"You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child"
About this Quote
Dogen’s line turns motherhood from a badge into a practice, and then pulls the rug out from under the usual hierarchy. The common story is linear: you become a mother, you graduate into authority, you dispense wisdom. Dogen insists on a second birth that runs the other direction. If you’re really paying attention, the child doesn’t just arrive into your life; your life is reordered around beginnerhood.
The intent is quietly radical for a religious leader writing in 13th-century Japan, where family roles were structurally fixed and spiritual life often meant climbing toward mastery. Dogen’s Zen is allergic to that kind of achievement narrative. “Become a child” doesn’t mean regress into helplessness; it means re-enter the world with the unarmored attention of someone who hasn’t already decided what everything is. That is Zen’s core move: the self that wants control gets interrupted by direct experience.
The subtext is a warning against turning care into domination. Parenting can easily become a moralized project: shaping, correcting, producing outcomes. Dogen reframes it as a relationship that dismantles the parent’s certainty. The child is not just an object of nurture but a force that exposes impatience, ego, and the fantasy of being the finished person in the room.
Contextually, Dogen founded the Soto Zen school and emphasized “practice-realization” - awakening expressed in ordinary acts. Here, the kitchen and the cradle become the monastery. Enlightenment isn’t elsewhere; it’s in the daily humility of being taught by someone who can’t even speak yet.
The intent is quietly radical for a religious leader writing in 13th-century Japan, where family roles were structurally fixed and spiritual life often meant climbing toward mastery. Dogen’s Zen is allergic to that kind of achievement narrative. “Become a child” doesn’t mean regress into helplessness; it means re-enter the world with the unarmored attention of someone who hasn’t already decided what everything is. That is Zen’s core move: the self that wants control gets interrupted by direct experience.
The subtext is a warning against turning care into domination. Parenting can easily become a moralized project: shaping, correcting, producing outcomes. Dogen reframes it as a relationship that dismantles the parent’s certainty. The child is not just an object of nurture but a force that exposes impatience, ego, and the fantasy of being the finished person in the room.
Contextually, Dogen founded the Soto Zen school and emphasized “practice-realization” - awakening expressed in ordinary acts. Here, the kitchen and the cradle become the monastery. Enlightenment isn’t elsewhere; it’s in the daily humility of being taught by someone who can’t even speak yet.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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