Genjokoan: A Skeleton Key to Dogen’s Shobogenzo

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Genjokoan: A Skeleton Key to Dogen’s Shobogenzo

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A Study of Genjokoan and the Commentary in The Flatbed Sutra of LouieWing by Ted Biringer

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PART 1

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The celebrated Genjokoan is one of the most widely known and highly praised essays of the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen. There is a very good reason for this; Genjokoan, literally meaning “actualization of the fundamental point,” is a masterpiece of Zen expression.

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One thing that places Dogen in the company of the greatest of Zen masters is his magnificent skill for Zen expression. Few masters before–and none since–have matched his skill for expressing the profound and subtle wisdom of the enlightened mind. Two of his early predecessors, Tozan and his disciple Sozan, earn their inclusion among these few through their elucidation of the classic Zen teaching of the Five Ranks.

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The doctrine expressed as the Five Ranks is one of the most influential Zen expressions of all time. The subject of that doctrine–the function and essence of the enlightened mind–is, and has always been, the summum bonum of Buddhism. Every genuine Buddhist expression is grounded on this central principal. The presentation of this principal by Tozan, further refined by Sozan as the Five Ranks, marks one point where the expression of the central truth of Buddhism evolved.

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Dogen’s Shobogenzo marks another such point.

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Dogen’s genius for expression is displayed nowhere better than in Shobogenzo, Genjokoan. His views, on every major aspect of the buddha-dharma, are revealed, either explicitly or implicitly, in this extraordinary essay. Genjokoan is a skeleton key that can be used to unlock the Shobogenzo, literally “Treasury of the True Dharma-Eye.”

~The Flatbed Sutra of Louie Wing: The Second Ancestor of Zen in the West by Ted Biringer

…To be continued…

Peace,

Ted