Episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'

Specter is a radio. Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel. For more episodes and to support the podcast go to Weird Studies.com. Today we're talking about Genja Kahn, which is an essay by Doge and Zenji A.H. Doge and 13th century Japanese Zen philosopher, arguably the most important philosopher in the Zen tradition. Now as a threshold matter, I already find myself tripping over my words, which doesn't auger well for the rest of this conversation I suppose. But even talking about Doge and as a philosopher introduces kind of an interesting challenge and this is something I've been thinking about this week. So I've had a couple of people saying nice things about the show, which is very much appreciated. And one thing that people sometimes say to me is like, "Oh yeah, well, it's really interesting that you guys are really getting into a lot of stuff about religion." That always wrong puts me because I never think that we're talking about religion. I always think that we're talking about just ideas, philosophical ideas, or maybe metaphysical ideas if I want to be more precise. But that to me is not synonymous with religion. But for many, perhaps even most listeners, if they hear us talking about, for example, our show on Philip K. Dick, we kept talking about the programmer, or I used the word the artificer. But you could just as easily use the word God, right? Those are all kind of synonyms. But calling it God places this squarely in the realm of something we call religion. Whereas if I talk about the patterner, the programmer, or whatever, that feels like either a way of framing it so it isn't quite so religious or else it's a fig leaf that I'm using to avoid using the G word, right? But either way, people are listening to this stuff and be like, "Oh, I know what this is. This is religion." And I guess I have a threshold problem with that because we talked about this actually last thing we were recording, which was the Heraclitus episode. With Heraclitus, we say, "Well, what is Heraclitus?" Well, he's a philosopher and we have no problem with that. There's centuries of practice that hallowed the notion of calling Heraclitus a philosopher. But the kinds of things he's playing with, the kinds of ideas he's playing with, fall just as easily, under the rubric of what we call religion. And it's almost just a matter of convention that we say, "Well, if they're ancient and Greek, they're philosophers." Religion as a separate category, and this is something I said, I think, when we were talking about Heraclitus, religion as a kind of autonomous, separate category of human experience and activity. The idea of defining religion as this special sphere, as opposed to something that just touches everything we do, that's a modern idea. Like the idea of calling it religion would not have occurred to anybody outside the North Atlantic West before about 400 years ago. At least that's my understanding that the religion or various cognates of that word religion have been around for longer than that. But this mental habit of hiving off all metaphysical questions, all questions that do not pertain to observable and material objects and forces. The habit of thinking of all ideas and speculations pertaining to those things as religion. That's a modern habit of mine that just goes along with the habit of holding God as this separate issue within civil society. And so to get back to the question of what is Dougan Zengy? Well, if you were a practicing Soto Zen Buddhist, he is a religious figure. In fact, he's a very important religious figure because he is the person who kind of founds certainly the Soto school as it is survived to the present day. But the way I'm approaching him today is as a philosopher. And I don't propose to answer comprehensively at the front end the question, well, what's the difference? But maybe that's something we can keep in mind as we go forward. When I first started getting interested in Zen Buddhism, and this is about a decade ago, there's a small Zen temple in Bloomington, Indiana called Senshinji, which is headed by a man named Shohaka Okumura. And Okumura is one of the great living exponents of Dougan's thought. And the practice at the Senshinji temple is very oriented to the reading, the study, the interpretation of Dougan's essays. These are a corpus of essays that were collected in a volume called the Shoboganzo, or the treasury of the true Dharma eye. And when I started attending events at this temple, it occurred to me that this was a very odd thing, that there was a sort of a religious aroma with incense and bells and robes all attached to this figure who is just as plausibly what we would call a philosopher as we might think of as a religious divine. And the idea occurred to me, I thought it was funny. Oh, this would be as if in 800 years from now there was a religion that had grown up around Heidegger, and people would be reading being and time with the same exegetical intensity as we are reading Dougan. And they would maybe be chanting passages of it and lighting sticks of incense and wearing robes and taking vows and so on. And basically the thought of Heidegger sanctioning all of these activities or giving all of these activities meaning. And it occurred to me that maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Maybe that would be an interesting thing to want to do. It at least occurred to me that that was a perfectly plausible idea. I could easily imagine a sci-fi future where Heidegger's writings have become "religion" simply because I think that there's always a sort of indeterminate boundary between philosophy and religion that we paper over with a set of assumptions that really don't hold up when you drag them out into the light of day. When I think about religion, so the word "religion" existed obviously before the 16th, 17th, before the Reformation, which is really basically the beginning of the modern concept of religion as creeds or ideologies almost, as political and metaphysical systems that you can exchange one for another that they're like mutually exchangeable. That idea is modern. Religion in the middle ages I think and in antiquity, religion meant they used it in the sense that we would use a word like "observance". So a religious person is someone who observed the rituals, who observed the rights that cared about the gods and their connection with the world and all that. And an irreligious person. We still use the word "irreligion" in this way. An irreligious person is someone who doesn't care for the things that they should care about, right? Which is to bear in mind what theologian "paltillic" called "ultimate concern". So a religious life in the pre-modern ages would be something like a life that takes ultimate concern into consideration and that uses the civil technology that's been developed for actualizing this concern, this care in the social context. So in that sense, religion, if that meaning of religion remains viable to a certain extent, then the connection with philosophy becomes apparent because philosophy necessarily is a concern for the ultimate. I mean, that's what philosophy is about, right? It's about getting to some ground, some ultimate ground of what's going on in a particular situation or in a metaphysical sense. Even if you say there is no ultimate ground, that itself is a statement pertaining to ultimate ground. Exactly. So what's interesting there and what you just said is the arising of new categories that both provide insight into phenomena and also occlude them or be cloud them in a