Mike Chodo Cross

Mike Chōdō Cross is a British Sōtō Zen priest, translator, and Alexander Technique teacher — Gudō Wafu Nishijima's principal English-language dharma heir and the man who, more than anyone else in the Nishijima line, made Dōgen's writings readable in modern English^[1]. As Nishijima's long-running student and close collaborator he produced, jointly with his teacher, **a complete English translation of Dōgen's ninety-five-fascicle Kana Shōbōgenzō** — published in four volumes by Windbell Publications and the Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, and recognised in the en.wikipedia article on Nishijima as one of only three complete English Shōbōgenzō translations in existence^[1].

Cross's textual approach is shaped by a distinctive parallel career. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique he carries an unusual sensitivity to the body, posture, and the somatic dimension of Zen practice; this informs both his rendering of Dōgen's notoriously slippery prose and his independent commentary work — including his book *Sitting–Dharma–Just Sit* and the long-running *Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching* commentary blog, where he has, sometimes in respectful disagreement with his teacher, continued to interpret the Shōbōgenzō chapter by chapter^[2].

His public profile is quieter than Brad Warner's, but his lineage role is at least as load-bearing: by the simple fact of having translated the entire ninety-five fascicles into English, he has shaped how an entire generation of Western readers — including most of the practitioners who first encountered Dōgen through the Nishijima-Cross edition — understand what Dōgen actually wrote^[2].