Let's read the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Parts of it, anyway.

It took me a long time to warm up to Zen. I think it's a victim of its own success in the West. People who aren't really representative of the tradition as it exists in Japan, China, and Vietnam took charge of the inculturation process early on and framed it in ways that redounded to its discredit, at least in my mind. It's not only white people, either; D.T. Suzuki deserves a lot of the blame here.

Among the best-regarded Zen texts, I have the most experience with the Shōbōgenzō. I've encountered it in several contexts and own partial translations of it into both modern Japanese and English. Over the coming weeks I'll be rereading some of it and sharing my thoughts in this thread.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I reread "108 Gates of Dharma Illumination" today. It's one of the best-known parts of the Shōbōgenzō, for good reason--it does yeoman's work advancing the "provisional" epistemology that many people find so charming about Zen (in other words, the idea that truth is knowable and the external world verifiable inasmuch as we can't realistically live otherwise, and can't realistically attain satori if we can't realistically live...). Andy Cohen's commentary on the gate "The sense organs are a gate of dharma illumination, for with them we practice the authentic way" reads, in part, "[t]his is one of the masterstrokes from Nagarjuna and others--the recognition that our only way to perceive and then conceive of anything which may lead to apprehension of the ultimate truth of emptiness has to start with the only available avenue for perception." I agree with him entirely; I even think this position is supportable in epistemologies very different from Nagarjuna's, because, well, all epistemologies have to start from somewhere.

"Freeing our mind of the friend-enemy distinction is a gate of dharma illumination, for whether we are among those who are hostile or friendly towards us, we can treat them all with impartiality" is one I enjoy too. It's always nice to see someone nuke Carl Schmitt from orbit, especially someone who lived centuries before Schmitt did. In general it's interesting how Dōgen presupposes that morally acceptable outcomes are desirable and then seeks to establish that traditional Buddhist morals are the way to those outcomes. He doesn't tie himself up in knots over metaethics, whether in the traditional consequentialism vs. deontology sense or in any of the weird nihilistic word game senses of the past century or two, "moral error theory" or whatever the hell else, because he trusts that anybody reading this will more or less be on board with a general Mahayana account of a good life or good society already.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Fascinating stuff. I completely agree that any sound epistemology has to start from somewhere, and that "somewhere" includes the sensory perceptions that are actually real to us, and will keep being real no matter how much we try to doubt them. I don't think sensory perceptions are the only thing that's true about, though. Abstract thought is just as real, and isn't something we humans can turn off any more than our senses. And then there are emotions, which can never be reduced to a given sensory input, and which certainly seem necessary if we want to even have a hope of understanding what suffering is. Consciousness, as a whole, is irreducibly true, but that's a broader and more complex entity than just senses. There's a whole world in there.

Buddhist epistemology classifies consciousness as a sense! The six senses are sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and thought or consciousness; the six objects of the senses are light, sound, physical bodies, flavors, odors, and objects of mental perception.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Today I read the Genjōkōan ("Actualizing the Fundamental Point" or "Key Consideration") chapter, where Dōgen talks about how "To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the ten thousand things. When one is actualized by the ten thousand things, the bodymind as well as the bodyminds of others slip away, no trace of having realized it all remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly". I actually went to a writing retreat about a year ago that used this as its crux: you figure yourself out, then get yourself out of the way and let the world exist through and around you. For Dōgen this is of course part of a broader teaching about the universal and the particular. If you're always focused on the outermost edges or abstract principles of your religious belief and practice, you'll never actually do anything and your faith won't be of any use either to yourself or to others.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Today I read the "Ikka Myōju" and Jūundō-shiki" ("One Bright Pearl" and "Appropriate Conduct for the Auxiliary Cloud Hall") chapters, an interesting juxtaposition since they're about very different issues--metaphysics and codes of conduct--but together advance an interesting "universalist" view. Dōgen is insistent that even a very unfortunate rebirth is not going to be a lasting obstacle to an enlightenment, because the Buddhist universe is both vast and monistic and thus even radically different situations within it (being a bodhisattva or being tortured in a hell dimension, in this case) will both contain the necessary means to practice the dharma. This strikes me as something that would be interesting to put into conversation with concepts from the Pure Land tradition, although that conversation might not be a very productive one. He discusses this in the "Pearl" chapter and then, in the "Appropriate Conduct" chapter, uses it to reassure the very young and clueless monks who are the presumed audience. The "Pearl" chapter also contains both a rather good food metaphor and this amusing side-sweep at the kind of "maek u think" approach to Buddhism that is as common today as it was during Dōgen's lifetime:

Nevertheless, neither you nor I know precisely what this Bright Pearl is and precisely what It is not, but hundreds of notions and opinions about this subject all too obviously have become associated with ‘food for thought’.