way. So when we have this modern concept of religion, then we start to separate things or art for that matter. At the same time as I would argue that these new categories offer perspectives on things that do have value. Like, there is something to the category of religion or the category of art. The creation of a category is equal. equal parts creation and discovery, I think. So when the modern idea of religion comes up, the tendency for a lot of people would be to say, it will be to discount the category because it's historically determined. Because this category is historical, therefore it's not true. I don't totally buy that. I think there is something to the modern concept of religion that allows us to understand even societies that don't use that concept, that we can't just dismiss it. At the same time as we have to be careful since as a category it's a conceptual apparatus and therefore it offers only a limited perspective. So I agree with you fully. I'm just saying that it's not surprising to me to find that certain traditions, certain thinkers exist in a kind of twilight zone between these categories. Because all these categories are perspectives on realities. As for the idea of Zen being a religion, that there's a whole debate about that is Zen a religion. Well, a lot of Buddhists argue that Buddhism is not a religion, mainly for one reason because it comes from a society that doesn't use that concept, right? Or hasn't until very recently. But also because they believe Buddhists believe that what they're doing is in a sense very, very different from what Christians or Muslims are doing. I don't think that's true. I don't think that it's actually very different. And I would say by the way that the Buddhists I know would all indignantly insist that Buddhism is a religion. Okay, well actually get very, very, a lot of Buddhists I know would get, I think they just get tired of people saying, oh yeah, Buddhism isn't really a religion it's a philosophy because I think a lot of the time it's secular moderns who are saying that to assuage their guilty conscience at flirting with something that they think is uncool. Yeah, you know, religion is super uncool. So you can sort of assuage your conscience by saying, well, but it's not really religion. It's really more of a philosophy which is sort of true, but it's also misleading. I really like the distinction you're making about how it's how people, well I forget how you put it, but observance. It's observance and the way that people observe certain ethical obligations towards one another. And this makes the idea of community or in Buddhism it's Sangha, right? Or we might say the congregation or whatever in more of a Christian context, but like the idea of the community that is bound together by observance, whether it's observance of an orthodoxy, like correct teaching or whether it's observance of orthopraxy, which is correct action. Buddhism is much more about orthopraxy than it is about orthodoxy. But nevertheless, regardless, you have the same sense of like a community bound together by right observation. And I think that is so key to Buddhism. You can't talk about Buddhism without that. So that's why I would say, yeah, Buddhism, fuck yeah, it's religion, of course it is. Well, maybe in a sense we could say that successful philosophies become religions necessarily insofar as religion. That's an interesting thought. Insofar as we can define a religion as a practice, which I think is what we get from Buddhism. And it was through looking at Christianity through the lens of Buddhism that I was able to understand or to embrace or to like dig what was going on in Christianity or Islam for that matter or Judaism. It's that these are practices. Slotterdijk has written some very interesting pages on this idea. Basically, he dispenses with the category of religion. He says what exists is exercise. He calls it exercise. At least in my French translation, I've read it in French. I hope that's the word he uses in English as well. And you must change your life. Yeah, so exercise is practice. And it's practice aimed at transforming yourself, changing yourself. And I think that that-- Hence the title of his book, You Must Change Your Life. Which is a quote from a real K poem. So the idea that a philosopher writes in order to occasion the development of a practice-- and that's the original Aristotle, I think, said the philosophies about living the good life. The good life is the life in which you put into practice certain things that transform you, that allow you to achieve your potential. And so far as religion is aimed itself betterment, or at living the good life, however, you may define that, well, then a good philosophy should become a kind of religion. The idea of a church of Heidegger-- that might seem scary to some people because of Heidegger's associations with Nazism. But if you just ignore that for a second, there's something kind of beautiful about that. What would that church be like? Well, it would involve probably long walks in the country and getting water from wells. And you can imagine a whole liturgy of Heideggerian practice that would be actually a very beautiful thing to behold, especially in an age like our own where we're so far from our natural embeddedness in the earth and all that. There's something about a Heideggerian religion that I find very appealing. And I don't think that would be a betrayal-- I don't think that would be a betrayal of philosophy. And so in that sense, just to get back to Dogeon, I think that if we look at Dogeon as a successful philosopher, then we can look at him as religious. And there's no contradiction there. We can just dive in from that perspective. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] There's an esoteric book I read somewhere that has this great line about how hanging out in spiritual scenes, it'll always get masked up at some point because spiritual scenes have people in them. Yeah. Oh, it's just like-- and it doesn't matter what religion you're talking about. You're going to come up against what the Buddhists politely call partial views all the time, right? Right. So I think the ideas of Zen remain for me, sublime ideas. I'm drawing a distinction between these ideas and the actual execution of these ideas in everyday life. And I'm just talking about ordinary people, people like me, who come together to sit in Zazan and to read fascicles of the Shobokanso. I sometimes find in American Buddhism-- maybe it's different in Japan. I don't know-- is people who are hiding out from the world. I have a friend who was brought up a fundamentalist Christian who is now the furthest thing from a fundamentalist Christian. And she was talking about how the worldview of her family growing up was one of just being afraid of the world. And she would laugh at how they even said the world, the phrase, the world, the world, with this sort of disappointed dip of inflection at the end to signify just how profoundly disappointing the world is. Because there's these people in it, f**king it up. These dumb, unenlightened people, these people who are full of cruelty and stupidity, ignorance, greed, and you come to see the world as inherently fallen as a place where nothing good can happen. And so what you yearn for is transcendence, right? And I'm not saying this is unique to Zen by any means. In fact, that shouldn't be what people aren't grasping for. Because in Zen, it's not about transcendence. It's about the world here and now. So Zen and Dogen in particular insists that that world right here right now, in all of its messy plurality and particularity, is