I have been asked to take as my subject here "the state of the field" of Dôgen studies in America. This I shall try to do.<1> However, in taking up this subject, I should warn you in advance on two points. First, although I have myself done some study of Dôgen, my own academic interests stand somewhat outside most American work in this field, and I am not particularly expert in, or even in many cases familiar with, this work. I shall not, therefore, try to give you here either a comprehensive bibliography of the literature or a detailed appraisal of individual examples; rather, I shall restrict my remarks to a brief historical survey of English-language publications and a more general overview of the ways that Dôgen has been and is being treated in America.<2> Second, although we may of course in a loose sense speak of a "field" of American Dôgen studies, from what I know of the work on Dôgen, my own feeling is that it may be misleading -- both historically and analytically -- to speak as if what we have in America represents anything so imposing as a "field" of Dôgen studies -- at least if we mean by this much more than a collection of books and articles on certain aspects of Dôgen. I shall try in what follows to explain why I say this.

There is no doubt that American interest in Dôgen has increased remarkably in recent years. A frequenter of the book shops of Jinbôchô, I note that the "Dôgen boom" in Japanese publication that began some years ago has not yet run its course. American book stores may not have anything quite like the daunting "Dôgen" sections we find in Tokyo, but I venture to say that there are now more books in print in America on Dôgen than on any other single figure in the history of Zen or even, I suspect, in the history of East Asian Buddhism as a whole.<3> As a result of these books, Dôgen (at least the name "Dôgen") is now familiar not only to specialists in Zen or East Asian Buddhism but to many scholars in other fields and even to many among the general public with interest in Asian culture.

Nevertheless, if Dôgen has grown quickly to become America's favorite Zen master, he has done so with surprisingly little help from American scholarship. Most of the Dôgen titles are trade books, intended for a popular audience; most of them are translations, few of which reflect significant research in primary sources. Many of them are not by scholars and not by Americans. If we look beyond the covers of these books for examples of original American scholarship on Dôgen, the list is much less impressive. In fact, the academic study of this Zen master remains in its infancy -- remains, that is, not only young but small, weak and immature. Thus, historically speaking, it may simply be premature to imagine an academic "field" of Dôgen studies in America. It may even be premature to predict that the considerable American interest in Dôgen is leading toward such a field. My own sense, at least for the immediate future, is that it is not.

I shall come back to the future at the end. Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that it is not only the age and size but also (and more importantly) the shape of American work that makes me reluctant to speak of something as broad as Dôgen studies in America. Insofar as there has been American scholarly work on Dôgen, it has been for the most part concerned with only one kind of Dôgen.

When we look at Japanese scholarship in this century, we can find at least three major kinds of Dôgen: first and most conspicuously, of course, there is "Dôgen the Zen master," the patriarch of the Sôtô Zen school and teacher of shikan taza; second, "Dôgen the philosopher," the metaphysician of "being-time" (uji) and the Buddha nature; and finally, "Dôgen the Japanese," the Kamakura-period Buddhist author and religious leader. Each of these Dôgens has his own origins: the Zen master Dôgen was largely inherited by modern scholarship from the sectarian studies (shûgaku) of the Edo period; the philosopher Dôgen was born from the pre-war Japanese encounter with Western thought; the Japanese Dôgen has been created largely by post-war historiography. Similarly, each of these images of Dôgen appears against and becomes defined by the background of his own setting: the Zen master belongs to the religious history of Zen tradition; the philosopher seems to move in the abstract atmosphere of timeless, universal truths; the Japanese is bound to the specific circumstances of medieval society and culture.

Of course, this kind of simple tripartite typology is too crude to do real justice to the varied, complex, and shifting styles of Dôgen studies in Japan (and I welcome your corrections to it). The categories are by no means clearly bounded but overlap to such a degree that perhaps most scholarship cannot be fairly embraced by any single one alone. The line, for example, between the Zen master as thinker and the philosopher as Buddhist is obviously not easy to draw. Indeed the study of what I am calling "Dôgen the Zen master" is a field of such proportions that it reaches from what in another context we would call "constructive theology" to highly revisionist (and sometimes quite positivistic) historiography. In the end, perhaps what such extremes have in common is only that they treat Dôgen in terms of the history and thought of Zen tradition.

