The Friday night knotzen podcast discussion tackled Gateless Barrier Case 13 on Friday. It is a controversial Case in many respects. Translators can't agree on how to translate it (proving that reading ancient Chinese won't help you), commentary is all over the place by everybody who tries to handle it.
In Blyth's commentary on Case 13 of Gateless Barrier, he quotes nine different Japanese Buddhist commentaries on Wumenguan*, including one called, "Mumonkan Explained Easily", which Blyth makes clear fails to achieve it's goal.
So the three kinds of Dogenism we know about are:
- the religious funerary business branch that dominated in 1900's Japan as reported in Pruning the Bodhi Tree
- the evangelical Zazen Dogenism which now dominates in the West, led by /r/zen/wiki/sexpredators
- anti-Zen Japanese academics, including Critical Dogen Buddhists and Western religious apologists like McRae, Faure, Sharf, Schlutter, Welter.
There is a fourth branch of Dogenism that is very friendly to Zen... that's the branch that unbanned Gateless Barrier after Dogen's church banned it several hundred years ago. We just don't hear much about them from modern Western scholars.
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Welcome! ewk comment: It's not clear why Japanese Buddhist scholarship is so averse to sharing it's "pro-Zen" history. But knowing this branch exists explains why there existed such a rich textual history of Zen study in Dogenism, as opposed to Zazen prayer-meditation, Japanese Buddhism, and for-profit funerary service providers.
Submitted April 24, 2021 at 04:09PM by ewk https://ift.tt/2Qk0tS1
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