what we have to deal with. It is the world we're in. There is no heaven, there is no better place that we can go to to seek refuge from this one. If there is a Nirvana, if there is a kind of a cessation of suffering to be found anywhere, it can only ever be found here and now in this very moment, right? Yeah. And yet, if that is true, if things are perfectly enlightened, if the microphone before me is perfectly that microphone, if the room I'm sitting in is perfectly that room, if the discomfort I feel as I sit here in this uncomfortable-ass chair is perfectly uncomfortable. It is perfectly thus, right? To really inhabit that worldview, you would say, saying like, "Oh, well, if the world is always already perfectly enlightened, then why am I experiencing it the way everybody experiences it?" As a kind of an endless carnival of fuck-ups and misery and stupidity. The problem then is sort of like you can say, "Well, oh, well, the thing that's preventing you from seeing that the world is perfectly lucid and brilliant and wonderful, the world is one bright pearl." The thing preventing you from seeing that is ignorance. It's illusion. It's a veil of Maya, right? And when you say that, then you have inserted. a nice blade between the world as it is and whatever it is you're talking about. And Dogan is constantly saying, "I'm not talking about some kind of pine in the sky world. I'm talking about the world right here and now." And yet in practice, you find yourself constantly trying to interpose things between yourself and this world. This is actually a call back to our Graham Harmon episode where I was saying, "It's like Dave Hickey's line. There's always a reason not to show us naked people. There's always a reason not to be down with the world as it presents itself to us in the here and now." So what you find very often among Buddhists, ironically, is they are seeking deliverance from the world and therefore treating the world like it's a waiting room. That was one of Dogan's problems. I think one of the questions that spurred him or started his quest and got him going to China and studying there was the question of, "If all things are already Buddha, then why does anyone need to practice?" Absolutely. And if the world is already perfect, then how does ignorance come into the equation to begin with? That's a really interesting question. And it's the same question you'll find in metaphysical discussions on how the one becomes the many or how a good God creates a world that's not perfect. You know, it's the same question. How do things fuck up if everything is perfect in its fundament? And I think that Genjokwan is very much an engagement with that question. Absolutely. Dogan is trying to lay out a way of seeing that accounts for both the absolute perfection of the world as is and the existence of ignorance in such a world. And I really, really, really love his solution to that philosophical problem because that is very much a philosophical problem that undergirds the religious practice. And that if a monk clues into this problem of how ignorance enters into a perfect equation where ignorance shouldn't exist, it becomes very hard for that monk to surmount it. Philosophy is in order as a way to investigate what the words that the religion uses mean. That's why any viable living religion will include a very strong philosophical tradition to discuss what words mean and what concepts and to shape concepts, the kind of Talmudic thing going on. I see Dogan as an absolute genius within the Buddhist tradition in that respect. Like what he does, some of the things he writes in this very short text are philosophical ideas that didn't see the light of day in the west until the 20th century with Husserl and Heidegger and Delos. And the way that he lays them out so simply is absolutely incredible to me because how could you summarize it so beautifully when it took 800 years later it took people, like, tome after tome of philosophical writing to get to the same idea. So that's really one of the things that make me see this text as more than just the work of a man but a kind of like black monolith document that kind of just like boom lands in front of us apes and then we just kind of have to worship it more. That's perfect. Yeah, and so what is his solution? I'll just summarize it. I'll read one line and then we can talk about that. It's near the beginning of the document. He, the second paragraph of the fascicle, he writes, "To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion, that myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening." To me, that line as simple as it is is just packed with meaning. There's a tendency in Buddhism given its roots in India and in certain philosophical schools of thought and also like within Buddhism there are many idealist schools that would conceive of the world as a great self, right? Atman. Yes. And the Yogakara School of Buddhism was very much an idealist kind of school where the self is the real thing and then the world emanates from the self or the world is a projection of the self or the world is a distortion of self. So he's arguing very forcefully against that here. And what he's saying is that when you project yourself onto the world, you delude yourself. When you let things exist as they are and appear to yourself, then you are enlightened. There's a whole bunch of reasons why he says that. So that kind of summarizes his philosophical position. Dogehn, if I had to describe his philosophy, I would say that it's a radical, realist philosophy. It's a realism of things and events and objects. There is no mind required, well, there might be mind of a sort that's required for things to arise, but there's no a subjective mind required for a world to exist. The world exists. But includes always includes a mental component necessarily. So I see it as a kind of like realist pan-psychism. Maybe I'm projecting my own stuff in there. Maybe I'm bringing myself into myriad things, but that really gets us off on the right foot as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. Also, the sentence just before the one that you read, flowers fall even though we love them, weeds grow even though we dislike them. And I'm reading from Shahaka Okamura's translation, but we'll leave in the show notes. There's a site that has something like eight variant translations of the Genjakon. You can just kind of click around and get all these different variant readings. But for the record, I'll just say that I'm reading from a different translation. I'm back and forth between those. Just that line, flowers fall even though we love them, weeds grow even though we dislike them, is just such a poetic line. Leaving aside what it means, I guess one of the things I wanted to also point out about Dogan is that he's a poet. As a text, this is not just a philosophically brilliant text, and I think you're quite right when you say that here is a 13th century Japanese monk cracking into philosophical problems that were not systematically raised in the West until the 20th century. This is very true. One reason why I think he has this extraordinary telegraphic precision, which isn't to say it's easy to read because it's not. It's very puzzling to read. But I think one reason why he is so succinct is because he's a poet. He just has this beautiful poetic imagination. And that is an important thing, I think, to get also about this text. Absolutely. That's a great point, actually, because if we look at in the realm of poetry, then a lot of the ideas that were elaborated by 20th century philosophers were around. A long time before, even