In any case, I trouble you with this crude typology here only as a heuristic device to help me emphasize the particular character of American academic interest in Dôgen. If you can grant me for the moment at least something like my three "ideal types" of Dôgen in Japanese scholarship, I want to suggest that it is only my second type, the philosopher (or perhaps the philosophical theologian), that has so far shown signs of flourishing in the American environment. Of the Zen master, and especially of Dôgen the Japanese, we have yet to see very much. First, let me give you a brief historical sketch of English-language publications on Dôgen; then I shall step back to reflect a bit on the academic "sociology," as it were, within which my various Dôgens are (and are not) being studied in America.

If the various Dôgens of Japanese scholarship were born at very different times -- Edo, pre-war and post-war -- the Dôgens in America (insofar as we can find a plurality) are very young. When I first began to read about and practice Zen as a philosophy student in San Francisco in the 1960s, Dôgen existed in America almost only as a Zen master -- and this perhaps less on paper than in the imaginations of a few zazen students at the San Francisco Zen Center and other such Sôtô-related Zen communities. Our books on Zen Buddhism at the time were mostly by, or influenced by, D. T. Suzuki; and, as you know, the Rinzai professor Suzuki did not much appreciate the Sôtô patriarch Dôgen.

I confess that, except for occasional flashbacks, my picture of the 1960s has long faded, but I recall from this decade only three significant English sources on Dôgen.<4> The first was The Sôtô Approach to Zen, an obscure little collection of essay and translation by the late professor of this university Masunaga Reihô.<5> Early in the decade, A History of Zen Buddhism, by the Sophia University professor Heinrich Dumoulin was translated into English from the German.<6> This book, which contained a lengthy chapter on Dôgen's life and thought, was for many years the most extended and substantial treatment of Zen history in English and served to introduce Dôgen to a wide American audience; it has been superseded only by Prof. Dumoulin's own recent revised and enlarged two-volume version, Zen Buddhism: A History.<7> In 1967, Jiyu Kennet, the English Sôtô nun trained at Sôjiji, published a collection of Sôtô Zen materials, including some of Dôgen's writings.<8> These three early treatments of Dôgen, though very different, had at least three things in common: first, none was written by an American; second, all (albeit in different senses and degrees) were products of and sympathetic toward Sôtô tradition; and therefore, finally, all took as their object some version of what I am calling Dôgen the Zen master.<9>

Thus, in the early 1970s, when I started graduate Buddhist studies at Berkeley, the American Dôgen was still only a Zen master, and Zen masters were still only on the margins of academic Buddhist studies, which tended to look down from its scholarly heights on the popular American literature on Zen and the unlettered enthusiasms of American Zen students. By the early 1980s, however, when I finished my dissertation, Zen studies was becoming recognized as a legitimate, even vital new area of academic Buddhist studies, and Dôgen was beginning to develop an established academic identity. Interestingly enough, this new identity has developed for the most part outside of Buddhist studies.

The 1970s saw a large leap in the English resources on Dôgen, with a good number of his writings being re-translated or newly rendered. In 1971, for example, Prof. Masunaga's translation of the Shôbô genzô zuimon ki appeared from the University of Hawaii Press, a publisher that has been particularly active in Dôgen studies and Zen studies in general.<10> Yokoi Yûhô translated the Eihei shingi,<11> as well as the Fukan zazen gi, Gakudô yôjin shû, and the twelve-fascicle (jûni kan bon) Shôbô genzô.<12> The first volume of Nishiyama Kôsen's complete translation of the Shôbô genzô appeared in 1975.<13> Particularly welcome during this period, though never to my knowledge brought together in a single volume, were the careful, annotated translations of the Shôbô genzô and other texts, published throughout the decade in the journal The Eastern Buddhist, by Norman Waddell, often in collaboration with Abe Masao.<14> In addition to these works of translation, the 1970s also saw the publication of Hee-jin Kim's important Kigen Dôgen: Mystical Realist. This book, produced in 1975, was the first (and even today, over fifteen years later, remains the only) general academic study in English of Dôgen's life and thought; it has continued to serve over the years as America's best single introduction to Dôgen.<15>

Prof. Kim's work combines a close familiarity with Sôtô shûgaku with the author's own interpretation of Dôgen's thought as religious philosophy. This interest in philosophy has been central to the work of Abe Masao, a man who has done much to spread an appreciation of Dôgen in America. Prof. Abe's scholarship differs markedly, of course, from that of D. T. Suzuki, but it is probably fair to say that he more than anyone else has inherited Suzuki's mantle in America -- both in the sense that he has taken on Prof. Suzuki's mission as interpreter of Zen to the West, and in the sense that his interpretation, like Suzuki's, is closely linked to the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy. Unlike Suzuki, Abe has made Dôgen central to his interpretation of Zen.<16> Especially during the decade of the 1980s, through his publications in English, his many lectures and seminars throughout America, his ongoing dialogue with Christian theologians, he has carried Dôgen's thought beyond the Zen centers and the academic Zen studies programs to a broad audience of American intellectuals.<17>

