Understanding Dogen’s Shobogenzo: Connecting Philosophical Thought and Reality

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Gudo Wafu Nishijima © Windbell Publications 1992

A Bridge Between the Intellect and Reality

After studying the Shobogenzo for more than 50 years, my confidence is complete: the aim of Buddhism is to realize reality. Gautama Buddha urged us to find reality by practicing Zazen. The traditional interpretation of the sanskrit word dharma is rather vague, referring to some form of teachings. But I think that dharma means not only teachings but points to three areas—principles or teachings, situation or external circumstances, and morals or behavior. These are the components of a philosophy of reality.

Can we, then, have a philosophy of reality, if reality is outside the area which philosophy deals with? Logically we must say the answer is no. Reality and intelligence are completely separate. What kind of system can we construct which will allow us to pursue a description of reality?

It was in just this state that Buddhists developed their unique method of explaining reality. The method is called catvary arya satyani, or the four noble truths, and it explains the relationship between intellectual activities and reality using four viewpoints. The first two viewpoints are the traditional philosophical standpoints, the third is a philosophy of reality and the fourth is experiential reality.

This is the hypothesis that I developed forty years ago from studying the Shobogenzo, and although it did not have the backing even of Buddhist society in Japan I can find no no inadequacies in my idea, no matter how hard I try.

Catvary arya satyani, the four noble truths comprise duhkha-satya, samudaya-satya, nirodha-satya and marga-satya. The traditional interpretation goes as follows:

Duhkha-satya, or the truth of suffering says that all things and phenomena in this world are suffering.

Samudaya-satya or the truth of aggregates says that the cause of suffering is desire.

Nirodha-satya, or the truth of denial says that we should rid ourselves of desire.

Marga-satya, or the truth of the right way says that when we rid ourselves of all desire we will realize the truth.

When I read this traditional interpretation of the four noble truths, I found it so dogmatic and illogical I could not accept it. To say that all the world is suffering seems to me the height of dogmatism. Of course the world often seems to be full of sadness, but the assertion that all is suffering in the world is pessimistic beyond words. And to say that the cause of all this suffering is desire is too dogmatic. I think that fundamentally desire is at the root of our life force. It is impossible for us to get rid of desire and continue living. If Buddhism were to insist that we should destroy all desire in ourselves, then it is urging us to do the impossible. And the last of the truths is not clear. What is the nature of the truth that will be realized? It is said that we should follow the eightfold right path, but no clear explanation of these eight paths existed in Gautama Buddha’s time. What is meant by right? The four noble truths is supposedly at the center of the Buddhist teachings, but it seemed to me impossible to believe in such a dogmatic and biassed set of ideas.

After I had read the Shobogenzo and become familiar with Master Dogen’s thought, I found a new interpretation of the four noble truths. It is an interpretation which allows us to combine our intellectual explanations and reality. I found the unique method that Master Dogen uses to connect philosophical thought and reality. I have called that method the theory of three philosophies and one reality.

To illustrate this method I will use chapter (3) Genjo Koan, which is the third chapter in the 95-chapter edition of the Shobogenzo, but was the first chapter in the earlier 75-chapter edition. It thus has special significance in that I think here Master Dogen lays out his philosophical viewpoint for the reader. The first paragraph of Genjo Koan is:

“When all things and phenomena exist as Buddhist teachings, then there are delusion and realization, practice and experience, life and death, buddhas and ordinary people. When millions of things and phenomena are all separate from ourselves, there are no delusion and no enlightenment, no buddhas and no ordinary people, no life and no death.

Buddhism is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so [in reality] there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are people and buddhas.

Though all this may be true, flowers fall even if we love them, and weeds grow even if we hate them,and that is all.”

This paragraph is composed of four sentences. The first is: “When all things and phenomena exist as Buddhist teachings, then there are delusion and realization, practice and experience, life and death, buddhas and ordinary people.” What does the sentence mean? This sentence describes the situation when we think about the world on the basis of an idealistic philosophical system—a set of teachings. From this basis we can find differences between many categories; delusion and realization, practice and experience, life and death, buddhas and ordinary people. This contrasts with the second sentence which says that there are no differences if we view the world “when millions of things and phenomena are all separate from ourselves.” This second sentence tells us that if we view the world separate from our own subjective viewpoint, that is objectively, we can find no difference in value between delusion and enlightenment, buddhas and ordinary people, life and death. They are all concrete facts and have equal value as such. This is the scientific or materialistic viewpoint. Master Dogen clearly distinguishes here between the philosophical standpoints of the idealist and the materialist.

