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

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

“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

Façade of the church of Maria Laach. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 2.5).

For a long time, I had therefore postponed writing about Maria Laach. The abbey is visually impressive and architecturally exceptional. Its history is rich and complex. It is a major monument of the Romanesque period, a key site for the history of Benedictine monasticism, and a place of continuous religious life for nearly a millennium.

The main nave of the church of Maria Laach, with Christ Pantocrator in the apse.

At the same time, my own perception of the place has never been a fully contemplative one. I have never encountered it as a quiet monastic site. Instead, I always encounter it as a dense and commercial complex, as a destination for day trips, and as a highly organized visitor infrastructure. However, it is also a place of Catholic memory, a Romanesque monument, and a functioning Benedictine abbey. That mixture makes Maria Laach interesting, but it also makes it ambiguous.

Side view of the central part of the church. The church is famous for its six towered silhouette and represents one of the most important Romanesque churches in the Rhineland. At the same time, the commercial surface surrounding it is real as well, with shops, cafés, and a hotel. This creates a certain tension between the historical and architectural depth of the abbey and the commercial surface surrounding it, which is part of the identity of the place today. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

I thought, it could be interesting to elaborate on this ambiguity a little further. Of course, Maria Laach cannot be reduced to its present day shop fronts, cafés, garden center, hotel, and visitor traffic. Such a reduction would be historically unfair. The abbey belongs to the major Romanesque monuments of the Rhineland and preserves a remarkable continuity of monastic, architectural, liturgical, artistic, and bibliographical history. Yet it also cannot be described honestly as if it were simply a secluded place of monastic silence. Whatever Maria Laach was in the past, today it is also a highly developed religious tourism site. The historical and architectural depth of the abbey remains real. The commercial surface surrounding it is real as well.

The abbey at the lake

Maria Laach lies in Glees in the district of Ahrweiler in Rhineland Palatinate, on the southwestern side of the Laacher See in the Eifel. The name itself preserves the relation to the lake. The Latin names Abbatia ad Lacum, Abbatia Lacensis, or Abbatia Mariae ad Lacum mean, in different formulations, the abbey at the lake or the abbey of Mary at the lake. The German form “Laach” derives from an older word related to Latin lacus, meaning lake. The name is therefore not incidental and the lake is not only a scenic background. It is part of the identity of the place.

Map of the eastern Vordereifel region, showing the location of Maria Laach and the Laacher See (center) in relation to the surrounding towns and cities. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

The abbey belongs today to the Beuronese Congregationꜛ of the Benedictine Order. Its church, often called the Laacher Münster, is one of the most important Romanesque churches in Germany. It is especially famous for its six towered silhouette, its double choir arrangement, its westwork, its crypt, its compact basilical structure, and its western atrium, traditionally called the “Paradise”. The abbey’s Paradise is of particular architectural importance because it is regarded as the last preserved structure of its kind north of the Alps.

Aerial view of Laacher See. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The church received the honorary title of Basilica minor from Pope Pius XI in 1926. Yet the importance of Maria Laach is older than such modern ecclesiastical recognition. Its historical meaning lies in the fact that it was founded in the high Middle Ages, developed into a major Benedictine house, passed through reform movements, secularization, private ownership, Jesuit occupation, Benedictine restoration, liturgical scholarship, and modern heritage preservation. Its present form is therefore the product of nearly a millennium of foundation, construction, interruption, reform, destruction, restoration, and reinterpretation.

The coat of arms of Maria Laach, which designates the abbey as a Papal Minor Basilica.

Foundation by Heinrich II of Laach and Adelheid

The abbey was founded in 1093 by Heinrich II of Laach, the first Count Palatine of the Rhine, and his wife Adelheid of Weimar Orlamünde. Heinrich called himself “of Laach” after his castle on the eastern side of the Laacher See. Since the couple had no children, the foundation of a monastery served several purposes at once. It was an act of piety, a provision for the salvation of their souls, a dynastic memorial, and a burial foundation. The abbey was to become the spiritual counterpart to the lordly seat across the lake.

The western façade of the abbey church of Maria Laach, with the main entrance at the center. Like many medieval churches, the church is oriented toward the east, while the principal entrance lies on the western side, facing the lake and the former castle site of its founders. The setting still makes visible the abbey’s original relation to the aristocratic foundation across the lake and to its role as a monastic and memorial institution.

This logic of foundation becomes more clear when we look at the foundation charter. Heinrich presents the monastery as a work established for the honor of Mary and Saint Nicholas and for the benefit of monks who live according to the monastic rule. The double patronage is important. Maria Laach was not originally simply “Maria Laach” in the modern sense. The medieval foundation was dedicated to the Mother of God and to Saint Nicholas. The later dominance of the Marian name reflects a long development of naming and reception rather than the full complexity of the original dedication.

Further views of the main entrance of the church, highlighting its Romanesque sculptural decoration.

The location was chosen carefully and intentionally. The southwestern side of the lake offered access, water supply through the Beller Bach, and enough space for a monastery. The abbey received lands and rights from the founders, including the area “zu Laach”, the southern part of the lake, forests, and several surrounding settlements such as Kruft, Alken, Bendorf, Bell, Rieden, and Willenberg. The first monks and builders came from the monastery of St. Maximin near Trier, placing the new foundation within the monastic networks of the region from the beginning.

The “Paradise” of Maria Laach. This western atrium is the last preserved structure of its kind north of the Alps. It was built in the early 12th century and served as a kind of transitional space between the secular world and the sacred space of the church.

Construction began soon after the foundation. Already in 1093, the foundations were laid for the crypt, nave, crossing tower, westwork, and eastwork. This means that the basic architectural conception of the church was planned at a very early stage. The later Paradise was not yet part of this first construction concept. When Heinrich died in 1095, the walls had already risen several meters. The east choir was the most advanced part, while the nave was less developed. Adelheid continued the work after the death of her husband, But after her own death in 1100, the building activity came to a temporary halt. At that point, the eastern transept still lacked a vault and was covered provisionally, serving as a temporary worship space for the monks.

Sarcophagus of Heinrich II of Laach, probably around 1280. Together with his wife Adelheid, he was the founder of the abbey. The sarcophagus is located in the crypt of the church, demonstrating the double intention of the foundation as a spiritual institution and a dynastic memorial.

The early history of Maria Laach therefore already shows the typical fragility of medieval monumental construction. The abbey was founded with a strong aristocratic intention, but its building program depended on succession, property, patronage, and institutional stability. A monastery was not simply built by one pious gesture. It required decades of resources, legal continuity, and monastic administration.

The same sarcophagus, viewed form the other side. Heinrich is presented with a model of the church in his left, symbolizing his role as founder and builder. The sarcophagus is a powerful visual statement of the connection between the founder, the church, and the monastic community, prominently placed in the crypt, thus centrally located in the spiritual heart of the abbey, the church itself.

From priory to abbey

In 1112, Heinrich’s heir, Count Palatine Siegfried of Ballenstedt, renewed the foundation and arranged for construction to resume. He also gave the monastery to the Abbey of Affligem in Brabant. Maria Laach therefore began its institutional life not immediately as an independent abbey, but as a priory under Affligem. This connection brought new monastic energy to the site.

Angled view of the church’s façade.

The decisive figure in this phase was Gilbert of Affligem, who came to Laach in 1127, first as prior and later as the first abbot after the community became independent. With him came a larger group of monks, and the abbey’s landholdings in the Eifel, along the Rhine, and along the Moselle began to grow. The monastery was not merely a spiritual community. Like other medieval abbeys, it was also an economic institution whose survival depended on land, rights, agricultural production, rents, donations, and networks of patronage.

The building materials, especially the brown yellow Laacher tuff, connect the church visually to the surrounding landscape and give it a distinctive regional character.

In 1138, Laach became an independent abbey. In 1139, Count Gerhard II of Hochstaden, a nephew of the founder, donated the northern half of the lake and Wassenach to the abbey. This expanded the abbey’s control over the landscape immediately surrounding it. The lake, the forests, the water management, and the monastery’s economic life were closely connected.

View into the “Paradise” of Maria Laach. The atrium is surrounded by a gallery with columns and capitals.

The church continued to grow during this period. Under Abbot Fulbert, who governed from 1152 to 1177, the crypt, nave, and west choir were consecrated on August 24, 1156 by Hillin of Fallemanien, Archbishop of Trier. Yet this consecration did not mean that the church was fully completed in the form we see today. Parts of the towers and upper structures remained unfinished. Provisional roofs still protected incomplete sections. Medieval consecration and architectural completion were not always identical: A church could be liturgically usable and still architecturally unfinished.

The right side of the cloister surrounding the “Paradise,” through which one enters the church.

Romanesque portal detail, a tympanum, above one of the main entrances into the church, showing a red painted cross.

By around 1177, the east choir, the flanking towers of the eastern dome, and the western gallery had been completed, supported by donations such as those of Countess Hedwig of Are. This phase gave the church much of its monumental Romanesque character. Maria Laach entered the architectural tradition of the great Romanesque churches of the Rhineland, especially the imperial cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms. It shares with them the language of massive walls, clear geometric articulation, strong tower groups, and the symbolic presence of the church as a kind of sacred fortress.

