Dōgen’s statement unfolds as a description of practice that turns inward and then goes beyond the very one who turns inward. To say that “to study the Buddha Way is to study the self” is to insist that the path is not found in something external or distant, but in careful attention to one’s own body–mind and daily conduct. The “self” here includes thoughts, habits, attachments, and ego-driven patterns, all of which are examined through practices such as zazen and mindful living. In this sense, the Buddha Way is realized not by accumulating doctrines, but by seeing directly how one’s own experience is shaped by delusion and conditioning.

The second movement, “to study the self is to forget the self,” points to what happens when this examination becomes deep and sustained. Looking closely, the supposedly solid, separate “I” reveals itself as a changing flow of conditions rather than a fixed, independent entity. As this is seen more clearly, the grip of self-centeredness loosens, and the standpoint of “me over against the world” naturally falls away. “Forgetting the self” does not mean destroying or negating a self in some violent way; it means that the ego no longer stands at the center of experience, claiming everything as “mine.”

Dōgen elsewhere continues this line with the phrase “to forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things,” which clarifies the positive dimension of this forgetting. When self-clinging drops, reality is encountered more directly, and the boundary between self and world becomes less rigid. Each situation, person, and thing can then be experienced as intimately related, revealing what is often called Buddha-nature. In this way, the study of the self matures into a way of being in which the Buddha Way is not something attained by an isolated individual, but is the very life of this interconnected field of experience.