in the West. So yes, that's a great point. But the beautiful thing about Dogan is that he's marrying philosophy and poetry, as I think any great philosopher would in order to develop concepts. Well, there's a discussion we could have about that, the difference between art and philosophy. But I think that he's using a poetic mode to do philosophy or a philosophical mode to do poetry. I agree with you. It's largely responsible for the succiveness and pointiness and precision and power of his text. Yeah, it's actually, it's interesting, again, call back to our Graham Harmon episode. I think we mentioned in that episode how, at the end of the third table, Harmon calls for a philosophy that does the work of art or a philosophy conceived as a kind of art. Philosophy must become art. Yeah. And I actually think that Dogan is a wonderful example of that approach to philosophy. Yeah. I think in a way, a lot of the great philosophers have been examples of that. Plato certainly is. Oh, I agree. But that's another discussion, totally. Just to, for listeners, like, what is the passage I read and then the little, the beautiful line that you read afterwards? What does that mean? Conquerately. Well, it means many things and any explanation of it will tar it or reduce it a little bit or limit it. But one thing it means is that reality is as it is and to expect reality to conform to your expectations or to expect reality to conform to your ideas is a doomed proposition. Enlightenment involves accepting and discovering reality as it is. That's certainly one thing it means. And it also means that things are more than they seem to you. And this is an ontological truth that what you see, and he gets into this later, what you see in this world is more than what you can perceive in them. So in the following paragraph, he writes, "When you see forms or hear sounds, fully engaging your body in mind, you intuit Dharma intimately. Unlike things in their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one thing is illumined, the other side is dark." And I really love this because what he's saying is that to accept things as they are, to let myriad things present themselves. By doing this, you are enlightened. In other words, you can see things as they are. But seeing things as they are involves knowing or perceiving or intuiting that those things are more than you can see. It's kind of a tricky thing. What it means is that if I look at the moon and I reduce the moon to my remantial representation of it, so okay, the moon is this. And then I perceive my own concept of the moon, which is drawn from my perception of it, to the moon. I basically confuse that perception with the moon itself. Then I'm not seeing the moon. I'm seeing my own idea of the moon. But if I see the moon, if I let the moon be what it is, so I see only what I see in it. I just accept only what I see. So I see a silver disc. I see this and that. If I just accept it as is, I immediately know that the moon is infinitely more than that. Because I realize that my perception is a perception. There's an idea in the philosophy of Shilderder's and his cinema books. He develops the concept of the perception image from the history of cinema. This is absolutely brilliant shit. So what he says is that at some point in the history of cinema, the POV shot comes into being. That's the point of view shot of the character. So you'll have a shot of a room. You'll see two people. All of a sudden the camera cuts to the point of view of one of the characters. So in a sense, the camera becomes the consciousness of the character. So the POV shot comes into being a point of view shot that those calls it a perception image. But he says it's not an image of what the character perceives. In other words, the point of view shot in order to be what it is in the semiotic network of a film needs to follow shots that aren't point of view shots. So a point of view shot is only a point of view shot if you cut to it. You need to establish an objective space and then with a shot from the like a regular shot, like a wide shot, let's say, or an establishing shot, then you see characters and then you cut to a subjective viewpoint within the objective space you've already established with the camera. Does that make sense? Yeah. When you do that, you cut to the perception of the character. But because that perception image exists in a series of shots that involves images that are objective, you are not just becoming the character. You are actually seeing an image of the character's perception. The POV shot is a shot of the perception. So it's not just becoming the perception. You're actually looking at what a perception is objectively. The camera is always objective into this. Yeah. Perception is bracketed in a kind of quasi-phenomenological way. Exactly. So in other words, the way I read Dogen here is that if you look at the moon and you see it from the in the way I just described as a perception image, you are seeing that your perception of the moon is a perception within an objective context. So you're seeing the perception objectively, which automatically implies that the object you're perceiving is not reducible to that perception. The kiss off sentence of that passage when one side is illuminated, the other is dark. That's one of those poetic lines from Dogen that resonates in my mind independently of its specific context. And even to some degree independently of any concrete or specific meaning, I should point out also these various lines. How do you use those lines? Or how do those lines, how do they work with your with your thinking? Something that's important to comment about is that these are discourses that were intended for practitioners, either lay practitioners or monastic practitioners. Some of them, not from this volume, but from another, the, hey, Colorado code, the vast record of Dogen, their Dharma Hall discourses. And so you meditate for several hours and then you get up and move around and then you sit back down and the abbot of the monastery delivers a discourse, delivers a Dharma talk and very often a Dharma talk based on something that Dogen wrote. Of course, in Dogen's day, it would just be something that Dogen wrote, right? And so then when that's over, you go and you meditate some more. So the utterance, the, what we're calling an essay, as if it's being is entirely as a inert piece of writing, sitting passively between two covers of a book. That's not what these things were at all. These were aids to meditation. These were enhancements of meditation or put another way the meditation is an enhancement to the essay. There are two sides of the same thing of practice enlightenment, which means that what these essays are and what these individual wonderful lines like when one side is illuminated, the other is dark. What they are are little shards of poetic image that lodge in your mind and in meditation, they come to mean things. They float back up to the surface of thought or reflection or whatever or the stream of mind that you're engaged with when you're in meditation. And they mean all kinds of things. Sometimes they disclose a meaning that is completely avanescent. Like the moment the gong goes and you stand up for meditation and you unkink your legs, that moment of realization is gone. I'm going into this perhaps at tedious length just to sort of give you the sense that these lines, they live a life that is somewhat independent of any particular meaning. These phrases do mean things, but they also the way they manifest in the life of a practitioner, you know, how they emerge as it were