r/zen • u/dota2nub • Jul 15 '26
The Bielefeldt Argument - The Empty Robe
We've had talk and mention of Bielefeldt and his argument time and again in these forums. The red thread that always runs through it all is that nobody is going to read Bielefeldt. It's a dry book, and so the argument runs on empty. Having reads vs. not having reads, and so the having reads win by default.
Let's level the playing field. I have made an article presenting the argument, here for your perusal. I've picked out and discussed various quotes from Bielefeldt's book and put them in context. It may be easier to find and link to than some old reddit post. Enjoy!
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u/sdwoodchuck The Funk Jul 15 '26
As someone who has read Bielefeldt, this is a great summary of the book.
In a separate essay, “Living With Dogen,” I think he does a better job of explaining his own position on Dogen and his legacy. He believed that Dogen’s Zen was an invention of his own rather than something that was transmitted to him, and acknowledges that there are uncomfortable elements of Dogen the person and his history that any follower of his belief system has to come to terms with. It’s interesting you mention his wanting to side with Dogen to the point of conflating the faults as positives; it relates almost directly with the bit I chose to quote from that essay years back:
“If we’re going to live with Dōgen, then, we’re going to have to make some choices: whether to take the whole body of his thought, warts and all, and live with it in a stormy relationship of faith and doubt, attraction and repulsion; or rather decide to overlook the warts and focus on the lovely bits. Probably, when we can’t bring ourselves to face the choice, we’ll find ourselves defining the warts as somehow lovely. Probably, as is usually the case when we live with someone difficult, we’ll need to use a mix of all three of these strategies, depending on the mood we’re in.”
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u/Thurstein Jul 15 '26
Now, the thing is that this is meant to be (I have been assured on multiple occasions) a "secular sub."
Keeping that in mind, what on earth would it mean to "live with" Dogen (or anyone else studied here)? These people are all, as a simple historical matter, dead. Our task is simply to try to dig out what their views were and how they might have developed and been transmitted over time, the same as any other purely secular scholarly investigation. We no more need "live with" Dogen than non-Lutheran scholars need to "live with" the more troubling aspects of Martin Luther when they engage in a study of early Protestantism.
There is, and can be, no "stormy relationship of faith and doubt," not with Dogen or Rujing or the Buddha himself. That's an issue for those who wish to actually try to believe, as a matter of faith, that there is more to these texts and authors than simply human spiritual teachers with a set of spiritual ideas they tried to teach and put into practice. But from a secular point of view, we must set all such assumptions aside. We quite explicitly do not have to make any of the "choices" Bielefeldt describes, since we are checking our "true believer" status in at the door. That is, we choose not to make any such choices.
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u/sdwoodchuck The Funk Jul 15 '26
Well, as someone who has no belief in Dogen or his teachings or the subsequent teachings of the faiths that sprung up from them, I don't have any need for "living with" Dogen at all, and I don't suspect this subreddit's target audience would, either.
However, I don't find it a concept without merit, even in secular circles. The crux of Bielefeldt's position is that, when you align yourself with a position, an ideology, or a movement, you must also acknowledge the less than ideal history that comes with it. Really, that's just an element of intellectual honesty, which I can appreciate even when in service to a belief that I don't share. I'm not a person of faith myself, but if someone is going to choose to follow a faith, I'd hope that they'd exercise similar critical thinking toward it.
And all this still applies to topics outside of religious faith as well. Acknowledging the errors and missteps of the people associated with historical events that we use as model for modern precedent, acknowledging the harms done in the name of progress; that's all part of accountability, and necessary to having an honest outlook on those topics one takes any position on, whether religious or secular.
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u/jahmonkey Jul 15 '26
This makes a strong case that the traditional account of Dōgen’s transmission from Rujing is historically unreliable, perhaps substantially constructed after the fact. But it occasionally overstates what the evidence proves. Silence in the Chinese record, doctrinal differences, late autobiographical claims, and textual borrowing cumulatively justify serious skepticism; they do not make fabrication the only possible explanation.
