White Snow on Bright Leaves: Dogen’s Japanese Waka

Though Dogen wrote more than 400 Chinese Kanshi and over 200 Japanese Waka, the latter compiled in a book called Verses on the Way from Sansho Peak, it is well known among Dogen scholars and practitioners that he disparaged the value of literature. In Shobogenzo Zuimonki he says:

I have been fond of studying [literature] since my childhood, and even now I have a tendency to contemplate the beauty in the words of non-Buddhist texts. Sometimes I even refer to the Selections of Refined Literature or other classic texts. Still, I think it is meaningless, and it should cease immediately.

In the end, Dogen does not say that one should not write poetry, but rather that one’s poems should not be evaluated by worldly standards such as literary devices and flowery styles. Okumura Roshi says, “From the time of Shakyamuni, Buddhist masters have questioned the ability of language to express reality beyond discrimination and conceptualization, and yet these masters all tried to express this reality using language, including Dogen. As he discussed in the Shobogenzo fascicle “Being Able to Speak,” Dogen never dismissed the importance of expressing reality, with or without language.” In this series, using his waka, we will see how well he did.