Quote:
... but secretly worry about such things as clothing for winter or summer and livelihood for tomorrow or the next year, [/b]
You know, I almost regret selecting the Zuimonki as the reading assignment. The reason is that Dogen can seem such a hard-ass sometimes, although we have to remember that he is a General trying to keep up his "troops'" morale and spur them on. These passages are meant for monks ... and really seem harsh unless we remember that he is trying to keep his troops' asses on the cushions during the hard, cold, snowy, long, lonely winters in a monastery in the middle of nowhere, day after day. No easy task, unless you preach a little "fire and brimstone", which is what General Dogen does to his men.
FOR EXAMPLE, I bet all these references to the unimportance of food and clothes ... were because the monks were grumbling about the bad food and the clothes being so poor in the monastery, in the cold and snow ... and Dogen had to keep morale up. So, he emphasized again and again how one must not care about food and clothes. Just a hunch.
...
What's more, Dogen's monks in those days were a hodgepodge of refugees with various backgrounds, some who were almost forced into studying with Dogen because their own teacher (who taught in a different style from Dogen) was outlawed by the government.
You can read more about that here (please read from the bottom of page 32 "Dogen's charisma probably met its greatest challenge" ... to the end of page 34.
http://books.google.com/books?id=BnLOFw ... hu&f=false
Herding cats!
The change in Dogen's writing style in his later years may be due in good part to this ... Summarized here ...
Quote:
The picture of the latter years of Dogen emerges as that of a man struggling with disciples who had come to him already trained in doctrines of Original Enlightenment, Japanese esoteric Buddhism (mikkyo), and the naturalism of the Daruma school, whose understanding of Buddhism was swayed by these traditions in ways of which Dogen did not approve and that Dogen was unable to counter conclusively. Significantly, this was also a time in which the growing Pure Land tradition was questioning the value of the monastic vinaya. This context would explain the evolution in his writing from his early dynamic engagement with contemporary Buddhist issues to a dogmatic condemnation of doctrines, practices, and teachers during his later years. His late emphasis on the training of his disciples at the Eihei-ji may be evidence of a kind of desperation to leave behind at least something of his original vision. In this sense Professor Sugio may be right in seeing Dogen's final intention for the Shobogenzo as a legacy to future generations. But, as we have seen, this is a highly ambiguous and controversial legacy, in light of the problem of which part of the Shobogenzo represents the "true" Dogen.
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Dog ... putney.htm
You can read about the Daruma-shu and Dogen in greater detail here ...
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Dog ... _Soto.html
My point is that Dogen had to herd cats, keep all these very different and disagreeing people motivated, unified somehow. He had them practicing in ways that were different from their earlier teachers, and with which some of them might have had personal and doctrinal disagreements. He had to avoid "Mutiny on the Bounty" on the S.S. Eiheiji.
This all contributed to a change in Dogen in his later years ... He became more the tough captain to keep the sailors in line.
This is the Dogen who shines through in the Zuimonki, which is largely from that period.
Gassho, Jundo
(herder of so kool kats around Treeleaf)
