I first encountered the translation of “Genjo Koan” found in “Moon in a Dewdrop” (see below). Started going through that, but felt that something was missing. So I got my hands on a Japanese book (the Mizuno book below). This book gives the original Dogen along with a translation into contemporary Japanese.

I have no interest in seeming to criticize the monumental efforts undertaken by Tanahashi and his collaborators in “Moon in a Dewdrop”. However, the Japanese version said something to me quite different than his version did, so I concluded there was room for another translation taking another approach.

How literal?

A key dimension in any translation is how literal to make it. That in turn depends on the audience. For Genjo Koan, if the audience is Buddhist scholars or students, there is a case to be made for a more literal approach, since those readers can presumably untangle some of the complexities of the original on their own. On the other hand, if the audience is the general public, then a very literal translation will seem stilted, or opaque. Of course, in the case of the Genjo Koan the utter density of the text militates in favor of a more literal translation, since even the best translator may not be able to decipher what is really going on.

In choosing the audience, though, we should remember that Genjo Koan was originally written as a letter to a lay disciple. So I doubt that Dogen wrote it with the intention that it be a turgid philosophical treatise. He was presumably trying to convey some basic ideas to his student in a fairly conversational, second-person way. Just reading the Japanese text from this perspective, to me, makes it more coherent. And in this light, I think a translation should also take the flavor of a teacher talking to his student.

Of course, Dogen used much Buddhist vocabulary, as well as allusions to Buddhist tradition and scripture, being a learned student of the literature himself. But this vocabulary was certainly familiar to the student he was writing to, so in that sense it cannot really be considered technical. An English translation which by definition is targeting English readers, in my mind, needs to make the shift from 13th century Japanese Buddhist terminology to something that the modern reader can relate to. For that reason, I chose to not use the Japanese or Sanskrit Buddhist terminology. Who am I to decide what English should be used to represent the time-honored concept referred to as “buddha-dharma” or “buppou”? Well, I’m the translator. If you want to translate, I think you should translate.

Minor translation issues

Another point regarding the literalness of a translation is to what extent the translator should take liberties with the order of sentences or phrases. There is a natural difference between Japanese and English that’s imposed by the grammar and syntax of the language, as well as the cultural differences. Often an overly-literal ordering of the translation will result in clumsy, unreadable, or disconnected sentence. That’s why I did take the approach of modest reordering where it made sense to better convey the meaning or result in English which flowed better.

There’s one aspect, though, where I prefer what might be called a more literal translation. Let’s say that the original author has repeated a phrase; we should assume that he has some reason for doing so and repeat the phrase in the translation as well. Let’s say that the original author has chosen a different word to represent what seems to be the same concept; we should assume that he has some reason for doing so and choose a different word in the target language as well. Something peculiar to Dogen is that he may have chosen to express something in a “kanbun” style, then possibly followed by the same idea in a “Japanese” style; we should assume that he had some reason for doing so and render the “kanbun” part in an appropriate style, and the “Japanese” part in an appropriate style.

Real-world translators have a little dirty secret: sometimes they leave things out of their translation entirely! There are a couple of cases where this can be justified. One is if the original text is highly redundant; perhaps the redundancy works better in the source language than the target. The second, more controversial, is when the translator doesn’t really know what the original means. In that case, he’s faced with the question of creating a translation which has some reasonable probability of being just wrong, versus assuming that the context will fill in, to some extent, the missing content for the reader. Yes, in my translation I have done this, in a couple of places I won’t reveal.

How to translate the title?

Basic question: what should the name of this essay be? Tanahashi chose “Actualizing the Fundamental Point”, which seems highly contorted. He is translating “genjo” as “actualize” and “koan” as “fundamental point”, of course. But beyond the mere awkwardness of this translation, I think it misses much of what Dogen was intending. In the grammar of noun phrases in Japanese, the phrase “genjo koan” could be interpreted in a number of ways: genjo-ing the koan, or koan-ing the genjo, the koan of the genjo, and the genjo of the koan, to mention just a few. Dogen himself gives us a clue where late in his essay he uses “genjo koan” as a verb, and then a noun. This is why I initially ended up with the title “Open question—becoming real”. I thought there was parallelity to Dogen’s original title, in the sense that it can be parsed as “the open question of becoming real”, or “the open question becoming real”. The verb form Dogen invents can perhaps be glossed as the latter, the noun as the former.

