DŌGEN (1200–1253), more fully, Eihei Dōgen (or Buppō Dōgen, but never Dōgen Kigen or Kigen Dōgen as has been mistakenly suggested), was the founding abbot of the Eiheiji Zen monastery. Since the late nineteenth century, he has been officially designated, along with Keizan Jōkin (1264–1325), as one of the two founding patriarchs of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school, and, most recently, he has been widely celebrated as one of Japan's most creative and original religious thinkers, whose writings and novel use of language seem to anticipate many modern philosophical concerns.

Dōgen lived at a time of political and religious unrest. Shortly before his birth, the Buddhist monastic centers in the ancient capital of Nara had been destroyed by warfare in 1185, Japan's first military government (shogunate) had been established in Kamakura in 1180, and the royal court in...