Dogen Zenji (1200-1253) is the most extensively studied East Asian Buddhist in the Western world. This founder of the Soto School of Zen emphasized the importance of zazen, meditation in a sitting posture. He linked the wisdom of non-duality with the beauty of compassion as the way of inner freedom. And he taught enlightenment as a breakthrough experience going beyond thought, intellectual studies, and verbal entrapment.

In this follow-up to Moon In a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, Kazuaki Tanahashi has assembled an impressive collection of his formal and informal talks, essays, monastic rules, journals, poems, and notes. The editor has used his own translations as well as those of Edward Espe Brown, Jane Hirschfield, Norman Fisher, and others.

Again and again, Zen master Dogen accentuates "the circle of the way": "On the great road of Buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained." To practice wholeheartedly is fulfilling as an all-encompassing activity. There can be no laxness. Or as Dogan concluded: "Endeavoring in the way ripens the conditions of your practice."