''Eihei Kōroku'' (), also known by its English translation ''Dōgen's Extensive Record'', is a ten volume collection of works by the

Sōtō Sōtō Zen or is the largest of the three traditional sects of Zen in Japanese Buddhism (the others being Rinzai school, Rinzai and Ōbaku). It is the Japanese line of the Chinese Caodong school, Cáodòng school, which was founded during the ...

Zen Zen (; from Chinese: ''Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka phil ...

monk Eihei Dōgen. The bulk of the text, accounting for volumes one through seven, are "Dharma hall discourses" (''jōdō''; 上堂), which are highly formalized Dharma talks, given from 1236 to 1252. Volume eight consists of "informal meetings" (''shōsan''; 小參) that would have taken place in Dōgen's quarters with select groups of monks, as well as "Dharma words" (''hōgo''; 法語), which were letters containing practice instructions to specific students. Volume nine includes a collection of 90 traditional

kōan A ( ; ; zh, c=公案, p=gōng'àn ; ; ) is a narrative, story, dialogue, question, or statement from Chan Buddhism, Chinese Chan Buddhist lore, supplemented with commentaries, that is used in Zen Buddhism, Buddhist practice in different way ...

s with verse commentary by Dōgen, while volume 10 collects his

Chinese poetry Chinese poetry is poetry written, spoken, or chanted in the Chinese language, and a part of the Chinese literature. While this last term comprises Classical Chinese, Standard Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, and other historical and vernac ...

. Unlike Dōgen's other major work the ''

Shōbōgenzō is the title most commonly used to refer to the collection of works written in Japan by the 13th-century Buddhist monk and founder of the Sōtō Zen school, Eihei Dōgen. Several other works exist with the same title (see above), and it is som ...

'', which was written in vernacular

Late Middle Japanese was a stage of the Japanese language following Early Middle Japanese and preceding Early Modern Japanese. It was a period of transition in which the language shed many of its archaic features and became closer to its modern form. The period ...

, the text of ''Eihei Kōroku'' is written in the Japanese version of

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

, known as

Kanbun ''Kanbun'' ( 'Han Chinese, Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for offici ...

. While Dōgen is also better known for the essays that make up the ''Shōbōgenzō'', most of them were completed by 1244. After that date, nearly coinciding with his move from

Kyoto Kyoto ( or ; Japanese language, Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan's largest and most populous island of Honshu. , the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it t ...

Eihei-ji file:Plan Eihei-ji.svg, 250px is one of two main temples of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism, the largest single religious denomination in Japan (by number of temples in a single legal entity). The other is Sōji-ji in Yokohama. Eihei-ji is loc ...

, he wrote 405 of the 531 Dharma hall discourses that make up ''Eihei Kōroku'', indicating that he may have come to prefer the ''jōdō'' format over the ''jishu'' style used in the Shōbōgenzō essays.

Taigen Dan Leighton Taigen Dan Leighton (born 1950, grew up in Pittsburgh, PA) is a Sōtō priest and teacher, academic, and author. He is an authorized lineage holder and Zen teacher in the tradition of Shunryū Suzuki and is the founder and Guiding Teacher of Anc ...

, a modern Zen priest and translator of the ''Eihei Kōroku'', believes that the Dharma hall discourses tell us more about Dōgen the individual than the Shōbōgenzō as they reveal his training methodology, humor, and even emotional states.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eihei Koroku Soto Zen Zen texts