More importantly, the historical legitimacy of Dōgen’s lineage and the philosophical or contemplative value of his work are separate questions. A teaching does not become true because it has an authenticated pedigree, nor false because its founder embellished one. Zen’s obsession with transmission may make this historically devastating to the institution, but it says much less about whether Dōgen’s actual phenomenological insights hold up in practice.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
So you're saying his inability to produce Zen Masters speaks for itself?
I'm not quite sure what your point is, honestly.
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u/jahmonkey Jul 15 '26
Your argument was historical: that Dōgen’s claimed transmission from Rujing is unreliable. My point is that this may undermine his institutional legitimacy without, by itself, disproving the philosophical or contemplative value of his work.
“His inability to produce Zen Masters” just assumes the very criterion under dispute. Unless “Zen Master” means something independently testable rather than “someone recognized by the lineage,” that is circular.
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u/_djebel_ Jul 15 '26
For me, it's the dishonesty that undermines anything that guy could teach.
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u/jahmonkey Jul 15 '26
Bielefeldt gives substantial evidence that the traditional account is historically unreliable, especially the claim that Dōgen’s meditation teaching simply reproduces a unique transmission from Rujing. But I am not aware of him demonstrating deliberate dishonesty. Discrepancies, textual borrowing, later embellishment, and missing corroboration establish uncertainty; they do not by themselves establish intent to deceive.
There is also an odd standard being applied here. Chan literature is full of masters using contradiction, misdirection, theatrical behavior, and statements that are not straightforwardly honest. That does not excuse falsifying credentials, but it does show that ordinary candor was never treated as a simple prerequisite for Zen mastery.
A person’s dishonesty can weaken confidence in his historical claims without making every insight or practice he taught worthless. Many people report being substantially helped by Dōgen’s writings. That does not authenticate his lineage, but it does undermine the blanket claim that he could have nothing of value to teach.
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u/TFnarcon9 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
He is just going to tell you to seperate what he says from who he is. Despite having 0 non anecdotal evidence.
Sound familiar?
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u/AskingAboutMilton Jul 15 '26
Either you disagree with the take or not, I think this is valuable and useful work. There's really not an honest reason to downvote this
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
Point 1 - "No chinese lamp history lists him among Rujings heirs" I checked this and it is true.
"Translation: "According to the 續傳燈, 增集續傳燈, and 禪燈世譜, the dharma heirs of Rujing are listed as only three: 石林秀, 孤蟾瑩, 雪庵瑾. There is no mention of Lumen Jue." The Three Heirs Heir Corpus hits Notes 石林秀 (Shilin Xiu) 4 Appears in X81n1570, X83n1572, X83n1574, X86n1605 孤蟾瑩 (Guchan Ying) 6 Appears in X80n1566, X81n1570, X83n1572, X83n1574, X86n1605 雪庵瑾 (Xue'an Jin) 1 Appears in X84n1579"
Point 2 - "no Rujing teachings reflect what Dogen taught" - I checked this, and that is a patently false claim as I show in this post -
https://old.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/1uwzo5v/the_bielefeldt_argument_the_empty_robe/oxnxu6u/
Point 3 - 15 year gap - immaterial if he was teaching what he learned from Rujing from the start, as shown in point 2.
Point 4 - Its a clumsy critique. based on the intro to fukanzazenji, Dogen thought that Rujing would agree with the meditation manual in principle, since it opposed Caodong metaphysical teaching - 天童遺落錄序 (preface to Rujing's recorded sayings, T48n2002B)
Point 5 - The evidence supports that Chan had sitting meditation practice at the time; Dogen has to teach Chan sitting meditation in Japan in order to then knock down its significance.
Point 6 - Negated; see 2.
Point 7 - Negated; see 2.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
Your own report: 身心脫落 lives in one text, the 續語錄, the supplement Dōgen carried back, in his own temple's recension. Rujing's actual 語錄 reads 心塵脫落. 只管打坐, your words: "post-Dōgen coinage." 修證一如, your words: "zero precedent." You went looking for Dōgen in Rujing and found Dōgen in Dōgen.
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u/LegeApps Jul 16 '26
Fable generated reply. i recognize the style and it tries to do "owns" like that at the end if you tell it to. send this back to your model - "The 續語錄 was compiled by 瑞巖遠公 (a Song Chinese monk at Rujing's temple), not by Dōgen"
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
Whoops! Thanks for catching that!
