The figure of Zen master Dōgen 道元 (1200—1253), founder of the Japanese Sōtō school of Buddhism, has in the last decades been in the center of interest of both Japanese and Western scholars given especially his innovative and original, yet also intriguing and often paradoxical teaching. While on the one hand, Dōgen was a traditional, almost a conservative Buddhist teacher and Zen master in that he attached value to the practice of seated meditation (shikan taza 只管打坐) that he is particularly famous for, he was also surprisingly unrestrained and unconventional in his use of language. The topic of Dōgen’s use of language is seldom ignored by scholars, yet only rarely explored in greater detail compared to the message of his writings. In this paper, my intention is to illustrate Dōgen’s rhetorical innovations and verbal creativity, which enabled him to formulate an original teaching that distinguishes him from his contemporaries and the other personages in Japanese Buddhism. I will propose a set of aspects regarding Dōgen’s original use of language, ranging from tendencies that would today be labelled as morphological, semantic and/or rhetorical. Based on examples from Dōgen’s masterpiece Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵), I will also illustrate how he innovatively employed Chinese words and expressions in a Japanese language context and how he created new meanings by the various approaches he employed.