To Whom Was the Eiheishoso Gakudō yōjinshū 永平初祖学道用心集 Preached?

Abstract

This paper considers what kind of audience Dōgen assumed in his work the The Collection of Essentials on Studying the Way by the Founding Patriarch of Eihei-ji, or Eiheishoso Gakudō yōjinshū 永平初祖学道用心集 (hereafter Yōjinshū). This work was proclaimed around 1234 by Dōgen at the Koshō-ji 興聖寺.It has a slightly different use of metaphors and citations from other works of the same period, and uses Chinese philosophical materials, Confucian and Taoist works, and so on. Hence, there may be some difficulty to clarify for whom Dōgen intended this work. One opinion holds the audience to have been Ejō 懐奘 and his colleagues, that is, those who converted from the Daruma-shū 達磨宗, while another says that it was Dōgen’s lay believers.

Recently, two remarkable essays have been published considering this issue. One of them, by Chao Zhang 張超, mentions the tendency of Chinese Chan monks to preach to lay supporters in the Song dynasty. Monks frequently used ancient Chinese philosophers’ works. This looks similar to what we see in the Yōjinshū. On the other hand, Ishii Kōsei 石井公成 suggests that Japanese novice monks were required to study Chinese literature at the beginning of their practices during the Heian period. This paper, by analyzing Yōjinshū citations, and evaluating the offered hypotheses, concludes that the Yōjinshū was presented to not only novice monks, but also to lay persons, possibly nobles, in order to bring them into Dōgen’s assembly.