, but also the whole universe of the ten directions, life and death, coming and going. Dōgen is therefore not advancing a dualistic anthropology in which human beings have separate mental and physical parts that each contribute to practice. Both “mind” and “body” exceed their conventional boundaries. Mind is worldly, body is cosmic, and both are relational, temporal, and empty of fixed essence.

The text also criticizes two opposing positions. Intellectualism assumes that the Way can be learned through ideas, explanations, or theories alone. Naturalistic passivity assumes that practice is unnecessary because one is already originally pure or Buddha by nature. Dōgen rejects both. The fascicle presents the Way as learned through concrete embodied practice, while refusing to turn that practice into self-possession.

The body section is especially important for understanding Dōgen’s Zen as embodied rather than purely contemplative. The body studies the Way not only in zazen but through bowing, taking refuge, observing precepts, leaving home, acting, resting, living, dying, coming, and going. This does not reduce the Way to ritual behavior. Rather, the fascicle treats the Dharma as inseparable from the forms through which it is enacted.

The life-and-death passages also clarify Dōgen’s account of liberation. If life and death are the true body, liberation cannot be escape from embodied temporality into a separate eternal realm. Life and death are the field of practice: Bondage when grasped through ignorance, but the dynamic activity of the whole universe when realized through the Way. This connects Shinjin gakudō with Dōgen’s broader critique of a permanent soul or immortal mind.

Conclusion

Shinjin gakudō is a key text for understanding Dōgen’s embodied account of the Buddha Way. It begins from the claim that truth cannot be attained without the resolve to study it. Such study is not merely intellectual but takes place with mind and body. Dōgen’s treatment of both therefore refuses ordinary dualism: Mind is not a private inner substance, body is not merely biological matter, and both open onto the whole field of the Dharma.

The analysis of mind includes thinking, non-thinking, balanced mind, bodhi-mind, moment-by-moment purity, and the mind of the ancient Buddhas. It also denies that mind is separate from mountains, rivers, earth, sun, moon, stars, walls, tiles, and stones. The body section adds that truth is studied with this red flesh, while the true body is also the whole universe of the ten directions, life and death, and coming and going.

Dōgen therefore rejects both intellectualism and spiritual essentialism. The Way cannot be reduced to theories about mind, nor replaced by the assertion of an original purity that eliminates the need for practice. Body and mind are released from fixed identity through practice rather than treated as its prior foundation. This links the fascicle closely with Bendōwa, Fukan zazengi, Genjō Kōan, and Uji. Each presents the Dharma not as an object of possession but as enacted reality.

The force of Shinjin gakudō lies in this embodied radicalism. The study of the Way neither withdraws into mind nor reduces practice to body. Dōgen instead makes body and mind, world and action, life and death, thought and non-thinking the field of practice. The fascicle situates the Way in the concrete activity of body, mind, world, and moment.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

“Circle” by Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), before 1770. The circle is a common motif in Zen art, often symbolizing the whole of existence, the present moment, or the nature of mind. However, as Dōgen argues in Busshō, such symbols can be misleading if they are taken as representations of a hidden essence. The circle is not Buddha-nature itself. It is a form that can point to the whole of existence, but it must not be mistaken for an object of worship or a metaphysical guarantee. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0)

In this post, we examine how Dōgen reinterprets Buddha-nature as the whole of existence rather than an inner property, why he treats the statements that beings “have” and are “without” Buddha-nature as complementary rather than simply contradictory, and how Busshō connects Buddha-nature with time, body, practice, non-abiding, and the concrete activity of the world.

Introduction

Busshō (佛性), usually translated as Buddha-nature, is one of the most important and difficult fascicles of Eihei Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. It was presented in 1241 at Kannondōri-kōshō-hōrin-ji in Kyoto, only a few years after Dōgen’s return from China and shortly before several other central fascicles such as Uji and Shinjin gakudō. The topic is one of the most sensitive in Buddhist thought: the meaning of Buddha-nature.

Buddha-nature has a productive but unstable place in Buddhist thought. It can express the universal possibility of awakening, the inclusion of all beings within the path, and a basis for compassion and confidence in practice. It can also be interpreted as a hidden essence, pure inner self, eternal spiritual substance, or metaphysical guarantee that makes practice unnecessary. Such an interpretation creates a serious problem for a Buddhist tradition structured by non-self, impermanence, dependent arising, and emptiness. If Buddha-nature is treated as an immortal essence within beings, it risks functioning as a Buddhist version of ātman, precisely what Buddhism rejects.

Dōgen’s Busshō is one of the most radical attempts to prevent this misunderstanding. He does not reject Buddha-nature. He does not say that the teaching is false or merely symbolic. But he refuses to allow Buddha-nature to become a substance, property, possession, potential seed, psychological awareness, or metaphysical self. Instead, he interprets Buddha-nature as the whole of existence, as concrete activity, as emptiness, as the present moment, as mountains and rivers, as body, as form, as non-abiding, and even as the statement that beings are “without Buddha-nature”.

This makes Busshō a key text for understanding Dōgen’s Zen. In Bendōwa, Dōgen argues that the Dharma is already present but must still be practiced. In Fukan zazengi, he warns against trying to become Buddha as a future object of attainment. In Busshō, he applies the same logic to Buddha-nature itself. Buddha-nature is not something that beings possess before practice. It is not something that will arrive later. It is not something hidden behind phenomena. It is the whole field of existence as it is realized in practice.

The central problem of Buddha-nature

The fascicle begins with a famous saying attributed to Sakyamuni Buddha:

All living beings fully have Buddha-nature.
The Tathāgata is always present, without any change.

This formulation is both revealing and potentially misleading. It can express the universal possibility of awakening, but it can also appear to affirm a universal and permanent Buddha-nature. The phrase “The Tathāgata is always present. There is no change” may, when read superficially, support precisely the essentialist view that Dōgen seeks to dislodge: An unchanging Buddha essence hidden within all beings.

Dōgen’s strategy is not to reject the statement. Instead, he re-reads it. He shifts the meaning of “have”, “being”, “living beings”, “Buddha-nature”, and “unchanging”. He does not allow any of these terms to remain stable in an ordinary metaphysical sense. He writes:

Fully being is Buddha-nature, and the all-inclusive whole of all existence is called “living beings”. Now, in this moment, the inside and outside of all living beings is the whole existence of Buddha-nature.

This is a decisive move. Buddha-nature is not a hidden possession inside living beings. Rather, the whole of existence itself is Buddha-nature. Living beings are not containers that contain Buddha-nature. They are the whole field in which Buddha-nature is expressed. Dōgen also writes:

You must know that Buddha-nature is now the whole of existence and is therefore beyond being and non-being.

This sentence sets the direction for the entire fascicle. Buddha-nature is neither an entity that exists nor a nothing. It is beyond the duality of being and non-being because it is not a thing to be counted, possessed, or denied. It is presented as the whole of existence, here and now.

The problem, then, is not whether Buddha-nature exists or does not exist. That question is already too crude. The deeper question is how Buddha-nature is realized without being turned into an essence. Dōgen’s answer is that Buddha-nature is not possessed. It is enacted, expressed, seen, forgotten, misunderstood, practiced, and realized in the concrete field of life.

The structure of Busshō

Busshō is a long and layered fascicle. It does not unfold as a linear philosophical treatise. Instead, Dōgen moves through scriptural quotations, lineage stories, paradoxical statements, critical corrections, and close readings of Zen dialogues. The text can be roughly divided into several major movements.

First, Dōgen interprets Sakyamuni’s statement that all living beings fully have Buddha-nature. He immediately reframes it as a statement about the whole of existence rather than a property possessed by beings, and rejects its identification with a permanent self, mental awareness, or pure inner substance.

Second, Dōgen criticizes interpretations of Buddha-nature as a seed. The image of a plant seed nourished by Dharma-rain is rejected as ordinary emotional thinking. In Dōgen’s reading, the metaphors of seeds, flowers, and fruits name momentary formations of mind and time rather than a hidden essence maturing into awakening.

Third, Dōgen reinterprets the saying, “When the time has come, Buddha-nature appears”. He rejects a future-oriented reading in which Buddha-nature is expected to reveal itself later. For Dōgen, the phrase means that the time has already come: The present moment is Buddha-nature appearing.

Fourth, Dōgen discusses the ocean of Buddha-nature through the saying of Aśvaghoṣa: Mountains, rivers, the great earth, samādhi, and the six powers (six supernormal powers; usually: miraculous abilities, divine hearing, knowledge of others’ minds, recollection of past lives, divine vision, and the extinction of mental defilements) all arise from Buddha-nature. Dōgen interprets this not as a doctrine of origin, but as the concrete identity of Buddha-nature with mountains, rivers, earth, and the functioning of practice.

Fifth, Dōgen examines stories about the fourth, fifth, and sixth ancestors, especially the statements “You are without Buddha-nature” and “a person from south of the mountains is without Buddha-nature”. These passages are central because Dōgen treats “without Buddha-nature” not as a denial, but as a more radical expression of Buddha-nature itself.

Sixth, Dōgen turns to the non-abiding or non-enduring character of Buddha-nature. The sixth ancestor says that Buddha-nature does not abide, while the discriminating mind that divides all things into good and bad does abide. Dōgen interprets non-abiding as a key feature of Buddha-nature: Grasses, trees, lands, body, mind, awakening, and nirvana are Buddha-nature because they do not abide.

Seventh, Dōgen discusses Nāgārjuna’s teaching that the relinquishment of self-attachment is required to see Buddha-nature. He analyzes the story in which Nāgārjuna reveals his body as the roundness of the full moon and uses it to argue that Buddha-nature is not an invisible essence but the manifesting body itself.

Eighth, Dōgen criticizes visual representations of Nāgārjuna’s moon-body, especially circular images that reduce the manifesting body to an abstract circle. The section is a critique of symbolic abstraction: Buddha-nature cannot be reduced to a diagram, icon, or empty visual sign.

