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Philosopher, Religious Thinker or Contemplative Practitioner? Making Sense of Dōgen Beyond Zen Modernism

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Abstract

Van der Braak reflects on the different approaches to understanding Dōgen’s work. For his own, he uses the philosophical hermeneutics of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). According to van der Braak, for Gadamer, understanding is possible through a merging of horizons, one’s own with that which one aims to understand. Regarding Dōgen, a central claim of Gadamer’s approach to understanding is that it is impossible to understand Dōgen “as he really is” or to understand what he wrote “as he really meant it”—Dōgen’s authorial intention is necessarily inaccessible. Since we do not have Dōgen before us, the only access we do have, even using his texts and studying the practices handed down in the Sōtō Zen tradition, is by way of imaginatively reconstructing him. Making sense of Dōgen is always imagining Dōgen. Such imaginings are created even before we encounter one of his texts. They are formed according to our subconscious pre-understandings (Vorverstehen): understanding him as a philosopher, as a religious thinker, as a prophet, or as a miracle worker. This pre-understanding, then, continues to color our imagination, even if we read Dōgen with an open mind.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

  2. 2.

    For the importance of enactment with regard to Dōgen’s view of zazen, see Leighton, “Zazen As an Enactment Ritual,” in Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice, Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 167–184.

  3. 3.

    Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

  4. 4.

    Wirth, Schroeder, and Davis (eds.). Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016).

  5. 5.

    Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962).

  6. 6.

    Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  7. 7.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō,” in Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World, R.C. Steineck (ed.) (Leiden: Brill, 2018a), 577–606.

  8. 8.

    Watsuji, Shamon Dōgen [Dōgen the Shramanera, 1926], in Watsuji Tetsurō Zenshū, Abe Yoshishige (ed.), volume 4,. (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1962), 156–246.

  9. 9.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō,” 577.

  10. 10.

    See Tanabe, Shōbōgenzō no tetsugaku shikan [My view of the Philosophy of the Shōbōgenzō], (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1939); Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982); Abe, A Study of Dōgen: his Philosophy and Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992).

  11. 11.

    Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004), xvi.

  12. 12.

    Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i, 1981); Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-nature: Dōgen’s understanding of temporality (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990); Heine, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985); Heine, Readings of Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020); Olson, Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000); Müller, Dōgens Sprachdenken: historische und symboltheoretische Perspektiven, (Freiburg: Alber, 2013); Müller, “Philosophy and the Practice of Reflexivity. On Dōgens Discourse about Buddha-Nature,” in Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World, R.C. Steineck (ed.) (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 545–576; Raud, “The Existential Moment: Rereading Dōgens Theory of Time,” in Philosophy East and West 62, no. 2 (2012): 153–173; Raud, “Thinking with Dōgen: Reading Philosophically into and beyond the Textual Surface,” in Whither Japanese Philosophy, Nakajima Takahiro (ed.) (Tokyo: UTCP, 2013) 27–35; Raud, “Dōgen’s Idea of Buddha-Nature,” Asian Philosophy 28, no. 4 (2015): 332–347; Raud, “Dōgen and the Linguistics of Reality,” Religions 12, no. 5 (2021): 331; Davis, “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, W. Edelglass and J. L. Garfield (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 251–259; Davis, “The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism,” in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 348–360; Kopf, Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida and a Phenomenology of No-Self (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001).

  13. 13.

    See e.g. Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Müller, Dōgens Sprachdenken: historische und symboltheoretische Perspektiven, (Freiburg: Alber, 2013); Raud, “Dōgen and the Linguistics of Reality,” Religions 12, no. 5 (2021): 331; van der Braak, “Dōgen on Language and Experience,” Religions 12, no. 3 (2021): 181.

  14. 14.

    Shaner, The bodymind experience in Japanese Buddhism: a phenomenological perspective of Kūkai and Dōgen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985); Kopf, Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida and a Phenomenology of No-Self (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001); van der Braak, “Nietzsche and Japanese Buddhism on the Cultivation of the Body: To What Extent does Truth Bear Incorporation?” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2009): 223–251.

  15. 15.

    See McMahan, “Repackaging Zen for the West,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, C.S. Prebish and M. Baumann (eds.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 218–229; McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  16. 16.

    See e.g. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1934).

  17. 17.