In any case, it has largely been Prof. Abe's image of Dôgen the religious philosopher that has dominated American interest over the 1980s. The decade has seen a steady stream of new translations of the Shôbô genzô, and occasionally of other texts, by Thomas Cleary,<18> Francis Cook,<19> Hee-jin Kim,<20> Kazuaki Tanahashi,<21> Thomas Wright,<22> Yokoi Yûhô,<23> and others. More significantly, this period has also witnessed, for the first time, the production of original scholarly studies of Dôgen by a number of young American scholars trained in Western and often Japanese philosophy, who seek to interpret Dôgen's thought through the techniques of phenomenology, analytic and comparative philosophy, and so on. Examples of these new interpretations can be found in books such as Tom Kasulis's extremely popular Zen Action-Zen Person,<24> Steven Heine's Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dôgen,<25> David Shaner's The Body-Mind Experience in Japanese Buddhism: A Phenomenological Perspective of Kûkai and Dôgen<26> or Joan Stambaugh's recent Impermanence and Buddha Nature: Dôgen's Understanding of Temporality.<27> Clearly, in such books we are in the presence of a Dôgen who has transcended Sôtô Zen, not to mention Kamakura Japan, to take his place among the World Philosophers.

Culturally speaking, that it should be the transcendental philosopher who has been most successfully exported to the West should not surprise us: he was, after all, from the beginning created with the foreign market in mind -- a model first developed in pre-war Japan from imported Western ideas as a part of the project to modernize and internationalize the country's intellectual history, in order to establish the place of the insular culture among the nations of the world. Predictably, the nations of the world now find their own ideas reflected in the model, and many Americans now find themselves more attracted to it than to the old Zen master. What seems more surprising is the relative neglect of a figure as famous as Dôgen by American students of Zen history, who are supposed, after all, to be attracted to old Zen masters.

Within the specific culture of the American academy, it may well be that Dôgen's very fame, both in America and Japan, is partly to blame for his neglect: he is, as it were, too "big" to offer an immediately promising subject of study -- at once too familiar to the American public to be academically fashionable and too imposing in the Japanese secondary literature to be easily manageable. Hence, the student of Zen studies (who in America after all still has almost the entire field from which to lay professional claim to a specialty) is likely tempted to look around for more exotic, less overworked areas where there is greater room for original scholarship. Nothing is so appreciated in the American academy as original scholarship.

It may also be not only the fact but the particular type of Dôgen's fame that is to blame: his dual status as philosophical giant and as sacred ancestor of Sôtô tradition has probably made him less, rather than more, attractive to Zen studies as it is typically done in America. Academic Zen studies arose in America during the 1970s largely within the environment of a "scientific" Buddhology centered in Indology and dedicated to rigorous historical and philological inquiry into ancient Buddhist texts. As a living East Asian religion that celebrated its freedom from the texts and norms of ancient Indian Buddhism, and as a religion that was tainted by its association with popular, anti-intellectual American fads of the 1960s, Zen was an "alien" (not to say "heretical") subject that needed to be domesticated.

Zen students, seeking academic styles that would distance them from Zen's alien ways and make them respectable Buddhologists, have tended to be shy of the big ideas of Zen philosophy and embarrassed by the popular pieties of Zen religiosity.<28> Dôgen, as object of both philosophical speculation and religious cult, has been in this sense doubly problematic for academic Zen studies. No doubt a number of the scholars of my generation who have begun to establish the field of American Zen studies originally came to these studies, as I did, with interest in Dôgen. I have, for some reason, been slower than most to outgrow this interest, but most of my generation has succeeded in finding more appropriate subjects. Apart from my own little study of the Fukan zazen gi,<29> James Kodera's work on the Hôkyô ki may be the only American book to deal with Dôgen in the context of Zen history.<30>

The early direction of academic Zen studies in America was particularly influenced by two books published in 1967: Yanagida Seizan's Shoki zenshû shisho no kenkyû,<31> which became a kind of "bible" of the field during its inception in the 1970s; and Philip Yampolsky's The Platform Sûtra of the Sixth Patriarch,<32> which, as the first scholarly study of a Zen text by an American academic, became a standard against which the field could measure itself. Both these books, of course, dealt with the origins of Zen in the T'ang dynasty, and both sought to reevaluate Zen tradition through the techniques of modern textual and historical scholarship. Subsequent American Zen studies has tended to favor this same subject and these same techniques.