Ninth, Dōgen examines statements from Chinese masters such as Enkan Saian, Isan Reiyū, Hyakujō, Nansen, Ōbaku, and Jōshū. These dialogues revolve around whether all beings have Buddha-nature, are without Buddha-nature, or whether even a dog has Buddha-nature. Dōgen refuses simplistic answers. “Has”, “has not”, “exists”, “does not exist”, and “no” all become ways of expressing and unsettling Buddha-nature.

Finally, Dōgen analyzes the story of the cut worm and the question of where Buddha-nature is located when the worm is divided into two moving parts. The answer, “Do not be deluded” and “wind and fire have not yet dispersed”, prevents any attempt to locate Buddha-nature in one part, both parts, movement, life, or consciousness. The fascicle ends by rejecting materialist, spiritualist, and originalist misunderstandings of Buddha-nature.

The overall structure is therefore not a simple explanation of what Buddha-nature is. It is a systematic dismantling of wrong ways of asking the question. Buddha-nature is not an object. It is not a property. It is not a hidden self. It is not psychological awareness. It is not waiting in the future. It is not merely “inside” living beings. It is not excluded from stones, walls, rivers, mountains, dogs, worms, birth, death, form, sound, practice, error, and the present moment.

Busshō

Because of its length, the full text of the fascicle is available on this separate page.

In-depth analysis of the text

The following sections reconstruct Dōgen’s argument through selected passages. They do not cover every section of the fascicle, but focus on its central conceptual movements.

Buddha-nature as the whole of existence

Dōgen begins by redefining the Mahāyāna statement that all living beings have Buddha-nature:

Fully being is Buddha-nature, and the all-inclusive whole of all existence is called “living beings”.

This sentence is the foundation of the fascicle. Dōgen does not read Buddha-nature as something added to beings. Nor does he read living beings as individual containers. Instead, “fully being” itself is Buddha-nature. The all-inclusive whole of existence is called living beings. There is no separation between beings and Buddha-nature. Beings are not something that have Buddha-nature as a property. They are the whole field of existence in which Buddha-nature is expressed. This indeed shifts the issue from possession to totality. The next sentence makes the point more concrete:

Now, in this moment, the inside and outside of all living beings is the whole existence of Buddha-nature.

Buddha-nature is not an interior essence. It includes inside and outside. For Dōgen, it includes the living being as a total field. The phrase “now, in this moment” is also essential. Buddha-nature is not a timeless metaphysical object. It is present as the whole existence of this moment. This interpretation prevents a common misunderstanding. When people hear that beings “have” Buddha-nature, they may imagine that each being contains a pure Buddha-substance hidden inside. Dōgen rejects this. The “having” of Buddha-nature is not possession. It is not a relationship between a subject and an object or between a container and its contents. It is the totality of existence itself. To say that beings have Buddha-nature is not like saying that a person has an organ, a mind, a soul, or a capacity. It is to say that beings are nothing outside the whole field of Buddha-nature. Dōgen’s next sentence intensifies this:

You must know that Buddha-nature is now the whole of existence and is therefore beyond being and non-being.

The phrase “beyond being and non-being” does not mean vague mysticism. It means that Buddha-nature cannot be grasped as an existing thing and cannot be dismissed as non-existence. It does not fit the binary question “Does it exist or not?”, “Do I have it or not?”. This already anticipates Dōgen’s later analysis of “having Buddha-nature” and “being without Buddha-nature”. Both statements can express the truth, and both can distort it if understood dualistically.

Dōgen’s reinterpretation of Buddha-nature as the whole of existence dislodges its treatment as a hidden essence or pure inner self. Buddha-nature cannot be reached by looking inward, nor is it a potential seed that grows into awakening. It is neither something beings possess before practice nor something that arrives after practice. Rather, it is the whole of existence here and now, with nothing outside or separate from it. This initial move establishes the non-essentialist, non-dualistic, and practice-oriented interpretation developed in the following passages.

Against Buddha-nature as a hidden self

Dōgen sharply criticizes a common error:

Many students, when they hear the term “Buddha-nature”, misunderstand it as a permanent self, as Senika described, who was not a Buddhist.

This warning is central. Dōgen knows that Buddha-nature can easily become a disguised ātman. The error is to imagine Buddha-nature as a permanent, pure, knowing essence hidden within the body and mind. Such a view directly contradicts non-self. Dōgen explains the cause of this misunderstanding:

They believe that mind, will, and consciousness, which are only the movement of brain cells, are enlightened knowledge and understanding of Buddha-nature.

This is an unusually blunt passage. Dōgen rejects the identification of Buddha-nature with ordinary mental activity. Mind, will, and consciousness are not Buddha-nature as inner essence. They are conditioned movements. The problem is not that mental activity is unreal. The problem is that people mistake it for enlightened knowledge. Dōgen adds:

Those who awaken and understand are Buddhas, but Buddha-nature is beyond enlightened knowledge and understanding.

This sentence is subtle. Buddhas awaken and understand, but Buddha-nature itself is not reducible to awakened knowledge. Buddha-nature is not a cognitive possession. It is not a purified consciousness. It is not an inner light that the mind owns. The awakened one does not possess Buddha-nature as an object of knowledge. Rather, awakening is one concrete expression of Buddha-nature.

This passage is especially important for the non-essentialist interpretation of Buddha-nature. Dōgen is not denying awakening. He is denying that awakening can be understood as the mind discovering a permanent essence within itself. Buddha-nature is beyond enlightened knowledge and understanding because it is not a mental object.

Dōgen touches the mental and cognitive aspects of Buddha-nature in these passages. And he does this in a very direct and rational way. He does not simply say that Buddha-nature is not a hidden self. He explains why it is not a hidden self. He identifies the specific error of mistaking ordinary mental activity for enlightened knowledge. This is a crucial point because it shows that Dōgen is not rejecting the idea of awakening or enlightenment. He is rejecting the idea that awakening is the mind discovering a permanent essence within itself. Instead, awakening is one concrete expression of the whole field of existence that is Buddha-nature.

Buddha-nature is neither material nor spiritual

Dōgen writes:

Buddha and nature are concrete; they realize this or that. Buddha-nature is always the whole of existence, precisely because the whole of existence is Buddha-nature. The whole of existence is neither material nor spiritual. Because the whole of existence is nothing other than doing and action, it is neither large nor small.

This passage condenses much of Dōgen’s argument. Buddha-nature is concrete. It realizes “this or that”. It is not a general metaphysical principle floating behind phenomena. It is not a purely spiritual essence. It is not a material substance. It is doing and action. Buddha-nature is dynamic. It is not an inert essence that beings possess. It manifests as activity, practice, form, body, speech, perception, error, liberation, and the present moment.

This connects Busshō with Dōgen’s broader teaching of practice-realization. Buddha-nature is not fulfilled by being believed in. It is realized in action. I.e., it is enacted in the very moment of practice and beyond: In every action, in every moment of life, in every form of existence. This also explains why Buddha-nature is neither large nor small. Size belongs to objects. Buddha-nature is not an object. It is the total activity of existence. To call it large would be to imagine it as a cosmic substance. To call it small would be to imagine it as an inner seed. Both miss the point according to Dōgen.

Against the seed metaphor

Dōgen criticizes another common view:

Other people think that Buddha-nature is like the seed of a plant or tree: while the Dharma-rain falls upon it, the seeds germinate and the plant or tree can grow.

This metaphor seems harmless at first. It presents Buddha-nature as latent potential. Practice, teaching, or merit allow it to grow. But Dōgen rejects this view as ordinary emotional thinking:

This understanding corresponds to the emotional thinking of ordinary people.

Why is this a problem? Because the seed metaphor can turn Buddha-nature into a hidden inner capacity that “matures” over time. It suggests that Buddha-nature exists inside the being before practice, waiting to unfold. This risks turning Buddha-nature into a potential essence. Dōgen does not simply discard the imagery of seeds, flowers, and fruits. Instead, he rereads it:

The roots, stalks, branches, and leaves are all Buddha-nature, arising and passing away with them moment by moment and making up the whole of their existence.

The key is “moment by moment”. Seeds, roots, branches, flowers, and fruits are not stages in the development of a hidden essence. They are each Buddha-nature as temporal manifestation. The seed is Buddha-nature as seed. The flower is Buddha-nature as flower. None is merely a deficient stage on the way to the real thing.

This transforms the metaphor in a distinctively Dōgenian way. Dōgen does not deny development, but he refuses to reduce any moment to preparation for another. Each moment is complete as its own Dharma-position. This connects Busshō directly to Uji: Buddha-nature is not a seed moving through time toward future completion, but each moment of seed, root, branch, flower, and fruit as being-time. There is no hidden essence that grows; there is the whole of existence in each moment of temporal unfolding.

“When the time has come” means the time is already here

Dōgen quotes another saying:

If you want to understand the meaning of Buddha-nature, you should here and now grasp the causes and conditions of real time. When the time has come, Buddha-nature directly appears before you.

This statement could easily be read as future-oriented. Many people understand it to mean that Buddha-nature will reveal itself later, when the proper time arrives. Dōgen explicitly rejects this:

For a long time, from past to present, many people have believed that the words “when the time has come” refer to a future time for which they wait until Buddha-nature reveals itself before them.

This is the same structure Dōgen criticizes in spiritual striving more generally. If Buddha-nature is imagined as something that will appear later, practice becomes waiting. The present becomes incomplete. The practitioner looks toward a future manifestation instead of realizing the Dharma now. Dōgen’s counterinterpretation is direct:

“When the time has come” means that it is already here.

This sentence is one of the clearest expressions of Dōgen’s temporal understanding of Buddha-nature. The time of Buddha-nature is not deferred. It is not a future reward. It is now. Dōgen continues:

Because the time is already here, Buddha-nature does not come. Therefore the time that is now here is nothing other than Buddha-nature directly appearing before you.

If Buddha-nature is already the present moment, then it cannot “come” from elsewhere. It is not waiting outside the present. It does not arrive like an object. The present time itself is Buddha-nature appearing. This connects Busshō very closely to Uji. Being-time and Buddha-nature intersect: The present moment is not a container in which Buddha-nature appears, but the temporal reality of Buddha-nature itself. Dōgen even adds:

Even if there is a time of doubt, it is Buddha-nature coming to you.

