The heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
Philosophical book review
DOGEN, Shobogenzo, Translated by Normal Waddell and Masao Abe, State University of New York Press, Albany
Anyone who has tried to read Zen texts before, knows how difficult it is to understand their usually cryptic style - in the first place, because the message is condensed to induce reflection in the reader, secondly because the original Zen texts are usually in Chinese or Japanese (languages which are very different in structure from our western languages) and thirdly, because Zen finds its origins in a cultural mindset which is historically different from ours. Given that the texts are already philosophically difficult to grasp for readers closer to those cultures, imagine how high the barriers are for us, western ‘outsiders’.
So a good guide who can explain or annotate the texts is helpful, and if this guide is familiar with both cultures East and West, it is even better. This is why I find “The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō” so interesting: its authors are both eminent translators, each with east-west cross-cultural experience. Norman Waddell, professor International Studies at Otani University in Kyoto, lives in Japan, and Masao Abe taught Buddhism and Japanese philosophy at various important universities in the US such as Columbia, Chicago, Princeton and Hawaii.
“The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō” provides the reader with annotated translations of eight core texts of Shōbōgenzō (which translates something like ‘The Treasury of the true Dharma Eye’). They were written by the 13th-century Zen master Dōgen. Dōgen founded the important Sōtō tradition of Zen, when it migrated as chan from China to Japan (there to become known as zen). This Sōtō tradition considers the attainment of enlightenment as a gradual process (as opposed to the Rinzai tradition, which advocates the instantaneousness of enlightenment) and Sōtō focuses on the practice of meditation – za zen, ‘sitting cross-legged’– as the principal way to realize it.
How to read this book? Some helpful images…
There are a few things that will help the reader to understand and appreciate not only the texts of Shōbōgenzō, but some Buddhist themes in general.
One image or metaphor, which is one of my favorites, is that of the ocean and the waves. The energy in the universe is – by definition – permanent, as per the physical law of conservation of energy. This energy is the only truly permanent thing in the universe. The world of the phenomena and forms is subject to continuous change: it is a world of things ‘becoming’ rather than things ‘being’. We can use this image of the ocean (energy) and the waves (phenomena) to better understand the above. The deepest nature of a wave is ocean. Buddhists call this ocean the ‘buddha nature’. In this way, Zen seeks to attune to the ‘ocean’ in all the things we encounter in our everyday life – we all are just waves on the same ocean, “living buddha natures” if you will.
The totality of phenomena and things in the world is buddha nature, without distinction. “It is never apart from you right where you are.”(p.4)
Buddha-nature is always entire being, because entire being is the Buddha-nature. Entire being is not an infinite number of miscellaneous fragments, nor is it like a single, undifferentiated steel rod. (p.64)
This ocean-and-the-waves image is also useful to further understand the texts around permanence and impermanence, impermanence referring to the waves, and permanence to the ocean/buddha nature. As waves, we see other waves and should realize that these other waves are not so very ‘other’ than we think: only their temporary (impermanent) form is what we observe, but their (permanent) ocean is the same as ours – we are not different and not separate. This means that each phenomenon, thing, or living being is carrier of the entire universe, since we are ‘ocean’. This is what is meant in the third chapter called ‘One bright Pearl’:
“… all is the universe-encompassing bright pearl.” and “… there are no deeds or thoughts produced by something that is not the bright pearl.” (p.36)
The whole moon and the sky in its entirety come to rest in a single dewdrop on a grass tip – a mere pinpoint of water. (p.42)
Subsequently, it is important to live in authenticity, i.e. live rooted in the deep ocean, not just on the surface of the impermanent waves. In order to do this, we need to practice awareness, to learn to understand ourselves, other people, things and situations from the viewpoint of the ocean and not just the waves. In other words: acknowledge and remain aware that we observe the world only through the colored glass that is our mind, our language, our culture with its man-made, collective and individual paradigms.
“The zazen I speak of … it is the things as they are in their suchness.” (p.4)
“It is activity beyond human hearing and seeing, a principle prior to human knowledge and perception.” (p.4)
“When there is life, there is nothing at all apart from life. When there is death, there is nothing at all apart from death. Therefore, when life comes, you should just give yourself to life; when death comes, you should give yourself to death. You should neither desire them, nor hate them.” (p.106)
The path to strengthening our awareness in this way is meditation (and the best approach to meditation for Dōgen is za zen). Because it is by ‘sitting cross-legged’ that the Buddha came to Enlightenment.
“You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not let your time pass in vain.” …
Chapters’ context
The nine chapters of the book are:
1. Fukanzazengi, “The universal promotion of the principles of zazen”: Master Dōgen’s first work and written after he returned from his travels in China. Likely it is written based on a Chinese example text on zen, and intended to transmit the teachings among his Japanese followers.
2. In Bendōwa, “Negotiating the Way”, the second text, Dōgen’s relates his travels and what he learned there, and he presents the practice of zazen as the gateway towards understanding Buddhist dharma (teachings). The text did not originally belong to the Shōbōgenzō, but addresses all its topics and serves as an excellent introduction to the main work – it is a “Zazen in a nutshell”.
