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Shōbōgenzō

Literary work

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Source of the title

Shōbōgenzō as a general term

In Mahayana Buddhism, the term True Dharma Eye Treasury (Japanese: Shōbōgenzō) refers generally to the Buddha Dharma; and in Zen Buddhism, it specifically refers to the realization of Buddha's awakening that is not contained in the written words of the sutras.

In general Buddhist usage, the term "treasury of the Dharma" refers to the written words of the Buddha's teaching collected in the Sutras as the middle of the Three Treasures of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In Zen, however, the real treasure of the Dharma is not to be found in books but in one's own Buddha Nature and the ability to see this Correct View (first of the Noble Eightfold Path) of the treasure of Dharma is called the "Treasure of the Correct Dharma Eye".

In the legends of the Zen tradition, the Shōbōgenzō has been handed down from teacher to student going all the way back to the Buddha when he transmitted the Shobogenzo to his disciple Mahākāśyapa thus beginning the Zen lineage that Bodhidharma brought to China.

The legend of the transmission of the Shōbōgenzō to Mahākāśyapa is found in several Zen texts and is one of the most referred to legends in all the writings of Zen. Among the famous koan collections, it appears as Case 6 in the Wumenguan (The Gateless Checkpoint) and Case 2 in the Denkoroku (Transmission of Light). In the legend as told in the Wumenguan, the Buddha holds up a flower and no one in the assembly responds except for Arya Kashyapa who gives a broad smile and laughs a little. Seeing Mahākāśyapa's smile the Buddha said,

I possess the Treasury of the Correct Dharma Eye, the wonderful heart-mind of Nirvana, the formless true form, the subtle Dharma gate, not established by written words, transmitted separately outside the teaching. I hand it over and entrust these encouraging words to Kashyapa.

Dahui's Shōbōgenzō and Dōgen's Shinji Shōbōgenzō

Dahui Zonggao, the famous 12th-century popularizer of koans in Song dynasty China, wrote a collection of kōans with the Chinese title Zhengfa Yanzang (正法眼藏). In Japanese this is read as Shōbōgenzō, using the same kanji for its title as Dōgen's later work. When Dōgen visited China in 1223, he first studied under Wuji Lepai, a disciple of Dahui, which is where he probably first came into contact with Dahui's Zhengfa Yanzang. In his book Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation, the modern scholar Carl Bielefeldt acknowledges that Dōgen likely took the title from Dahui for his own kōan collection, known now as the Shinji Shōbōgenzō. He later used the same title again for what is now his most well-known work, the Kana Shōbōgenzō (now almost always referred to simply as "the Shōbōgenzō"):

Indeed the fact that Dōgen styled his effort "Shōbō genzō" suggests that he had as his model a similar compilation of the same title by the most famous of Sung masters, Ta-Hui Tsung-kao [Dahui Zonggao]. Unlike the latter, Dōgen was content here simply to record the stories without interjecting his own remarks. A few years later, however, he embarked on a major project to develop extended commentaries on many of these and other passages from the Ch'an literature. The fruit of this project was his masterpiece--the remarkable collection of essays known as the kana, or "vernacular", Shōbō genzō.

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