Customer Reviews

Dogen and Koan Tradition: A Tale of Two Shobogenzo Texts (Suny Series on the Sublime)

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If the price reflected the value of the book, I'd have to give it five stars. Otherwise, I'd hesitate to give it half a star. I am not disapproving when it comes to educated English, but this book is atrocious to read. Its style seems less like academic prose, and more like academic pose. It seems like murdering Dogen, to me. There is surely a limit to the degree of academic jargon you can bring to the task of surveying a tradition, for which it was axiomatic "not to speak too plainly" (pu shuo pu).

P.S. Heine's contributions elsewhere(not least 'The Koan:Texts and Contexts. The Zen Canon etc.) are meaningful and valuable. I didn't find those laboured. Alas, the present work left me feeling that I was lifting dumbells with my eyeballs. In short, as regards the hermeneutical horizons of the two textual properties or modules under current evaluation, there were certainly infrastructural resemblances to the literary proclivities of the Japanese cenobite, productive of the key Buddhological source materials at hand. However, the excruciatingly didactic, pedagogical patterns and profusion of multi-complex, multivalenced academic jargon, made me somewhat catatonic, and in an irrational upsurge of neuromuscular exertion, mediated through the biceps and triceps, the said tome ullulated through the ambient ether, and thus found itself laying, functionally redundant, in a circular waste receptacle, pending further functional assignments, morphologically modified in the phenomenological sense, as waste paper.