Relief on the doorknob at the church entrance, depicting Adam and Eve.

Architecture as history

The church of Maria Laach cannot be treated separately from the history of the abbey. Its architecture is itself one of the main historical documents of the monastery. The building is a double choir, three aisled pier basilica with two transepts and six towers. The westwork is crowned by a central tower and flanked by two lower round towers. The eastern crossing tower is accompanied by two higher square flanking towers. This arrangement gives the church its famous silhouette, especially when seen from the west or from the surrounding landscape.

Crypt of Maria Laach Abbey. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The building materials also root the church in the region. Brown yellow Laacher tuff, white limestone from Lorraine, red Kyll sandstone, grey tuff from Weibern, basalt lava from the Veitskopf and from Niedermendig were used in different phases. The church is therefore not only a Romanesque form placed into the Eifel landscape. It is materially made out of that landscape and its wider trade connections.

View from inside the cloister.

The church follows the broad conceptual logic of monastic planning associated with the St. Gall plan, although the real building history is of course more specific and historically layered. The abbey church was not merely a place for public worship. It was the liturgical center of a monastic organism. Around it were arranged spaces for prayer, reading, administration, production, hospitality, burial, and economic management.

Top: Central section of the St. Gallen Monastery Map. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain). – Bottom: Reconstruction drawing of St. Gallen Abbey based on Johann Rudolf Rahn’s plan of the abbey, 1876. . Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain). – The monastery of St. Gallen served as a kind of ideal model for medieval monastic architecture and planning. The church was the center of a complex of buildings for different functions, including cloisters, dormitories, refectories, workshops, and guesthouses. Maria Laach shares with this model the idea of a church as the liturgical and symbolic heart of a monastic community, around which other spaces are arranged according to their function and relation to the liturgy.

The symbolic interpretation of the building also reflects medieval social thought. The westwork, turned toward sunset, could be associated with the noble and protective estate. The eastwork, turned toward sunrise, with the clerical and teaching estate. The nave, mediating between both, with the people. Such interpretations should not be treated as simple architectural facts, but they show how Romanesque church buildings could be read as symbolic models of Christian society.

Inside, the church is comparatively restrained. Maria Laach does not overwhelm through late medieval pictorial density or Baroque theatricality in the way many other ecclesiastical buildings do. Its power lies in mass, rhythm, proportion, stone, spatial sequence, and the strong contrast between compact exterior and ordered interior. The nave was originally covered by a flat wooden ceiling and was vaulted only in the early 13th century. This later vaulting belongs to the completion and transformation of the Romanesque project rather than to its first foundation phase.

The east choir contains one of the church’s most important furnishings, the ciborium altar. This baldachin, supported by columns, was acquired in 1256 under Abbot Theoderich II of Lehmen. It originally stood over the founder’s tomb and served to elevate the memory of Heinrich II of Laach. Since 1947 it has functioned as the altar ciborium in the east choir. Its displacement and reuse show how medieval objects often survive not by remaining unchanged, but by being integrated into new liturgical and spatial arrangements.

Another view of the sarcophagus of Heinrich II of Laach, located in the crypt.

The founder’s tomb itself reveals the close relation between aristocratic memory and monastic space. Maria Laach was founded for spiritual purposes, but also as a dynastic and memorial institution. The monastery prayed, preserved memory, displayed legitimacy, and translated aristocratic patronage into liturgical permanence.

The Paradise and the completion of the Romanesque ensemble

Under Abbots Albert and Gregor in the early 13th century, the westwork was completed. Between roughly 1220 and 1230, the Nikolaus Chapel was built. Around the same time, the western atrium known as the Paradise was added as a new architectural element. This Paradise is one of the most distinctive features of Maria Laach. It forms an enclosed open space in front of the west façade, comparable to an atrium, although its exact function and later uses changed over time.

Another view into the “Paradise” of Maria Laach, showing the central lion fountain and the surrounding gallery.

The term “Paradise” itself points to the symbolic and transitional character of the space. It stands between outside and inside, between secular arrival and sacred interior, between the visitor’s movement and the church’s liturgical order. Architecturally, it softens the transition into the massive Romanesque westwork. Experientially, it creates a zone of preparation. Today, however, one also enters it as part of a major visitor route. The space still carries the symbolism of threshold and enclosure, but the modern stream of visitors has changed how it is experienced.

The Paradise was not always preserved in its present form. In later centuries it received an upper story used for guests and connected to adjacent monastic buildings. A drawing by Renier Roidkin from 1725 preserves one of the older visual witnesses to this altered state. In the 18th century, this upper structure was removed, and the Paradise was brought closer to what was understood as its original Romanesque form. Its current appearance is therefore not simply medieval survival. It is medieval architecture filtered through restoration history.

This is true of Maria Laach more generally. The church looks exceptionally Romanesque today because many later changes were reversed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Gothic roof alterations, Baroque window enlargements, and other modifications were removed during restoration campaigns. The result is visually coherent, but that coherence is partly modern. It reflects a historical desire to recover, or reconstruct, the Romanesque character of the church.

The lake, the Fulbert tunnel, and the problem of water

The Laacher See is scenic, but it was also a practical challenge. Since the lake has no natural surface outlet, its water level mattered directly for the monastery. A long drainage tunnel, often called the Fulbert tunnel after Abbot Fulbert, has been interpreted as a medieval attempt to regulate the lake’s water level and protect the abbey from flooding. Klaus Grewe connected its construction to a dry period beginning in the 1160s, during which such work would have been technically possible because of lower water levels.

Entrance to the Delius Tunnel. The Fulbert tunnel served to regulate the water level of the Laacher See, which was crucial for the abbey’s survival. The tunnel is a remarkable example of medieval engineering and environmental management, demonstrating how monasteries were not only spiritual centers but also technical landscapes that had to deal with practical challenges such as water supply and flood control. After the abbey’s secularization in 1802, the tunnel fell into disrepair. Between 1840 and 1845, the Delius and von Ammon families, then owners of the monastery estate and the lake, had a parallel tunnel (the Delius Tunnel) driven approximately 5 meters deeper and 1,060 meters long, during which the Fulbert Tunnel was partially filled with spoil. The lake’s surface area decreased by 48 hectares due to the lowering of the water level, resulting in an equivalent amount of land being reclaimed. Today, nothing of the Fulbert Tunnel is visible above ground. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 2.5).

More recent discussion has also considered a Roman origin for the tunnel, based on Roman settlement remains near the abbey and features of tunnel construction. This uncertainty is historically interesting. It shows that the abbey’s landscape contains older layers that precede the Benedictine foundation. Maria Laach stands in a region where Roman, medieval, early modern, and modern interventions overlap.

The tunnel also reminds us that monasteries were not only places of prayer and learning. They were technical landscapes. Water supply, drainage, agriculture, mills, vineyards, forests, fishing, and roads formed part of monastic life. The spiritual ideal of stability depended on very practical environmental management.

Flourishing, reform, and humanism

After a difficult phase in the mid 13th century, the abbey experienced renewal under Abbot Diedrich II of Lehmen, who governed for several decades and was later remembered by Laach historians as a kind of second founder. His period brought economic consolidation, the acquisition of new properties, architectural changes, and renewed discipline. The later Middle Ages saw further spiritual and cultural activity, including a famous writing and painting school. One of its products was the Laacher Sanktuar, an important collection of prayers and chants for the Eucharistic liturgy, now preserved in Darmstadt.

A closer view to the today’s altar area in the east choir. The ciborium altar, originally placed over the founder’s tomb, is now used as the altar canopy. The church’s interior has been repeatedly reorganized, and objects have been moved and reused in different contexts. Note, that the altar mosaic is a modern addition of the early 20th century.

Under Abbot Kuno of Lösnich, from 1295 to 1328, the abbey entered another period of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Gothic roof expansions continued into the 14th century. As in many medieval monasteries, architectural adaptation did not stop with the Romanesque phase. The monastery continued to change because liturgical, aesthetic, economic, and institutional needs changed.

The 15th century brought the reform movements that reshaped Benedictine monasticism after the Council of Constance. The Archbishop of Trier, Johann II of Baden, supported the integration of Benedictine houses into the reform currents of the order. In 1469, Johann Fart of Deidesheim was sent to Laach as reform abbot. In 1474, the abbey definitively joined the Bursfelde Congregation, one of the most important reform movements within late medieval Benedictine life.

This reform was not merely administrative. It aimed at stricter observance, renewed liturgical life, improved discipline, and a stronger intellectual culture. Under Abbots Simon von der Leyen, Peter Maech of Remagen, and Johannes V Augustinus Machhausen, Maria Laach became a center of monastic humanism. Its library grew, scholarship was cultivated, and the abbey participated in the broader intellectual transformation of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Epitaph of Eva von der Leyen, née Mauchenheimer, in the abbey church of Maria Laach. She was the mother of Abbot Simon von der Leyen, who governed Maria Laach from 1491 until his death in 1512. The monument belongs to the von der Leyen family burial context in the church and reflects the close connection between aristocratic patronage, monastic memory, and late medieval commemorative art.

