While moving from the UK to live in the Czech Republic at the beginning of 2018, I realised that I had a large amount of unpublished material dating from 1977 that I thought might be of interest to others – texts of early translations of chapters of the Shobogenzo, cassette tapes of recordings of Nishijima Roshi’s lectures at his Saturday seminars in Tokyo and at Tokein, the temple in Shizuoka where he held all of his sesshins throughout the 80s and 90s, videos, booklets that we published and many photographs of the activities of Dogen Sangha through the years. As one of the founder members of Dogen Sangha and as Nishijima Roshi’s first Dharma heir, I began to feel a duty to make all this material available to all interested people. I am slowly editing this material and putting it on this website so that it can be accessed easily. Thanks to Ralph Hoyte for converting all the cassette tapes into MP3 files and to Andrew Deakin and members of Dogen Sangha UK for typing in the Shobogenzo chapters, which I had typed on an old-fashioned typewriter in my flat in Tokyo before personal computers were readily available. Thanks also to Pavel Fencl for setting up the site and helping to administer it. I am happy to add other material that other members of Dogen Sangha may have. Please contact me at mike.luetchford (@) gmail.com if you have other resources that you would like me to add.
This is a work in progress and I hope that you will find something of value here. Listening to Nishijima Roshi’s voice recorded in the early 1980s takes me back to the years when our small group of his students felt that we were involved in something important for the world. Certainly, this was what Nishijima Roshi felt and expressed to us in those formative early years of Dogen Sangha when we established the Hideo Ida Zazen Dojo in Moto Yawata in Tokyo, started to hold monthly one-day retreats there and worked to make the teachings of Zen Master Dogen available in English. It is only in retrospect that I realise what we achieved during that time, and what is still being achieved. Nishijima Roshi’s legacy lives on in all his dharma heirs in Japan and throughout the world.
Mike Luetchford
Hradec Kralove
Czech Republic
June 2019
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