Dōgen’s Zen Poetry

Stone monuments inscribed with poems by Zen master Dogen stand in central Kyoto, where the founder of Japan's Soto school of Zen Buddhism spent formative years before establishing Eiheiji Temple in Fukui. Dogen wrote roughly 60 surviving waka poems in the thirteenth century, spare verses that distill observations of nature and impermanence into plain language. When novelist Yasunari Kawabata accepted the Nobel Prize in 1968, he opened his speech with one of these poems, reading its simplicity as the true nature of Japan. Each inscribed verse invites a pause, connecting the bustle of the surrounding city to the stillness at the core of Dogen's practice.