However, in October 2004 I adopted a new English translation, “The Present Issue.” The thinking is that “present” and “issue” have some of the range of meanings of “genjo” and “koan” and together, a similar potential for combining themselves in various ways.

References

Japanese books:

• Dogen Zenshuu (Dogen’s collected works), Vol. I, translated and annotated by Mizuno Yaoko, ISBN 4-393-15021-X
• Zen-yaku Shoubou-genzou, Vol. 1, by Nakamura Shuuichi, published by Seishin Shobou, ISBN 4-414-11201-X.
• Genjo Koan wo Kataru, by Kurebayashi Koudou, ISBN4-8046-1097-9.
• Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen by Tanahashi (ed.) appears to have the same translation as is in Moon in a Dewdrop.
• ç?¾ä»£èªžè¨³æ­£æ³•çœ¼è”µ, 玉城康四郎（大蔵出版刊）. I have not consulted this book but portions are on-line.

English books:

• Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo: Book 1,
  by Gudo Nishijima (Translator), Chodo Cross (Translator)
• Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen
  by Zen Master Dogen, Kazuaki Tanahashi (Editor)
• Flowers Fall: A Commentary on Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan, by Hakuun Yasutani, Taizan Maezumi

Online translations:

• From Soto Approach to Zen.
• By Yasuda Joshu roshi and Anzan Hoshin roshi, called Genjokoan: The Question of Our Lives, excerpted from the forthcoming book Dogen: Zen Writings on the Practice of Realization.
• Translation by Kosen Nishiyama and John Stevens
• Aitken/Tanahashi

I recently checked out Ancient Paths, having been recommended by a friend.

In an nutshell, Craig Hill is saying that the ancient Hebrews had it right, with arranged marriage and cultural rituals marking life transitions. I am somewhat sympathetic here. But he then goes on to applaud stoning of adulterers, and claiming that the degeneration of modern society has given rise to homosexuality. Guess what, Paul. Our modern society is actually progressing beyond how adulterers are treated in places like Nigeria. And study homosexuality, and the incontravertible data that show that it has existed in all human (and animal) societies since record-keeping began. Especially here in West Hollywood.

Found an interesting article by Carl Bielefeldt of Stanford: Circumambulating
the Mountains and Waters. I don’t know Carl, but it seems like he’s one of the pre-eminent Dogen scholars we have in the West. His article is about translating Dogen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra” in particular, and translating Dogen in general. He has great insight into the whole question of translating loosely versus translating literally. Suddenly my past musings on this issue in the context of computer manuals seem very shallow. He says:

Of course, there are lots of ways to translate, each with its own virtues and vices. When the translator doesn’t understand what the author is talking about, probably the safest approach is to keep as close as possible to the author’s language. Every translator has to cook her text, but the trick in this approach is to try for no more than medium rare, so the reader can still taste some of the raw juices of the original words.

Yes—but there’s a difference here. Eating a picee of meat, raw juices are raw juices and the eater can taste them as they are. But once something is translated, from Japanese to English in this case, the raw juices are gone forever. (In culinary terms, it has at least been “seared”!) It doesn’t really seem to me, for example, that using the word “practice and verification” (for 修証) in your English translation is leaving any “raw juices” for the reader to enjoy. Unless he’s a Buddhist scholar, and can back-translate in his head to the original Japanese—but in that case, why is he reading an English translation in the first place? Carl goes on to say:

The chief virtue here, at least when all goes well, is that the translation will have less of the translator’s own ideas.The chief vice is that the translation will be hard to read,with a foreign feel, full of odd diction and unusual syntax. Sometimes, this minimalist approach may catch more of the author’s style; other times it can distort the style, making what may originally have been smooth and flowing for the native reader into something twisted and clunky. Sometimes, it can make a passage seem more difficult or more exotic than it really is, turning what was fairly easy and idiomatic into something strange and fraught with unintended mystery; but it can also preserve some of the original strangeness and keep open mysteries that are inherent in the text.

It’s nice to objectively list the trade-offs between more and less literal translation like this. But the real question is: how do you weigh those trade-offs, and what side do you come down on? Personally, I think Carl has captured the negatives of literal translation extremely well here and they far outweigh the smaller number of positives. “Hard to read”, “distorted style”, “clunky”, “strange”—I couldn’t have come up with better words to describe the vast majority of Dogen translations I’ve read.