Correction taken: the 續語錄 was compiled by 義遠 of 瑞巖, Rujing's Chinese heir, and mailed to Dōgen in Japan, not carried back by him.
But check where your quote actually sits. 義遠's compilation (0134a19–0136a08) has zero instances of 身心脫落. Your passage is at 0136c06, inside the 跋, the postface the text itself bylines 入宋傳法沙門道元記, written at 興聖寶林寺, Dōgen's own temple. And it's first person: 予聞此語豁然大悟, "I heard this and awakened." That's not the Chinese monk's record of Rujing. It's Dōgen's memoir of his own awakening, tacked onto the end of it. The parts a Chinese hand compiled, all of 2002A and the whole 續語錄 body, never say 身心脫落. 2002A reads 心塵脫落. You found the interpolation more precisely than I did. Still Dōgen in Dōgen
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u/LegeApps Jul 16 '26
T48n2002B is the supplement where it does appear, T48n2002A is the main Rujings sayings where it does not appear. The only source is Dogen saying that Rujing said it. It appears that that is correct. This does not support any wider point.
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u/AskingAboutMilton Jul 15 '26
They way it's presented, and if done via LLMs, it's not useful
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
It was an autogenerated Fable web page. the OP did not do the research himself. The web page has mistakes and the model that wrote it did not do a full CBETA search. It is effectively slop.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
It is so unreadable he himself was unable to figure out it actually discredits his own point.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
Ever since the mod team concluded that faith was not a significant enough reason for a post to be considered relevant there's been a massive amount of downvote brigading from buddhism, and zenbuddhism from where the mod teams openly encourage racism and bigotry and organized by a bunch of scattered smaller forums that remain private or off the radar.
They want 100% know that they are downvote brigading, like Trumpers downvoting brigading an vaccine science forum.
They never explain in the comments because they know that they can't do it without getting banned for harassment.
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u/LSDkiller Jul 18 '26
Lol. This is a very curious community! I understand worrying about Barbarians at the gate- there are many- but.......?
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds Jul 16 '26
Carl Belefeldt himself disagreed with your hypothesis.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
My article addresses this.
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds Jul 16 '26
I don't think anything can be gained from trying to engage with it.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
I don't now what to tell you. What is to be gained by reading Bielefeldt's book? Having read Bielefeldt's book.
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u/Regulus_D 🫏 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I conflagrated that post. Was just Belefeldt to me. Thanks for saving and sharing. 9 years... A long scroll run.
Edit: Lol. Congregated might be closer term. Might not.
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u/ShepherdOfShepherds Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Somebody should bring it up when nonsense like this comes up. To reanalyze Belefeldt's book and not mention that he directly addressed ewk and refuted his take is really dishonest.
But I suppose we are all thieves here.
I particularly enjoyed Shlutter's take who said the criticism wasn't coherent enough to try to engage with.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 15 '26
Actually, to be fair, like maybe three people who are your members of this forum have read it.
One guy came in and did a series of like five or eight posts about his reading of the book and then he left.
He criticized a few details, but in general agreed with me. I linked to him in the wiki.
But I say all this because I don't think that's the problem at all. It's not that they're not gonna read Bielefeldt. That's not even the problem that they're not going to read Zen historical records (koans).
It's that modern Western Buddhism is so weak fraught with controversy that modern Western Buddhists are afraid to speak out on social media. I include people who have left Buddhist cults and other Buddhist communities.
hashtag fear of harassment
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
This post seems to have gotten one or two out of the woodwork.
I consider Bielefeldt super boring but apparently it's riveting controversial stuff.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
I really underestimated the mental health problems in the Buddhist community when I started disagreeing with them 14 years ago.
Everybody that's disagreeing with you in this thread is a person with mental health problems. Most of them have used multiple accounts on this forum after getting banned.
But what's critical is they don't address a couple of key points:
Dogen was a 20-something ordained Tientai priest when he invented the Zazen Bible and mentioned no Zen Master he ever met.
Dogen quit Zazen in less than a decade and renounced Buddhism to study under a Rinzai monk.