At the same time, in the third sentence he separates the Buddhist viewpoint from these first two: he says that Buddhism is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so in reality there are people and buddhas. Master Dogen is saying that Buddhism is different from relative comparisons in terms of large or small, heavy or light. Of course the meaning of the phrase “originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity” is not exact, but he seems to be saying that Buddhism does not belong to the area where we compare; where we say this is more valuable than that, this is not as important as that, and neither does it belong to the area of physical comparisons.

Here, we should pause for careful thought. Is it possible to have a “philosophy” which does not belong to the discriminating intellectual area? Is there a philosophical area in which we can transcend both subjective and objective criteria? The only tool we have to think about philosophical problems is the intellect. What does it mean to transcend philosophy in the area of philosophy?

At times our thoughts are of the nature “I think this”, or “I believe in this.” We use our own internal ideas and beliefs to construct a picture of the world. Our attitude is subjective. Philosophy which is constructed on the basis of our subjective thoughts is called subjectivism.

At other times we base our thoughts on our sense perceptions. We perceive the material world through the senses and make sense of what we perceive with our intellect. This is objectivism.

Subjectivism and objectivism, idealism and materialism, form the two fundamental types of philosophy. Both are pursuits of the intellect. We can also find the existence of philosophies which are mixtures of the two basic types. But can we find a philosophical system which does not fit into any of these three groups? The answer is of course no. It is impossible to construct a philosophy which is not somehow based on either idealism, materialism, or a mix of the two; this is the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is without question restricted to the area of the intellect.

But in the third sentence of Genjo Koan, we see Master Dogen insisting that Buddhism is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, over all kinds of relativistic analyses. The word “Buddhism” in the sentence is butsu-do in Japanese. Butsu means Buddha or Buddhist, and do means way, principle, or moral criterion. So the word translated as “Buddhism” also refers to Buddhist behavior, conduct or action. I think that in this sentence Master Dogen is saying that Buddhism is not in the same area as philosophical analysis, whether idealistic or materialistic. I think that the transcendent area that Master Dogen is referring to is the area of our behavior or conduct; that is our actions themselves.

Thiis is a very important point in understanding Buddhist teachings. Philosophers are prone to believe that the intellect is absolute; that there is nothing that we cannot analyze with the tools of logic, nothing that we cannot describe or discuss in words. Master Dogen gives an example in (10) Shoaku Makusa of this tendency of ours to cling to the intellect as the all-powerful. He quotes a discussion between a famous Chinese poet, and Buddhist Master Choka Dorin:

‘Haku Kyo-i of the Tang Dynasty was a lay disciple of Master Bukko Nyoman, and a second- generation disciple of Master Baso Do-itsu. When he was the governor of the Koshu district he studied under Master Choka Dorin.
One day Kyo-i asked, “Just what is the great intention of the Buddha’s teaching?”
Master Dorin said, “Not doing wrong. Doing right.”
Kyo-i said, “If that is so, even a child of three could speak such words!”
Master Dorin said, “Even though a child of three can speak this truth, an old man of eighty cannot practice it.”
At these words, Kyo-i immediately prostrated himself in thanks, and then he left.’

The story emphasizes the absolute difference between saying “don’t do wrong” and actually not doing wrong. In our day to day lives we are prone to forget this difference, the difference between the idea of right conduct and right conduct itself. This is one of the most important tenets of Buddhist philosophy; the fundamental and absolute difference between thought and action. Buddhists found that the area of our actions, our conduct, our behavior in this world is completely different from the areas of intellectual analysis or sense perception. This is the meaning of Master Dogen’s statement in Genjo Koan:

“Buddhism is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so [in reality] there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are people and buddhas.”

Although the sentence is a statement of Master Dogen’s philosophical framework, it does not lay out an intellectual concept; it refers to our real actions. And it says that our real actions are outside the philosophical area; they transcend it.

We now have a problem. Can we permit Buddhist philosophy to contain statements which are not statements of philosophy as such, but which talk about something beyond philosophy? Can we affirm such a philosophical system as valid and rational? In the tradition of western thought, this is not acceptable. But unless we accept it and move forward we will not be able to understand Master Dogen’s philosophy at all. We will have to reject it as a philosophical system.

In western philosophy there is one method which reminds me of this problem. It is the method of dialectic, much valued by the German philosopher Hegel (thesis, antithesis and synthesis) and used by Karl Marx in developing the doctrine of dialectic materialism. Master Dogen uses a tool similar to dialectic in explaining the triangular relationship between subjectivism, objectivism and Buddhism.

It is clear that Master Dogen thinks that Buddhism belongs to an area outside the intellectual area; that is, it is not intellectual analysis per se. But at the same time, he puts forward Buddhism as a realistic philosophy. What does a ‘realistic philosophy’ mean?

