As a religion involved with joint providing, Zen grew out of a Buddhist worldview very difficult from the right now prime arithmetical acquisitiveness. Justly, says Taigen Dan Leighton, Zen cannot be skillfully assumed sleeve of a worldview that sees reality itself as a central, functioning colleague of awareness and healing. In this book, Leighton explicates that worldview downhearted the writings of the Zen master Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), leisurely the founder of the Japanese Soto Zen tradition, which right now enjoys increasing reputation in the West.
The Lotus Sutra, arguably the maximum sizeable Buddhist scripture in East Asia, contains a recognized story about bodhisattvas (informative beings) who come up with from under the earth to wrap up and pick up the Lotus teaching in the distant a long way away. The story reveals that the Buddha entirely appears to tender on sale, but actually has been practicing, and stimulus extend to do so, over an inexplicably fancy life spread.
Leighton traces commentaries on the Lotus Sutra from a extend of key East Asian Buddhist thinkers, with Daosheng, Zhiyi, Zhanran, Saigyo, Myoe, Nichiren, Hakuin, and Ryokan. But his main item is Eihei Dogen, the 13th century Japanese Soto Zen founder who imported Zen from Chinaware, and whose plentiful, hateful, and romantic writings are sizeable to the modern onslaught of Buddhism to the West.
Dogen's use of this sutra expresses the significant segregate of Mahayana likeness and prediction as the context of Zen teaching, and his interpretations of this story next reveal his functioning worldview of the earth, space, and time themselves as central agents of spiritual provocation.
Leighton argues that Dogen uses the images and descriptions in this story to enlist his own saintly worldview, in which earth, space, and time are lively agents in the bodhisattva issue. Broader awareness of Dogen's worldview and its implications, says Leighton, can give details the possibilities for near approaches to foundation Mahayana concepts and practices.
