Omori Sogen by Dogen Hosokawa
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1.2 MB
Overview: This book – part biography, part essay collection – is a story told out of great respect. Taken at face value, we are to accept that Omori Sogen was one of the greatest Zen masters of the Rinzai line in the twentieth century, and perhaps ever.
The writing is, in a word, plain. Japanese happens to lose a significant amount of nuance when translated into English, and one gets the sense that author Hosokawa Dogen is not the most skilled translator. Nevertheless, he is indisputably sincere and reverential. Is he the best possible author, the one who can do Omori full justice? Perhaps not, but he is to a large extent all we have, and I believe all interesting stories are worth appreciating no matter how they reach us.
It happens that the plainness aids us; Dogen states the facts of Omori’s life without embellishment (although he does romanticize his appreciations of them), allowing us room to imagine what kind of man this was. If anything, Omori was someone who literally and figuratively practiced what he preached, which in my eyes is a monumental accomplishment.
Isaiah Berlin would categorize Omori as a hedgehog. Omori read widely, from Marx to Heraclitus to Johan Huizinga, but largely appropriated their ideas into the Rinzai metaphorical space rather than considering them on their own, or in relation to each other. But it is somehow well done, because the points he takes are consistent with the Rinzai system.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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