The famous pillar frescoes of Benedict, Nicholas, and Christopher belong to this late medieval and early modern visual culture. They show that the church was not always as visually restrained as the current Romanesque impression may suggest. Maria Laach once contained a richer network of altars, images, devotional zones, and liturgical furnishings. In the 16th century, the church possessed sixteen altars. Their later removal and replacement are part of the long process by which the interior was repeatedly reorganized.

Baroque transformation and monastic expansion

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Maria Laach underwent Baroque changes. Under Abbot Placidus Kessenich, the interior was adapted to Baroque expectations. The west choir was lowered, the floor of the nave was raised, and the founder’s tomb with its baldachin was moved into the west choir. The side aisle windows, originally Romanesque in scale, were enlarged according to Baroque preferences. Later restorations reversed these changes, but for several centuries they shaped the experience of the church.

Other abbots continued to transform the complex. Josef Dens commissioned new choir stalls. Clemens Aach added a carved pulpit. Heinrich III Artz expanded and heightened the convent buildings, transformed the Nikolaus Chapel into a three bay hall with buttresses and a three sided choir, and altered the refectory. Under Josef II Meurer, the Josefflügel was added in 1775 by Johannes Seiz, a student of Balthasar Neumann.

These changes are important because they complicate the common image of Maria Laach as a purely Romanesque monument. The abbey did not freeze in the 13th century. It lived through Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern phases. Each period left traces, although not all traces were allowed to remain visible. The present building is therefore also the result of selective preservation.

Secularization and the end of the old abbey

The old Benedictine abbey came to an end during the secularization under French rule. On August 6, 1802, the monastery was dissolved by the French administration, following the secularization edict of June 9, 1802. Already in 1801, the abbey’s property had been seized by the occupying authorities. By the time of dissolution, the community had only seventeen monks. The last designated abbot, Thomas Kupp, had died shortly before the formal end of the abbey.

The property was transferred into French state ownership. Movable goods were inventoried, collected, and dispersed into state and private ownership. Lands, vineyards, and other valuable properties were auctioned. The abbey’s library was scattered. The monastery was even considered for conversion into a prison. Ironically, this uncertainty may have helped preserve the buildings, since no immediate demolition was ordered.

After the Congress of Vienna, the complex passed into Prussian state ownership in 1815. Several attempts at privatization followed. In 1820, the former monastery buildings, the lake, and the lands were sold to Daniel Heinrich Delius, the Prussian government president in Trier. The church itself was excluded from the sale and remained separate. Under the Delius family, the former abbey became a private estate. After a major fire in 1855, the east wing of the prelature was rebuilt in neo Gothic forms by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner, the Cologne cathedral architect.

Maria Laach around 1840, steel engraving from “Views of the Rhine” by William Tombleson. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain).

This 19th century phase is crucial for understanding Maria Laach. The abbey was not continuously a monastery from 1093 to the present. It was dissolved, privatized, partially transformed, damaged, restored, and only later returned to religious use. The historical continuity of the place is therefore spatial and cultural, but not uninterrupted institutionally.

Jesuits, Benedictine restoration, and the new name Maria Laach

In 1863, the German Jesuit province acquired the former abbey buildings and established its Collegium Maximum there. The Jesuits rebuilt the library and developed an active religious publishing culture. From this period onward, the complex came to be known by the modern name “Maria Laach”, whereas the medieval name had more commonly been Laach or Abbey at the Lake. Latin Marian names had existed earlier because of the dedication to Mary, but the modern German name became established in this 19th century context.

Photo of the abbey and a map showing the ciborium (still) in the west choir. Anonymous (1860–1890), Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Collection. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 1.0).

During the so-called Kulturkampf, a period of conflict between the German state and the Catholic Church, the Jesuit institution was closed in 1892. The Jesuits then offered the abbey to the Benedictines. Willibrord Benzler from Beuron took up the opportunity and obtained permission from Kaiser Wilhelm II, in his capacity as King of Prussia, to take over the complex. On November 28, 1892, Benedictine monks resettled Maria Laach as a priory. On October 15, 1893, it was consecrated again as an abbey, and Benzler became abbot.

Maria Laach around 1900; the octagonal crossing tower still features the pointed spire from 1355, with St. Nicholas Chapel in the foreground. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain).

The church itself was only transferred by the Prussian state to the abbey in 1923. Before that, the Benedictines were granted use of the church under the condition that they accept simultaneous use by the Evangelical Church of the old Prussian Union. In practice, this Simultaneum remained insignificant, but legally it reflects the complex post secularization status of the church.

Wilhelm II also shaped the church’s modern interior. In 1898, he donated a new high altar designed by Max Spitta, later removed after 1945. From 1905 onward, he supported the mosaic decoration of the interior, including the representation of Christ Pantocrator in the main apse, inspired by the cathedral of Monreale and executed by Puhl & Wagner after a design by the Beuronese monk Andreas Göser. This mosaic belongs to the modern revival of sacred monumental art rather than to the medieval Romanesque phase, yet it has become part of the modern visual identity of the church.

A closer view of the early 20th century monumental mosaic depicting Christ Pantocrator in the main apse. Also parts of the ciborium altar can be seen in the lower foreground. The mosaic was designed by the Beuronese monk Andreas Göser and executed by Puhl & Wagner after 1905, with support from Kaiser Wilhelm II. It belongs to the modern revival of sacred monumental art rather than to the medieval Romanesque phase, yet it has become part of the modern visual identity of the church.

Between 1901 and 1913, the monk and architect Ludger Rincklake designed several monastic buildings. In 1928 and 1929, Martin Weber added further extensions. Maria Laach became not merely a restored monastery, but a center of modern Benedictine culture, architecture, art, and liturgical renewal.

Liturgical movement, Adenauer, and the 20th century

In the early 20th century, Maria Laach became one of the important centers of the liturgical movement. Under Abbot Ildefons Herwegen, the community engaged deeply with liturgical scholarship. In 1948, an institute dedicated to liturgical studies was established. This work placed Maria Laach within a wider Catholic movement that sought to renew worship, recover older liturgical forms, and deepen the participation of the faithful in the liturgy.

A Pieta in a side niche of the church. In front of it, installations for placing memorial and remembrance candles.

The abbey also became connected with German political history. In 1933, after being removed from office as mayor of Cologne by the National Socialists, Konrad Adenauer found refuge in Maria Laach for about a year. He lived there under the name “Brother Konrad”. The abbey was then led by Ildefons Herwegen, who had known Adenauer from school. This episode has become one of the most frequently mentioned modern historical associations of Maria Laach.

The relationship between Catholic institutions and the National Socialist period is complex and cannot be reduced to isolated anecdotes. Adenauer’s refuge at Maria Laach is historically significant, but it does not exhaust the political history of the abbey in the 20th century. Like many religious institutions in Germany, Maria Laach must be understood within the broader tensions of Catholicism, authoritarianism, nationalism, accommodation, resistance, and institutional self preservation. A full analysis would require a separate study. For the present purpose, the Adenauer episode shows how the abbey functioned not only as a liturgical and monastic site, but also as a place embedded in the crises of modern German history.

The abbey reached its largest community size in 1934, with 182 members. The foundation of the publishing house ars liturgica also belongs to this period. The 20th century thus saw both demographic strength and intellectual ambition.

Golden relief of the cruzifixion scene, decorating one pillar in the nave.

Two major restoration campaigns shaped the present appearance of the church. In 1937, work began to bring the exterior closer to an assumed Romanesque state. Late Gothic and Baroque elements, including steeper roofs and altered upper structures, were removed. In 1955 and 1956, before the 800th anniversary of the church’s consecration, the interior was also restored in a Romanesque direction. The interventions were guided by Stefan Leuer, professor of church building and architecture at the Cologne Werkschulen. The floor changes from the Baroque period were reversed, and the interior was reorganized to approximate its medieval appearance.

Modern tympanum relief in Maria Laach showing Christ as healer and life giver.

This restoration history is essential as it defines how we see Maria Laach today. Maria Laach appears today as one of the most harmonious Romanesque churches in Germany partly because 19th and 20th century restorers made it so. The building is authentic, but not untouched. It is medieval, but also restored. It is a monument of the 12th and 13th centuries, but also a monument of modern ideas about what Romanesque architecture should look like.

In 1984, the abbey and the Laacher See were placed on the tentative list for possible World Heritage status, but the application was withdrawn in 1993. On August 27, 2006, the Benedictine community celebrated the 850th anniversary of the church’s consecration with the Bishop of Trier, Reinhard Marx. In 2021, the abbey counted 25 monks and two claustral oblates.

Further impressions from the interior of the church.

The library

The library of Maria Laach deserves separate attention because it preserves another dimension of monastic history: The history of reading, collecting, copying, teaching, and intellectual continuity.

Library of Maria Laach Abbey. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

Today, the library contains around 260,000 titles. About 9,000 of them were printed or written before 1800. This makes the library one of the largest private libraries in Germany. Its main fields include ascetic, monastic, and church historical literature. Such a collection reflects the intellectual profile of a Benedictine institution. A monastery is not only a liturgical community. It is also a reading community. The Benedictine tradition has always linked prayer, study, manuscript culture, and the disciplined preservation of texts.