phenomenologically in one's practice. Practice means meditation, but it means all these other things as well. Everything on the cushion as well as off. These things are like they're like splinters that lodge in your mind and they go to you and they trick you. They almost have agency of their own. This is a weird thought that a line, a sentence or a clause in a dog and essay can have its own agency, but they kind of do and that very line, the one side is illuminated, the other is dark. For me is one of those lines that has this kind of living meaning. Totally. That's the beautiful thing about poetry in general and Dogon in particular here obviously is that in meditation the mind is free to intuit the depths of aesthetic images. So a poetic line will come to you in this whole new light. It can happen in Zazen, but it can also happen taking a walk or you know, living your life. I mean, that's what that's kind of what art does. Like, oh my god, that's what it means. You know, yes, exactly. And then, but it's never just that. The minute a line of text expresses a symbol, then it's by definition infinitely, inexhaustibly interpretable. That's the nature of symbols. And since Dogon writes poetry, his work has that quality. And since this poetry was written within a tradition of meditation, well, then it got the attention that any great work of art deserves. And that's basically what makes Zazen so powerful is this. I love about Zen Buddhism is it's aesthetic and poetic dimension. It's a hugely important part of what Zen is. And you get texts like Tenazaki's texts and praise of shadows that kind of Japanese aesthetic tradition. It's a very beautiful thing. And it allowed for the flourishing of traditions that attributed a lot of importance to the imaginal or symbolic dimension of utterances and artworks and that sort of thing. So yeah, absolutely. And I wouldn't argue that my interpretation of this line exhausts that line. In fact, that line has the same infinite depth as the moon in my example has. So, so that's just the nature of reality is the nature is an inexhaustible jewel. Zen makes systematic that awareness of the inexhaustibility of things. Like, that's part of the package deal that you're going to be aware that I mean the practical outcome of this is like, what can you say about it? Well, what on earth can you say about the Dharma? Right? Dharma being this all-purpose Buddhist word that means both teaching and also means just everything. True things. Right? Then truth. It means a bunch of things. You know, what an earth is there to be said about Dharma? Everything you can say the moment it comes out of your mouth is in some way falsified. There's a title of a book. You have to say something. There's two sides to this utterance. You say, there is nothing to say. And yet you must say something. Yeah. Coming out of meditation very often, you have the feeling that you have experienced something for which there are no words. There is literally nothing to say about your experience. And yet you have to say something because a kind of pure quietism just pure inner illumination and none of that gets out into the world. Well, what good is that? You're not you're not saving all beings, you know, you're not you're not acting out the bodhisattva vow. I vow to to save all beings. Stick around. Yeah. And I will stick around to do it. I will be the last being to enter Devana. Like you're on the Titanic. You make sure everybody's on the lifeboats before you are. You know, how the fuck are you going to be doing that? If you were just sort of in this complacent silent meditation, you have to say something. You have to express it to other people. And yet there's nothing to express. And so this is one of the big co-uns, the big unanswerable riddles of Zen, which nevertheless you are practicing those riddles. You are meditating. meditating on, you were living them every moment of the day, at least you are if you were a much better person than I am. Yeah, there's a difference, I think, between talking about Dharma and saying Dharma, or like speaking Dharma. Yeah, speaking Dharma. And I think that's kind of the idea of speaking in tongues, not the modern charismatic idea of speaking in tongues, but the biblical, mythological instances of this, is that the apostles would speak and everyone, whatever their language was, and everyone understood it because they were speaking the logos itself, right? The idea is that they were not talking about something anymore. Their words were the thing. And I think it's similar to what you just described there. And I believe that poetry, real poetry, or music for that matter, or like, you know, true art, does that. Yeah. Art when it's really doing the art thing, you could almost say that's what makes art, that also almost what defines art is art is the condition not of talking about Dharma. However, we wanted to find that impossible word, but actually speaking Dharma. Absolutely. I would argue very strongly for that. I think that's exactly what good artworks do. So we'll just move on here. But before we do, I just want to say one thing about the, when one side is illuminated, the other is dark. This is a very particular experience that you have in Zen meditation. You know, in meditation, like your mind, your discursive, chattering, endlessly distractible, monkey mind, it eventually quietens down. And it quietens down a little more readily when you've been practicing for a while and you get used to it, right? And when your mind really quietens down, when it really, really quiets down, it's almost sort of like being able to see the stars when you go out into the desert, you know, you're not close to light pollution. So suddenly you can see the Milky Way really, really bright light, right? It's like that. Things become illuminated in the silence of mind and you can become aware of a very great brightness of illumination. I'm speaking somewhat metaphorically of brightness, but things are illuminated just, you know, going with doggins word. And yet if you say, I experienced illumination, you jump off the cushions, I am enlightened. That would be an unbelievably uncool thing to say. But if you did, you would be missing the point because who was it that got enlightened there? Who was it who experienced that illumination? That illumination was there precisely by virtue of the fact that you weren't there, that your egotistical grasping mind shut the fuck up for a second. Then who, then what was illuminated? I don't know. Who was doing the illuminating? I don't know. There are no answers to this, but the moment you snap back to being just who you are, you know, your discursive mind comes fully back online again. Then at that moment, that illumination is extinguished. It becomes dark. Do you see what I'm saying? Where the illumination is I cannot be. When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. And that is quite apart from being a poetic image is actually an empirical reality that people who meditate experience. This is the other side of that sort of like there's nothing to say. And yet you have to say something. All I can say is thank God I'm not a Zen teacher. And I hope nobody listening to this has the least notion that I am doing something in the nature of a Dharma talk that I'm teaching Dharma. Further this thing from it, I'm totally unqualified to do any such thing. I'm approaching this as a philosophical essay. And therefore, as I am talking about it as philosophy, one side is dark. And do you know which side that is that's dark? It's the only thing that matters according to Dogen. The very fact that I'm filling