More basically, I think it is a false dichotomy to say that there is a tension between something smooth and something faithful. The implication that a translation might read smoothly just because the translator has “papered over the cracks” is wrong in my opinion. On the contrary, clumsiness often results from a combination of not being faithful (usually due to not understanding the source text), and lack of effort in crafting the target text. If the text is understood, and the effort is taken, the result can naturally become smooth. Carl now goes on:

Every translation is a bunch of trade-offs, every translator is a negotiator between author and audience. But when the negotiations get tough, as they often do with Dogen, I guess I’d rather let the reader wrestle with the difficulties of his medieval Japanese diction and syntax than make her read my own ideas in easy English paraphrase…

But wait. You are going to let the reader “wrestle with the difficulties of the medieval Japanese diction and syntax”? I’m confused then. If you’ve translated something at all, it’s in English now, so you’ve already made some large percentage of the decisions, right or wrong, about how to parse and interpret the Japanese and turn it into English. You can’t avoid responsibility by leaving clumsy structural remnants of the Japanese lurking in the English syntax and vocabulary and let the user sort them out for you.

Let’s say I am arranging a Bach cello suite for the piano. I could simply transcribe each note in the original into the corresponding note on the piano. But why would I bother to do that? I want to make this into a piano piece—with the harmonies appropriate to that instrument. Yes, that requires me to have an understanding, or perhaps even to guess, about what harmonies were in “Bach’s head” when he wrote the piece. But presumably I’m doing the piano arrangement because I am a musician and student of Bach and can make good judgments about such things that will make my piano arrangement pleasing and in some sense causative of analogous emotions to those someone feels when listening to the original cello piece.

Frankly, I think “literal translation” is an oxymoron. It is translating into a language that does not exist.

John Horgan recently wrote in Slate about why he thinks Buddhism doesn’t work. He says:

Eventually…I concluded that Buddhism is not…rational…”.

Stop the presses! Buddhism is not rational!

What’s next? Horgan the restaurant reviewer, criticizing a Mexican restaurant because it doesn’t serve sushi? Why not criticize it for not offering dry cleaning services either?

Horgan says,

Together, these tenets [reincaration and karma] imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.

Gee, bringing Santa Claus and cockroaches into the discussion seems like going sort of overboard, although I know that as a big science writer Horgan needs to keep his prose lively. But actually, neither reincarnation nor karma, understood correctly, have anything to do with a cosmic judge.

Horgan moves on to point out, rightly, that it is often more useful to consider Buddhism as a roadmap to personal growth, focused on meditation practice, but then claims that “meditation’s effects,,,[are]…highly unreliable”, and that “[m]editation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people.” Well John, you’re a reporter or a journalist or a writer or something, right? Why not tell us whatever results you experienced from your own meditation practice, since you say you did join a Buddhist meditation class four years ago? And you know as well as anyone that any practice targeting emotional growth, including pyschotherapy for one, can and does (and probably should) create “negative” effects—as a stage in the process. Are you saying that any practice that exacerbates depression at any point is bad or wrong—a point of view that reveals an extremely shallow grasp of the nature of depression itself?

Horgan goes on to claim that Buddhism raises as an ideal “perceiving yourself as unreal”. Then he proceeds from this cartoon-like characterization to the conclusion that perceptions of unreality can also be caused by drugs so they’re bad; or that perceiving yourself as unreal might cause you to stop caring about human suffering. I doubt if he could find a single Buddhist teacher anywhere in the world (did he talk to one?) who would describe the Buddhist ideal to be thinking of yourself as unreal (it’s closer to thinking of yourself as very real, I would say). Of course, his account would not be complete without pointing out that some masters have had various personal quirks—drinking too much, say—and claims that this invalidates a supposed Buddhist tenet that reaching enlightenment is supposed to make you a paragon of virtue. I would say that reaching enlightenment is supposed to make you “you”.

We have to wait until the end of the article to figure out what Horgan is really trying to say. Turns out he isn’t really down on Buddhism specifically, but rather all philosophical and religious frameworks. Of course it seems odd that the minute he gets done complaining that Buddhist practice can aggravate depression, he himself is proposing a sort of ultimately depressing anti-philosophy:

The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can…accommodate science’s disturbing perspective (that human beings are accidents).

In fact, I would say that Buddhism accommodates, or more accurately presages, this perspective perfectly. But that’s probably hard to see for a person like Horgan who has already put all religions into one big box in his mind, and implicitly and explicitly forcing his expectations and preconceptions of “religion”, based on his experience with Western ones, onto Buddhism. Yes, it’s hard to look at a new philosophical framework—but what’s the point if you’re just going to evaluate it in terms of your old one?

