Eihei-ji
Temple in Eiheiji, JapanWikipedia
14
MENTIONS
7
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 14 mentions across 7 episodes found for "Eihei-ji".
Aug 29, 2026
speaker_1ANNOUNCER
And so he's gonna lead us off.
speaker_1ANNOUNCER
I'm-- About thirty years ago, I was standing at the gate of Eihei-ji for the first time, and we're gonna-- this is the entry gate today.
speaker_1ANNOUNCER
And I was standing there with, um, Huitsu Suzuki, Sojin Mill Weitzman, and Zenki Blanch Hartman, the three people whose names appear before mine on the lineage paper, and about to enter Eihei-ji.
speaker_1ANNOUNCER
And as a young man, it was quite overwhelming, uh, to think about entering that gate and thinking of all the ancestors that were in between.
speaker_1ANNOUNCER
Um, and so today, I think as we begin, Stephen will be helping us walk through that gate to begin the day and to begin our weekend.
22 MINS LATER
Stephen HeineGUEST
Of course, uh, for, for people coming close to death, the time of death, you know, that's something literal.
Stephen HeineGUEST
But that's the message for people all through life, is to face that moment of death and, and bring that se- sense of self-awareness into the present moment.
Stephen HeineGUEST
Now let's go back to, uh, Dogen's own life, and I'm gonna be showing several, um, illustrations of part of the story of, of Dogen's, um, uh, Dogen's, uh, adventures i- in, um, starting to practice meditation and, and, um, and then going to China and coming back from China, and leading the temple at Eihei-ji.
Norman FischerGUEST
The Tōnji manuscript version translated here lacks a colophon for this chapter." Colophon is, you know, the little blurb about when it was written and on what occasion.
Norman FischerGUEST
[clears throat] Uh, "The 18th century Myōshinji manuscript ascribes it to the late spring of 2040-- 1243, shortly before its author was to abandon his Koshōji near the capital and withdraw to the province of Echizen, where he started Eihei-ji." So this was written, they think, before he went to Eihei-ji.
Norman FischerGUEST
"As its title indicates, the text deals with the traditional set of four practices through which the bodhisattva attracts converts to Buddhism.
Norman FischerGUEST
The treatment of this theme is noteworthy for its use of examples from Chinese literature and for its lack of reference to the Chinese Chan literature or use of Chan locutions of the sort we see in Dōgen's other Shōbōgenzō text from the early 1240s.
speaker_7GUEST
Thank you.
Kaz TanahashiGUEST
And Roshi Joan was the first female master asked by Eiheiji, the kind of, uh, uh, uh, head temples of, uh, sort of school to give a talk to monks, and then she was the first foreign master too to give talks.
Kaz TanahashiGUEST
And then she did that in the other head temple, Soji-ji, too.
Kaz TanahashiGUEST
So yeah, we, uh, we are so grateful for the kind of pioneering, uh, female masters in, in the United States.
Koshin Flint SparksMODERATOR
Oji.
Koshin Flint SparksMODERATOR
Um, about 10 years after he'd come back from China, and is waiting, waiting to enter, uh, Eihei-ji himself, w- waiting for it to, to begin.
Koshin Flint SparksMODERATOR
So we're back at the gate again, this time Dogen, uh, waiting, and this is a fascicle he wrote at that time.
Koshin Flint SparksMODERATOR
I'm looking forward to hearing about it.
Steven HeineGUEST
But for the most part, we think of Dogen as being very difficult, very elusive.
Steven HeineGUEST
Uh, on top of that, as Kaz mentioned, um, uh, for the first, uh, century or so after Dogen, uh, for the most part, um, the reading of Shobogenzo was limited to, uh, monks who could travel to, uh, Eihei-ji to read original copies.
Steven HeineGUEST
Um, then in the, in the 1400s, copies were circulated to different temples, uh, in Japan, and, and, um, some of them got lost in archives that ha- in, in some cases have been rediscovered by, by Japanese researchers in the 20th century.
Steven HeineGUEST
And then, uh, there was a wave of intense interest by scholar monks in the late 16 and 1700s, and they, they organized and edited the, the, uh, Shobogenzo more or less as we know it, uh, today.
Mary Ann SackstederGUEST
Um, he'd had an experience of body and mind dropping away, and then came home, continued to practice and teach in Japan over the next two decades, and over those decades, he revised and changed this text many times.
Mary Ann SackstederGUEST
His own handwritten version from 1233 has been saved in the treasured archives of the Eiheiji, um, Soto sect temple.
Jaune EvansGUEST
temple.It was the same temple that Dogen himself founded in 1244.
Jaune EvansGUEST
His final version, the one we'll be using, was completed in 1242 or 1243, and it was in his full maturity.
Kanshin Allison TaitHOST
So we're not quite sure what Dogen wore.
Kanshin Allison TaitHOST
And there have been several attempts in the history of Soto Zen in Japan to figure this out by very close examination of texts or staring for a long time at old statues and paintings and trying to figure out, oh, did they have it like that or like that? And one of these investigations led to a huge fight in the 1800s between the two main temples of the Sōtō school in Japan, which is Eiheiji, that was founded by Dōgen, and Sojiji, which was founded by Keizan.
Kanshin Allison TaitHOST
And they got very intensely angry with each other for a very long time about two main things.
Kanshin Allison TaitHOST
The first one was whether you should fasten your ropes with a ring or with a tie.