Shinji Shōbōgenzō Dahui Zonggao, the famous 12th century popularizer of koans in Song Dynasty China, wrote a collection of kōans with the Chinese title Zhengfa Yanzang (正法眼藏). In Japanese this is read as Shōbōgenzō, using the same kanji for its title as Dōgen's later work. When Dōgen visited China in 1223, he first studied under Wuji Lepai, a disciple of Dahui, which is where he probably first came into contact with Dahui's Zhengfa Yanzang. In his book Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation, the modern scholar Carl Bielefeldt acknowledges that Dōgen likely took the title from Dahui for his own kōan collection, known now as the Shinji Shōbōgenzō. He later used the same title again for what is now his most well known work, the Kana Shōbōgenzō (now almost always referred to simply as "the Shōbōgenzō"): Indeed the fact that Dōgen styled his effort "Shōbō genzō" suggests that he had as his model a similar compilation of the same title by the most famous of Sung masters, Ta-Hui Tsung-kao [Dahui Zonggao]. Unlike the latter, Dōgen was content here simply to record the stories without interjecting his own remarks. A few years later, however, he embarked on a major project to develop extended commentaries on many of these and other passages from the Ch'an literature. The fruit of this project was his masterpiece--the remarkable collection of essays known as the kana, or "vernacular", Shōbō genzō. Compilation of the Shōbōgenzō The different component texts—referred to as fascicles—of the Kana Shōbōgenzō were written between 1231 and 1253—the year of Dōgen's death (Dōgen, 2002, p. xi). Unlike most Zen writings originating in Japan at that time, including Dōgen's own Shinji Shōbōgenzō and Eihei Koroku, which were written in Classical Chinese, the Kana Shōbōgenzō was written in Japanese. The essays in Shōbōgenzō were delivered as sermons in a less formal style than the Chinese language sermons of the Eihei Koroku. Some of the fascicles were recorded by Dōgen, while others were recorded by his disciples. Dōgen rearranged the order of the fascicles that make up the Shōbōgenzō several times during his own lifetime, and also edited the content of individual fascicles. After his death, various editors added and removed fascicles to make different versions of the Shōbōgenzō. In pre-modern times there were four major versions that consisted of 60, 75, 12, and 28 fascicles, with the 60 fascicle version being the earliest and the 28 fascicle