" Dogen takes the basic premise of Buddhism to its ultimate conclusion. And he does so fearlessly. He doesn’t accept any doctrine without question. He is the ultimate skeptic — he’s skeptical even of himself, his own senses, and his own conclusions. That kind of attitude would paralyze most people. Yet Dogen manages to take that skepticism and turn it into something that’s freeing rather than paralyzing. It’s also a very contemporary attitude. As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. "