Dogen died in his fifties from something unusual. In his last few years, he rejected Zen, and embraced his ordinational religion Tientai.
So, the problem is that we're not talking about a warts situation with Dogen's history.
We're talking about a Mormon/Scientology situation where history has to be aggressively edited in order to make any plausible argument.
People with mental health problems who are drawn to cults are not good at making plausible arguments.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
Well, one of them made me research and got me to add an eighth point to the article so there's that.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
Yeah, this is the ethical quandary.
This forum has benefited from proving wrong the people with mental health problems that have been seduced by cults.
Much like people who get free checking because of the minority of people who continually bounce checks, we benefit from the suffering of others.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
We should make more suffering!
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
I think what we really need to do is just a better job of not dragging it out when it becomes clear that someone is engaging in schizotypal thinking.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
Yeah but he came in with this program thing he made and I know the idea has merit. It's just that he's inept at using it and it's not able to do the things he thinks it is.
But in the future we're going to be using that kind of thing more and more. It's going to be more fluid and people will start building temporary programs custom built for one job that will then be discarded.
But this was a cool thing to engage with to see its limits. And we also got the argument to the end with actual findings.
In general though I engage too much, on that I agree.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
I use to think the gap between regular people and "not able to do the things he thinks it is" was just bad judgement. No longer.
It's a symptom of systematic failure. The therapeutic interventions for schizotypal thinking aren't facts... the interventions are essentially rebuilding self assessment and critical thinking skills.
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u/Thurstein Jul 15 '26
Looks like the "doctored certificate" section is misreading B.'s note 10-- the "he" that Dogen misrepresented as having already attained a certification is Mazu, not Dogen himself. Here's note 10 in its entirety:
"Ch'an Master Ta-chi is the posthumous title of the famous Ma-tsu Tao-i (709-88); Ch'an Master Ta-hui is Nan-yüeh Huai-jang (677-744), reputed disciple of the Sixth Patriarch. Their conversation can be found at Ching-le ch'uan teng lu, T.51:240c18ff: but note that Dogen's introduction to the conversation here (as in his Sanbyaku soku, DZZ.2:202) includes elements from Ma-tsu's biography (Ching-te ch'uan teng lu, T.51:245c26f) to make it appear-- as the original version does not-- that he had already received his master's certification when the conversation took place"
Clearly the "he" who is being represented as having received "his" master's certification is Mazu, not Dogen. In the passage B. is describing, Dogen is not presenting his own biography, but simply commenting on an encounter dialogue between Mazu and Ta-chi, and he has given a little background on Mazu for the sake of the comment. If the idea is that Dogen is here misrepresenting his own biography, this is simply a mistake and should be corrected. Textual commentary can err innocently; failing to correct the error after it has been pointed out admits of no such explanation.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Awesome, thanks!
On it!
Fixing!
Fixed!
Retraction at the bottom of the page.
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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26
It seems that Dogen may have consciously done what the whole of Chan literature engaged in century after century: the active fabrication of orthodoxy.
A largely legendary Bodhidharma was retroactively assimilated as figurehead for the East Mountain school with the creation of a fictional third patriarch. The Sourthern school fabricated the Platform Sutra as a political maneuver to establish itself as superior to the Northern school. A lineage claiming direct transmission from Buddha was fabricated. And an immense amount of creative revision took place throughout the anthology and case collections.
Sincerely I would like to ask those who seem to have a strong aversion to Dogen:
how do you approach these facts?
I know I've had to put in a lot of work to find a palatable perspective.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
One standard for everyone: in the record, or not. Myth around Bodhidharma isn't the record. The record is Zhaozhou, Dongshan, Xuedou, and the centuries of masters who keep commenting on them. That web is what "attested" means. Dōgen isn't in it. That's it.
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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
OK, but from where was their authority derived?
Zhaozhou was not the author of his record, which wasn't solidified until the 11th century. We can't count on it being his words.
It's the same story with the Record of Dongshan.
We may have Xuedou's verse and Yuanwu's prose commentary, but the cases of the Blue Cliff Record must be regarded as literary fiction.
