In a recent paper, Rein Raud, well known for his research on ancient and modern Japanese philosophy, argues against “the widespread assumption that Dogen postulates two levels of selfhood, that of the deluded individual and a transcendent True Self to the attainment of which one should aspire.”
Raud explains: “In Dogen studies, such reification takes the form of postulating a ‘True Self’, as opposed to the ‘deluded self’ or the naïve experience of (human) subjectivity. The True Self is allegedly universal and belongs to all sentient beings, being the thing that one must reach through the overcoming of one’s small, individual self. This move also allows its proponents to cast Dogen’s thought as essentially religious and mystical in the traditional sense, advocating a communion of the individual Zen practitioner with a transcendent Absolute.”
Raud believes that this is not only confusing, but also a misinterpretation of Dogen’s thought. He argues that “it is unacceptable for the interpreter to decide that Dogen uses the word jiko (usually translated as “self”) in the two senses of “True Self” and “deluded self” and to use either one or the other as fits their purpose. This occasionally enables the interpreter to present something that looks like textual evidence (especially to the reader who does not have the capacity to read Dogen’s original) but actually amounts to the manipulation of the source material in the interests of making one’s claims stick.”
Dogen himself, he adds, has criticised the view that a True Self exists in a text where he rejects it as heresy: “Dogen has dedicated a long passage to the explicit denouncement of the so‐called ‘Srenika heresy’, or the theory that a True Self exists (1.53.7‐1.54.13). This is incidentally also the only place in the Shobogenzo where the expression ‘true I’ 眞我 shinga is met. All of this suggests that the ‘True Self’ theory is an arbitrary interpretive construction with very little basis.”
Raud, therefore, proposes a rephrasing of the translation of the two sets of verses of the Genjokoan which have guided the practice of many Zen Buddhists over the years:
These are, in their traditional translation:
“Bringing the self forward to verify the myriad things in practice represents delusion;
To let the myriad things practice and verify the self is awakening.”
and
“To study the Way of the Buddhas is to study oneself.
To study oneself is to forget oneself.
To forget oneself is to be verified by the myriad things.
To be verified by the myriad things is to cast off one’s own bodymind as well as the bodyminds of others.”
Talking about the first set of verses, Raud explains that: “To turn toward the truth is a mistake. The truth is in turning‐your‐back and in turning‐toward. The turning‐your‐back and in turning‐toward are both the truth. Has anyone understood that this ‘mistake’ is precisely the ‘truth’ itself? Thinking that there is a ‘correct’ way of apprehending reality is the source of errors. The only truth is in looking for the truth, not in anything labelled as such.” So, it is not so much that there is a correct and an incorrect way of approaching reality. The truth is that one should turn toward reality and turn our back to reality at once. The truth is in our looking for the truth, the error is in believing in the certainty that we have found it, and proceed with a reification of what we have found.
Raud continues: “Our perspectivally embedded patterns are what make us who we are, and the only way beyond them is through them. As Bret Davis has put it, Dogen ‘does not think that the perspectival limits of all perception, feeling, understanding, and expression are as such antithetical to enlightenment. Rather than an overcoming of perspectivism, enlightenment for Dogen entails a radical reorientation and qualitative transformation of the process of perspectival delimitation … enlightenment does not supplant perspectival knowing with an omniscient ‘view from nowhere’. Rather, it involves an ongoing nondual engagement in a process of letting the innumerable perspectival aspects of reality illuminate themselves’.”
Raud says that what Dogen “articulates is a relational ontology, according to which nothing exists besides particular but impermanent and constantly re‐emerging individuals, and all individuals have a perspective that simultaneously determines how they see the world and how they are what they are. The totality of all these individuals and their particular ways to see the world cannot be reduced to an overarching One, nor can it be exited into an abode of enlightenment.”
Raud, therefore, suggests that the lines quoted above could be translated as follows:
“The practice of acknowledging the myriad things through imposing your particularity on them is delusion.
Letting the myriad things advance [along their trajectories] and practice through their acknowledgement of your particularity is enlightenment.”
and
“To study the Buddha way is to study your own particularity.
To study your particularity is to forget your particularity.
To forget your particularity is to be acknowledged by myriad things.
The acknowledgment by myriad things is tantamount to letting your individual bodymind and the bodyminds of other individuals drop off.”
In keeping with his own argument, Raud ends his paper with the following statement: “That said, a text of such a level of complexity as Dogen’s cannot ever be exhausted by one interpretation or wholly described by one closed set of labels or one definitive discourse. All interpretations are necessarily perspectival, and so is mine.”
Sources:
Rein Raud – “Selfhood and Individuality in Dogen’s Thought” (December 2024)
Bret W Davis – The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy (2020)