The Shinji Shōbōgenzō or Mana Shōbōgenzō (真字正法眼蔵), literally the True Dharma Eye Treasury in Chinese Characters, is a collection of 300 kōans compiled by Eihei Dōgen from 1223–1227. "Shinji" and "Mana" are two alternative Japanese pronunciations of the Chinese characters "真字"; this literally means "true characters" and refers to its use of Classical Chinese as opposed to Classical Japanese, which is written using kana and is the language of Dōgen's more well known Kana Shōbōgenzō. It is also known informally as the Shōbōgenzō Sambyaku Soku (正法眼蔵三百則), the True Dharma Eye Treasury of Three Hundred Cases. The literary sources of the Shinji Shōbōgenzō are believed to have been The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp and the Shūmon Tōyōshū.Steven Heine : Did Dōgen Go to China? Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 144 It is written in Chinese, the language of the original texts from which the kōans were taken.
Background Regardless of a few instances where Dōgen criticized the study of kōans, legend states that the young monk stayed up all night copying the Blue Cliff Record before his journey China (although this story is likely apocryphal, given the great length of the text).H. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics (1986) p. 126 Dōgen's first teacher, Eisai, taught the importance of kōan introspection. While establishing the Kōshōhōrin-ji, Dōgen gathered the three hundred kōans featured in the Shinji Shōbōgenzō.
English translations
See also Shōbōgenzō 101 Zen Stories The Gateless Gate Blue Cliff Record Book of Equanimity
References
External links
Introduction to the Shinji Shobogenzo translated by Gudo Wafu Nishijima - Edited by Michael Luetchford & Jeremy Pearson by Daido Loori, delivered at the Symposium on Dogen Zen at Stanford University comments on koans from Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by John Daido Loori, in Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly The 300 koan-s of the Mana Shōbōgenzō