A library existed already in the medieval monastery founded in 1093. During the secularization of 1802, however, the old library was dispersed. The inventory counted 3,719 printed works at the time of dissolution. Today, only sixty nine manuscripts from the historical library of Maria Laach can still be identified. This loss is typical of secularization history. Monasteries were not merely closed as religious houses. Their intellectual infrastructure was broken apart, redistributed, sold, or absorbed into other collections.

The modern library was rebuilt after the Benedictine restoration of 1892. Its foundation came partly from the old holdings of the secularized Benedictine Abbey of Neustadt am Main. Additional volumes came from Beuron, and purchases were made from Swiss monastic libraries such as Einsiedeln and Engelberg. By 1900, the library already contained around 40,000 volumes. This rapid growth shows how strongly the restored abbey understood itself as an intellectual and scholarly institution.

The library is now divided between two buildings. In 2013, a modern storage building was completed in the former Jesuit cowshed. This allowed the historic Jesuit library building, built in 1865 as a connection between the abbey church and guest wing, to be freed from later shelving installations and restored in its original spatial effect. The building, with its cast iron staircase from the Sayner Hütte, is considered one of the most important and best preserved 19th century library buildings in the tradition of great Baroque monastic libraries. After two years of renovation, it reopened on July 21, 2015 and now houses the reference library and reading room.

The library therefore embodies the layered identity of Maria Laach particularly well. It is medieval in origin, devastated by secularization, rebuilt by the restored Benedictine community, shaped by Jesuit architecture, and preserved today as a historical research space. It also complicates the simple tourist image of Maria Laach. Behind the visible flow of visitors lies an institution that has preserved and rebuilt a serious scholarly infrastructure.

Art, craft, and the Bauhaus in the monastery

One of the more surprising aspects of modern Maria Laach is its connection to 20th century art and design, especially through ceramics. The abbey’s ceramic workshop experienced a new flowering through Theodor Bogler, a Bauhaus trained artist and later Benedictine monk. Bogler brought Bauhaus principles into the monastic context: Simplicity, function, clarity of form, and the possibility of uniting craft, use, and spiritual discipline.

Examples of the today’s ceramic production in the abbey’s shop. The workshop produces hand painted stoneware, tableware, vessels, urns, and other ceramic objects. Some of the contemporary ceramics explicitly refer to Bauhaus principles, including simple and functional forms.

This history matters because it prevents a simplistic opposition between monastic tradition and modern design. In Maria Laach, the two were not always separate. The modern Benedictine restoration of the abbey included architecture, publishing, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, and liturgical art. The monastery was not merely preserving old forms. It was also producing new ones.

Further examples of the today’s ceramic production in the abbey’s shop.

Today, the ceramic workshop continues this tradition under Brother Stephan Oppermann. The workshop produces hand painted stoneware, tableware, vessels, urns, and other ceramic objects. Some of the contemporary ceramics explicitly refer to Bauhaus principles, including simple and functional forms. The restaurant Tausend93 at the Seehotel uses tableware produced by the abbey’s ceramic workshop, thereby connecting hospitality, commercial presentation, monastic craft, and the historical identity of the year 1093.

"Prophet", by Hildegard Bienen, 1971. Hildegard Bienen (1925-1900) was a German sculptor and artist. She created numerous works, mostly inspired by religious themes. Her plastics, glass mosaics, and church furnishings are found in numerous churches in the Lower Rhine region. The inscription on this work is taken from Psalm 63 and reads: "To you, O Lord, I lift up my hands." {: .align-caption}

This continuation of monastic craft is one of the more defensible parts of the present commercial structure. A monastery has always needed material production. Benedictine life is not only contemplation, but also work. The problem begins when the relation between craft and spiritual discipline is overwhelmed by the logic of retail display, visitor consumption, and mass tourism. In Maria Laach, both realities coexist.

View into the shop area of the abbey. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

The abbey also preserves a tradition of sculpture, metalwork, and bronze production. The present day Kunstschmiede and Bildhauerei describe works ranging from bronze inscriptions and Braille panels to bronze models, metal fittings, restoration work, and artistic objects. The online shopꜛ presents religious bronze objects, devotional items, crosses, pendants, figures, reliefs, and other products. This field too has historical roots in monastic art production and the Laach tradition of ars liturgica. Yet in its current presentation, it also participates in a broader market for religious objects and aesthetic gifts.

Another view of Hildegard Bienen’s “Prophet”.

The present day visitor economy

The present day abbey complex is not only a monastery, church, library, and historical monument. It is also a highly developed commercial and tourist site. The official language of the abbey presents these activities as Klosterbetriebe, monastery businesses rooted in the tradition of Laach craftsmen and artist monks. That is not wrong. Monasteries have always operated economically. They farmed, produced, administered, hosted, traded, and sold. Benedictine life never meant separation from material production.

Areal photo of the Maria Laach Abbey, tkaen in 2022. The chuch in the center divides the commercial area on the left from the monastic area on the right. On the left, we prominently see the large and newly reconstructed restaurant with its terrace and the large garden center. On the right, we see the monastic buildings and the library wing. The large parking lot, the lake, the hotel and the shops are located further to the left and are not visible in this image. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

Nevertheless, the present visitor experience of Maria Laach is dominated to a striking degree by commercial infrastructure. There is a Klostergarten where visitors can buy plants, garden accessories, and products associated with the abbey. There is the ceramic workshop and a shop presentation of its products. There is the large Klosterladen with devotional objects, crosses, rosaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, gifts, and products from the abbey’s own manufactories. There is a hotel. There is the Seehotel restaurant Tausend93. There is the new Klostergaststätte, opened after a major rebuilding phase, with substantial indoor and terrace capacity and direct views toward the abbey church and the Laacher valley. There is a large playground area. There are outdoor displays and sales areas for sculptures and bronze objects. There is an expanded parking infrastructure that visibly serves the constant arrival of cars, day tourists, and coaches.

Impressions of the garden center, which is one of the most visible and visited commercial areas of the abbey.

This is not a marginal addition to the site. It shapes the experience of arrival. One does not approach Maria Laach simply as a quiet abbey by the lake. One arrives in a structured visitor zone. The movement toward the church passes through or alongside signs, shops, garden retail, gastronomic facilities, groups, families, tourists, bus passengers, and commercial displays. The result is a peculiar inversion. The abbey church remains the architectural and symbolic center, but the commercial frame often becomes the first and most persistent sensory impression.

Further impressions of the garden center.

My own experience of Maria Laach has therefore never matched the romantic image of a secluded monastic place of silence. The site is usually busy. It is not merely alive in the sense of a functioning monastery. It is busy in the sense of a visitor economy. Waves of tourists move through the complex, many from Germany, many also from the Netherlands. Buses arrive. The shops are open. The gastronomy is active. The garden center functions like a well visited retail destination. The religious, aesthetic, and commercial layers are so closely interwoven that it becomes difficult to separate pilgrimage from shopping and contemplation from consumption.

Further impressions of the garden center.

This does not mean that every visitor must experience the place in this way. The church itself can still be impressive and quiet at certain moments. The lake remains beautiful. The Romanesque architecture remains one of the great monuments of the region. The library, the monastic community, the liturgy, the craft traditions, and the long history of the abbey are not erased by the commercial present. But for me, the present day surface of Maria Laach is a bit too commercially dense to be ignored.

Further impressions of the garden center.

The Sunday and holiday opening of sales areas intensifies this impression. A Christian monastery that sells plants, goods, devotional objects, ceramics, alcohol, and other products on Sundays and holidays presents a tension that cannot be easily explained away by appealing to hospitality. Sunday is, within Christian tradition, not simply another retail day. It is the day of worship and rest. Of course, modern tourism has its own rhythms, and monasteries need income. Yet when commercial operation continues precisely on those days that are supposed to mark a different relation to time, the contradiction becomes visible. The monastery becomes not only a place visited on Sunday, but a place that monetizes Sunday visitation.

Further impressions of the garden center.

This is not a moral accusation against individual monks or employees. It is a structural observation. The economic survival of large religious institutions is difficult. Historical buildings require maintenance. Monastic communities are smaller than they once were. Visitors expect food, toilets, access, shops, parking, and services. The abbey cannot simply remove itself from the economic conditions of the present. Yet the current form also has consequences. It changes what the place communicates. The more the abbey functions as a destination for shopping, gastronomy, plants, souvenirs, and coach tourism, the less plausible it becomes to experience it primarily as a place of monastic withdrawal.

Further impressions of the garden center.

In this sense, Maria Laach has become a kind of pilgrimage site for tourism and consumption rather than a pilgrimage site in the older spiritual sense. The word “pilgrimage” is still useful, but only if one asks what people are actually pilgrimaging toward. Many visitors do not seem to come for liturgy, silence, confession, monastic teaching, or spiritual retreat. They come for the lake, the church, the restaurant, the garden center, the shops, the atmosphere, and the convenient package of history, religion, landscape, and consumption. That is not illegitimate. It is simply different from the religious self image that the word abbey may suggest.

Impressions of the garden center, which is one of the most visible and visited commercial areas of the abbey.