3. Ikka Myōju, “One bright Pearl ”, as a title, refers to the words Dōgen picked up from a Chinese zen-master (Hsüan-sha),
4. Genjōkōan, “Manifesting Suchness”, is the condensation of Master Dōgen’s entire teaching. All other Shōbōgenzō texts stem from the Genjōkōan chapter. The central theme is ‘immediate presencing of all things as they truly are in their suchness’, i.e. the ultimate reality of things, untouched by the filter of the human mind.
5. Uji, “Being-Time”, is the most difficult text of the entire Shōbōgenzō. It discusses how time and being are inseparable in the ‘instant present of the ‘I’’.
6. Busshō, “Buddha nature”, is the longest chapter of the Shōbōgenzō. It’s theme is the Buddha-nature.
7. Sammai-Ō-Zammai, “The King of Samadhis Samadhi”. The title refers to Nagarjuna, and translates something like “all rivers flow to sea”, an image to explain how there are different schools for the same Buddha dharma, but for Dōgen there is only one: the way of zazen.
8. Shōji, “Birth and Death”, is the shortest chapter of Shōbōgenzō.
9. The short ninth text, Zazengi (“The principles of zazen”) is an ‘easy read’ after the deep philosophical caliber of the previous eight chapters. And it brings you back to earth, to practice.
“Devote your energy to a Way that points directly to suchness.” (p.5)
Enjoy reading!
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Soul Mountain
Philosophical book review
GAO XINGJIANG, Soul Mountain, translated by M. LEE, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2000
Gao Xingjiang (°1940), Chinese dissident residing in France, writer, playwright, painter and critic, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the millennium year, is best known for his book Língshān (1990), translated as ‘Soul Mountain’. In many ways, the book is a story of life, a personal journey in search of Meaning. It is what happens to anyone suddenly confronted with or conscious of the reality of their own mortality. Life fleets.
At least to me a Westerner, Língshān is not an easy book to read. The different characters don’t have names other than ‘you’, ‘she’, ‘I’ etc, and it takes time to appreciate the fine ambivalence this creates: on the one hand these characters are a variety, they have very different personalities, backgrounds and goals and the fact that they meet at all appears, on the surface, to be totally at random. They have been hurt by life, every single one has his or her situation to deal with. Yet gradually the reader discovers that they come together in the way that a schizophrenic multitude unifies in the single human.
There are 81 chapters to this book, if chapters are the right word. You could call them snapshots, figments, impressionistic pearls of a roaming mind, a Rubik’s cube of scenes that are presented in no apparent sequential order, as if they have been intentionally randomized. Whether they make up a book or not is even discussed in chapter 72. It is not until you, the reader, reach the end and can look back on the work as a whole, that it becomes clear that the characters, and hence also you, have walked a Tao, the path of a bird in the sky.
This journey itself is the most important event of the book. It is only halfway through that ‘I’ appears as a character. Before that, the stories are told in ‘you’, which confronts the reader in a very direct way with a life that is not immediately his/hers. By the time ‘I’ enters, it almost feels like the reader is coming home, or at least on the main road. The goal of the journey, Língshān mountain, is of secondary importance and in the end turns out to be an elusive place ‘I’ cannot reach, it is as much a figment of the mind as everything else in Gao Xingjiang’s Tao of stories. Intentional initiatives by ‘I’ usually remain unsuccessful, or turn out to evolve in unexpected ways at the least. It is only when ‘I’ goes with the flow of events that the gems of life-experience are found. These are the moments of authentic awareness, the main cure to our schizophrenic life. And gradually, the ‘I’-character regains balance.
Pivotal to the book is chapter 52. It is where the different characters come together without actually admitting to the schizophrenic scenario in so many words. “In this lengthy soliloquy you are the object of what I relate, a myself who listens intently to me – you are simply my shadow. As I listen to myself and you, I let you create a she, because you are like me and also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation. So you talk with her, just like I talk with you. She was born of you, yet is an affirmation of myself.” And further: “Like me, you wander wherever you lie. As the distance increases there is a converging of the two until unavoidably you and I merge and are inseparable. At this point there is a need to step back and to create space. That space is he. He is the back of you after you have turned around and left me.” One can almost imagine these being pictured in a Chinese painted landscape, as tiny human figures walking in the shade of the valley where they are swallowed up in the scenery. The entire chapter is a kaleidoscope of I-you-he-she, the relationships between them the facets of a single gem. It is the most philosophical chapter in the book, addressing the question of self and not-self, linking to karma, God, the end of philosophy, and bringing everything back to basics: “If a futile self-made signifier is saturated in a solution of lust and at a particular time transforms into a living cell capable of multiplying and growing, it is much more interesting than games of the intellect.”
Soul Mountain closes with a chapter on the god-frog. Not that God is a frog, God is just not a person. The messages pointing us to the Mystery of life are many, and come to us in many different ways – you just have to be aware of them. Although throughout the story ‘I’ seeks the ancient traditions, (Taoist, Buddhist, shamanic, etc.) and enjoys most encounters, they are just outer forms, carriers of a message but not the message itself. Healing comes not from outside, but from within: it is only when ‘I’ is lost in utter loneliness that there emerges the fullness of the experience, the mystery of life.
