Chinese Chan shapes Dōgen’s vision in the Shōbōgenzō at the deepest levels of authority, practice, and expression. He anchors his teaching in the Chan model of lineage and dharma transmission, continually invoking Chinese patriarchs and especially his own teacher Rujing to ground the authenticity of his perspective. This emphasis on mind-to-mind transmission, rather than mere scriptural learning, reflects a Chan conviction that the living encounter between teacher and student is the true conduit of the Buddha-dharma. At the same time, he adopts Chan terminology and stories not as historical ornaments, but as vehicles through which the living truth of practice can be disclosed in the present.

The Chan inheritance is perhaps most evident in Dōgen’s understanding of meditation and realization. Drawing from the Caodong tradition’s “silent illumination,” he articulates shikantaza—“just sitting”—as seated meditation without object or goal, where practice and enlightenment are not two separate stages but a single reality. This non-dual insight, expressed as the oneness of practice and realization, refuses to treat zazen as a technique for attaining some later state; sitting itself is the full expression of inherent Buddha-nature. In this way, the Chan theme of sudden, direct realization is preserved, yet it is woven into an insistence on continuous, wholehearted practice rather than on dramatic experiences.

Chinese Chan also shapes the literary and pedagogical style of the Shōbōgenzō. Dōgen constantly engages Chan koan literature, citing classic cases and re-reading them as living expressions of reality rather than as riddles to be solved. His prose mirrors Chan’s fondness for paradox, wordplay, and the subversion of conventional doctrinal language, turning familiar phrases inside out to reveal a more dynamic understanding of Buddha-nature, time, and the phenomenal world. In this way, Chan’s iconoclastic suspicion of rigid literalism is preserved, yet it is harnessed to a careful, often intricate, philosophical reflection.

Finally, Dōgen’s integration of Chan is visible in his treatment of everyday activity and monastic life. Echoing Chinese models, he portrays cooking, washing, and the smallest details of communal discipline as complete occasions for realizing the Way, not as secondary or mundane concerns. The forms of monastic conduct, inherited from Chinese Chan codes and practice environments, become for him not mere external regulations but the very embodiment of awakening in action. Even where he critiques what he sees as distortions or imbalances in certain Chan approaches—such as an overemphasis on sudden enlightenment without sustained practice—this criticism itself arises from a Chan-informed standard of what authentic practice and transmission should be.