Doubt is not outside Buddha-nature. Confusion, uncertainty, and questioning are not excluded from the field. This does not mean that delusion is equivalent to realization in a careless sense. It means that delusion is also not a separate metaphysical realm outside the Dharma. Doubt itself becomes part of the temporal field in which Buddha-nature is studied.

Mountains and rivers are Buddha-nature

Dōgen quotes Aśvaghoṣa, an ancient Indian Buddhist philosopher and poet:

The mountains, rivers, and the great earth
all rest on Buddha-nature and arise through it.
Samādhi and the six powers rest on it
and are revealed through it.

Dōgen interprets this concretely:

If you see mountains and rivers, you are looking at Buddha-nature itself.

This is one of the most important non-essentialist statements in the fascicle. Buddha-nature is not hidden behind mountains and rivers. It is not an invisible essence that must be inferred from visible forms. Mountains and rivers themselves are Buddha-nature. This does not mean that they contain Buddha-nature as a substance. It means that the concrete existence of mountains and rivers is the appearing of Buddha-nature. Dōgen continues in characteristic style:

And when you look at Buddha-nature itself, you see a donkey’s jaw or a horse’s mouth.

Thus, Buddha-nature is not only found in sacred images, luminous visions, or noble states. It is also donkey jaw and horse mouth, i.e., in the ordinary. Dōgen deliberately uses earthy, ordinary, even awkward images to cut through spiritual abstraction. If Buddha-nature is the whole of existence, it cannot be restricted to what appears elevated or pure. This connects Busshō directly to suchness. To see Buddha-nature is to see things as they are, not to look past them toward a hidden metaphysical core. Mountains as mountains, rivers as rivers, donkey jaw as donkey jaw: These are not obstacles to Buddha-nature. They are its concrete expression.

“Without Buddha-nature” as a deeper expression

One of the most radical parts of Busshō concerns the phrase “without Buddha-nature”. Dōgen discusses the story of the fourth and fifth ancestors. When the young future fifth ancestor says that his name is Buddha-nature, the fourth ancestor replies:

You are without Buddha-nature.

Dōgen refuses to read this as a denial. Instead, he treats “without Buddha-nature” as a powerful expression of the truth. He writes:

In what moment of now could you be without Buddha-nature? Are you without Buddha-nature when you begin as Buddhists, or when you go beyond Buddha?

“Without” does not mean that Buddha-nature is absent. It means that Buddha-nature is not an object one possesses. To be “without Buddha-nature” is to be without any thing called Buddha-nature. It is to be free from the objectification of Buddha-nature. Dōgen later clarifies:

The words “because Buddha-nature is emptiness, we say that it is without something” clearly express that emptiness is not non-existence.

Thus, “without Buddha-nature” is not nihilism. It is not the claim that Buddha-nature does not exist. It is the statement that Buddha-nature is emptiness, and therefore cannot be grasped as a thing. To be without Buddha-nature is to be without an objectified, possessable Buddha-nature. This is crucial for understanding Dōgen’s thought. He uses both “having Buddha-nature” and “being without Buddha-nature” to point to the same truth:

The two statements, “all living beings have Buddha-nature” and “all living beings are without Buddha-nature”, express exactly this fundamental truth.

This may sound contradictory at first. How can beings both have and be without Buddha-nature? The key is to understand that both statements are not describing a relationship between beings and a thing called Buddha-nature. They point beyond that way of thinking altogether. The contradiction is only a contradiction if Buddha-nature is understood as a thing. If one asks, “Do beings have it or not?”, one is already asking the wrong kind of question. Dōgen uses both statements to break the dualism of possession and absence. Buddha-nature is not something that one possesses, and being “without Buddha-nature” does not mean that it is absent. Both formulations point to the fact that Buddha-nature cannot be objectified as a thing.

This is where a connection with the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi is helpful. One can say that

• beings have Buddha-nature,
• do not have Buddha-nature,
• both have and do not have it, and
• neither have nor do not have it.

Dōgen does not present this as abstract logic, but he performs something structurally similar. He forces the reader beyond the fixed alternatives of existence and non-existence, possession and absence. The point is not to choose the correct statement, but to see why the very structure of the question is already misleading.

Buddha-nature and emptiness

The fifth ancestor’s explanation develops this issue further:

Because Buddha-nature is emptiness, we say that it is without something.

and Dōgen’s comment:

The formulation clearly expresses that emptiness is not non-existence.

as this is an important passage for understanding Dōgen’s relation to śūnyatā. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. It means that things do not exist as independent, fixed essences. To say that Buddha-nature is emptiness is not to deny Buddha-nature. It is to deny that Buddha-nature is a substance. Dōgen rejects two misunderstandings. First, emptiness is not simply a void. Second, form is not a thing that is artificially turned into emptiness. He writes:

The statement that form is nothing other than emptiness does not describe a form that one willfully turns into abstract emptiness, nor an emptiness that one cuts apart in order to artificially produce form.

This is a critique of conceptual manipulation. Emptiness is not produced by intellectual negation. Form is not dissolved by analysis into some abstract nothing. Dōgen then writes:

The statement may rather describe a situation in which emptiness is simply emptiness.

Emptiness is not a metaphysical substance behind things. It is the way things are: Without fixed essence, yet fully concrete. This is why Dōgen can say that Buddha-nature as emptiness is “without something”. It is without thingness, without possession, without fixed self.

The sixth ancestor and the absence of Buddha-nature

Dōgen also analyzes the encounter between the fifth ancestor and Huineng, the future sixth ancestor. The fifth ancestor says:

A man from south of the mountains is without Buddha-nature. How can you hope to become Buddha?

Dōgen interprets this carefully:

This statement does not mean that a man from south of the mountains has Buddha-nature or does not have it. It simply says that a man from south of the mountains, without being anything, is Buddha-nature.

Again, “without” is not absence. It is emptiness. It is being without fixed essence. A person from the south is Buddha-nature precisely as “without something”, i.e., in his true nature as he is, empty of a fixed self and yet fully concrete.

Dōgen then adds one of the most striking statements in the fascicle:

It is the direct way to realize Buddha when you speak or hear the words that you are without Buddha-nature. Therefore, you are Buddha precisely in the moment when you are without Buddha-nature.

This is not a paradox for its own sake. Dōgen continues to remove Buddha-nature from the structure of possession. The statement “I have Buddha-nature” may become clinging to Buddha-nature as identity, whereas “You are without Buddha-nature” cuts off the object of possession. In this logic, Buddha-nature is realized as non-objectifiable emptiness. Dōgen’s claim that people should rejoice in hearing that all living beings are without Buddha-nature thus names release from Buddha-nature as spiritual property and a hearing of the Dharma beyond the duality of having and not having.

Thus, “without Buddha-nature” is not a denial of Buddha-nature. It is a deeper expression of it. It is the way to realize Buddha-nature as emptiness, as non-possessable, as the whole of existence without fixed essence.

Buddha-nature does not abide

Dōgen further cites the sixth ancestor:

Buddha-nature does not abide. Only the thinking mind that divides all things and phenomena into good and bad abides.

This reverses a common assumption. Many people imagine Buddha-nature as the permanent element and ordinary discriminating mind as unstable. Dōgen’s reading is different. The discriminating mind “abides” in the sense that it clings, repeats, fixes, and divides. Buddha-nature does not abide because it is not a static essence. Dōgen writes:

The non-abiding moments of grasses, trees, and forests are nothing other than Buddha-nature. The non-abiding moments of body and mind of human beings are Buddha-nature. Since lands, mountains, and rivers do not abide, they are Buddha-nature.

This is one of the most important passages in the whole fascicle. Buddha-nature is not permanence. It is non-abiding. Grasses and trees are Buddha-nature because they do not abide. Human body and mind are Buddha-nature because they do not abide. Mountains and rivers are Buddha-nature because they do not abide. Even awakening and nirvana are Buddha-nature because they do not abide. This deepens impermanence into a positive account of Buddha-nature. Impermanence is not a defect in things that prevents them from having Buddha-nature. Impermanence is precisely their Buddha-nature. To look for Buddha-nature as something permanent behind impermanent phenomena is to miss Dōgen’s point entirely. This also rejects the idea of a fixed eternal Tathāgata hidden behind change. The phrase “always present, without any change” from the opening cannot mean permanent substance. For Dōgen, what is truly constant is not a static essence, but the non-abiding functioning of the Dharma. Buddha-nature is not destroyed by impermanence. It is impermanence realized. And in process-oriented view, impermanence is the actual reason that Buddha-nature even can be. If things were permanent, they would be fixed and unchanging, and thus could not manifest the dynamic activity of Buddha-nature. It is precisely because things do not abide that they can be Buddha-nature.

Nāgārjuna: Seeing Buddha-nature by giving up self-attachment

Dōgen tells a story about Nāgārjuna. When people ask how one can see Buddha-nature, Nāgārjuna says:

If you want to see Buddha-nature, first give up self-attachment.

This is a direct and practical statement. Buddha-nature is not seen by acquiring a doctrine. It is seen by releasing self-attachment. Dōgen comments:

It is not that this true seeing does not exist. Rather, this seeing truly exists when you give up self-attachment.

This is important because Dōgen does not deny seeing Buddha-nature. He rejects the idea that Buddha-nature is seen by a self that remains intact as possessor. The self that wants to own Buddha-nature is precisely what obstructs seeing.

Nāgārjuna is then said to manifest his body like the roundness of the full moon. Dōgen interprets this not as a supernatural spectacle, but as the manifestation of Buddha-nature through body:

This body is nothing other than the roundness of the moon manifesting itself.

He explicitly rejects the idea that Nāgārjuna displayed a magical transformed body:

Ignorant people think that what Nāgārjuna calls the roundness of the moon is the manifestation of a body that has been supernaturally transformed. But this is the false view of those who have not authentically received the Buddha-truth.

