Like all modern historiography, however, it is still rooted in various ancient, proto-historical modes of discourse, such as those found in epics, myths of origin, tales of a golden age, dynastic chronologies, and hagiographies. Twentieth-century scholarship on the history of Soto Zen has become much more critical in its outlook and quasi-scientific in its methods. Rather, they depicted the lineage as having a sort of abstract, timeless being - something like a species that lives on without essential change even as its individual members are born, flourish, and pass away. They did not, however, treat the Soto lineage as something that evolved over time in response to changing social, economic, and political circumstances. They are all collections of biographies of eminent patriarchs belonging to Dogen's line of dharma transmission." Those traditional genealogies promoted consciousness of the Soto lineage (Sotoshu) as a historical entity and strove to legitimate and celebrate it as a vehicle for the preservation and transmission of true Buddhism.
The earliest histories of Soto Zen as such date from the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). I will then propose my own working definition of the "Soto school" and explain the type of historical analysis that I shall bring to bear on it in this presentation. Let me begin, therefore, by briefly reviewing some of the ways that the history of Soto Zen has been written in the past. Scholars do not always agree with each other or follow exactly in the footsteps of their predecessors, but they do operate within a community of discourse in which many of the basic parameters and terms of debate have already been fixed. First, what is this thing, the "Soto school," that I am supposed to relate the history of? And second, what mode of historical discourse shall I adopt to speak of it?įortunately, these are not questions that I have to resolve entirely on my own.
Having been asked to speak on "the history of the Soto school," I find myself faced with two very basic questions. Trained in Zen monasteries in Japan active in Buddhist studies, with research interest in philosophical, literary, social, and historical aspects of East Asian Buddhism, especially the Ch’an/Zen tradition author of numerous articles and the forthcoming Ch’an Myths and Realities in Medieval Chinese Buddhism member, American Academy of Religion Buddhism Section steering committee, 1987-94 board member, Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values recipient of Fulbright, Eiheiji, and Japan Foundation fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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