The Zen Poetry of Dogen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace

Rating:
Summary: pleasant
Review: Firstly, I must forewarn that my fivestar rating may be an overly biased praise of this book because I have never read any other books about Dogen, yet for this reason I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. But it was undoubtedly well written and explained.
In Dogen I'm left with different impressions than I am with the "stereotypical" Zen Masters (if there is such a thing) who retain an apparent lack of emotion and a "white foam at the mouth" (silence) other than when spouting seemingly paradoxical koans. In these poetry collections the reader senses his deep and genuine humanity. He is more open to verbal expression of the Truth (which would make sense for a poet) than the aforementioned Zen Masters. (the wall-gazing Brahmin's "A special transmission outside the teachings/No reliance on words and letters") He does not disagree on the ultimately inexpressability of Truth with ideas, but, as he himself puts it,
"The Dharma, like an oyster
Washed atop a high cliff:
Even waves crashing against
The reefy coast, like words,
May reach but cannot wash it away."
He asserts that complementary creative resource of verbal expression "can display but not exhaust it."

Emotionally, nearly all of the poems convey his unfathomably deep relations and extensions to the natural universe. These are the most awe-inspiring and mystical feelings one can possess, and certainly something overlooked by much of the modern world. Whether or not a Buddhist is to consider Dogen as bona fide as any other Zen Master, I would find it hard to believe that one would not find life in the devotion of his poetry.

Rating:
Summary: The first ever book in English of Dogen's poems.
Review: THE ZEN POETRY OF DOGEN : Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace. Translated by Steven Heine. 183 pp. Boston, Mass.: Tuttle Publishing, 1997. ISBN 0-8048-3107-6 (pbk.)

Dogen Zenji (1200-1253), founder of the Soto Zen sect, is not only one of Japan's greatest Zen Masters, but he is thought by some to have been the most brilliant writer Japan has ever produced. Although he is better known in the West for his more purely philosophic writings, most especially for his magnum opus, the 'Shobogenzo' or 'Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,' few of his poems have appeared in English before.

Happily the present book now remedies this lack. Besides containing a complete translation of Dogen's Japanese poetry, it also contains a representative selection of his Chinese poems. Alongside the Japanese poems, Steven Heine has thoughtfully provided romanized Japanese transcriptions. The book, which is well-printed on excellent paper (although the font used for the poems might have been bolder), also includes nine interesting halftone illustrations of Dogen, his calligraphy, Eiheiji Temple, etc.

Most of the poems were composed on the mountain peak of Eiheiji Temple or the 'Temple of Eternal Peace,' the temple Dogen himself founded. They are of many types (Lyrical, Doctrinal, Devotional, Personal) and cover a wide range of themes (Impermanence, Emotions, Nature, Illusion, Language, China, etc.). Here is a brief example, with my obliques to indicate line breaks:

"To what shall / I liken the world? / Moonlight, reflected / In dewdrops, / Shaken from a crane's bill" (p.69).

Heine's renderings, on the whole, read quite well, and an occasional flatness is more than made up for by the excellence of his very full commentary which takes up the first half of the book. Since the poems serve to illuminate key aspects of Dogen's life and thought, and since Heine succeeds so well in elucidating the depths that underlie their seeming simplicity, the present book holds much that will be of interest to all lovers of Dogen.