The tension between monastery and destination

The tension at Maria Laach is not unique. Many historically important monasteries in Europe have become hybrid spaces: Still religious, but also touristic; still monastic, but also commercial; still sacred, but also curated for visitors. The historical buildings require preservation, and preservation requires money. The public wants access, and access requires infrastructure. Religious communities shrink, while visitor numbers rise. In such a context, commercialization is not an accident. It is one of the mechanisms through which heritage survives.

Side view of the abbey church, seen from the garden center area.

Maria Laach is therefore not a simple case of spiritual decline. Its commercial system is also part of its preservation system. The shops, hotel, restaurants, gardens, and workshops help support the place. They keep buildings maintained, staff employed, crafts continued, and visitors engaged. A purely negative judgment would be too easy.

Yet one should not confuse preservation with spiritual authenticity. A well maintained religious heritage site can still lose much of its contemplative force. A monastery can remain institutionally active while its public face becomes dominated by retail. A church can remain architecturally sacred while its surroundings function like a leisure complex. Maria Laach shows this tension very clearly because the Romanesque church is so powerful and the visitor economy around it is so visible.

The result is a layered experience. Historically, Maria Laach is a major medieval foundation, a Romanesque masterpiece, a site of Benedictine reform, a victim of secularization, a Jesuit educational institution, a restored Benedictine abbey, a center of liturgical scholarship, a place of modern sacred art, and a significant library. Presently, it is also a commercial destination with a garden center, manufactories, hotel, restaurants, shops, sculpture sales, playgrounds, parking areas, and day tourism. Both descriptions are true. The difficulty lies in the imbalance between them as experienced on site.

For me, the historical depth of Maria Laach makes the commercial surface more troubling, not less. A place with such a long religious and intellectual history should not feel primarily like a branded visitor economy. Yet it often does. The church remains the soul of the complex in the official description. In the actual visitor experience, however, that soul must compete with retail, gastronomy, buses, souvenirs, and constant circulation.

Conclusion

Maria Laach is one of the most important Romanesque monastic sites in Germany. Its foundation in 1093 by Heinrich II of Laach and Adelheid, its development from priory to abbey, its architectural completion in the 12th and 13th centuries, its Paradise atrium, its medieval writing culture, its participation in reform movements, its Baroque transformations, its dissolution during secularization, its Jesuit phase, its Benedictine restoration, its role in the liturgical movement, and its modern library all make it a site of exceptional historical density.

The abbey church itself remains the central reason to visit. Its six towered silhouette, double choir structure, crypt, westwork, Paradise, Romanesque massing, and restored interior make it one of the clearest examples of Romanesque architecture in the Rhineland. At the same time, its present appearance must be understood historically. Maria Laach looks so Romanesque today not because nothing happened to it, but because later Gothic and Baroque layers were partly removed during modern restoration campaigns. The monument is medieval and modern at once.

The library adds a second dimension. It shows Maria Laach not only as stone architecture, but as an institution of memory, reading, monastic scholarship, and textual reconstruction after loss. The dispersal of the medieval library during secularization and the rebuilding of the modern collection after 1892 reflect the rupture and recovery that define much of the abbey’s modern history.

The present day commercial complex is harder to evaluate. It supports the site, continues certain craft traditions, and makes the abbey accessible to many visitors. The ceramic workshop, the garden, the book and devotional shops, the gastronomy, the hotel, and the artistic production all have some relation to monastic work, hospitality, and cultural preservation. But the scale and intensity of the commercial operation also change the character of the place. In my own perception, Maria Laach often feels less like a quiet abbey and more like a religiously branded tourism and shopping destination.

Memorial for the Laach monks who died in the First World War, erected under Abbot Ildefons Herwegen. The central figure follows the early Christian type of Christ as the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb on his shoulders and holding a shepherd’s pipe. I placed this photo here at the end of the post. I thought it would set a perfect final note. Being surrounded by all the commercial activity, this statue of the alleged founding figure of Christianity points towards the ethical and spiritual core of the religion. It reminds us that the abbey is not just a monument or a tourist destination, but also a place of religious memory and spiritual identity. The tension between these layers is what makes Maria Laach such a fascinating and complex site.

Every visitor will have to decide how to perceive the place. One can enter the church and experience the spatial force of Romanesque architecture. One can walk by the lake and see why the site was chosen. One can study the history and recognize the abbey as a major medieval and modern institution. One can also see the shops, restaurants, buses, commercial displays, Sunday sales, and visitor infrastructure and ask whether this still communicates monastic withdrawal or rather the logic of contemporary heritage consumption.

Maria Laach remains worth visiting. But it is worth visiting critically. Its history is too important to be reduced to tourism. Its present is too commercial to be ignored. The abbey at the lake is therefore not only a monument of Romanesque architecture. It is also a case study in what happens when religious memory, historical preservation, monastic identity, and commercial visitor culture occupy the same place.

References and further reading

• Wikipedia article on Maria Laachꜛ
• Website of the Benedictine Abbey Maria Laachꜛ
• Maria Laach online shopꜛ
• Klosterverlag Maria Laachꜛ
• Website of the Abbey’s libraryꜛ
• Drutmar Cremer, Maria Laach – Münster und Mönche am See, 1989, Lahn-Verlag, ISBN: 3-7840-2670-2
• Basilius Sandner, Karl-Heinz Schumacher, Die Benediktinerabtei Maria Laach, 2006, Sutton-Verlag, ISBN: 3-89702-982-0
• Basilius Sandner, Karl-Heinz Schumacher, Die Klosterkirche Maria Laach, Sutton-Verlag, Erfurt 2007, ISBN 3-86680-124-6
• Basilius Sandner, Karl-Heinz Schumacher, Laacher Mönche bei der Arbeit, Sutton-Verlag, Erfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-86680-296-4
• Basilius Sandner, Karl-Heinz Schumacher, Maria Laach im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg, Sutton-Verlag, Erfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-86680-536-1
• Marcel Albert, Die Benediktinerabtei Maria Laach und der Nationalsozialismus 2004, Schöningh, ISBN: 3-506-70135-5
• Theodor Bogler, Maria Laach – Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Abtei am Laacher See, In: Kunstführer, Große Ausgabe, Bd. 12, Schnell & Steiner, München und Zürich 1958 (Dritte und neubearbeitete Auflage)
• Dethard von Winterfeld, Die Abteikirche Maria Laach, Schnell & Steiner, Ars Liturgica, Regensburg 2004, ISBN: 3-7954-1681-7

Archaeologisches Museum Frankfurt. Medieval artefacts of the former monastery, which is now the museum’s home.

The permanent antiquities exhibition

During the research for this post I learned, that the antiquities collection of the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt belongs to a longer Frankfurt collecting history. The museum developed out of the archaeological department of the Historical Museum Frankfurt (German: Historisches Museum Frankfurt) and became an independent institution in 1937. Its first home was the Dominican monastery (German: Dominikanerkloster) in Frankfurt. During the Second World War, the museum had to close, and the Dominican monastery was largely destroyed in 1944. After several postwar relocations, the museum eventually moved into its present location in the former Carmelite monastery.

Archaeological Museum Frankfurt: New Building and Entrance Area. On the right, parts of the former Carmelite monastery can be seen. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

Although the museum is primarily responsible for the archaeology of Frankfurt and its surrounding region, it also preserves important collections of Classical Antiquity (e.g., ancient Greece and Rome/Italy, Minoan civilization, Phoenicia) and the Ancient Near East (e.g., Mesopotamia, Assyria, Sumerians, Akkadian Empire, Elam, Babylonians, Canaanites). The classical antiquities collection has its roots in Frankfurt’s older private and civic collecting traditions. Many objects entered the museum through donations, purchases, and long term loans. This explains why a museum focused on Frankfurt’s archaeology also contains artefacts from Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, Iran, and other ancient regions.

The strength of the permanent antiquities exhibition lies in its focus on objects of use. The display includes vessels, weapons, jewelry, bronze objects, terracottas, funerary containers, horse gear, and ritual or symbolic objects. These artefacts show how people stored, poured, drank, cooked, perfumed, armed, adorned, buried, represented, and remembered. They give access to concrete practices rather than to antiquity as an abstract historical category.

The classical section shows this through Greek, Etruscan, Italic, and South Italian ceramics and bronzes. Kraters, cups, lekythoi, aryballoi, urns, ash chests, wine strainers, and bronze vessels point to drinking culture, bodily care, burial customs, elite display, and workshop traditions. The Iranian and Ancient Near Eastern section extends this perspective through Luristan bronzes, Amlash vessels, Tepe Sialk ceramics, Giyan pottery, weapons, standards, and horse equipment. Together, these objects show ancient societies through the material forms of everyday life, ritual practice, status, exchange, and death.

Early Iron Age Italy and the Villanova horizon

The Villanova culture belongs to early Iron Age Italy and is usually dated from the 10th to the 8th century BCE, with later developments continuing into the 7th century BCE. It was especially important in central Italy, including regions that later became part of historical Etruria. Archaeologically, it is known above all through cemeteries, cremation burials, impasto pottery, bronze objects, and grave goods. For that reason, Villanova material is often treated as one of the main foundations from which Etruscan culture developed.