For Dōgen, the manifesting body is not an illusion, symbol, or magical projection. It is the concrete body itself. Buddha-nature appears as the body that manifests. This connects Busshō strongly with Shinjin gakudō: The body is not an obstacle to truth. The body is the field in which truth appears. Dōgen writes:

The Buddha’s body is the true body that manifests itself. Buddha-nature exists in the form of a body that manifests itself.

This is a radically embodied view of Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is not hidden behind form. It appears as form. It is not outside the skandhas, even though it is not reducible to a fixed identity within them. The manifesting body is Buddha-nature.

Against abstract images of Buddha-nature

Dōgen criticizes later attempts to depict Nāgārjuna’s moon-body as a simple circular image:

When they tried in vain to paint it with the brush, they represented a circle like a round mirror above the Dharma seat. They regarded this as Nāgārjuna’s body revealing the roundness of the moon.

Dōgen calls this a false representation. His criticism is not merely aesthetic. It is directed against abstraction. The moon-body is not an empty symbol, not an abstract circle, not a decorative ensō. To replace the manifesting body with a circle is to miss the point. Dōgen compares this mistake to a painted rice cake, an image that cannot satisfy hunger. He writes:

Earlier and present Buddhas should truly experience the manifesting body and not delight in images of painted rice cakes.

The statement criticizes what may be called secondhand spirituality: The enjoyment of symbols of realization in place of realization, or the drawing of a circle in place of the manifesting body. The deeper point is that Buddha-nature cannot be reduced to an image, even a Zen image. When Dōgen describes the depiction of Buddha-nature, he insists on the concrete manifesting body: Eyebrows rising, one eye winking, skin, flesh, bones, marrow, the stillness of sitting, and the smile that creates Buddhas and ancestors. In this account, Buddha-nature appears concretely rather than as an abstract sign.

The limits of saying “have” and “without”

Dōgen later returns to the two statements that have already shaped the central argument of Busshō: “All living beings have Buddha-nature” and “all living beings are without Buddha-nature”. At this later point, however, the focus shifts. Dōgen is no longer merely explaining that “without Buddha-nature” is not a denial. He is now examining the danger of turning either formulation into a fixed doctrine.

He first cites Enkan Saian’s statement:

All living beings have Buddha-nature.

Dōgen interprets “all living beings” in an unusually broad way:

If we say “all living beings” in the Buddha-Dharma, this means that everything that has mind is a living being, because mind is a living being. What appears to be without mind may also be a living being, because everything that exists has mind. Therefore everything that has mind is a living being, and all living beings have Buddha-nature.

This expands Buddha-nature beyond human beings and even beyond sentient beings in the ordinary sense. Grass, trees, lands, sun, moon, and stars are not excluded from the field of Buddha-nature. Dōgen’s point is not simply that animals and humans possess Buddha-nature. It is that the whole field of existence is already involved in Buddha-nature. The distinction between beings that have Buddha-nature and things that do not is therefore already too narrow.

But Dōgen also criticizes the wording “have”:

He should let the word “have” fall away in the statement “have Buddha-nature”.

This is the decisive correction. “Have” can mislead because it suggests possession. It makes Buddha-nature sound like a property, capacity, or inner essence that belongs to a being. If Buddha-nature is possessed, then living beings and Buddha-nature become two separate things. Dōgen’s entire reading of Busshō works against this separation. The problem is therefore not only the denial of Buddha-nature. The affirmation of Buddha-nature can also become false when it is understood as possession.

Dōgen then discusses Isan’s statement:

All living beings are without Buddha-nature.

He gives this statement a strikingly high status:

The statement that all living beings are without Buddha-nature alone has the highest rank in the Buddha-Dharma.

This does not mean that Dōgen simply prefers negation over affirmation. The phrase “without Buddha-nature” has the highest rank because it cuts more sharply through the idea of possession. It prevents Buddha-nature from being turned into something one owns, contains, discovers, or secures. Yet even this formulation becomes dangerous if it is frozen into doctrine. If “without Buddha-nature” is taken as a metaphysical denial, it misses the point just as much as the possessive statement “have Buddha-nature”. This is why Dōgen cites Hyakujō:

If we teach that all living beings have Buddha-nature, we degrade Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. If we teach that all living beings are without Buddha-nature, we also degrade Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Thus both become degradation, whether we say that living beings have Buddha-nature or whether we say that they are without it. But even so, one should still make such statements.

This is one of the most nuanced passages in Busshō. Both statements distort when they become fixed positions: “All beings have Buddha-nature” can become essentialism, while “all beings are without Buddha-nature” can become nihilism. Nevertheless, Dōgen treats both as necessary expressions because language cannot simply be abandoned. His point is not that one statement is true and the other false, but that both function as liberating expressions rather than doctrinal definitions.

This gives the earlier discussion of “without Buddha-nature” a broader linguistic frame. The issue is not only the meaning of “without,” but how any statement about Buddha-nature can open insight or produce attachment. “Have” and “without” are useful insofar as they release the reader from objectifying Buddha-nature, but misleading when treated as final descriptions. Dōgen therefore uses language against its own tendency to harden into concepts: He speaks of Buddha-nature in order to prevent it from becoming a thing.

Nansen, Ōbaku, and non-dependence

Dōgen discusses a dialogue between Nansen and Ōbaku. Nansen asks about the theory that when balance and wisdom are practiced together, Buddha-nature is clearly realized. Ōbaku replies:

If you are dependent on nothing for twenty-four hours, you already have Buddha-nature.

Dōgen interprets the “twenty-four hours” not merely as clock time, but as a complete temporal field:

The twenty-four hours exist moment by moment for twenty-four hours, and they depend on nothing else. The clear realization of Buddha-nature exists because these real twenty-four hours depend on nothing.

This establishes another connection between Buddha-nature and time. Buddha-nature is not a future arrival but the non-dependent reality of each moment. To depend on nothing for twenty-four hours does not mean isolation. It denotes freedom from conceptual supports, identities, possessions, or expectations.

Nansen then challenges Ōbaku by asking whether this is his own view. Ōbaku says:

I would not dare to say that.

Dōgen notes that this phrase is not simple denial. It expresses that Ōbaku truly has the capacity, while not appropriating it as personal possession. Again, Dōgen’s critique of possession appears. Buddha-nature is realized, but not owned.

The dialogue ends with Ōbaku’s silence. Dōgen comments:

Silence can be eloquent and laughter sharp as a sword. It is the clear realization of Buddha-nature when one is satisfied with rice in the morning and at noon.

Buddha-nature appears here not as a doctrine, but as everyday sufficiency. Rice in the morning, rice at noon, silence, walking, speaking, not answering: These are not outside Buddha-nature. They are its concrete forms when not grasped.

Jōshū’s dog and the word “no”

Dōgen also analyzes the famous kōan:

A monk asked Jōshū, “Does even a dog have Buddha-nature, or not?”
Jōshū answered, “No!”

This “No”, or “Mu!” in Japanese or “Wu!” in Chinese, is one of the most famous words in Zen. Dōgen refuses to reduce it to a simple denial. He writes that this “No” may describe Buddha-nature itself, the dog, or an exclamation from a third position. The point is that “No” is not merely the opposite of “Yes”. It is a Dharma-word that cuts through the question.

The monk asks why the dog exists without Buddha-nature if all living beings have it. Jōshū replies:

Because it has karmic consciousness conditioned by earlier experience.

Dōgen interprets this carefully:

The dog exists “without” the idea of Buddha-nature, and Buddha-nature exists “without” the idea of Buddha-nature. The dog’s consciousness can never grasp its nature.

This is not an animal psychology claim. It is an analysis of grasping. Consciousness cannot grasp Buddha-nature. Whether one says the dog has Buddha-nature or does not have it, one remains within conditioned consciousness if one treats Buddha-nature as an object.

Dōgen also discusses another version in which Jōshū answers, “It exists”. Dōgen writes:

Jōshū’s statement “it exists” means that the dog exists, and because the dog exists, Buddha-nature also exists.

Here “exists” is not ordinary existence. It is Buddha-existence. The dog is not a container of Buddha-nature. The dog’s existence itself is Buddha-nature. The “No” and the “It exists” are not simply contradictory answers. Both are ways of undoing the same mistaken question.

The cut worm and the impossibility of locating Buddha-nature

Near the end of the fascicle, Dōgen analyzes a dialogue about a worm cut in two:

A worm was cut into two parts, and both parts move. I wonder in which part Buddha-nature is located.

This question assumes that Buddha-nature must be located in a part. If the worm is split, where does Buddha-nature go? In one part? Both? Neither? Chōsa answers:

Do not be deluded!

The official asks how to explain the fact that both parts move. Chōsa replies:

Wind and fire have not yet dispersed.

Dōgen refuses to let the question be answered by locating Buddha-nature. He writes that Chōsa did not say that the worm has Buddha-nature, nor that it does not have Buddha-nature. He only said not to be deluded and that wind and fire have not yet dispersed. This is important because it rejects both materialist and spiritualist interpretations. Buddha-nature is not found by identifying movement, life, consciousness, or vital forces. It is not located in the moving part. It is not absent from the moving part. It is not identical with wind and fire, but also not separate from them. The question itself is wrongly formed. Buddha-nature cannot be located in a part of the worm because it is not a thing that can be located. It is not a substance that can be divided. It is not a property that can be assigned to one part or another. The question of location is a trap that assumes Buddha-nature is an object.

Dōgen then gives one of his strongest warnings:

It is very naive and superficial if you think that Buddha-nature exists only while you live and disappears when you have died.

He continues:

As long as you live, you have Buddha-nature, and at the same time you do not have it. When you have died, you have Buddha-nature, and at the same time you do not have it.

This is the catuṣkoṭi-like structure again. Living and dead, having and not having, existence and non-existence all fail to capture Buddha-nature if treated as fixed alternatives. Buddha-nature is not material life-force, not spiritual awareness, and not original essence. Dōgen writes:

Those who claim that Buddha-nature is something material whose existence or non-existence depends on whether something moves or not are not Buddhists. Those who claim that Buddha-nature is something spiritual whose holiness or non-holiness depends on whether one is aware of it or not are also not Buddhists. Ultimately, those who say that Buddha-nature is something original whose nature or non-nature depends on whether one recognizes it or not are also not Buddhists.