your ears with my words right now means that you're not meditating. You're not practicing. There's a tradition in the West in the philosophy of conceiving the mind, the subjective mind as a kind of light that the intellect casts light upon a dark world and illuminates things. And with our intellectual faculties, we actually illuminate the world. In the old tradition, an Aquinas, especially an Aquinas, intellect becomes a diffuse, divine thing that exists outside of individual human minds. But it doesn't take long after Aquinas for that to fall apart because of the death of the ontological argument for the existence of God. So then therefore the intellect becomes again, once again, the subjective egoic thing. So the modern, scientific position is that reason which exists only in individual human heads is the light that illuminates the world. But what happens in satory is that because I think, well, I've had experiences that I would describe as that. I'm not as unbotive, so I'm not, I don't really, they might offend people or I don't know, I don't really care. Yeah, fuck it. But there are that experiences where objects become luminous. And it is a metaphor, but it's not. Like in moments like that, the world does become kind of, the colors become brighter, objects become more, their dimensions become accentuated. There's no thinking going on. You're seeing something, but you're not thinking the concept of what it is. You're just seeing it. So I remember seeing this yellow house in Vany once and just being blown away by after the fact and in the moment, I was just experiencing it, but after that, blown away by how it revealed itself to me. And this goes back to what we were saying, what I and thou, approaching things as thou, instead of it's, to approach things as thou is to allow a thing to cast that light that you initially reserved, you restricted only to your own intellect. So you're letting, you're letting objects have their own light. So luminosity is a very good metaphor for what's going on there. And what it reveals is, I think what Deloes called pure immanence, the pure immanence of the world, the absolute self-existence of things as they are and the incredible beauty of things as they are. So that I really like the way you interpret the line. I mean that when one side is is illumined, the other is dark. Yes, you are nowhere when this happens. It's precisely that thinking being, that kind of mental ego thing that disappeared in order to let things shine their own light. And yet, to say that you disappear in a nihilistic sense would be completely wrong because experience was certainly there. There was certainly life there. Something exists. And this gets us to the doggins idea of the self. So in doggin and Zen and general, there is no atman, there's no self. There's no like solid core like avocado pit to you that is eternal and transcendent. You are synonymous with your experience. You are a kind of wave of experience. And that's what the self is. That's very similar to Berkson's idea of the self, which is that the self is a contraction. And I really like that word contraction, that you have all these forces and they contract in a certain point and then mistakes itself as a self. That's a very cool way of putting it. And to dissolve the illusion that this self is absolute, transcendent or eternal is to fall from Maya, to fall into the realm of delusion. And doggin talks about this when he describes with his boat analogy. He says, "When you write a boat and watch the shore, you might assume the shore is moving. When you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you see that the boat moves." Similarly, if you examine myriad of things with a confused body in mind, you might suppose that your body and your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self. So that everything is process. Everything is becoming in a very white, heady and kind of way. It is. Another great example of ideas that we're playing with here that we don't really see carefully thought through in the West until the 20th century. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it goes on from there. Every paragraph has analogies. Every paragraph, we could do a show about every single paragraph in this book in essay. Because it really is like an entire book boiled down to a string of extremely compressed and beautifully poetic little. Like stances of a poem. Something that you were describing very beautifully, the feeling of literal luminousness, that things attain when we. As it were, get out of the way and chance to see them. Of course, I'm speaking conventionally when I say we see them. Who the hell knows who sees them. But that is the condition of things being just perfectly thus, being perfectly as they are. And this is what I take dogen to mean when he talks about. in the very end. very first line of this text, when all dharma's are the Buddha dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, Buddha's and living things, or living beings in my translation. We are, you and I are talking about this condition where all dharma's, all things are Buddha dharma. All things are perfectly thus, things are, it sounds weird to say enlightened, but I'm going to go with that, say, all things are enlightened, including rocks and plastic toys that you step on in the middle of the night when you go to get the glass of water. I hate those. I know you know what I'm talking about, but all those things, when all those things, the legos in the floor, whatever, all those things are Buddha dharma, then there is delusion and realization because most of the time we have no fucking idea about any of this. There are just some plastic legos that I stepped on and hurt like a motherfucker and I'm going to yell at my kids in the morning about this. There's delusion, but then there's also the possibility of realization. This was the big question that Dogen had, which is about the arising of the very notion that maybe I should start meditating, maybe I should start practicing because I'm unhappy or something's missing or something's wrong in my conduct of life and in the way the world is. You have to experience the world not as being Buddha dharma. You have to experience that in order to get the idea that you would want to practice in the first place. Right. So when all dharma is a Buddha dharma, there's a distinction to be made between delusion and realization, between just normal life and practice, right? Between life and death, that's also a line in this opening phrase. Life and death, we ordinarily think of life as something that we like and death as something that we hate. You know, I don't want to die and neither do you. And so I'm making a distinction there, right? And Buddha's in living beings, that's the other thing. So the whole line is when all dharma is a Buddha dharma, there is delusion and realization, consciousness, life and death, Buddha's in living beings. You know, in Buddhism, life and death often becomes almost a shorthand. Conditions that we make distinctions between, right? And one such distinction would be between Buddha's in living beings. Living beings are just ordinary-ass people going about their day who don't know about any of this shit. Buddha's are people who have realized it. And yes, he says that. Yeah, I know what you're going to say. What's mega puzzling is the very next line negates all of this, right? Is that what you're going to say? Well, there's a couple of things. But finish your point first. Well, my point was like I was then going to go into the second line where he pretty much negates everything he just said, where he