Map of the Villanovan Culture, 10th to 8th century BCE. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The objects in the exhibition make this funerary and domestic aspect of the culture very accessible. The exhibited hut urn for instance is a funerary container, but its form refers to domestic architecture. The dead are placed in a vessel shaped like a house. Burial, household identity, and the symbolic meaning of dwelling are therefore connected in one object.

Hut urn, findspot unknown, possibly Latium, impasto, Villanova IA; 10th/9th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The urn with a helmet as cover adds another layer. The helmet gives the container a martial and personal character. Even if the original context is uncertain, the combination of urn and helmet points to a burial culture in which social identity could be expressed through objects.

Urn with helmet as cover and incised decoration, with tin inlay on the helmet, from the surroundings of Veii; urn and helmet allegedly found together. Impasto; Villanova (Veii I), 9th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The impasto vessels, including the spouted pitcher with abstract water birds, the kantharos (old Greek cup), the animal shaped ring vessel, and the tripod vessel with horse handle, show a visual language based on incised decoration, abstraction, animal symbolism, and vessel form. These objects are not narrative in the later Greek sense. Their meaning lies in shape, surface, material, and use.

Spouted jug, brown impasto; incised decoration on the shoulder: abstracted water birds. Findspot unknown; formerly Bourguignon Collection, central Italy, late Villanova; early 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Kantharos, black impasto, findspot unknown, northern Etruria (Vetulonia?); late Villanova; early 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Ring vessel in animal form, impasto with remains of white paint, findspot unknown, Bisenzio (?); second half of the 8th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Four leaf spiral fibula, bronze, findspot unknown, southern Italy; second half of the 8th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

So called chalkophon, musical instrument, findspot unknown, southern Italian or Phoenician, 8th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Skyphos, bucchero like brown impasto, from Santa Maria Capua Vetere; formerly Bourguignon Collection, Campania; 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Tripod vessel with horse handle from central Italy, Bisenzio (?), ca. 700 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Amphora with spiked handles, part of a rich grave assemblage, rest not exhibited, findspot unknown, Latium; mid 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Italic, Corinthian, and Etruscan ceramics in the Orientalizing period

From the 8th to the 6th century BCE, central and southern Italy became increasingly connected with the wider Mediterranean. Greek colonies in southern Italy, Phoenician trade, Etruscan maritime networks, and contacts with the eastern Mediterranean changed local material culture. This period is often described as the Orientalizing period, because Near Eastern and Greek motifs entered Italy through trade, migration, imitation, and elite consumption.

Left: Extent of Etruscan civilization and the twelve Etruscan League cities. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0). – Right: Ethnolinguistic map of Italy (Italic people) in the Iron Age, before the Roman expansion and conquest of Italy. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

Top: Map of ancient Corinth: Isthmus of Corinth and the cities of Corinth and Sikyon in Greece. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0). – Bottom: Reconstruction of ancient Corinth during the 2nd century CE. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The objects from the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE show this process at the level of pottery and small vessels. Corinthian pottery and its animal friezes became important models for Italic and Etruscan workshops. These workshops did not simply copy Greek objects. They adapted foreign forms and motifs to local production, taste, and use.

The footed cup, the globular aryballoi (a small Greek spherical container), the salve vessels, and the rotelle jug belong to this Corinthianizing visual world. Small perfume and oil containers are especially useful here, because they connect artistic imitation with bodily practice, grooming, and elite display. The animal frieze becomes a decorative form that travels between regions and is then reworked in local workshops.

Seven salve flasks of different forms, mostly from Santa Maria Capua Vetere and Cumae, Italo Corinthian; turn of the 7th to 6th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Lower left: Footed cup, findspot unknown; formerly Haeberlin Collection, Italo Corinthian; turn of the 7th to 6th century BCE. Rest of the bottom row: Three globular aryballoi with imitation Corinthian animal friezes, findspots unknown, Italo Corinthian; two from the same workshop; early 6th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The Olla or amphora with bird decoration belongs to a more subgeometric tradition. It keeps a stronger emphasis on repeated ornamental forms, while the Corinthianizing vessels move toward denser figural decoration. Together, these objects show a transitional period in which Italic and Etruscan material culture absorbed Mediterranean influences without losing its own regional forms.

Olla (amphora) with bird decoration, findspot unknown, Italic subgeometric, central Etruria; early 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Rotelle jug with imitation Corinthian animal friezes, findspot unknown, Italo Corinthian, probably Vulci, Pescia Romana Painter; early 6th century BCE, loan from the Historisch Archäologische Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Etruscan black figure, red figure, bronze vessels, and funerary culture

The Etruscans were one of the major cultures of pre Roman Italy. Their core region was Etruria, roughly corresponding to parts of modern Tuscany, northern Lazio, and western Umbria, but their influence extended more widely across central Italy and the western Mediterranean. From the 8th to the 3rd century BCE, Etruscan cities developed complex urban societies, extensive trade networks, rich funerary traditions, and a strong culture of metalwork and painted pottery. Much of what is known archaeologically about the Etruscans comes from tombs and grave goods.

Etruscan territories and major spread pathways of Etruscan products. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Etruscan objects in the exhibition cover a long period, from the 6th century BCE into the 1st century BCE. They show several important aspects of Etruscan material culture: Painted pottery, bronze vessels, drinking equipment, personal display, and burial practice.

The black figure cups show Etruscan workshops working within a Mediterranean visual language. The one handled cup with cattle and bird frieze stands under eastern Greek influence. The two handled cup with predator groups is related to Pontic vase painting. Both objects show how Etruscan craftsmen used Greek and eastern Greek models while producing objects for local contexts.

One handled cup with cattle and bird frieze, findspot unknown, Etruscan black figure, under East Greek influence, ca. 530 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The later Etruscan objects are closer to dining, pouring, bodily care, and display. Wine strainers and ladles point to the preparation and serving of wine. The female head vessel and the hammered bronze bottles show the importance of decorated containers in elite settings. The duck askos (a flat bulbous vessel) combines vessel form, animal shape, and painted decoration.

Painted amphora. Unfortunately, I did not record any further information on this object. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The ash chests from Chiusi bring the funerary context into focus. The ash chest of the freedwoman Hasti Velthuria preserves social identity through inscription and burial form. The chest with a Gorgoneion uses a protective image that was well suited to a funerary context. These objects show how Etruscan burial culture combined cremation, image, inscription, mythological motifs, and social memory.

Two handled cup, obverse and reverse: Group of predators, findspot unknown, Etruscan black figure, related to Pontic vases; last third of the 6th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Duck askos, with rich red figure painting, findspot unknown, Etruscan, Chiusi; advanced 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Wine strainers and wine ladles, findspot unknown, Etruscan; 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Vessel in the form of a female head, findspot unknown, Etruscan; 3rd century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Two hammered bronze flasks with chased ornamental bands, from Italy and Tarquinia respectively, Etruscan; 3rd to 2nd century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Ash chest of the freedwoman Hasti Velthuria, with depiction of the hero fighting with a ploughshare, remains of the cremated bones preserved, findspot unknown, Chiusi; second quarter of the 1st century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Ash chest with depiction of a Gorgoneion, findspot unknown, Chiusi; first half of the 1st century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Italic warriors, armor, and regional identities

Before Roman expansion unified the peninsula politically, ancient Italy consisted of many different peoples, cities, and regional cultures. Etruscans, Latins, Umbrians, Samnites, Apulians, Campanians, Greeks in southern Italy, and other groups lived in close contact, but they did not form one cultural unit. Weapons, armor, warrior figures, and military equipment therefore also belong to regional identities, not only to warfare.

Peoples of the Apennine Peninsula at the beginning of the Iron Age. Blue: Ligurians; Ochre: Veneti; Magenta: Etruscans; Cyan: Piceni; Light-Green: Umbrians; Brown: Latins; Dark-Green: Osco-Umbrians; Orange: Messapians; Yellow: West-Greeks. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

The warrior figures and armor elements in the exhibition point to this diversity. They show traditions in Umbria, Apulia, and central Italy, where weapons and martial imagery were part of status, ritual, and social identity.

The exhibited terracotta rider from Canosa belongs to southern Italy. Although the lance and horse are lost, the rider in helmet and armor still conveys a clear martial identity. Canosan terracottas are often connected with funerary contexts, so the object should be read not only as a military image, but also as part of elite representation.

Terracotta statuette, rider in helmet and armor, lance and horse lost, findspot unknown, Canosan; 3rd century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The Umbrian bronze warrior statuettes and the cardiophylakes show armed male bodies and protective equipment in small scale form. A cardiophylax protected the chest, but in a display case it also becomes evidence for how armor could serve as a visible marker of rank and regional identity.

Two bronze statuettes: armed warriors, findspots unknown, Umbrian; ca. 520 to 470 BCE. Above: two so called cardiophylakes, chest armor, findspots unknown, central Italy, Umbria (?); 6th/5th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The two gutti from Apulia add a more practical vessel type. A guttus was used for controlled pouring. The example with a lion head spout shows how use and ornament could be combined even in a functional object.

Two gutti, one of them with a lion head spout, findspots unknown, South Italian, probably Apulian; first half of the 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Terracotta figurines and small scale representation

Terracotta figurines formed an important part of ancient material culture across the Greek, Etruscan, and South Italian world. They were inexpensive compared with bronze or marble, could be produced in molds, and circulated widely in domestic, votive, funerary, and sanctuary contexts. Their subjects often include women, children, riders, animals, deities, mythological figures, actors, and masks.