The Philosophy of Action

I think that the third sentence of Genjo Koan is Master Dogen’s definition of a philosophy of reality. The story about Master Choka Dorin quoted earlier reminds us that we usually miss the difference between intellectual ability and action itself. But I think that this difference is crucial: Gautama Buddha himself found the clear difference between what we think reality is and what real action is. Buddhist philosophy is a philosophy which is based on this difference. It expounds this difference, and as such is a completely new philosophy. I call it the philosophy of action.

At the level of day-to-day life we see clearly that thinking about eating is completely different from the actual experience of eating. And the taste of the food is separate and different from the action of eating. This much is clear, but we often fail to recognize such simple facts. This is of fundamental importance to a clear understanding of Buddhist philosophy.

Action is described in Buddhist theory as the contact between subject and object. It is the meeting of inside and outside. This is seen in the Buddhist insistence that mind and body are one. Action always takes place in the present moment. Time here and now is the subject of the chapter in the Shobogenzo titled Uji. In this chapter Master Dogen explains that the present moment is the stage for all action.

So action is different from thinking. Action is different from perceiving with the senses. Action does not exist without a denial of thinking. Action does not exist without a denial of sense perception—because action is outside of the area of thought and perception At the same time, it is not possible to construct a philosophy which does not have an intellectual base. So the philosophy of action is by its very nature an anomaly. It is based on the denial of intellect and sense perception, but it relies on both. This is a true dialectic. This is also a true contradiction. It is the contradiction between intellect and reality. In the area of the intellect, we should never accept logical inconsistency, and we should never give way to the view held by some that Buddhist theory is beyond logic. As far as intellectual explanation can go, we should retain strict logical rules to developing any theoretical structure. But the philosophy of action points to something beyond an intellectual image. This is why it is so difficult to give it a place in the philosophical systems of the west. But its time has come: to move beyond the intellectual bounds of the existing philosophies of our civilization, we need the third philosophy.

Reality

Having mapped out the basis for our new philosophical viewpoint, we are prone to forget that this new philosophy is still just that. The philosophy of action can never catch the ineffable nature of reality itself—it can only point the way. And the reality which we all experience is completely different from any philosophies we may construct. It can never be fully described in words. This is why many writers attempt to catch reality with symbolic expression and poetry.

Master Dogen says in the last sentence in the paragraph in Genjo Koan, “Thought all this may be true, flowers fall even if we love them and weeds grow even if we hate them, and that is all.” In this sentence he tries to express the ineffable nature of reality.

The use of symbolic expressions to capture the nature of reality itself is a step that we cannot find in the same way in western philosophical thought. It is a step beyond the three-phased thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is a step beyond philosophy itself. Explanations of reality can never be reality. This is why I call my four-phased philosophical system three philosophies and one reality.

Three Philosophies and One Reality

There have been two main philosophical systems in the history of western thought: idealism and materialism. It is easy to find the basis for these two systems in the human thought process itself. At first, when we think about a philosophical problem, our train of thought steps forward from logical premise to logical premise. We construct a rational framework in our minds and it is this entity which becomes the object of our thoughts or beliefs. Out thoughts are based on the intellect itself. This was the way that Plato proceeded and is normally referred to as idealism; that is, a philosophy centered on ideas themselves. The effect that idealistic thought has had on the history of western philosophy can never be underestimated.

But in the history of thought we can find another distinct stream; one in which the rational framework we construct is based on perception of the external world through the senses. What we perceive through our senses gives us a mental picture of the external world. We base our thoughts and beliefs on this information from outside the mind. That substance which is outside the mind we call matter. And a rational framework based on matter is referred to as materialism.

These two basic philosophies arise from different sources and are fundamentally opposed to each other. The fact is that there are no grounds for us to decide which of these two world views is true. For thousands of years idealistic philosophers have insisted that idealism is the truth, that ideas are the true perfection, and materialistic philosophers have disagreed, insisting that the physical world is the true reality. This conflict, although when looked at from afar seems almost comical, has occupied the minds of many sincere thinkers for as long as we can find records.

Gautama Buddha noticed this conflict, as it arose in his own searchings, and was greatly concerned to find a solution. After a long and sincere search he found one day that he was living in reality, not in the area of human intelligence which is the home of both materialism and idealism. In the intellectual area there are two viewpoints only; idealism, based on a subjective view of reality, and materialism which is based on an objective view. Subject and object can be differentiated absolutely in our minds. This is in fact what Master Dogen is saying in the first paragraph of Genjo Koan. Both idealism and materialism have equal claims to be the right description of reality; we can never decide which is the better of the two.

