John Jorgensen, 1991:
Even Japanese [Dogen Buddhist] monks and modern specialists frequently misunderstood the Chinese Zen texts, reading colloquial Chinese in a Classical Chinese manner, with the aid of kaeriten and okurigana. Ordinary colloquial words that appeared in gorouku (even those by Japanese) such as shen-mo (what) or tsuo-mo-sheng (why, how), were translated as nanzo or transliterated into meaningless syllables like somosan. These sources of confusion made Zen texts written in Chinese even more difficult for a modern Japanese readership, which is increasingly versed in kanbun or Classical Chinese.
...
Indeed, the problem of language has been present from the very beginning of the introduction of Zen into Japan. Dialogues between Chinese and Japanese have been recorded in Classical Chinese or colloquial Chinese, in Japanese, and even in odd mixtures of all three.
For example, Dogen, who first wrote his Shobogenzo in Classical Chinese, later rewrote most of his own comments, though not citations of texts, in Japanese.
In a record of a conversatino with a Chinese monk, Dogen reports his own speech in Japanse: [Japanese] and he reports the reply of the monk in colloquial Chinese, followed by Japanese.
Later he quotes a Chinese master saying to him in a hodgepodge of Chinese and Japanese. This precedes a quote in pure Classical Chinese.
How Japanese readers coped with this requires investigation, and it may account for the Japanese [Dogenist Priests'] advice to ignore texts and "just sit!"
Wrap up:
Dogen wasn't just a cultleader conning people about his travels to China, his own religious ideology, what Zen records say, but, according to D. T. Suzuki:
It is moreover true that for hundreds of years after Dōgen’s death, Shōbōgenzō was treated as a secret book, used only in the teacher’s chambers. Not only was it inaccessible to outsiders, it was not freely shown even to Sōtō priests.
Bankei remarks:
*The reason Japanese monks are teaching laymen inept at Chinese using Chinese words that are hard for them to understand is that they themselves haven't settled the matter of the Unborn Buddha Mind, and evade people's questions by using Chinese words that are hard for ordinary folk to grasp. On top of which, these [difficult expressions] are nothing but the dregs and slobber of the Chinese patriarchs * . . .
Dogen's swindle, like all cults, are made by and for illiterate idiots who come to /r/zen to try and justify a culture that was so illiterate in the very texts they claimed to understand that even such brazen "hodgepodge[s] of Chinese and Japanese" totally slipped by. (Behind closed doors, ofc, b/c Zen texts were banned for public consumption)
Submitted February 11, 2022 at 03:56AM by ThatKir https://ift.tt/ijOqreN
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