Although we are now beginning to get some excellent original American studies of T'ang-dynasty Zen, the field remains weaker for later periods and for Japan (not to mention Korea and Viet Nam). Profs. Yanagida and Yampolsky have themselves moved on from their earlier studies to consider topics in Japanese Zen, and recent American Zen studies shows some signs of following suite; but the fact remains that most areas of Japanese Zen have yet to be explored. This is unfortunately true not only within Zen studies but also in other fields of Japanese studies from which we might have hoped for scholarship on Dôgen as medieval Japanese figure. In fact, this last of my three Dôgens is the least known in America.

While the study of Japanese Zen (and, apart from some notable exceptions, of Japanese Buddhism more broadly) has lagged behind work on China, American scholarship has made significant advances in Japanese history, literature, and religion. Yet this scholarship has not, for the most part, been attracted by the technicalities of Buddhist thought and has, therefore, largely stayed clear of the "great thinkers" of Kamakura Buddhism -- the Dôgens, Shinrans and Nichirens -- preferring to leave such towering figures to the specialists in Buddhist studies. Since American Buddhist studies has not yet been ready to accept the challenge, we still have nothing approaching an adequate history of Kamakura Buddhism within which to place Dôgen and, therefore, little sense of him as a participant in and creator of medieval Japanese religious culture.

In short, then, it seems that the conditions of the American academic community have so far not been very conducive to the development of the study of Dôgen as an historical figure, either within Zen tradition or the Japanese past. If we can take as representative of American scholarship the collection of papers, entitled Dôgen Studies, published in 1985 as a result of the first Kuroda Institute conference on Dôgen, it is still almost entirely Dôgen's ideas that preoccupy us.<33> Yet conditions are rapidly changing, and I would like to close with a few thoughts on the future of Dôgen studies in America.

Among the most general changes that may effect this field is the increasing incorporation of Asian humanities into American university education. One sign of this change is the recent graduation of Buddhist studies from the relative isolation of Asian language programs into religious studies departments. If this move may be tending to increase the distance of Buddhologists from their colleagues in Asian philology and classical languages, it is also bringing them into much closer contact with the interests and methods of new colleagues and thereby breaking down the old barriers, almost as daunting in America as in Japan, between the disciplines of Buddhist studies and religious studies. How might such contact affect the future careers of my three Dôgens?

At first glance, religious studies would seem the ideal environment for further development of scholarship on Dôgen as religious philosopher, providing an intellectual setting in which he can be viewed alongside, and in conversation with, the great thinkers of the world's religions. Some American academic institutions may in fact provide such a setting. But it must also be realized that the discipline of religious studies in America has itself been undergoing considerable change in recent years, moving from earlier emphases on theology, intellectual and church histories, history and phenomenology of religions, and so on, toward increasing concerns for recent developments in hermeneutics and critical theory, culture studies and social history. In this new environment, the old ways of doing the humanities, with their focus on the cultural products of the social elite, are being called into question; and in religious studies departments deeply influenced by this environment, the study of the "great" religious traditions and of the great religious thinkers of the past is giving way to new interests in popular religious "mentalities" that are best discovered in the ordinary beliefs and everyday practices of the community.

There is an obvious sense in which such developments do not bode well for Dôgen studies, which has been after all, both in Japan and America, a prime example of the "old ways" of the humanities. Certainly the new religious studies environment will not be conducive to the study of Dôgen as philosopher; for the time being, it may be difficult for such study to find a comfortable home in at least the more up-to-date institutions. But the study of Dôgen as Zen master, at least as this study has traditionally been approached, is also not likely to flourish: if American Zen students were unattracted to such study in the earlier Buddhist studies environment (where they were at least expected to read the great books of the tradition), it is difficult to see what in the new environment will encourage them to the years of textual work involved in fitting Dôgen into Zen tradition. We should probably not expect soon to see many American specialists in such subjects as the Chinese sources of Dôgen's doctrine or the textual history of the Shôbô genzô. On the other hand, since Japanese scholarship is so good at such subjects, perhaps we do not need many of these American specialists.