Display case with terracotta figurines, including female figures, heads, seated figures, and a winged figure. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt.

The two display cases in the exhibition show this small scale world particularly well. The figures are portable and repeatable images rather than monumental cult statues. They bring ancient representation closer to everyday practice, devotion, burial customs, and household display. Female figures, seated women, heads, riders, and winged figures such as Eros point to the same visual world that also appears on South Italian pottery: body, status, beauty, myth, theater, and funerary symbolism.

Display case with terracotta figurines, including standing female figures, small riders or animal figures, heads, and architectural or mask-like fragments. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt.

These objects also show why terracotta was such an important medium. It allowed ancient workshops to reproduce recognizable figure types in large numbers, while still leaving room for local styles, painted details, and variation in gesture or posture.

Attic red figure pottery and the Greek visual language of myth, symposium, and ritual

Attic red figure pottery developed in Athens in the late 6th century BCE and became one of the most important ceramic traditions of the classical Greek world. Athens exported large quantities of painted pottery across the Mediterranean, including to Etruria and southern Italy. These vessels were therefore not only Athenian products. They also became part of non Greek contexts of drinking, burial, collecting, and display.

Delian League, under the leadership of Athens before the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. Attica is shown in red. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 2.5).

The Attic red figure vessels in the exhibition show Greek vase painting of the late 6th and 5th centuries BCE. Their presence in Frankfurt’s collection reflects both Greek production and Mediterranean circulation.

The bowl with the dancing reveler belongs to the early period of red figure technique. Red figure painting allowed more flexible internal drawing than black figure painting, especially for bodies, gestures, clothing, and movement. The dancing drinker belongs to the world of wine, performance, and the symposium.

Bowl. In the tondo: Dancing reveler, from Santa Maria Capua Vetere; formerly Bourguignon Collection, Attic red figure, Bowdoin Eye Painter; ca. 520 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The lekythos with Eos pursuing Tithonos introduces mythological subject matter. The stamnos with men and youths conversing, the owl skyphos, the krug, and the kraters show other parts of Greek social and ritual life. They point to conversation, drinking, sacrifice, youth, music, and public religious practice.

Lekythos, Eos pursuing Tithonos. Findspot unknown, Attic red figure, Painter of the Paris Gigantomachy; ca. 490/80 BCE. Loan from the Museum für Kunsthandwerk. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The kraters are especially useful because their function and imagery belong together. A krater was used to mix wine and water. The kolonette krater with a banquet and flute player shows the social setting of wine drinking. The bell krater with a sacrifice to Apollo places ritual action at the center. These vessels are therefore both objects of use and carriers of imagery.

Stamnos. Obverse and reverse: men and youths conversing, from Pozzuoli; formerly Haeberlin Collection, Attic red figure, Syriskos Painter or Copenhagen Painter; ca. 480/70 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Owl skyphos, findspot unknown, Attic red figure, first half of the 5th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Column krater. Obverse: banquet with flute player, reverse: young men conversing. Misfired, findspot unknown, Attic red figure, Hephaistos Painter; 450/40 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Jug, Attic red figure, Camucia Painter, ca. 460/50 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Column krater. Obverse: banquet with flute player, reverse: young men conversing. Misfired, findspot unknown, Attic red figure, Hephaistos Painter; 450/40 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bell krater. Obverse: sacrifice to Apollo, reverse: three mantle youths; allegedly from Nola; formerly Haeberlin Collection, Attic red figure, Hephaistos Painter; ca. 450/40 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

South Italian red figure pottery: Apulia, Campania, Paestum, and theatrical imagery

Southern Italy and Sicily had been part of the Greek colonial world since the 8th century BCE. Greek cities such as Taras, Sybaris, Kroton, Syracuse, and many others created a strongly Greek cultural zone in the central Mediterranean, but this world always stood in contact with Italic populations. By the 4th century BCE, local workshops in Apulia, Campania, Paestum, Lucania, and Sicily produced their own red figure pottery.

Ancient Greek colonies and their dialect groupings in Magna Graecia. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain).

The South Italian red figure vessels in the exhibition come from this historical setting. They do not simply continue Attic vase painting. They develop regional styles, themes, and workshop traditions, especially in relation to funerary display, mythological imagery, women, Eros, Dionysian motifs, and theater.

The Apulian objects show a strong interest in female heads, Eros, ornament, luxury, and funerary symbolism. The pilgrim flask, the lekanis lid, the bowl with Eros, and the kantharos with a seated woman and Eros belong to a visual world in which beauty, desire, status, and burial culture overlap. These motifs are decorative, but not only decorative. They belong to a social language of display and transition.

So called pilgrim flask, obverse and reverse each with a female head, perhaps Aphrodite, findspot unknown, late Apulian, circle of the Stoke on Trent Painter, Painter of the Macinagrossa Stand; ca. 320/10 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The Campanian lekythos with Menelaos, Helen, and Aphrodite brings mythological drama into the section. The scene refers to the power of Aphrodite over heroic violence and human intention. The Paestan bowl with Eros and possibly Dionysos adds a Dionysian theme, which is common in South Italian vase painting and often connected with wine, theater, transformation, and funerary expectation.

Lekythos, Menelaos threatens Helen and is overcome by Aphrodite. Findspot unknown, Campanian, Capua, Aigisthos Group, Spotted Rock Group, circle of the Cassandra Painter; third quarter of the 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The Campanian bell krater with a phlyax and flute player is especially interesting because it points to comic performance in southern Italy. It shows that vase painting can preserve traces of theater and staged performance, not only myth and ritual.

Bell krater. Obverse: phlyax and flute player, reverse: two mantle youths. Findspot unknown; Donner and von Richter estate, Campanian, probably Capua, AV II, Libation Painter; ca. 340/20 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Lid of a lekanis, two female heads between palmettes, inside a female head sketched in outline drawing, findspot unknown, late Apulian, successor of the Patera Painter and Baltimore Painter, Frontal Head Group; end of the 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bowl. In the tondo: floating Eros, outside: seated Eros or richly adorned female head. Findspot unknown, late Apulian, circle of the Darius Painter and the Patera Ganymede workshop, Group of the Trieste Askoi; ca. 340/20 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bowl. In the tondo: Eros and Dionysos (?), in the lower field: quail, outside: laurel branch. Findspot unknown, Paestan, circle of Asteas; third quarter of the 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Kantharos, obverse: seated woman with box and wreath, reverse: seated Eros with box. Findspot unknown, late Apulian, workshop of the Baltimore Painter; fourth quarter of the 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Ancient Iran: Bronzes, animal symbolism, weapons, and horse gear

Luristan lies in the western Iranian highlands, in a region that connected Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and the Zagros mountain zone. The bronze objects usually grouped under the term Luristan bronzes belong mainly to the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BCE. Many of them are known from burial contexts, although the exact archaeological provenance of older collection pieces is often uncertain. They reflect a world of metalworking, mounted elites, animal symbolism, weapons, and grave goods.

Today’s location of the Iranian province of Lorestan, where many Luristan bronzes were found. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Iranian bronze objects in the exhibition shift the perspective away from the Mediterranean. They include standards, weapons, horse gear, bracelets, animal figures, vessels, and fittings. This material shows that western Iran had its own highly developed object traditions, while also participating in wider Near Eastern motifs and technologies.

The standards are the most striking objects in this part of the exhibition. Their exact meaning remains uncertain, but they were used as grave goods and were mounted on narrow or bell shaped stands. Many show animals, human figures, or the motif of a figure mastering wild beasts. This motif was known in Mesopotamia since the late 4th millennium BCE, but Luristan bronzes gave it a distinctive local form.

Standards. The so called standards are among the typical Luristan bronzes. The older standards show two or three animals facing one another, such as ibexes, big cats, and similar animals. The later examples are worked in the form of a man stylized into the shaft, grasping two predators by the neck with his hands. At the lower end, the hindquarters of the predators are visible, while their bodies merge with the shaft. Additional faces and rooster heads may also be attached. The meaning of these standards remains completely uncertain. It is certain only that such objects were used as grave goods and that they were mounted on narrow high or bell shaped stands. The depicted motif of the “master of wild animals” was known in Mesopotamia since the end of the 4th millennium BCE and was represented in Luristan in a form not previously produced. The motif also recurs on disk headed pins and cheek pieces. Standard upper right: ca. 900 BCE. All others: 9th/8th century BCE. Lower right: two standard bases. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Animal imagery appears throughout the section. Deer figures, goat pendants, bird shaped vessels, bat shaped vessels or lamps, and rhyta in the form of cattle or horses show how animals were used as symbolic forms. These objects are not simple representations of animals. They transform vessels, fittings, and ornaments into animal bodies.

Two bronze deer figures, “Amlash”, around 1000 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The horse gear points to mounted elites and the social value of horses. Bits, cheek pieces, rein rings, and bells were practical equipment, but their animal and figure decoration also made them visible status objects. Weapons such as full grip swords and bronze daggers add another dimension. Some dagger types connect Luristan with Mesopotamian weapon traditions and show that western Iran was part of wider technological and cultural networks.