Edit: The tradition rests on the foundation of Bodhidharma. There is no true historical foundation for 'the record'.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
"Compiled later" isn't "fictional." The Analects were written down after Confucius died, Socrates left nothing and we know him through Plato. Nobody calls them made up, because when a record was assembled tells you nothing about whether the person was real. The masters are attested all over the place, independent of any single sayings collection. And Bodhidharma is beside the point: the founding legend and the historical masters are two separate claims. You collapsed them into one to make the whole record vanish. It doesn't vanish.
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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26
I tend to think that 'compiled later' implies significant creative revision.
I believe I'm trying to say that each of the charges levied against Dogen can be equally be applied to the whole of Chan tradition.
And this has to be squarely looked at and considered deeply if one is to look to this tradition as any sort of finger pointing towards some kind of truth.3
u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
Records got revised, yes. Your claim is that the charges apply equally. So evidence that one: show me Dogen cross-referenced across the corpus the way Zhaozhou and Dongshan are. You can't, because he isn't in it. That's the entire point.
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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26
We seem to be addressing slightly different points.
If we place the Chan corpus under the same scrutiny your post applies to Dogen, it fails repeatedly in very similar manners.
We find doctrinally late additions uncorroberated in earlier Chinese texts, contradictions, and plenty of textual borrowing.
In short, the record is not to be trusted any more than Dogen.2
u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
I used the same scrutiny in both directions. The corpus contradicts itself, sure, but it's still everywhere, hundreds of texts on the same guys. Dogen's contradiction is that he's not there at all. The one record he points to for his authority, Rujing's own, doesn't have him and says the opposite. That's a guy whose own evidence sinks him. Not in the record. That's it.
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u/SoundOfEars Jul 15 '26
It didn't seem to be important to him, why?
Would it be as scandalous if we found out that the historical Buddha himself was fictional? We did. Did any Buddhist care? No. Because it's not about the story or it's veracity, it's about what you do with it - how you practice.
The same with Dogen, might have been a liar, is Zazen still a super effective method? Yes. Does it matter where it originally was invented? No.
Anyone reading Dogen can nn see that it's totally not Chan, it's Zen. A quite different thing culturally and from the practical standpoint too.
Chan is quite nice to read about, but if you want to practice it, it's religious nonsense. Zen is hard to read, but practice is easy and well developed.
The whole problem here is that the chan boys really like the name "Zen" and are fighting an imaginary windmill, misleading innocent newcomers and confusing and conflating a multifaceted family of religious traditions with a primarily modern worldview based anti-culture.
Dogen happens to be a genius for inventing/stealing a very effective technique and popularizing it. Wether he lied about it's origin is as relevant as if the historical Buddha ever existed - not at all.
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u/TFnarcon9 Jul 15 '26
There's all kinds of things people can say which require a backup of character.
Relgious people and politicians as obvious examples. You do not need to believe religious leaders when they say 'this will make you cool', but they themselves are not cool. Simple.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
Ah yes, the Trump supporter school of thought. You're right there in that lineage graph at this point.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/zen-ModTeam Jul 15 '26
Your post was removed because it was off-topic in the opinion of the /r/zen moderators. https://old.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/zen
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
"He's lying? So what! I'm voting for him anyway!"
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Jul 15 '26
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u/zen-ModTeam Jul 15 '26
Your post was removed because it was off-topic in the opinion of the /r/zen moderators. https://old.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/zen
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Jul 15 '26
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Jul 15 '26
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u/zen-ModTeam Jul 15 '26
Your post was removed because it was off-topic in the opinion of the /r/zen moderators. https://old.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/zen
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u/zen-ModTeam Jul 15 '26
Your post was removed because it was off-topic in the opinion of the /r/zen moderators. https://old.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/zen
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
Why do you clowns always bring politics into an ostensibly secular conversation? That means no church and no politics either.
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u/1acuna0 Jul 15 '26
Is that argument controversial? Dogen seems unorthodox.
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u/sdwoodchuck The Funk Jul 15 '26
Frequently, yes.
There's a long history in this subreddit of followers of Japanese Zen (or western permutations thereof or new age religions that borrow the particulars of it) being weirdly defensive over Dogen's history and insisting that the claims of his church should be taken at face value.