I’m wondering why Horgan joined the meditation group and started to get interested in Buddhism. Most people would do such things because they felt some disconnect in their lives, because they felt the need for some kind of answer. It’s fine that Horgan did not find his answer in Buddhism. Did he find it somewhere else? Did he decide he didn’t need an answer or already had it? His article would have been so much more relevant if he had given us even basic clues about his personal experience.

I’ve read Horgan’s 1996 book, “The End of Science”, and I greatly respect his ability to shine light on complex questions. That’s why it’s unfortunate that he did not bother to take the extra steps either in terms of his practice or his thinking or his writing to actually illuminate what insights Buddhism has to offer.

Oversized snowflakes drifted langorously down from the sky, piling themselves carelessly on the limbs of centuries-old cedars. A choir of unseen frogs in the lotus-filled ponds croaked out their songs of desire. The presence of Dogen Zenji, the legendary founder of Soto Zen, permeated the ancient halls of Eiheiji, the temple he founded more than 750 years ago.

larger

OK, so I made up the part about the frogs. Didn’t actually hear any frogs at all. But it was really snowing, although that’s not surprising since it was March and Eiheiji is located in modern-day Fukui, in the region called Hokuriku, where Kawabata set his famous novel “Yukiguni” or “Snow Country”. And there were really tall cedars, including the “Godai-sugi” located right in front of the “Sanmon” or Main Gate, and said to date back to the time of one of Dogen’s immediate successors.

As for Dogen’s unspoken presence, I didn’t actually feel that very strongly either. The dominant impression was of a whole bunch of monks eating, sleeping, and sitting. They engage in all three of these activities on the single tatami-mat assigned to them in the Sodo or Monks’ Hall, a dark, cavernous building said to have last been renovated one hundred years ago—I sure hope they don’t wait another hundred to renovate it next time! We didn’t stay there, but it looked cold. But actually that building is one of the older buildings at Eiheiji; there is nothing that dates back even close to the time of Dogen, the very oldest structure being the 250-year old Sanmon. Turns out that wooden buildings burn and fall down. Actually, it seems that the current location is not even that of the original Eiheiji, it having moved at some point in the past.

The overall layout of Eiheiji is modeled on a seated Buddha, with the Sodo corresponding to the right elbow The Hatto The Hatto (Dharma Hall) is at the top of the hill and corresponds to the Buddha’s head. The Buddha Hall is more or less in the middle and is his heart. His right elbow maps to the Sodo and the left to the Daikuin (kitchen), while the bathroom (Tousu) and bath-house are his knees. The Sanmon is his hands.

As long as we are giving the little tour, I’ll mention that the buildings are all connected by covered hallways, their wooden floors gleaming from daily polishing by the monks during samu. Other buildings in the complex, besides the new building where we stayed, include a temple dedicated to Dogen Zenji and where his ashes are kept, the 102-year-old Zenji’s quarters, where we noticed, incongruously, a pile of teddy bears sitting in the waiting area; and buildings related to the funeral business, basic to the economic model of all Zen temples in Japan.

I visited Eiheiji under the program they call “sanzen”, a sort of dumbed-down four-day intensive for lay people. I have to appreciate the effort the people at Eiheiji have gone to to make it possible for people like me to go there and have an experience of life at a monastery. They make some reasonable attempt to give you a flavor of the rhythm and style of the monastic life. Of course, you do not really live among the monks, but rather in their ugly new administration and reception building called “Kichijo-kaku”. The accommodations are spartan (futons on the floor), but at least the building is heated, unlike the Sodo where most of the real monks stay. The food is what everyone there eats and is very good, if simple.

The first meal of the day is “shou-jiki”, and is just rice gruel and pickles, although each day the gruel was perked up with something—little kernels of corn, or little pieces of mochi. That is the only meal of the day for which the spoon is used. Lunch, or “chuu-jiki”, is rice, miso soup, pickels, and a couple of side dishes, such as hijiki or boiled vegetables. Dinner, called “yakuseki”, is much the same. All of the meals are eaten in the highly-stylized “o-ryo-ki” style, which turns out to be something quite different than the much more Westernized and simpliifed system I learned at Zen Mountain Center. There was so much mental energy around eating there that sometimes I got the feeling that the real reason I was there was to go to o-ryo-ki school, with some sitting thrown in to kill time.