This passage summarizes Dōgen’s critique. Buddha-nature is neither material, spiritual, nor original essence. It cannot be tied to movement, awareness, recognition, life, or death. It is not a thing.

The final expression is concrete and deliberately startling:

If you want to describe Buddha-nature further, it is simply the fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles before you. If you want to express the situation even more truly, what is this Buddha-nature? Have you fully understood it? Three heads and eight arms!

Dōgen ends not with abstraction, but with walls, tiles, pebbles, and mythic bodies. Buddha-nature is here, concrete, strange, ordinary, and ungraspable.

Busshō in a nutshell

The central aspects of Busshō can be summarized as follows:

• Buddha-nature is not a hidden self.
  Dōgen explicitly warns that many people misunderstand Buddha-nature as a permanent self. This would contradict the Buddhist teaching of non-self.
• Buddha-nature is the whole of existence.
  It is not a property contained inside beings. The inside and outside of all beings, here and now, is the whole existence of Buddha-nature.
• Buddha-nature is beyond being and non-being.
  It cannot be understood through the binary question of whether it exists or does not exist.
• Buddha-nature is not mental awareness.
  Dōgen rejects the view that ordinary mind, will, consciousness, or the movement of thought is Buddha-nature.
• Buddha-nature is neither material nor spiritual.
  It is not a physical substance, not a spiritual essence, and not an original hidden nature.
• Buddha-nature is doing and action.
  Dōgen describes the whole of existence as activity. Buddha-nature is enacted, not possessed.
• Buddha-nature is not a seed waiting to grow.
  The seed metaphor is rejected if it suggests a hidden potential essence. Seeds, roots, flowers, and fruits are each Buddha-nature moment by moment.
• The time of Buddha-nature is now.
  “When the time has come” does not mean a future moment. It means the time is already here.
• “Without Buddha-nature” is not nihilism.
  It means being without an objectified thing called Buddha-nature. It expresses Buddha-nature as emptiness.
• Buddha-nature does not abide.
  Grasses, trees, lands, mountains, rivers, body, mind, awakening, and nirvana are Buddha-nature because they do not abide.
• Buddha-nature appears as the manifesting body.
  Nāgārjuna’s moon-body is not a magical symbol, but the body manifesting Buddha-nature.
• Buddha-nature includes ordinary and non-human forms.
  Mountains, rivers, walls, tiles, pebbles, dogs, worms, donkey jaws, horse mouths, grasses, trees, sun, moon, and stars all belong to its field.
• Language is used and released.
  “Have Buddha-nature”, “without Buddha-nature”, “exists”, “no”, and “emptiness” function as Dharma-expressions insofar as they loosen fixed views.

Busshō and core Buddhist concepts

Busshō is one of Dōgen’s most important attempts to articulate Buddha-nature within core Buddhist teachings without turning it into an essence. Its principal conceptual relations include:

• Non-self (anattā)
  The fascicle directly rejects the interpretation of Buddha-nature as a permanent self. Buddha-nature is not an inner owner, witness, soul, or pure consciousness.
• Impermanence (anicca)
  Buddha-nature does not abide. Grasses, trees, body, mind, lands, mountains, rivers, awakening, and nirvana are Buddha-nature precisely because they are non-abiding.
• Dependent arising (paṭicca-samuppāda)
  Buddha-nature is understood through causes and conditions of real time, but not as a mechanical product of them. It appears as the concrete field of conditions here and now.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā)
  The phrase “without Buddha-nature” expresses Buddha-nature as emptiness. This emptiness is not non-existence, but the absence of fixed, possessable essence.
• Suchness (tathatā)
  Buddha-nature is not hidden behind things. It appears as mountains, rivers, donkey jaws, horse mouths, bodies, gestures, walls, tiles, and pebbles. This is Buddha-nature as suchness.
• Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha)
  Dōgen reinterprets Buddha-nature radically. It is not potential essence, not spiritual self, not mental awareness, not future attainment. It is the whole of existence as concrete activity.
• Practice-realization
  Buddha-nature is not realized by belief in Buddha-nature. It is realized in action, practice, body, speech, time, and letting go of self-attachment.
• Middle Way
  Dōgen avoids the extremes of existence and non-existence, possession and absence, materialism and spiritualism, permanence and nihilism.
• Catuṣkoṭi-like logic
  Dōgen repeatedly moves beyond binary alternatives. Living beings have Buddha-nature, are without Buddha-nature, both have and do not have it, and neither possess nor lack it in any ordinary sense. This is not abstract logic, but a practice-oriented dismantling of fixed views.
• Embodiment
  Nāgārjuna’s manifesting body and Dōgen’s critique of abstract images show that Buddha-nature is not apart from bodily form. The body itself can manifest Buddha-nature.

Philosophical implications

Busshō systematically critiques essentialist interpretations of Buddha-nature. Dōgen recognizes that “all living beings have Buddha-nature” can generate a false ontology: Living beings appear on one side, Buddha-nature on the other, as a property they possess. The fascicle dismantles this structure. Living beings do not possess Buddha-nature as a thing. The whole of existence is Buddha-nature.

This has major implications for the relation between Buddha-nature and non-self. A permanent inner essence would contradict Buddhism’s rejection of self. Dōgen avoids this result by presenting Buddha-nature as empty, non-abiding, and active. It is not a self behind change but the concrete, changing, non-abiding activity of existence.

The fascicle also transforms the meaning of impermanence. Interpretations of Buddha-nature as real often assume that it must be permanent. Dōgen reverses this premise. Buddha-nature is Buddha-nature because it does not abide. Grasses, trees, body, mind, lands, mountains, rivers, awakening, and nirvana are Buddha-nature because they are temporal and non-fixed. Impermanence is not Buddha-nature’s opposite but its concrete mode of appearing.

Dōgen’s treatment of “without Buddha-nature” is equally significant. Negation does not mean nihilism: To be without Buddha-nature is to be without an objectified Buddha-nature. The formula removes the illusion that Buddha-nature is something owned and makes negation a linguistic form of liberation from grasping.

The fascicle also demonstrates Dōgen’s distinctive use of language. He does not seek a final doctrinal formula but uses conflicting formulations to unsettle fixed views. “All living beings have Buddha-nature” can release separation or create possession. “All living beings are without Buddha-nature” can express emptiness or become nihilism. “No” cuts through objectification, while “it exists” can identify existence itself with Buddha-nature. Language is not rejected. It functions as practice rather than metaphysical possession.

Finally, Busshō gives an embodied account of Buddha-nature. Nāgārjuna’s manifesting body, Jōshū’s dog, Chōsa’s worm, mountains, rivers, fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles all reject the treatment of Buddha-nature as a hidden spiritual essence. It appears as form, body, action, speech, silence, and ordinary things. This links Busshō to Dōgen’s broader account of the Dharma as enacted in concrete phenomena rather than located elsewhere.

Conclusion

Busshō is one of Dōgen’s most radical texts because it confronts a central tension in Mahāyāna Buddhism: The tendency to turn Buddha-nature into a metaphysical self. Dōgen does not reject the teaching that all beings have Buddha-nature. He rereads it so that “having Buddha-nature” no longer denotes possession. Buddha-nature is not an inner essence, permanent soul, pure consciousness, original substance, seed of enlightenment, or future revelation. It is the whole of existence as concrete, empty, non-abiding activity.

This interpretation locates Buddha-nature within the core Buddhist framework of non-self, impermanence, dependent arising, and emptiness. Dōgen’s Buddha-nature is not behind phenomena. It is mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, walls and tiles, body and speech, life and death, dogs and worms, doubt and practice, form and emptiness, now.

The fascicle’s most provocative formulation is Dōgen’s insistence that “without Buddha-nature” may express the truth more sharply than “having Buddha-nature”. To be without Buddha-nature does not mean that Buddha-nature is absent. It means that there is no thing called Buddha-nature to possess. The negation cuts through spiritual ownership and presents Buddha-nature as emptiness, action, and the present field of existence.

Read alongside Bendōwa, Fukan zazengi, Shinjin gakudō, and Uji, Busshō belongs to a consistent pattern in Dōgen’s thought. The Dharma is already present but not possessed, not elsewhere but not automatic, and not a self but realized as body, mind, world, and action.

Ultimately, Busshō presents Buddha-nature not as something beings have, lack, or await, but as the whole of existence here and now, beyond being and non-being and manifesting as the concrete activity of the ten thousand things.

References and further reading

• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909

Copy of the Tenpuku version of Dōgen’s Fukan zazengi, originally produced in 1233. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0)

In this post, we take a closer look at Fukan zazengi to understand Dōgen’s vision of zazen and how it relates to his broader project of clarifying the authentic practice of the buddhas and ancestors. We will also see how Fukan zazengi fits into Dōgen’s wider body of work and the Zen tradition.

Historical and textual context

The text is traditionally associated with the period shortly after Dōgen’s return from China. Dōgen had studied there under the Caodong master Tiantong Rujing, known in Japanese as Tendō Nyojō, and later presented his own teaching as an authentic transmission of the Zen practice of the buddhas and ancestors. The exact compositional history of Fukan zazengi is complex. A version traditionally dated to 1227 is associated with Dōgen’s return to Japan. A manuscript in Dōgen’s own hand, often called the shinpitsubon (真筆本), carries a colophon indicating 1233. The later and better-known disseminated version, the rufubon (流布本), seems to reflect further revision. This means that Fukan zazengi should not be read as a single fixed statement produced once and for all, but as a text Dōgen returned to and reshaped as his understanding and institutional project developed.