Horse gear. The equipment of the horse includes bits, rein rings, and bells. Bits with cheek pieces in the form of animals and figure groups are especially characteristic. Such bits are so far known only from the region of Pish i Kuh and are dated to the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Bits and bit parts; rein ring; hanging: basket bells; bronze, Luristan, beginning of the 1st millennium to 8th/7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Fork with two long prongs, bronze, Luristan, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bronze ladle and two bronze cups, Luristan, first quarter of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Pendant in the form of a goat, bronze, Luristan, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bracelets and bracelet fragments with figurally decorated terminals, bronze; iron, Luristan, 11th to 7th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Full grip swords from northern Iran, left: Amlash; right: Mazandaran, end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bronze daggers. The dagger types exhibited here were known not only in Luristan, but also in Mesopotamia. The laurel leaf dagger, far right, is a typical weapon of the Early Dynastic III period in Mesopotamia, 2600 to 2350 BCE. The flange hilt daggers, center, can be dated well through comparable examples inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian rulers. The dagger on the left, for example, corresponds to an example of King Ninurta nadin šumi, who ruled in Babylonia in the second half of the 12th century BCE. The fan hilt dagger, whose stone inlays are still preserved, is dated to the same period. Somewhat later, by contrast, is the second fan hilt dagger, whose hilt decoration is already worked in one piece. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Handle with feline figure, bronze, “Hasanlu”, 9th to 8th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Gold ornament disk with depiction of a male head. Findspot unknown, northeastern Iran, Marlik culture; late 2nd millennium/early 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Painted ceramics and regional traditions of western and northern Iran

The Iranian ceramic objects cover a much longer period than the classical Mediterranean material. They range from the 4th millennium BCE to the 1st millennium BCE and come from regions such as Tepe Sialk, Giyan, Nihavand, Amlash, Luristan, Gilan, Mazandaran, Urmia, and northwestern Iran. These regions were not one uniform culture. They represent different local traditions within the broader Iranian highlands and adjacent zones.

Map showing archaeological sites in Iran.. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 3.0).

The earliest vessels belong to the Sialk horizon. Tepe Sialk, near Kashan, is one of the important archaeological sites for prehistoric and early historic Iran. The vessels from Sialk II and Sialk III show painted ceramic traditions around 4000 BCE and the late 4th millennium BCE. They belong to a world of early settlement, craft production, and geometric decoration long before the historical cultures of classical antiquity.

The material from Giyan, Sialk V, and Luristan shifts the chronology into the 2nd and early 1st millennium BCE. These vessels show later regional developments in painted pottery, vessel shape, and ceramic decoration. The broad painted pot, the painted jug, and the group of spouted vessels show that western Iran cannot be reduced to bronze objects alone. Ceramic forms were equally important for storage, pouring, burial, and display.

Vessels from the period of Giyan II, “Nihavand”, middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Several objects use animal shaped forms. The bird shaped spouted jug, the jug with bird head stylization, the bovine rhyton, the horse or rider rhyton, and the camel figure turn animals into vessels or small sculptural objects. This creates a close connection between use, image, and symbolic form.

Bird shaped spouted jug, “Amlash”, around 1000 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The northwestern Iranian material adds another regional perspective. The Urmia culture pot with painted triangles, animals, and human figures, the painted jug from northern or western Azerbaijan, the triangle ware bowl, the double vessel, and the bat shaped bowl or lamp show a strong interest in geometry, compact symbolic fields, and unusual vessel shapes.

Left: bulbous pot painted with hatched triangles and inserted animal and human figures, findspot unknown, Urmia culture; ca. 1900 to 1550 BCE. Right: painted jug, northern or western Azerbaijan, second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Vessels from the period of Sialk III, “Tepe Sialk”, end of the 4th millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Left: large chalice, area of Tehran, beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, period of Sialk III, 2. Right: bowl on a high foot from Ismailabad near Tehran, around 4000 BCE, period of Sialk II. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Broad painted pot, “Luristan”, end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Painted jug from the period of Giyan I and Sialk VI, “Luristan”, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Spouted jug, pilgrim flask, and three other small vessels from the period of Giyan I, so called Luristan ceramics, 9th to 8th century BCE. The spouted jug and one of the small vessels are permanent loans from the Adolf and Luisa Haeuser Foundation. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Chalice shaped pot on three feet with five image fields: hunting, herding, and agricultural scenes, findspot unknown, northwestern Iran; ca. 1900 to 1500 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Spouted jug with incised decoration and bird head stylization, Gilan, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Left: rhyton in the form of a bovine, “Mazandaran”, end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Center: camel figure, terracotta, “Amlash”, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Right: rhyton in the form of a horse (?) with rider, “Amlash”, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Vessels made from two or three individual small flasks, “Amlash”, beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Double vessel of triangle ware, northwestern Persia, 5th to 3rd century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Vessels from the period of Sialk V, Necropolis A, “Ajin Dujin”, end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The flask and the painted bowl may be later, around 1000 BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bowl of triangle ware, northwestern Persia, 6th to 4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Bowl or lamp (?) in the form of a bat, northwestern Iran; 1st millennium BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Achaemenid and western Anatolian objects

The Achaemenid Empire was the first large Persian empire and ruled from the late 6th to the late 4th century BCE. At its height, it connected Iran, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, and parts of Central Asia within one imperial system. Western Anatolia was one of the important contact zones of this empire, linking Persian imperial structures with Greek cities, local Anatolian traditions, and Mediterranean exchange.

Map of the Achaemenid Empire’s greatest territorial extent, achieved during the reign of Darius the Great (522–486 BCE). Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

The western Anatolian and Achaemenid objects in the exhibition include gold earrings, bronze bowls, and silver bowls with leaf decoration. These objects belong to elite metalwork and bodily display rather than to everyday ceramic use.

Metal vessels and jewelry could move within the Achaemenid world as prestige objects, gifts, possessions, or grave goods. Their value lay not only in their material, but also in their association with rank and cultivated elite taste.

Bronze bowl, “western Anatolia”, 8th to 6th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

The silver bowls with leaf decoration show a restrained ornamental style. The gold disk earrings show how precious metalwork was used on the body. The bronze bowls from western Anatolia add a more practical vessel form, but still belong to the wider field of elite consumption and display.

Gold disk earrings, “western Anatolia”, Achaemenid; 5th to 4th century BCE, loan from the A. and L. Haeuser Foundation. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Two bowls with leaf decoration, silver, Achaemenid; 5th/4th century BCE. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the visit to the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt. Its permanent antiquities exhibition shows ancient history not through grand narratives, but through objects of actual daily use: Vessels, weapons, jewelry, horse gear, burial containers, bronze fittings, and ritual or symbolic forms. These objects show how people drank, poured, stored, adorned, armed, buried, remembered, and represented status or belief. By doing so, the distance, that usually separates us from the objects seen in museums, gets reduced. By looking at these objects one can imagine how they were used, how they felt in the hand, and how the people who used them lived. The “subjects” of history books suddenly become real people, who lived in real places and had real experiences. Any conceptually perceived temporal distance gets reduced and brings ancient life for a short moment into the present. Thus, the objects are not just things to look at, but they are traces of human life and practice.

But the exhibition also highlights another aspect: The interconnectedness of the ancient world. The objects show that the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds were not isolated. They were connected through trade, migration, and cultural interaction and exchange. This also accounts on smaller scales, such as the connections between ancient Greece, Etruria, and Italy. Corinthian motifs were adapted in Italy. Attic pottery circulated into Etruscan and Italic contexts. South Italian vase painting developed its own regional language. Luristan bronzes combined local forms with wider Near Eastern motifs. Iranian ceramics preserve long regional traditions from the 4th to the 1st millennium BCE.

For me, this made the permanent antiquities exhibition one of the most rewarding parts of the visit. It does not present antiquity as one unified story. It shows several ancient worlds through the material traces of practice, exchange, status, ritual, and death, which all had their own local forms, but were also connected to wider networks of cultural interaction and adaptation.

References and further reading

• Website of the Archäologisches Museum Frankfurtꜛ
• Website of the Archäologisches Museum Frankfurt on Klassische Antikeꜛ
• Website of the Archäologisches Museum Frankfurt on Griechen, Etrusker und Römerꜛ
• Dagmar Stutzinger, Zum Wohle der Stadt? Erwerbungen 1933–1945, 2018, Schnell & Steiner, ISBN: 978-3795433444
• Larissa Bonfante, Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies, 1986, Wayne State University Press, ISBN: 978-0814318133
• Nancy Thomson de Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend, 2006, ISD International - IPSUK, ISBN: 978-1931707862
• John Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th–6th Centuries BC, 1998, Thames & Hudson, ISBN: 978-0500203095
• John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, 1989, Thames & Hudson, ISBN: 978-0500202449
• A. D. Trendall, Red Figure Vases of South Italy and Sicily: A Handbook, 1989, Thames & Hudson, ISBN: 978-0500202258
• Oscar White Muscarella, Bronze and Iron: Ancient Near Eastern Artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, ISBN: 978-0300195651
• John Curtis and Nigel Tallis, Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia, 2005, British Museum Press, ISBN: 978-0714111575