Shobogenzo

Dogen wrote this text after he had just gone into exile in 1243, far from Kyoto, its debates and battles between rival schools, the violence and insecurity that reigned there, to settle in the mountains of the "north of the north" of Japan. He remained there until the eve of his death in 1253. This exile marked a break in his actions and in his thinking: surrounded by his students, he directed the construction of the great monastery of Eihei-ji; he formalized the governance of the community of monks, determined to return to the heart of Buddhism: a vision of the world in which we live, an open world, without fences or divisions, where the manifest and the secret, the known and the unknown, the said and the unsaid, play. He reestablishes the "triple world," a notion of scholasticism, in its primary state, which is the world where all beings belonging to the kingdoms of existence, animal, vegetable, and mineral, live, by invoking the "heart," without which the three worlds would not exist. The "heart" is neither the spirit, nor the mind, nor the conscience, nor the soul affixed or opposed to the body, but this insubstantial, complex, changing place that ties and unties in response to things and events, which resolves itself in universal vanity. Faithful to his style, dense and heterogeneous, combining indigenous elements (Japanese language and sensitivity, traces of his classical education) with external borrowings (Chinese sutras, spoken Chinese, vernacular expressions learned in the monasteries of the continent), he exposes the unity of the "triple world" and the "heart." Charles Vacher's French translation, freed from strict literalism, is intended to be faithful and in simple language. Its numerous annotations enlighten the reader and allow him to accompany Dogen in his thoughts.