    Taylor, A Secular Age (Boston: Belknap Press, 2007). For critical evaluations of Zen modernism and Suzuki’s part in it see Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 42, no. 3 (1995a): 228–283; Sharf, “Sanbōkyōdan: Zen and the Way of the New Religions,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22, no. 3–4 (1995b): 417–458. For a more nuanced view on this process, and Suzuki’s role in it, see Hori, “D.T. Suzuki and the Invention of Tradition,” The Eastern Buddhist 47, no. 2 (2019): 41–81. See also Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  18. 18.

    van der Braak, Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor and Zen Buddhism in the West (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2020). For a description of the cross pressures between such a modernized presentation of Zen to the West and historical-critical studies, see Heine, “Introduction: Fourth-Wave Studies of Chan/Zen Buddhist Discourse,” Frontiers of History in China 8, no. 3 (2013): 309–315; Heine, From Chinese Chan to Japanese Zen. A Remarkable Century of Transmission and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  19. 19.

    Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist, xvii.

  20. 20.

    Even though he admits to having done so himself in Steineck, Rappe, and Arifuku (eds.). Dōgen als Philosoph (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002).

  21. 21.

    Tanahashi (ed.), Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Zen Master Dōgen’s Shobo Genzo (Boulder: Shambhala, 2012).

  22. 22.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō.” (Leiden:Brill 2018a), 579.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 585.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 588.

  25. 25.

    Tanahashi, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 38.

  26. 26.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō.” (Leiden:Brill 2018a), 590.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 592.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 593.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 594.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 597.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 597–598.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 598.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 602.

  34. 34.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō.” (Leiden:Brill 2018a), 582.

  35. 35.

    Nevertheless, Steineck argues that the Shōbōgenzō is not a philosophical text according to this definition.

  36. 36.

    Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), here: 104.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 105.

  38. 38.

    See George Wrisley, “Dōgen as Philosopher, Dōgen’s Philosophical Zen.” Presented at the workshop, “Dōgen’s texts: Manifesting philosophy and/as/of religion?” January 21–23, 2021.

  39. 39.

    Quoted in Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 22.

  40. 40.

    Kim, Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004), xviii.

  41. 41.

    See Steineck, “‘Religion’ and the Concept of the Buddha Way: A Study of Semantics of the Religious in Dōgen.” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques 72, no. 1 (2018b): 177–206, for a much more elaborate discussion.

  42. 42.

    Steineck, “A Zen Philosopher? – Notes on the Philosophical Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō.” (Leiden:Brill 2018a), 603.

  43. 43.

    See George Wrisley, “Dōgen as Philosopher.”

  44. 44.

    Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  45. 45.

    Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 27.

  46. 46.

    Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

  47. 47.

    Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  48. 48.

    Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 63–64.

  49. 49.

    Davis, “Introduction: What is Japanese Philosophy?” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy (New York: Oxford UP, 2020), 53–54.

  50. 50.

    For a contextualized approach to Dōgen see Heine, From Chinese Chan to Japanese Zen. A Remarkable Century of Transmission and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018).

  51. 51.

    Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 82. See also Maraldo, “A Call for an Alternative Notion of Understanding in Interreligious Hermeneutics,” In Interreligious Hermeneutics, 89–115 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010) for a call to expand epistemic approaches to also include embodied epistemologies with regard to the field of interreligious hermeneutics.

  52. 52.

    Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson, A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 14.

  53. 53.

    See their writings in my bibliography. See also Garfield, Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) for an extensive discussion of these matters.

  54. 54.

    See Wirth, Schroeder, and Davis (eds.), Engaging Dōgen’s Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening. (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016).

  55. 55.

    van der Braak, Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor and Zen Buddhism in the West (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2020), 227–235, for a discussion of these topics in the Shushōgi.

  56. 56.

    For another indication of these shifting tides, see Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

  57. 57.

    Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 117. In 2021, the name of the chair was changed to “Comparative Philosophy of Religion,” in order to better fit with the structure of the Faculty of Religion and Theology.

  58. 58.

    See Komjathy (ed.), Contemplative Literature: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on Meditation and Contemplative Prayer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015); Komjathy, Introducing Contemplative Studies (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018).

  59. 59.

    See the ISCR 2022 report.

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    André van der Braak

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Ralf Müller

  2. History, Anthropology, & Philosophy, University of North Georgia, Gainesville, GA, USA

    George Wrisley

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van der Braak, A. (2023). Philosopher, Religious Thinker or Contemplative Practitioner? Making Sense of Dōgen Beyond Zen Modernism. In: Müller, R., Wrisley, G. (eds) Dōgen’s texts. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42246-1_1

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