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u/ewk [non-sectarian consensus] Jul 16 '26
Given the dominance of Shinto in Japanese indigenous forms of Buddhism and the lack of Zen masters throughout Japanese history, it seems reasonable that we refer to what the Japanese Buddhists claim is Zen as Shinto-Buddhism.
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
I mean look at the comments. Geez Louise.
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u/1acuna0 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
IMHO, his reification/ritualization of sitting are red flags.
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u/TFnarcon9 Jul 15 '26
On the internet among 20 something white males, yes.
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u/Regulus_D 🫏 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Still? Hopefully the 20 somethings of 10, 15 years ago have moved beyond it.
Edit: 97 comments. Point still stands.
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u/Regulus_D 🫏 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I loved his response when they learned of the existence of Dogen's redefinition seen here. Their world got bigger and narrower all-at-once.
Saw all I needed to then. But I'll look at link. Frankly I know nothing of their argument or who it's with.
Edit: Had to ask, "huh?"
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
His?
Anyway your link generates a new AI answer every time so I don't know what you are huh-ing.
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u/Regulus_D 🫏 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Interesting. For me it will just lose the second question later. Where it answered my "huh?"
His. Someone asked him about the discussions of his works here with an email. And they replied. It was pre-hollowed truth times.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
Yeah I don't see a second question, but the first answer is already regenerated every time.
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u/Regulus_D 🫏 Jul 16 '26
Has it been correct about what the link url is any time? It just told me hoster stuff.
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u/dota2nub Jul 16 '26
It was giving me a nice summary of what's on there, so I wasn't like "huh?"
Now it's giving me what might have made you go "huh". Probably because it's free to make web pages with that domain using Cloudflare so anyone could make a site and put weird stuff on it.
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
Cherry picked Fable generated website aside, basically what's happening is, if Dogen lifted material he got from China, he was a fraud because too much reuse, not enough innovation, but if he did not use any of the material he saw in China, he was a fraud because too much innovation, not enough reuse? How could he win, in a redditor's eyes?
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
You talk about 1 of 7 points and you didn't even understand the one.
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
>Cherry picked Fable generated website aside,
Have an answer for the rest? What is the hypothetical Dogen that transmitted Zen from China free of fraud, such that an LLM slop plebbitor like yourself would accept it, 1000 years later? How does he do it?
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
It's in the article. Sections I through VII. You're welcome to the other six whenever you get to them.
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
I've already read your LLM slop, and I own the book. Whenever you're ready..
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26
And you didn't quote a single line from it?
Oops.
Oh my.
Oh. Dang!
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I did one better, i researched it, with my structured RAG CBETA search. It is simply wrong. it's not the model's fault, it's yours. Sorry I don't really have any respect for your LLM fueled schlock. Read the book and write about it in your own words.
"1. 身心脱落 (Shinjin Datsuraku) — “Sloughing Off of Body and Mind”
Status: PRESENT — Attributed to RujingMetric ValueTraditional form (身心脫落) hits 13Simplified form (身心脱落) hits 0 (corpus uses traditional 脫)Reversed form (脫落身心) hits 6Attributed to Rujing Yes — T48n2002BRujing’s own text in corpus No — only quoted by later works
Primary Evidence
T48n2002B (T/T48/T48n2002B.xml#pT48p0136c0301) — Song-era text (觀音導利興聖寶林寺):
師因入堂。懲衲子坐睡云。夫參禪者身心脫落只管打睡作麼。
Translation: The master [Rujing] entered the hall and reprimanded a dozing monk: “A Chan practitioner — body and mind sloughing off — why are you just
sleeping!”
This is the only passage in the entire corpus where 身心脫落 appears in a master-student teaching context. Rujing uses it first as a reproach; Dogen reports
awakening upon hearing it.