The language of Fukan zazengi itself is also significant. Unlike much of the Shōbōgenzō, which is written in Japanese with complex philosophical and poetic turns, Fukan zazengi was composed in classical Chinese. This places it in the broader East Asian genre of Zen meditation instructions. A substantial part of its practical description of sitting draws on earlier Chinese meditation manuals, especially the Zuochan yi by Changlu Zongze from the early 12th century. Dōgen did not invent the basic posture instructions from nothing. His originality lies in how he interprets this posture. He does not present zazen as one method among others for producing a later attainment. He presents it as the concrete enactment of awakening itself, which is a radical interpretation of the practice. This is indeed the key to understanding the text’s actual significance and its place in Dōgen’s broader teachings.

Overall, this makes Fukan zazengi a crucial companion to Bendōwa. Bendōwa argues in a broader doctrinal and polemical way that zazen is the true gate of the Dharma. Fukan zazengi gives that claim a very practical form. It asks the reader to stop chasing words, turn the light inward, sit correctly, let body and mind drop away, and practice immediately. Its agenda is therefore both instructional and philosophical: It tells the practitioner how to sit, but also why sitting cannot be reduced to ordinary meditation training.

Context and purpose of the text

The title Fukan zazengi can be broken down into three parts. Fukan (普勸) means universal encouragement or general recommendation. Zazen (坐禪) means seated Zen or sitting meditation. Gi (儀) means form, rule, guideline, or ritual procedure. The title therefore suggests a widely addressed instruction for the practice of sitting. It is not directed only to advanced monks or scholastic specialists. It is framed as a general recommendation to anyone who seeks the Buddha Way.

This universal tone in the text is an also a very important aspect. Dōgen’s early project was not simply to introduce another monastic technique into Japanese Buddhism. He wanted to clarify what he regarded as the authentic practice of the buddhas and ancestors. In Fukan zazengi, the question is not whether meditation is useful in a general sense. The question is whether zazen is the direct form in which the Dharma is realized. Already the opening sentences formulate the problem sharply. If the truth is everywhere present, why practice? If the fundamental vehicle exists by itself, why make effort? If reality is already beyond dust and defilement, why attempt to purify it? If we are never apart from the goal, why train at all? These questions are not rhetorical decoration. They name the central tension that runs through much of Dōgen’s work: The Dharma is already present, but this does not make practice unnecessary.

This is the same problem explored in Bendōwa and Genjō Kōan. In Bendōwa, Dōgen answers that the Dharma is abundant, but without practice it does not reveal itself. In Genjō Kōan, the same logic appears in the image of the fan: Air is present, but one must still use the fan. In Fukan zazengi, the answer is even more direct: Stop conceptual pursuit and practice zazen immediately. Do not try to grasp the truth through words and concepts. Do not try to become Buddha. Instead, sit correctly, let body and mind drop away, and directly reveal your original face. The practice of zazen is the concrete enactment of awakening itself. It is not a means to an end, but the very expression of the Dharma in action. The text thus functions as a practical gateway into Dōgen’s broader teaching of practice-realization.

Fukan zazengi

The following is a translation of the rufubon version. The original text is traditionally a continuous paragraph, but it is divided here for readability:

In-depth analysis of the text

After reading the text, we can now analyze its key themes and arguments in more detail. We will focus on three main aspects: The opening paradox about the presence of truth and the need for practice, the authority of Siddhartha and Bodhidharma, and the practical instructions for sitting.

The opening paradox: If truth is everywhere, why practice?

Fukan zazengi opens with a problem that is central to Dōgen’s thought:

When we now seek the truth, it is fundamentally present everywhere. Why, then, should we depend on practice and experience?

The structure is familiar from other Dōgen texts. The Dharma is not absent. It is not something imported from outside. Reality is already beyond impurity and purification. The goal is not fundamentally distant. But this appears to undermine the need for practice: If truth is already present, why sit? If reality is already complete, why make effort? Dōgen’s answer here, however, is not to deny the presence of truth. He accepts it. But he refuses to infer that practice is unnecessary. This is the same logic that appears in Bendōwa: Everyone possesses the Dharma in abundance, but without practice it does not reveal itself. Fukan zazengi formulates this point in an especially sharp way:

And yet, if there is even the smallest distinction, the truth is as far away as heaven from earth. If even the slightest opposition arises, the mind loses itself in confusion.

This sentence gives the opening paradox its answer. Truth may be everywhere, but the slightest dualistic separation can obscure it. The problem is not that the Dharma is absent. The problem is that ordinary consciousness divides, grasps, compares, opposes, and appropriates. Practice is necessary because the present truth is not automatically realized by a mind caught in separation. This also explains why Dōgen criticizes pride in understanding. A person may believe that they have clarified the mind or attained the truth, yet still remain trapped in subtle dualism. Intellectual insight, mystical confidence, and spiritual self-assurance can all become forms of obstruction if they reinforce a self that possesses realization. The opening of Fukan zazengi therefore places the practitioner in a precise tension: Nothing is lacking, and yet practice is necessary.

The authority of Siddhartha and Bodhidharma

Dōgen then invokes two exemplary figures:

We can still recognize the traces of the great sage of Jeta Grove, who sat upright in zazen for six years. And we still hear the story of Bodhidharma, who sat facing the wall for nine years.

The “great sage of Jeta Grove” refers to Siddhartha Gautama, and the wall-sitting figure is Bodhidharma. Dōgen uses them not primarily as objects of devotion, but as paradigms of practice. If even Siddhartha and Bodhidharma sat, then practice cannot be dismissed as unnecessary. Their examples answer the opening paradox historically and practically. This is an important rhetorical move as Dōgen does not construct his teaching only through abstract reasoning. He grounds it in lineage and precedent. The legitimacy of zazen comes from the transmitted practice of the buddhas and ancestors. The appeal to Siddhartha and Bodhidharma is therefore not merely illustrative. It functions as an argument: Authentic awakening has always been inseparable from embodied practice.

At the same time, Dōgen’s use of these figures is selective. He does not recount elaborate mythology. He focuses on sitting. Siddhartha sat for six years. Bodhidharma sat facing the wall for nine years. The lesson is not theological speculation, but bodily practice. The ancient models point toward the same instruction: Sit.

Huike offering his arm to Bodhidharma, ink wash painting by Sesshū Tōyō, 1496, Japan. This dramatic scene illustrates one of the most famous legends in Zen history. It is said that Huike, the second patriarch of Zen, was so desperate to receive Bodhidharma’s teaching that he cut off his own arm to demonstrate his sincerity. In this depiction, we see Bodhidharma sitting calmly while Huike offers his severed arm. The painting captures the intensity of the moment and Bodhidharma’s profound commitment to practice that characterizes the Zen tradition in general and Dōgen’s teachings in particular. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain)

Stop chasing words and turn the light inward

The next instruction shifts from authority to practice:

Therefore you should stop seeking rational explanations and chasing after words. Instead, learn to take a step back. Turn your light inward and let it reflect there.

This does not mean that Dōgen rejects thought, language, or study in general. His own writings are intellectually sophisticated and deeply textual. The criticism is directed at a particular misuse of thought: Chasing explanations instead of practicing. Words can guide practice, but they can also become substitutes for it. When they become objects of possession, they reinforce the very self-centered structure that practice is meant to loosen. The instruction to “take a step back” is therefore central here. It does not mean withdrawal from life in a passive sense. It means stepping back from the outward movement of grasping, explaining, comparing, and seeking. Turning the light inward does not imply discovering a hidden permanent self. It means allowing awareness to illuminate the activity of body and mind directly. This is why the next sentence,

Then body and mind will drop away by themselves, and your original face will directly reveal itself.

is decisive. This anticipates the phrase shinjin datsuraku, “dropping off body and mind”, which later became central in Dōgen’s awakening narrative. In Fukan zazengi, the phrase appears in a practical context. It is not presented as an exotic mystical experience. It names what happens when the practitioner stops chasing outward objects and practices directly. Body and mind “drop away” not because they disappear, but because identification with them as possessed objects loosens.

The term “original face” should also be handled carefully. It does not mean an eternal soul behind the body and mind. In Dōgen’s context, it points to the direct manifestation of reality when dualistic grasping is released. It is closer to suchness than to a hidden metaphysical essence.

The practical setting: A quiet room and moderate conditions

Dōgen then turns to concrete conditions:

For the practice of zazen, a quiet room is suitable. Do not eat and drink too much. Give up all attachments and let the duties of everyday life rest.

Fukan zazengi becomes very concrete and practical here. Overall, the text is not only a philosophical one. It gives the practitioner direct instructions for how to sit, in particular, what kind of environment supports sitting: A quiet room, moderation in eating and drinking, and a temporary suspension of ordinary concerns create the conditions for practice. Just to get this right: Dōgen does not claim that awakening depends on an ideal environment. He recognizes that bodily and environmental conditions do matter, and the practitioner should therefore care for body and environment as well as for his mind in a way that all three together support practice. And this is a sober aspect of Dōgen’s teaching. He does not romanticize practice as pure inwardness independent of posture, room, food, clothing, or bodily alignment. The Dharma is enacted through concrete conditions. This is consistent with dependent arising. Practice does not occur in an abstract mind. It occurs through body, space, breath, posture, effort, environment, and mind.

The instruction to “let the duties of everyday life rest” should therefore not be misunderstood as a rejection of ordinary responsibilities. Dōgen argues elsewhere, especially in Bendōwa, that worldly duties do not automatically obstruct the Dharma. Here, the instruction concerns the specific period of sitting. During zazen, one releases ordinary concerns so that the act of sitting is not turned into another episode of planning, worrying, or problem-solving.

Beyond good and evil, right and wrong

Dōgen continues:

Do not think of good and evil or of right and wrong. Calm your mind, your will, and your consciousness, and do not consider anything in images, thoughts, or representations. Do not try to become Buddha.