If there is a bright spot in this rather gloomy forecast, I suspect it may lie in the study of the last of my three Dôgens, the medieval Japanese. To be sure, in a narrow sense and over the short term, a redirection of our attention from the great figures of the past to their historical contexts will make the great figure of Dôgen as Kamakura cultural hero less immediately attractive as an object of study; similarly, a preference for social history and culture studies over the history of ideas will not encourage an appreciation for such obvious subjects as the place of Dôgen's doctrine in the history of Japanese Buddhist thought. Topics like "Dôgen and Shinran" or "Dôgen and hongaku thought" are not likely to be central to the concerns of the next generation of American scholarship. In a broader sense, however, and over the longer run, the new directions of religious studies should help to liberate Dôgen from such topics and make him more attractive to a wider range of American scholarship.

As Zen students are led from the sanctuary of traditional Buddhist studies into the fray of Asian religious and cultural life, the flood of historical realities they will encounter should work to erode the old Buddhological prejudices against Zen as alien and Japan as marginal. As American Zen studies becomes more sensitive to the varied cultural contexts of Zen, the specific historical instantiations of the religion will take center stage, and the particular features of Zen in Japan may begin to get the attention they have so far not enjoyed. Given what I have suggested here are his several handicaps as an object of such attention, I doubt that this process will start with Dôgen; but eventually American scholarship should rediscover his value, less now perhaps as universal philosopher or enlightened Zen patriarch than as an important expression of -- and therefore a major resource for understanding -- the religious life of medieval Japan.

At the moment, I can think of no young scholar at a major American university who plans to specialize in Dôgen. I can think, however, of several -- at my own university and elsewhere -- who have particular interest in the later history of Sôtô Zen, both medieval and modern.<34> Research in this history (especially of Edo and Meiji) could do much to help Americans understand the historical origins and ideological characteristics of our current images of Dôgen and thus indirectly spark renewed curiosity about the person and the books that may (or may not) stand behind these images. Perhaps from among these scholars, perhaps from among their students, will come a new generation of Dôgen studies in America.

But enough of such daydreaming about the future; let me close here with one brief final point less speculative and more urgent. Whatever direction American Dôgen studies is to take, if it is to flourish it will need considerably better access to Dôgen's own writings than it now has in English. I need hardly point out to this audience the difficulties presented the reader by much of Dôgen's corpus, with its unusual style, surprising linguistic play, obscure allusion to the literature of Chinese Zen, and so on. Of course, for most serious Dôgen scholarship, there can be no real substitute for work in the original texts, but the texts are sufficiently difficult that even the specialist can benefit greatly from scholarly translation.

With all due respect to their authors, and appreciating the considerable variety (and often high quality) of our current translations, I think it fair to say that few have been done with the scholarly reader in mind. Hence, they have tended to make Dôgen, as it were, too "easy" -- covering over what is obscure in the original with a good guess, resolving what is ambiguous or multivalent with a single reading, often smoothing the exotic imagery and striking metaphor into a bland abstraction, sometimes masking (or even omitting) what seems irrelevant to the message or might be distasteful to the audience. Such translation surely has its purposes and its value, and no doubt it has made Dôgen more accessible to many readers; but it is too far from the original to serve as an adequate resource for many (I would say most) scholarly purposes. Thus perhaps the prime desideratum for American Dôgen studies today is a set of authoritative English versions of at least his major writings (including the Eihei kôroku, which has so far received far too little attention) -- versions that are sensitive not only to the texts themselves but to the wealth of commentary and scholarship that has been done on them, versions that provide full annotation to the textual features, historical background and literary sources of the originals.

If I have been close to right here in my characterization of the American field, then we cannot expect it soon to produce a scholar capable of (or inclined to undertake) such a difficult and technical project. In any case, it should not be left to a single scholar or to the American field: it should be the long-term job of a team of Japanese and American scholars, representing differing expertise and disparate points of view. Similar teams have been at work in Kyoto, producing excellent translations of Shinran. Komazawa University is by any measure the "Mecca" of Dôgen studies, and I appeal to friends of American Dôgen studies among you to consider such a project here. To a large extent, of course, you would have to consider it a gift -- a form, if you will, of intellectual foreign aid; but I suspect that the process of studying the texts together and arriving at a mutually acceptable reading might even have its occasional benefits for Dôgen studies here at home.