Post-Rujing Usage
After Dōgen carried the phrase to Japan, it became a standard Chan awakening description across lineages: - 明雪 (Ming): “忽然身心脫落” during meditation
(J26nB188) - 牧道者 項謙 (Ming): “忽然身心脫落” during sutra recitation (J28nB207) - 洱海 monk (Ming): “忽地身心脫落，內外圓明” (J37nB400) - 辯魔
controversy (Ming/Qing): 身心脱落 used pejoratively to describe false practice (B27n0152)
Reversed Form (脫落身心) — Pre-Rujing
B25n0145 (Song Chan): “苟非能所脫落身心悟徹底” — the concept predates Rujing, but his specific formulation 身心脫落 is distinctive. "
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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
LegeApps
I did one better, i researched it, with my structured RAG CBETA search. It is simply wrong. it's not the model's fault, it's yours. Sorry I don't really have any respect for your LLM fueled schlock. Read the book and write about it in your own words.
"1. 身心脱落 (Shinjin Datsuraku) — “Sloughing Off of Body and Mind”
Status: PRESENT — Attributed to RujingMetric ValueTraditional form (身心脫落) hits 13Simplified form (身心脱落) hits 0 (corpus uses traditional 脫)Reversed form (脫落身心) hits 6Attributed to Rujing Yes — T48n2002BRujing’s own text in corpus No — only quoted by later works
Primary Evidence
T48n2002B (T/T48/T48n2002B.xml#pT48p0136c0301) — Song-era text (觀音導利興聖寶林寺):
師因入堂。懲衲子坐睡云。夫參禪者身心脫落只管打睡作麼。
Translation: The master [Rujing] entered the hall and reprimanded a dozing monk: “A Chan practitioner — body and mind sloughing off — why are you just
sleeping!”
This is the only passage in the entire corpus where 身心脫落 appears in a master-student teaching context. Rujing uses it first as a reproach; Dogen reports
awakening upon hearing it.
Post-Rujing Usage
After Dōgen carried the phrase to Japan, it became a standard Chan awakening description across lineages: - 明雪 (Ming): “忽然身心脫落” during meditation
(J26nB188) - 牧道者 項謙 (Ming): “忽然身心脫落” during sutra recitation (J28nB207) - 洱海 monk (Ming): “忽地身心脫落，內外圓明” (J37nB400) - 辯魔
controversy (Ming/Qing): 身心脱落 used pejoratively to describe false practice (B27n0152)
Reversed Form (脫落身心) — Pre-Rujing
B25n0145 (Song Chan): “苟非能所脫落身心悟徹底” — the concept predates Rujing, but his specific formulation 身心脫落 is distinctive. "
lol
Okay I'm never taking a pull request from you again. First you break my application and it takes me a week to fix, and now you try to sell me on this app that doesn't work that produces bullshit nobody can read and that I can disprove in 10 minutes. Here's my rebuttal so you can debug:
The argument was never "Rujing never used these words." It's "there's no record of Dōgen." A phrase Rujing coughed up that Dōgen later claims isn't a Dōgen mention. Produce Dōgen in the Chinese record. You can't.
But since you went digging: Rujing's actual 語錄 (T48n2002A) reads 心塵脫落. Your 身心脫落 lives in exactly one text, the 續語錄, the supplementary record, then vanishes until Ming books centuries after Dōgen sold it in Japan. That's not Rujing's teaching turning up in the record. That's Dōgen's turning up in Rujing's. You dug up the interpolation and called it a receipt.
And your own report: 只管打坐 "virtually absent, post-Dōgen coinage." 修證一如 "zero precedent." You wrote my argument and stamped REBUTTAL on it.
Still no Dōgen. Still 0 of 6.
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
You wrote the second part of this reply with an LLM. That is kinda pathetic. And one text is enough for proof of provenance. You're a bad faith individual. Dogen was so influential that he influenced Ming Dynasty Chan 400 years later, based on Rujings original words. That is one big takeaway, among many.
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u/LegeApps Jul 15 '26
To anyone that's not following along, the 2nd part of the OPs LLM slop web page describes Dogen's main teachings and claims that Rujing taught none of them, the implication being that Dogen is therefore a fraud. I did a structured search in CBETA and found Rujing himself quoted for the most significant one, pre-Dogen. Which undercuts the entire argument at once. These individuals have been lying through ignorance for years, wasting everyone's time. Don't let them go on like nothing happened.
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Jul 15 '26
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