says, "When the ten thousand dharma's are without fixed self, that's like another way of saying when all dharma's are Buddha dharma." Right? Ten thousand, that again, that's a formula expression. It means "murried things." When they're without a fixed self, when they. There is no sense of a. As you say, the pit in the avocado and it essence an inherent being. In other words, when we understand the ten thousand things in light of Buddhist teaching, in light of the Buddha dharma, then he says, "Totally contradicting what he just says, then there is no delusion and no realization. No Buddha's and no living beings. No birth and no death. The negation of all of this stuff. There's no distinction between Buddhas and ordinary people. There's no distinction between delusion and realization. There is no birth and there is no death." All these things are already. Well, which is. I mean, it's crazy. He says in the following paragraph, he says, or the second paragraph of the text, he says, "Those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhas." And then he says, a few lines later, he says, "When Buddhas are truly Buddhas, they do not necessarily notice they are Buddhas." And I'm assuming that most people wouldn't realize their Buddhas either if they can't realize it themselves. They don't notice it themselves. So there's a Kierkegaard has this great passage on the night of faith. The night of faith is the person who's made the leap and who basically is practicing existence as Kierkegaard thinks we all should. He says, "The night of faith will come across as the most ordinary person you can meet." He's not going to show up with a shining armor and a two-handed sword. The night of faith is ordinary. And there's something about that, I think, is very key, is that he's trying to subsume delusion into the perfection. And this is where things get weird for me in an interesting way with Dogeon. I think that's what he's hinting at, at least one sense, or one possible interpretation of the final passage of the text, where he talks. He tells a story about a monk encountering a master who's fanning himself. I'll just read this little story at the end. So the Zen Master was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent, and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself?" Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent, the Master replied, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere. What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere? Ask the monk again. And then Ma Yu just kept fanning himself, the monk bowed deeply. I love that. Because what he's saying is that even delusion is enlightenment. Even action in the world, engagement in the world, is in itself enlightenment. Even one could argue, even unenlightened categorization and unenlightened attachment to things is on a deeper level, at that without thinking level, is already enlightenment. And the only thing that can happen is this purely passive switch in the mind that's achieved through Zazen, where one just clues into this. And then you can live out the rest of your life, but you will have that Dharma. You will, the theories that your life will be improved infinitely, because you will never, you will never attach yourself to your attachments, even though those attachments necessarily exist, even though when you're hot you'll fan yourself, because it's hot. You will take measures to deal with the world, but even that engagement will, in some sense, in a deeper sense, you'll be detached even from your engagement with the world, which is a very paradoxical idea. Yeah, it is. I can offer another interpretation, which I think is complementary to yours. It's another way of saying maybe the same thing. And this is not an original thought either. I think I got this from Shohaka Okamura, but the idea is sort of like the air in this metaphor is Buddha Dharma. It's the nature of everything, of the 10,000 things, the myriad things. Things just are that way, right? If that's the case, then there's an obvious question, and we mentioned it right at the beginning of the show, then why practice? Why do anything at all? The implication is I am always already enlightened, and so are you, and so's my dog who's sitting up my feet, and everything in the world is enlightenment. Then why practice? That's surely the ultimate coals to Newcastle type scenario, right? You're trying to bring something extra into a situation that is already perfect. And this is the defining question for Dogen in his young life. This is why he went to China, at least the classic telling of the story of Dogen's life is that he couldn't find the answer to this question. This was his big question, his burning question, his young monk. He couldn't find anybody in Japan who could answer the question. And so he went to China to train, and it was there that he found his true teacher. If you think about this koan, this story of the monk fanning himself, from this point of view, the younger monk who challenges him is saying, look, if air pervades everywhere, if all things are Buddha Dharma, if enlightenment pervades everywhere, you couldn't outrun it if you tried. Then why fan yourself? The air always already pervades you. That's a way of asking the question, why practice if everything is always already enlightenment? And the older monk answers that you understand the air pervading everywhere. Yeah, my translation says, the master said, you only know that the wind's nature is ever present. You don't know that it permeates everywhere. So he's making a distinction between the idea of air is everywhere, but you don't yet understand permeation. In other words, how it acts, how it operates in the world. Well, from a certain point of view, when we're talking about enlightenment, you're talking about the view of the world, Suspecia, Eternutatus, under the aspect of eternity. Well in eternity, yeah, everything is, everything is enlightenment, but in our world, the world of manifestation where there is time, this shit needs to pervade, it needs to circulate, it needs to move, it needs to work. It has an action, a mode of action. And that's what the younger monk doesn't understand. If you don't understand that, then you'll fall into the error of believing that you don't need to practice. And then the monk, the younger monk, asks, well, then how does wind permeate everywhere? And the master responds by waving his fan, what is so beautiful about his response? He doesn't say anything. He just weighs the fan. Well, what's waving the fan? That's waving the fan is making the air permeate. In other words, it's Zazen. It's practice. What's the answer to this question? How does the wind permeate everywhere? You know, that's the thing about Zen is at a certain point we leave off Theological disputation and we just hit the cushion again. You just sit and so the monk waving the fan is a way of getting as an allegory for this idea of like the answer ultimately is the same answer We're going to come up with every single time which has just sit So and that by the way is the name of the core practice of Soto Zen Shikantaza Just sitting meditation Just sitting right and in this dialect of medieval Japan There's a very particular nuance that it's not just sitting. It's just sitting right now like a pure Undyeluded sitting it is a purity of action. It is sitting for no purpose, but sitting Which itself is a very difficult thing to wrap your head around anyway. I'm sorry I've been going off at grade and boring length about this colon I think that you and I are probably talking about very complimentary very similar things