The differences range from additional rules about how to unpack and repack your eating implements, to new steps such as the use of both hot tea and hot water during the clean-up process. Some of the changes have an obvious logical reason, such as washing the outside of each bowl by dipping it sidewise in the next smaller bowl filled with hot water and rotating it. Overall, though, the differences give a whole different flavor to the o-ryo-ki process; instead of making it seem more artificial and ritualized, they actually seem to enrich and complete the scheme.

One particular difference is that you eat with your bowl held high, near your mouth, and your elbows held out to your sides. This has the effect of focusing your attention on the meal and the eating process. Small things, like placing your chopsticks back on the middle bowl with both hands, or picking up your chopsticks (also with two hands) first, adling them between your thumb and index finger, and only then picking up the bowl you plan to eat from, have the effect of giving the overall eating process a sort of attractive dignity.During the noon meal the offering is given to the Buddha—seven grains of rice. (For some reason, in the ZMC version, this is done during all meals. In the Eiheiji version the problem that occurs at ZMC as to which food to offer—the macaroni and cheese, or the salad?—does not arise since there is rice at every meal). One unfortunate participant managed to drop his little bunch of rice on the floor, since this is a traditional Soto monastery where you are eating on the ledge of the “tan”. The response by the monks watching over us was quite astonishing—they ran over to his seat, with everyone bowing and gassho-ing while the rice grains were retrieved from the floor. I guess this only needs to happen once or twice before you start getting very focused when sticking the offering on the end of the “setsu”, or spatula. God knows what would happen if you happened to drop your chopsticks, or heaven forbid an entire bowl, on the floor.

I found it interesting that there was no real attempt to teach anything about Zen. We learned different bowing styles; the gassho should be a real gassho, with arms held up parallel to the ground, fingers an inch from your nose. And shashu, and how to behave physically in the Zendo, including such details as the direction to rotate your zabuton when plumping it back up after sitting (clockwise). But no-one ever talked about the mental aspects of the meditation process. In this retreat, there was also no dokusan or interviews with the teacher. I imagine this is indeed how Zen is taught normally in Japan, including to the monks who come to Eiheiji to live for one or two or three years—a sort of throw them in the water and see if they can swim process, or maybe it’s more along the lines of getting them so frustrated and/or confused that when a teacher finally deigns to spend a couple of minutes with them they value the opportunity much more and take it much more seriously.

The monks that dealt with us, probably six in all, were not very chatty and as such we did not obtain much information about who they were or what they were thinking. We did get some clues, though. It seems that the majority of the 200+ monks at Eiheiji are there for a relatively short time, by which I mean 1-3 years, after which they intend to go back and run their family temple. Although they could take over the family temple without a stay at Eiheiji, by doing their time they get some kind of certification.

Frankly, my impression of the monks at Eiheiji was that many of them were in fact just “doing time”. It may seem strange to a Western student of Zen that someone with the chance to study at the premier Soto temple in the world would choose to just go through the paces, but that was indeed my impression. To my Western eye, the monastic life there does seem quite limited and limiting. The schedule provides no time for personal activities. Even activities such as taking a bath, which at ZMC occur during “personal” time, are carried out in groups, the monks all proceeding in a single line to the bath house and taking their bath together—something made possible by the big Japanese-style bath tub (although we were not allowed in the actual “yoku-shitsu” or bath house used by the monks). Samu is more group-oriented as well. As far as I could tell, there is little to no time at least for the junior monks to do any studying or reading either. One of the monks told us that the organization systems at Eiheiji were so well-developed that the Japanese armed forces visited them to study how they did it. Well, they should be well-developed—they’ve had over seven centuries to work out the kinks. It is quite amazing when you think about it that daily life at the temple is probably quite close to what it was at Dogen’s time—one of the few institutions in the world, I would say, that has maintained consistent forms for such an extended period of time.

The sanzen program is open to anyone who wants to come but is certainly not oriented to non-Japanese speakers. Some Westerners might have trouble with sitting in seiza for a whole hour during the morning services. The schedule itself is pretty close to a ZMC sesshin, although they haven’t gotten around to adding yoga to the schedule yet—that will probably take another 750 years.

Japanese readers can find more information about Eiheiji here.
Information about the sanzen program can be found here.
A Japanese book called “Kuu, Neru, Suwaru” (“Eat, Sleep, and Sit”), about one man’s experience as a monk at Eiheiji, can be found here.