This passage can easily be misunderstood. Dōgen is not rejecting Buddhist ethics. He is not saying that good and evil do not matter in conduct. Rather, he is describing the specific orientation of zazen. During sitting, the practitioner does not engage in moral calculation, conceptual judgment, doctrinal analysis, or imaginative construction. The mind is not directed toward evaluation or acquisition. The instruction “do not try to become Buddha” is especially important. It does not deny Buddhahood. It rejects goal-oriented striving (as the Heart Sutra states: mushotokuko, “there’s nothing to be gained”). If zazen is practiced as a technique for becoming Buddha later, then the practitioner has already split practice from realization. Dōgen’s point is that sitting should not be organized by the desire to become something else. To sit is already to enact the Buddha posture.

This connects directly to practice-realization. Practice is not a ladder toward future status. It is the present enactment of realization. “Do not try to become Buddha” therefore does not mean “do not practice”. It means: Do not turn practice into self-centered acquisition.

The posture of zazen

The middle section of Fukan zazengi gives detailed instructions for posture:

One can take either the full lotus or the half lotus posture. In the full lotus posture, first place the right foot on the left thigh, and then the left foot on the right thigh.

Dōgen gives a sequence of bodily instructions: Arrange the mat and cushion, loosen but order the clothing, place the hands correctly, touch the thumbs, sit upright, align ears and shoulders, nose and navel, place the tongue against the upper palate, keep lips and teeth together, keep the eyes slightly open, and breathe quietly through the nose. The level of detail is significant. Dōgen’s Zen is not disembodied. It is not a philosophy that merely uses the body as metaphor. The body is the actual field of practice. Alignment matters because zazen is enacted through the whole body-mind. The posture is not incidental to realization. It is the form through which realization is practiced.

This is why Dōgen can distinguish zazen from ordinary sitting or lying down. The external form may seem simple, but its meaning is not reducible to physical stillness. Ordinary sitting can be relaxation, waiting, fatigue, or habit. Zazen is disciplined sitting as Buddha posture. The difference lies not only in bodily arrangement, but in the total orientation of practice.

The instruction to keep the eyes slightly open is also important. Dōgen’s zazen is not a withdrawal into inward darkness. It is not trance, sleep, or blank absorption. The practitioner remains awake, embodied, and present. This fits the broader Zen emphasis on clarity rather than escape.

Thinking from the ground of non-thinking

The best-known passage of Fukan zazengi is the instruction:

When you sit still and unmoving, “think from the ground of non-thinking”. “How can one think from the ground of non-thinking? It is beyond ordinary thinking.” This is the essential art of zazen.

This passage is central for understanding Dōgen’s view of meditation. He does not instruct the practitioner simply to stop all thought. He also does not instruct the practitioner to think discursively. The phrase points to a third mode: Beyond ordinary thinking. This is often associated with hishiryō, non-thinking or beyond-thinking. The structure is subtle. “Non-thinking” does not mean unconsciousness. It does not mean suppressing thoughts by force. It means not being governed by ordinary conceptual elaboration. Thoughts may arise, but the practitioner does not pursue them, identify with them, or construct a self around them. The mind is not blank, but it is not captured. This is closely connected to the Buddhist critique of clinging. The problem is not the mere appearance of thought. The problem is attachment to thought, identification with thought, and the transformation of thought into narrative selfhood. To think from the ground of non-thinking is to allow mental activity to arise within a field not dominated by grasping.

This also clarifies why zazen is not simply concentration practice in the ordinary sense. Dōgen is not primarily teaching a technique for narrowing attention onto an object. He is pointing to a mode of sitting in which body and mind are no longer organized by gaining, judging, and appropriating. In this sense, non-thinking is practical emptiness enacted in sitting.

Zazen is not learning meditation

Dōgen then makes one of the strongest claims in the text:

This zazen is not the learning of meditation. It is simply the Dharma gate of peace and joy. It is the practice and experience in which awakening is completely realized. In zazen the universe realizes itself immediately.

This passage is the doctrinal center of Fukan zazengi. Dōgen explicitly rejects the reduction of zazen to the learning of meditation. This does not mean that zazen is not meditative. It means that it should not be understood as one meditation technique among others, practiced in order to reach a later state. For Dōgen, zazen is the “Dharma gate of peace and joy”, the direct form of practice-realization.

The phrase “practice and experience in which awakening is completely realized” connects Fukan zazengi to Bendōwa. In both texts, Dōgen refuses to separate practice from realization. Sitting is not preparation for awakening. It is awakening enacted as sitting. This is why the text can say that the universe realizes itself immediately in zazen. The practitioner is not an isolated individual producing a private mental state. The act of sitting belongs to the whole field of reality in this sense. This does not mean that every moment of sitting is subjectively dramatic or mystical. Dōgen is not promising extraordinary experience. The language is strong because he is redefining the status of practice. The ordinary posture of sitting is not ordinary if it is the embodied enactment of the Dharma.

Dragons in water, tigers on the mountain

Dōgen writes:

If you grasp this meaning, you will be like dragons in their water and like tigers on their mountain.

This image expresses fittingness. A dragon belongs in water. A tiger belongs on the mountain. When the practitioner understands and practices zazen, they are no longer displaced from their own element. This does not mean comfort in the ordinary psychological sense. It means that the practitioner is no longer trying to attain the Dharma from outside. They sit in the place where the Dharma is enacted.

This image resonates with Uji. A dragon in water and a tiger on the mountain are not beings placed in neutral space. They are beings in their own concrete situation. Their being is inseparable from their field. In the same way, zazen places the practitioner in their own Dharma position: This body, this posture, this breath, this time.

The image also prevents an abstract reading of practice. Dōgen does not say that one becomes a conceptually enlightened observer. One becomes like a dragon in water or a tiger on the mountain. Practice is embodied, situated, and alive.

Rising from sitting and the power of practice

Dōgen gives practical instructions for ending zazen:

When you rise after sitting, move the body slowly and stand up calmly. Be without haste.

Even the transition out of sitting is part of practice. This is significant because it prevents a sharp split between meditation and post-meditation. The body should rise slowly and calmly. Practice extends into movement. The posture changes, but the quality of attention continues.

Dōgen then turns to examples of awakening that occur through gestures, sounds, and actions: A raised finger, a falling object, a wooden block, a hossu, a fist, a stick, a shout. These references point to Zen encounter stories in which awakening is triggered by concrete events rather than by conceptual explanation. Dōgen’s point is not that such events are magical. His point is that realization cannot be captured by ordinary thinking and discrimination.

This section also rejects hierarchies based on intelligence:

Therefore you should not say that knowledge is excellent and stupidity inferior, and you should not distinguish between intelligent and limited people.

This should not be read as anti-intellectualism. Dōgen himself was intellectually brilliant. Rather, he rejects the idea that awakening depends on intellectual superiority, or would generate it. The decisive factor is not cleverness, but practice. This is consistent with the inclusive dimension of Bendōwa: The Dharma is not restricted to the learned, powerful, or socially privileged. It is available to anyone, anyone who practices and has the true will to pursue the Buddha Way.

Practicing only zazen

Dōgen then makes a strong exclusive statement:

Therefore you should practice only zazen and strive for the truth, even though there are infinitely many distinctions and differences in this world.

This sentence belongs to the polemical core of the text. Dōgen knows that there are many Buddhist practices, doctrines, rituals, and schools. Yet he urges the practitioner to practice zazen directly. This does not mean that all other forms are meaningless in every context, in the truest expression of upaya. It means that, for Dōgen, zazen is the central and sufficient enactment of the Buddha Way. The next image even sharpens the point:

Why should you abandon your seat in your own home in order to wander aimlessly through the dusty regions of foreign lands?

This can be read on several levels. Literally, it warns against restless seeking. Philosophically, it criticizes the idea that truth is somewhere else. Practically, it tells the practitioner to sit. The “seat in your own home” is not merely a place. It is the immediacy of practice here and now. To abandon it is to turn the path into wandering. The warning about the passing moment is also central:

One false step, and the present moment passes you by.

This does not mean that Zen becomes anxious about time. Rather, it emphasizes the preciousness of embodiment and opportunity. A human body is not to be wasted. This connects with broader Buddhist reflections on the rarity of human birth and the urgency of practice. Dōgen writes:

Have you not received your human body as the essential instrument?

The body is not an obstacle to awakening. It is the instrument of practice. This is a crucial point in Dōgen’s embodied Zen. Practice is not escape from the body. It is practice through the body.

The true dragon and the direct way

Near the end, Dōgen writes:

Do not be frightened by the true dragon because you have become accustomed to its images. Direct your efforts toward the way that is directly accessible and uncomplicated.

The “true dragon” refers to a well-known story about a man who loved images of dragons but was terrified when a real dragon appeared. Dōgen uses the image to criticize attachment to representations. One can become comfortable with ideas, symbols, doctrines, and images of the Dharma, yet shrink back from direct practice when it appears. This is one of the strongest warnings in Fukan zazengi. It applies not only to medieval Buddhist practitioners, but to any reader of Zen texts. One can enjoy Zen as literature, philosophy, aesthetics, or cultural history, while avoiding the direct demand of practice. Dōgen’s point is that the image of the dragon is not the dragon. The concept of zazen is not zazen. Understanding the text is not the same as sitting. Only direct practice is the true path. The “way that is directly accessible and uncomplicated” is the way of sitting. It is not hidden behind complex doctrines, esoteric rituals, or intellectual puzzles. It is available to anyone who sits.

The treasury of the Dharma

The text ends with a promise:

If you practice this long enough, you will certainly become this yourself. Then the treasury of the Dharma will naturally open, and you will be able to receive and use its treasures as you wish.

The phrase “receive and use” recalls the jisho zanmai, the samādhi of receiving and using oneself, which is central in Bendōwa. The treasury of the Dharma is not forced open by conceptual mastery. It opens naturally through sustained practice.

This ending is not a promise of possession in the ordinary sense. To “receive and use” the treasures of the Dharma does not mean acquiring spiritual property. It means that the practitioner becomes able to live the Dharma directly. The treasure is not an external reward added after practice. It is the unfolding of practice itself.

Fukan zazengi and Shōbōgenzō Zazengi

Dōgen later returned to the theme of zazen in several texts. These include Bendōwa, Zazenshin, Zanmai ō zanmai, and the Shōbōgenzō fascicle Zazengi (坐禪儀), usually translated as Guidelines for zazen or Rules for zazen. This later Zazengi was presented in 1243 at Kippō-ji and is much shorter than Fukan zazengi. It is also more narrowly practical.