We are from I mean those two things the first thing I could say that sitting is just another thing You're doing that there's nothing magical about Zazen in fact. It's precisely the opposite Yes, so sitting is like a way like you know Leonard Cohen said that Zen was the greatest con in history and I think what he meant was that it's getting you to do something sitting is certainly doing something and in fact sitting is very complicated in Zen It's there's a very particular way of sitting and there's a and it's accompanied by many bells and whistles So it's not it's an action. It's an action in the world. It's not retreat from action At the same time as it's making you realize that everything is already enlightened I mean the goal of Zazen is to realize that everything is already enlightened and in what you said at one point you said that And I just want to clear this up. You said that Basically Zazen is necessary because although subspecies eternity In the eternal level the world is perfect in our world things are not perfect because there's time Therefore Zazen is a way to leave our world and connect with the eternal. Is that what you're saying? Not exactly because that would sneak transcendence back in I Know but that's a really really obvious Construal in fact it's almost impossible not to Think that way when you're practicing and so although that's not what I'm trying to say that's definitely how I Thought when I was like very deep into practice right. I don't think that way so much anymore partly because I don't practice that much anymore I'm a I'm a shit Buddhist. I don't I don't meditate enough Yeah, I think that that would be a problem thinking that way is a problem because you're right It introduces that note of transcendence and that is I think how you end up little bit by little bit getting away from the true sublimity of this teaching of this way of thinking and back towards something that just feels very I don't know just very ordinary and very human get me out of here Right, you know stop the world. I want to get off , but I don't know what to say to people who you know is Zazen does it have a medicinal? Thing is it something that certain people who have a particular sickness need or is it something that like Engagement in the world and with the world for me is a pleasure and what I've written in the past There's an implicit. How could I call it a kind of like decadent hedonism? I guess you could call it I'm not proud of this. I'm just observing it It's in the particulars It's in diving into the particulars and in going whole hog into the story of a moment the passions really like that one Lives a good life, you know My ethical model is someone like Riesman, you know these decadent or at least his character I can remember his name in the Arabor who who basically this guy just Castulates himself in this mansion surrounded by like books and sculptures and artifacts and perfumes and just basically luxuriates in aesthetic beauty and this is his answer to the world I have a lot of sympathy for that as selfish as it sounds It could be applied very selflessly Find your pleasure find your enjoyment dive in and then you're enlightened boom. That's it. How do you how do you respond to that as someone who is Who is it was en Buddhist? With a heavy sigh. I don't know. I mean if this is where I say like do not ever ever Get the idea that you're gonna learn Dharma from me. I'm just incompetent to talk about these profundities, you know past a certain point It's too hard. It's too difficult, right? But I will say one thing. I love the idea of Hussman or his fictional avatars as being Buddhists You know this is a some left hand path shit, right? This is some right like this is a thing in Tibetan Buddhism There is a left hand path or a tantric Buddhist path, which I know next to nothing about but I know that Chokum Trupa Who is this Tibetan Lama who he was Allen Ginsberg's teacher? He was a kind of an important figure. He was one of the people associated with Naropa University in Colorado Which is a Buddhist University anyway He he's a very important person in the transmission of Buddhism to the West very important And he wrote a book called cutting through spiritual materialism Which I have on my shelf and which anybody who is interested in the spiritual path so-called Must read that because it is the most hard-hitting take no prisoners critique of Selfishness in spiritual practice the way we tend to make spiritual practice about something other than what it really is And we make it about ourselves we turn it into another achievement trip We turn it into something that glorifies ourself, right? And the the Thousand and one ways that we can trick ourselves into doing this is truly Dizzying and impressive, but Trupa was famously like a heavy drinker I'm not sure if he was an actual according to oil alcoholic But he certainly was a heavy drinker and he slept with his students or some of them They committed various acts of abuse including against Ginsberg himself Like abuse of power like throwing his weight around that kind of abuse That makes him a very to use the weasel word that we pokes moderns left to use makes him very problematic individual But there was people who stick up from say well, you know, there was a kind of crazy wisdom to the guy And that idea of crazy wisdom is something that you find in this more left-handed kind of Buddhism This idea that you don't aim at holding yourself pure You don't aim at hiving yourself off from sex and drugs and rock and roll all of the fleshy temptations of the material plane like you fully participate in those things like you You fully realize delusion just as dogan says in this essay Those who greatly realize delusion are budas. That's kind of a slightly tantric Idea that you greatly realize delusion you drink till bursting you Just you have lots of promiscuous sacks you do all of those things that your straight-laced right hand path brethren Look upon with horror and yet by greatly realizing this delusion you Actually have a fighting chance of learning something true something real more perhaps in people who have cut off parts of themselves I'd rather like this idea even though I ain't about that life But I will say getting back to what you were saying about the idea of use man as a maybe a secret Buddha I love the idea that there can be people who are like degenerate mother fuckers. I like to imagine like you know David Bowie in the 70s like coke addled Flirting with Nazi imagery like yeah, fucking hyper sexual David Bowie Like the idea that he was a Buddha a secret agent Buddha right he's in so deep his cover is so deep even he doesn't know it But he's carrying out this Buddha action. I love the idea that there are people like that who like they're Accident in a way they in they are fully with they grasping the world with both hands Oscar Wilde I think is a great example of that Oscar Wilde yeah Andrew WK is my guy fucking love Andrew WK he mentioning him. I like the idea that they are like maybe you think could go to your grave and never suspect it and then you imagine that in the other side of the veil between life and death when all is revealed you realize oh you were a good agent you never blew your cover you never realized you were a Buddha no nor did anybody else good job but the whole time you were doing Buddha activity so thanks here's your golden watch in your metal consider subscribing to weird studies on iTunes, Stitcher or another podcast service you can also find us on Twitter music for the podcast is composed and performed by Pierre-Yves Martel thank you for listening you