Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Perhaps faced with 2500 pages of more-or-less raw renderings of Dogen’s highly idiosyncratic prose and the elaborate apparatus needed to unpack it, readers will be challenged to ask, “What is it all for?” Was there really no easier way to say what Dogen wanted to say? Was this simply Dogen’s style as an author? Was he just showing off or playing around with words? Or is there some message Dogen sought to convey by the medium of such prose? And, if there is a message in the medium, is it a message relevant only to Dogen’s time and place and monastic community of professional religious? Or is it also a more universal message about language and its role in our study of the Buddha dharma and our study of ourselves.

Back in the 1960’s, when, as a graduate student, I first started translating the “Mountains and Rivers Sutra” (Sansuikyo) chapter of the Shobogenzo, some of my fellow practitioners at the San Francisco Zen Center suggested that I might be wasting my time — time better spent on the meditation cushion. Why fool around with words? What is it all for? It is a question I still have all these years and more than a million words later.’ (from the Sotoshu Journal)

I was actually looking for something else when I came across the latest edition of the Sotoshu Journal, and read some of the talks from the presentation of the new “official” translation. Of course I will be tempted to splash out the many dollars required to buy it – I am definitely in the target demographic.