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Believe It or Not: Dōgen on the Question of Faith
Studia Orientalia Slovaca, 2018
The founder of the Sōtō School of Japanese Zen Buddhism, Dōgen (1200-1253) was a fervent advocate of silent meditation, as well as a prolific writer. He authored a great number of essays and treatises, instructions and commentaries, poems and kōan interpretations. History remembers him, however, mostly as an ardent proponent of sitting meditation, the famed shikan taza of the Sōtō School. Yet despite his undeniable support to meditation practices, he was also a Buddhist monk and teacher, who transmitted to his disciples a more coherent notion of Zen Buddhism including aspects of faith and devotion. By means of surveying Dōgen’s own texts in the Shōbō genzō, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the aim of this paper is to shed light on Dōgen’s view on both sitting meditation, zazen, and the importance of devotional practices noted therein.
Dôgen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection of His View of Zen - By Hee-Jin Kim
Religious Studies Review, 2008
2 volumes (continuously paginated). Pp. 680. ¥ 3,100. This book is a very thorough study of an exceedingly small piece of a monumental Buddhist treatise. From the vast compendium of Buddhist doctrine known as the Yogā cā rabhū mi, Deleanu focuses on Book XIII, the Ś rā vakabhū mi, which presents mainstream Buddhist [i.e., non-bodhisattva] practices. His project is to edit, translate, and comment on the first chapter of the Ś rā vakabhū mi's fourth section, which sets forth the so-called "mundane path," comprising the practices allegedly mastered by Buddha during his early studies: the four absorptions (dhyā na), the four immaterial attainments (ā rū pyasamā patti), and the five supernatural faculties (abhijñā). The volumes contain both a diplomatic and a critical edition of the Sanskrit, an edition of the Tibetan by Jinamitra and Ye-shes-sde and of the Chinese by Xuanzang, an English translation, and a substantial introductory study. This latter covers the context of the chapter within the larger corpus, the provenance of its various versions, the textual formation of the Yogā cā rabhū mi corpus, and its legacy in later Buddhist literature and thought. A Hamburg doctoral dissertation that (after the European fashion) was sent straight to press, the book exhibits many shortcomings of that genre-in particular, a tendency to obsessively document every single claim or concept (featuring, e.g., nearly 125 pages of annotations to merely twenty pages of translation). Yet, in the final analysis, it is an unmistakably rich-if rather unwieldy-contribution to the study of this fascinating literature.
Philosophy and the practice of reflexivity. On Dōgen's discourse about Buddha-nature
What is philosophy? Ed. by Raji Steineck et. al., 2016
Is Dōgen a philosopher? Or even an example of what he scolds a “word-counting scholars”? Despite the difficulties of classifying Dōgen, many would still agree, at least with regard to his magnum opus, the Shōbōgenzō, that his writings are philosophical. This, however, requires some clarification, since there is not much left of this work if one were to exclude all the fascicles that are not explicitly cited for philosophical interpretation. e philosophic scope becomes even smaller if one were to consider the respective passages of the few fascicles pertinent for explicit philosophical reading. At the risk of oversimplifying, the philosophical reception of Dōgen's works is almost entirely grounded in the fascicle “Uji”, which is...
The Enlightenment Debate in Early Buddhism
Fierce historical debates surround the concept of ‘true self’ in Buddhism and its relevance to enlightenment. Opponents of the concept consider ‘true self’ an impostor derived from a Hindu worldview. The article presents ‘true-self’ or Buddha-nature as a possible key to understanding the differences between the nature of phenomena in the cycle of existence and Nirvana.
If we understand something's having intentional content as its being about something, then conceptualism, broadly construed, is the view that, "no intentional content, however portentous or mundane, is a content unless it is structured by concepts that the bearer possess." 1 Put more precisely, conceptualism is the view that, "For any perceptual experience φ, (i) φ has a Fregean proposition as its content and (ii) a subject of φ must possess a concept for each item represented by φ." 2 Thus, conceptualism is the view that experience has intentional content only to the extent that it is structured by concepts that the person possesses. If we understand the experience of a person who has achieved Buddhist enlightenment to be ineffable; 3 and if we attribute that ineffability to the experience of ultimate reality's being non-conceptual, then we appear to have a direct conflict between conceptualism and enlightenment so understood. Since I find compelling both conceptualism and the idea that enlightenment experience is ineffable, the aim of this paper is to offer a way of reconciling the two. 4 Hilary Putnam writes, "…it is a part of almost all religious forms of life to say that God, or whatever may be of ultimate concern in the particular religious form of life, is not properly conceptualizable by us." 5 He goes on to write that in the context of religion what lies behind this problem of language is the nearly universal, "..sense that whatever one say [sic] about God falls 1 Gunther 2003, 1. 2 Bengson, Grube, and Korman 2011, 168. I take it that the notion of a "Fregean proposition" here is to emphasize the idea of a proposition whose sense is a product of it conceptual parts-a sense that is to be distinguished from its possible referent. This needn't commit us to an ontology of mind-independent propositions along the lines of abstract objects. 3 Here "experience of a person who is enlightened" is not the experience at the moment of enlightenment, but that enlightened aspect of the ongoing, lived experience of the enlightened individual, and as such it is presumably shot through with intentional content. 4 As such, I am bracketing the question of conceptualism's truth. 5 Putnam 1997, 410.