In its rules of action and discipline, there is no confusion of right and wrong. . . . Outwardly it favors discipline over doctrine, inwardly it brings the Highest Inner Wisdom.8
Although it may seem paradoxical that a pacifist religion like Zen found immediate favor with the rough warrior class of Japan, it had an obvious appeal. As Sir George Sansom has explained it,
For a thoughtful warrior, whose life always bordered on death, there was an attraction, even a persuasion, in the belief that truth comes like the flash of a sword as it cuts through the problem of existence. Any line of religious thought that helped a man understand the nature of being without arduous literary stuThes was likely to attract the kind of warrior who felt that the greatest moments in life were the moments when death was nearest.9
The Japanese warriors were captured by the irreverent, anti- scholastic qualities of Rinzai, with its reliance upon anecdotal koan and violent jolts of enlightenment. Thus the ruling warriors of Japan began studying koan, even as the peasantry at large was chanting praises to Amida and the Lotus Sutra.
The aristocratic priest Dogen (1200-1253), who also left the Tendai monastery for China and returned to establish the meditative, gradual school of Soto Zen, is generally considered the second founder of Japanese Zen. Although he grudgingly
acknowledged the usefulness of koan as an aid to instruction, Dogen considered zazen meditation the time-proven method of the Buddha for acTheving enlightenment. For scriptural support, he preferred to go back to the earlier Hinayana sutras for their more authentic accounts of the words of the Buddha, rather than to rely on Mahayana sources, which had been corrupted over the centuries by an elaborate metaphysics and polytheism. Dogen had not originally planned to start a school of Zen but merely to popularize zazen, to which end he wrote a small treatise, General Teachings for the Promotion of Zazen, which has become a classic. This was followed a few years later by a larger, more generalized work which was to become the bible of Japanese Soto Zen, Shobogenzo, or Treasury of Knowledge Regarding the True Dharma. In this work he tried to stress the importance of zazen while at the same time acknowledging the usefulness of instruction and koan where required.
There are two ways in which to set body and mind right: one is to hear the teaching from a master, and the other is to do pure zazen yourself. If you hear the teachings the conscious mind is put to work, whilst zazen embraces both training and enlightenment; in order to understand the Truth, you need both.10
Unlike the conciliatory Eisai, Dogen was uncompromising in his rejection of the traditional schools of Buddhism, which he felt had strayed too far from the original teachings of Gautama. He was right, of course; the chanting, savior-oriented popular Buddhists in Japan were, as Edwin Reischauer has noted, practicing a religion far closer to European Christianity of the same period than to the faith started by the Buddha—an atheistic self-reliance aimed at finding release from all worldly attachments. Dogen's truths did not rest well with the Buddhist establishment of his time, however, and for years he moved from temple to temple. Finally, in 1236, he managed to start a temple of his own, and gradually he became one of the most revered religious teachers in Japanese history. As his reputation grew, the military leaders invited him to visit them and teach, but he would have no part of their life. Possibly as a result of Dogen's attitude, Soto Zen never became associated with the warrior class, but remained the Zen of the common people. Today Soto (with approximately six and a half million followers) is the more popular version of Zen, whereas Rinzai (with something over two million followers) is the Zen of those interested in theological daring and intellectual challenge.
Historically a religion at odds with the establishment—from Bodhidharma to the eccentric T'ang masters—Zen in Japan found itself suddenly the religion of the ruling class. The result was a Zen impact in Japan far greater than any influence Ch'an ever realized in China.