Shusho Ichinyo, Dogen's Claim That Practice and Realization Are One

Dogen's teaching that practice and realization are one, shusho ichinyo, denies a claim most religious training assumes without stating: that practice is a means to a separate end called enlightenment, arrived at once the practice has done its work and then set aside. In his essay on pursuing the way, Dogen writes that to think practice and realization are not one is a view outside the Buddha's own teaching, and that in the authentic transmission the practice of the way at the very outset is already the whole of original realization, so that a beginner's single period of sitting is not a lesser or partial version of a master's, but complete in the same sense the master's is. Modern scholarship on Dogen ties this claim to his rejection of a widespread medieval Japanese Buddhist idea called original enlightenment, hongaku, which had come to treat awakening as an already possessed status needing no practice at all; Dogen's own position sits deliberately between the two extremes his critics accused him of, neither treating practice as a ladder to a distant goal nor treating it as unnecessary because buddhahood is already secured. The doctrine has a direct practical consequence recorded in Soto training: a monk is not ranked by how many years of sitting stand behind him, since a fresh period of shikantaza is held to actualize the same completeness Dogen ascribes to his own long practice.