Where Fukan zazengi opens with a philosophical paradox, Zazengi begins more directly:

To truly experience Zen means to sit in zazen. For zazen, a quiet room is suitable.

The tone is less rhetorical and more instructional. Zazengi gives concrete guidance on the meditation place, protection from wind, smoke, rain, and dew, keeping the room clean and orderly, using a mat and cushion, arranging the posture, placing the hands, aligning the body, keeping the eyes open, breathing through the nose, and practicing beyond thinking. It preserves several key ideas from Fukan zazengi, including the instruction not to think about right and wrong, not to try to become Buddha, and to think from the ground of non-thinking. The later text is especially valuable because it shows that Dōgen did not treat bodily details as secondary. The placement of the cushion, the position of the spine, the relation of ears and shoulders, nose and navel, the openness of the eyes, and the exhalation before sitting all matter. The inclusion of Zazengi in the Shōbōgenzō indicates that correct bodily and mental posture was not marginal to Dōgen’s teaching. It was one of its foundations.

The relationship between the two texts can be summarized carefully. Fukan zazengi is broader and more programmatic. It introduces zazen as the direct gate of the Dharma, frames the problem of why practice is necessary if truth is already present, and links sitting to the complete realization of awakening. Zazengi is more compressed and technical. It focuses on the practical conditions and bodily form of sitting. Both texts share the same core view: Zazen is not ordinary meditation training. It is the embodied practice in which the Buddha Way is enacted.

Read together, the two texts show the two sides of Dōgen’s teaching on zazen. One side is philosophical and doctrinal: Practice and realization are not two. The other is practical and bodily: Sit upright, arrange the body, release conceptual striving, and practice. Dōgen’s originality lies in refusing to separate these two sides. The philosophical claim only becomes meaningful in bodily practice, and the bodily practice is not merely physical technique. It is the concrete form of realization.

Fukan zazengi in a nutshell

The central aspects of Fukan zazengi can be summarized as follows:

• Truth is already present, but practice is still necessary. Dōgen begins with the paradox that the Dharma is everywhere and yet must be practiced. If we treat ourselves and the Dharma as two separate things, we no longer realize the truth that is already present.
• Zazen is not merely meditation training. The text explicitly says that zazen is not the learning of meditation. It is the Dharma gate of peace and joy and the practice-experience in which awakening is completely realized.
• Practice is embodied. Posture, cushion, hands, eyes, breath, tongue, clothing, and bodily alignment matter. Dōgen’s Zen is not disembodied philosophy.
• Non-thinking is central. The instruction to think from the ground of non-thinking does not mean suppressing thought. It means practicing beyond ordinary discursive thought and beyond identification with mental activity.
• Do not try to become Buddha. Dōgen rejects goal-oriented striving (mushotokuko). Trying to become Buddha turns practice into a means toward a future object. In zazen, the Buddha posture is enacted now.
• Practice is not limited by intelligence. Dōgen rejects distinctions between clever and limited people as decisive for the path. What matters is wholehearted practice and the true will to pursue the Buddha Way.
• The human body is the essential instrument. The body is not an obstacle to awakening. It is the concrete field through which practice is enacted.
• The direct way is simple but not shallow. Dōgen’s instruction is direct: Sit. The simplicity of the practice is not a lack of depth, but the refusal to replace practice with conceptual detours.
• The text is both instructional and doctrinal. Fukan zazengi gives practical instructions, but it also articulates the core structure of Dōgen’s Zen: Practice and realization are inseparable.

Fukan zazengi and core Buddhist concepts

Although Fukan zazengi is specifically a Zen practice text, it remains deeply connected to core Buddhist ideas. We can see the following concepts at work in the text:

• Impermanence (anicca) The text’s warnings about the fleeting human body, the dewdrop on grass, and the flash of lightning directly express impermanence. The urgency of practice arises because life is unstable and brief.
• Non-self (anattā) The instruction to let body and mind drop away undermines identification with body, mind, thought, and self-image. It does not destroy the person, but loosens the illusion of a fixed self.
• Suffering (dukkha) The text addresses suffering indirectly by targeting the structures that sustain it: Conceptual pursuit, dualistic opposition, attachment, goal-seeking, and the postponement of life into future attainment.
• Craving and clinging (taṇhā and upādāna) Dōgen repeatedly warns against seeking, chasing words, attaching to distinctions, and trying to become Buddha. These are subtle forms of craving and clinging within spiritual practice itself.
• Emptiness (śūnyatā) The instruction to go beyond good and evil, right and wrong, thinking and non-thinking, intelligent and limited does not negate differences in ordinary life. It prevents these categories from being grasped as fixed essences.
• Suchness (tathatā) Turning the light inward and letting the original face reveal itself points to the direct appearance of things as they are. Zazen is not a route away from reality, but a way of becoming intimate with suchness.
• Practice-realization (shushō ittō) The most important concept in the text is the unity of practice and realization. Zazen is not a method for producing awakening later. It is the present enactment of awakening itself.
• Right effort (sammā-vāyāma) Dōgen rejects self-centered striving, but not effort. The text repeatedly demands disciplined, immediate, and sustained practice. This is effort without gaining idea.

Read in this way, Fukan zazengi is not a marginal practical appendix to Dōgen’s philosophical work. It is one of the clearest expressions of his whole work. The text shows how Buddhist insight is not merely understood, but enacted through posture, breath, attention, and non-grasping practice.

Philosophical implications

Fukan zazengi presents a precise challenge to ordinary models of spiritual practice. In a common model, the practitioner begins in ignorance, performs a method, and eventually reaches awakening as a future result. Dōgen does not deny that practice unfolds over time, or that practitioners mature. But he rejects the deeper assumption that practice and realization are ultimately separate. If the Dharma is already present, practice cannot be the production of something absent. It must be the enactment of what is already true. This has consequences for how zazen is understood. It is not a psychological tool for calming the mind, though calm may arise. It is not a technique for producing special experiences, though experience may change. It is not a method for becoming Buddha later, because trying to become Buddha already introduces separation. Zazen is the bodily form of nonseparation. It is the activity in which the practitioner stops standing outside the Dharma as someone trying to obtain it.

The text also clarifies why Dōgen’s Zen cannot be reduced to anti-intellectualism. He criticizes chasing words, but he does so in a carefully written text. The problem is not language itself, but attachment to language as a substitute for practice. This is a recurring theme in Dōgen’s writings. Words can point, clarify, and transmit, but they cannot replace sitting. The concept of zazen is not zazen.

A further implication concerns the body. Many spiritual traditions are tempted to treat the body as a lower vehicle for a higher mind. Fukan zazengi does not do this. The body is precisely where practice occurs. The posture, breath, hands, eyes, tongue, and spine are not secondary technicalities. They are the form of the path. This embodied dimension connects Dōgen’s teaching to the Buddhist rejection of a permanent self hidden behind body and mind. Practice is not escape from embodied existence. It is the transformation of embodied existence into the field of realization.

Finally, Fukan zazengi shows that simplicity and depth are not opposed. The instruction is simple: Sit. But this simplicity contains Dōgen’s full understanding of the Buddha-Dharma. It includes the critique of dualism, the urgency of impermanence, the rejection of spiritual acquisition, the importance of posture, the practice of non-thinking, and the unity of practice and realization. The direct way is not shallow. It is direct because it refuses to avoid the actual practice of the path.

Conclusion

Fukan zazengi is one of the clearest and most practical statements of Dōgen’s Zen. It presents zazen as the universal and direct practice of the Buddha Way, while also embedding this practice in a rich philosophical framework. The text begins from the same paradox that runs through much of Dōgen’s work: Truth is already present, but practice is necessary. The Dharma is not absent, but it is not realized through conceptual certainty, spiritual pride, or passive possession. It is enacted. The text’s practical instructions are therefore not incidental. The quiet room, the cushion, the lotus posture, the hand position, the upright spine, the open eyes, the breathing, and the instruction to think from the ground of non-thinking all show that Dōgen’s Zen is embodied. The body is not a secondary support for a purely mental realization. It is the field in which realization is practiced.

Fukan zazengi also prevents several misunderstandings of zazen. It is not ordinary sitting, not trance, not mere concentration training, not an attempt to become Buddha, and not a method for acquiring spiritual property. It is the Dharma gate of peace and joy, the practice-experience in which awakening is completely realized. This does not make practice passive or automatic. On the contrary, the text repeatedly demands immediate, disciplined, and sustained effort.

Read alongside Bendōwa, Fukan zazengi gives the practical form of Dōgen’s doctrine of practice-realization. Read alongside Shōbōgenzō Zazengi, it shows how seriously Dōgen took the exact bodily conditions of sitting. Together, these texts make clear that Dōgen’s Zen cannot be reduced either to abstract philosophy or to a neutral meditation technique. It is a practice in which body, mind, posture, time, and world become the field of the Dharma.

The force of Fukan zazengi lies in its directness. Do not chase words. Do not wait for a future state. Do not try to become Buddha as an object of attainment. Sit, now, with the whole body and mind. In this sitting, the path is not postponed. It is enacted.

References and further reading

• Dōgen, Eihei, Fukanzazengi, 1227
• Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo – Die Schatzkammer des wahren Dharma-Auges, 4 Bände, 2013, Verlage: Kristkeitz Werner, Übersetzung: Ritsunen Gabriele Linnebach, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, ISBN: 9783921508909
• Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (Autor), Jochen Eggert (Übersetzer), Zazen: Die Übung des Zen: Grundlagen und Methoden der Meditationspraxis im Zen, 1. Januar 1990, Herausgeber: O. W. Barth; 2. Edition, ISBN-10: 3502645957
• Kōshō Uchiyama, François-Albert Viallet, Kōshō Uchiyama, Weg zum Selbst: Zen-Wirklichkeit, 1973, Barth, ISBN: 9783870412654