Gautama Buddha found that the solution to the conflict between the two fundamental philosophical systems was to view things from a third area, which he called nirodha satya, or the philosophy of denial. By denial, we mean denial of both intellectual thinking and of sense perception. At the same time, this denial suggests a backdrop of action—which does not belong to the area of the mind or the senses. But does life include areas which are out of the area of our intellect and senses? It seems as strange insistence. My answer is yes. For example, concepts and names of objects are intellectual tags, but the entities themselves are nameless; they exist as they are—nameless—in an area with no name. This is a very important fact, but one which is prone to be overlooked in this world of ingrained intellectual habit in which we live. We tend to think that real things and phenomena surrounding us are identical to the concepts we have of them, and therefore we do not distinguish between things as we see them with the intellect or senses and things in nameless reality. This is the delusion which Gautama Buddha uncovered in the human condition.

To recap, then, there have been three basic streams of philosophical thought in history; idealism, materialism, and philosophical systems which are a mixture of the two. These mirror the two basic modes of thinking; thought based on the mind and thought based on perception. Besides these three streams, we can find no other philosophical systems which will stand up to scrutiny. Recently, however, particularly in the area of Buddhist philosophy, we have seen the emergence of a “philosophy” which is based on the concept of sunyata or emptiness.4 These thinkers propose a philosophical system which is different from idealism, materialism and their combinations, but still in the intellectual area. To me as a Buddhist monk, their standpoint is completely without foundation.

It sometimes seems, in the first paragraph of Genjo Koan, that Master Dogen may be suggesting the existence of a strange area of the intellect which is not idealistic or materialistic or a combination of the two. But I think this is a misunderstanding of what he means by transcendence of abundance and scarcity. To transcend abundance and scarcity means to get out of the areas of intellect and sense perception, it does not mean to get rid of these two areas within the intellect—it is not an intellectual denial of the intellect resulting in “Emptiness.” It is impossible for us to rid ourselves of the difference between abundance and scarcity within the areas of mind and sense perception. But Gautama Buddha and Master Dogen alike discovered that area which is not within the mind or perception—the area of action. The discovery of this area and the clarification of its nature in philosophical terms solves the problem of the conflict between idealism and materialism. This is Buddhism’s true contribution to world philosophy.

Both Hegel and Marx seemed to have noticed the need for a resolution to this conflict, and they both attempted to find a philosophy that rose above this difference. Neither was successful, because their philosophies did not in the end point to a reality beyond the areas of the intellect or sense perception. Although Hegel’s interest in world history suggests his interest in the real world outside the world of ideas, he became trapped in his concept of “world spirit” which pulled him back to intellectual conclusions. Marx’s interest in material solutions trapped him in his belief in the ultimate reality of matter, and in the end he too, failed in his attempts to transcend the conflict.

Buddhist dialectic, however, differs in important ways from Hegelian or Marxist dialectic in that Buddhist dialectic has four phases—thesis, antithesis, synthesis and reality. The Buddhist dialectic says that there are three kinds of ways to view reality, but in the end the object of our explanations does not exist in our intelligence; it exists as it is in nameless reality. So in this sense, Buddhist philosophy serves as a bridge between philosophy and reality. This is why Buddhist theory seems so difficult to grasp.

Finally, reality cannot be put into words. Buddhists use the simile of a finger pointing at the moon. The moon is a symbol for reality and the finger is symbolic of philosophical explanation. Ironically, the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics remain trapped by the excellence of their intellectual explanations. But Buddhism points to the real world in an essentially practical way.

It is a sad and yet amusing fact that we human beings have for thousands of years mistaken the picture of the world that we have constructed with our excellent intellectual abilities for the real world in which we exist. We have failed to recognize the existence of reality. Even though we are living in reality, we are largely unable to recognize the fact.

But Gautama Buddha recognized that fact after his practical efforts in pursuing the truth, and I feel that the world is now entering a new phase—a phase in which we are finding out the nature of the reality in which we live; not a world only of the mind, nor a world of material substance alone, but a real world. This, I believe, is the reason why many people are now showing an interest in Buddhist belief.

But the real world is ineffable, beyond description. and this is the reason that both Gautama Buddha and Master Dogen urged us to practice Zazen. Zazen teaches us the true nature of reality.

In the ultimate phase, then, we have to think about what is impossible to think about. This is the fundamental reason why Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo appears so difficult. But if we do study the Shobogenzo we can find a philosophical system which is based on realism—a philosophy for today.

source

http://www.thezensite.com/zenwritings/understandingShobogenzo.pdf

About Gudo Wafu Nishijima

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Gudo Nishijima talks about life of Zen monk Dogen (1)

Gudo Nishijima on Zen monk Dogen - part 2

Gudo Nishijima on Dogen III - Dogen in China

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Just think of the trees: they let the birds perch and fly, with no intention to call them when they come and no longing for their return when they fly away.

If people’s hearts can be like the trees, they will not be off the Way.

Langya

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