Living with Dōgen:
Thoughts on the Relevance of His Thought
Carl Bielefeldt
My charge this morning is to talk about “Dōgen’s thought”. I was given this charge one day last year in Tokyo, when several of us were beginning to plan our symposium. At the time, I didn’t think much about it: the symposium was far off in the distance, and my talk seemed like a small pebble on the horizon. Now, however, as I actually face my charge close up, it looms over me like a giant boulder. This is a massive topic, far too weighty for me to manage. Dōgen thought about a lot of things, and what he thought is often very hard to grasp. I myself have no idea what he thought about many things and only a vague sense of what he thought about most of the rest. Many things he wrote I haven’t read yet; many things I’ve tried to read I can’t figure out; many things I’ve figured out how to read I still don’t understand.
Faced with this massive, difficult topic, I’ve decided to leave aside most of what Dōgen thought and focus fairly narrowly on the theme of our symposium. Our symposium deals with “Dōgen Zen”. At first glance, we might think that this expression, “Dōgen Zen”, means simply something like “Dōgen’s approach to Zen” — i.e., whatever Dōgen himself thought about his own religion. But in fact the expression isn’t only a description of what Dōgen thought; it’s also a prescription for what we should think. At least when used within the modern Sōtō school, “Dōgen Zen” is a kind of technical term for the orthodox teaching of the tradition that looks back to Dōgen as its source. As such, the term has a double meaning: what Dōgen himself said, and how what he said should be understood by his Sōtō followers. To talk about Dōgen Zen, therefore, it’s not enough to know what Dōgen said: we must also take into account how Sōtō tradition understands what he said.
It’s not my job here to talk about the history of Sōtō tradition; I expect other people will be doing some of that. I merely want to note that, because “Dōgen Zen” is defined not only by Dōgen himself but also by his tradition, it’s at once more rigid and more flexible than Dōgen’s own writings: more rigid, because it serves to establish an orthodox reading of Dōgen’s thought that may limit his followers’ access to other readings; more flexible, because it also includes the range of his followers’ readings, the history of shifting Sōtō orthodoxies from Dōgen’s day to our own.
Depending, then, on how one thinks about Dōgen Zen — as a rigid orthodoxy or as a flexible, shifting tradition, the agenda of a symposium on “Dōgen Zen and Its Relevance for Our Time” could be seen as more or less ambitious. It could be seen as a meeting to discuss how the received Sōtō definition of Dōgen Zen fits into our time; or it could be seen as an invitation to ask how our time might redefine Dōgen Zen and move toward a new development in Sōtō tradition. I myself favor the latter, more ambitious view of our symposium agenda. To do a proper job of this, I suppose we ought to have a second meeting entitled, “Our Time and Its Relevance for Dōgen Zen”; but, in thinking about my topic today, I would at least like to make a gesture toward such a more ambitious agenda by treating Dōgen’s thought as a resource for a Dōgen Zen in our time. Two things follow from this choice that help me to limit my broad topic to more manageable dimensions.
First, although I’m talking about “Dōgen’s thought” for our time, I’m not talking about it as a premodern version of modern philosophy. In our time, Dōgen has become famous as a philosopher, a thinker whose views can be compared with those of modern philosophers — Heidegger, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, etc. — and can contribute to modern (or postmodern) discussions of metaphysics, epistemology, language theory, and the like. For the intellectual bystander, so to speak, this may be the most interesting and important role for Dōgen’s thought in our time. But not for me. Since I’m interested here in Dōgen’s thought in the context of Dōgen Zen, I want to treat him not as a philosopher but as a Buddhist religious thinker.
Second, although I’m treating Dōgen as a Buddhist religious thinker, I’m not particularly concerned here with his place as a thinker either in the history of Buddhism and Zen or among the religious options of our own day. Dōgen is often celebrated (rightly, I think) as one of the most profound and creative religious thinkers Buddhism has produced, a master theoretician of Zen spiritual practice. In recent years, some people have also begun to treat him as a representative of Buddhist religion in dialogue with other religions, and I suspect that, as his writings become better known, such treatment will only become more common. But for my purposes here, neither of these roles is particularly important. The question for me is not what Dōgen contributed to Buddhism or might contribute to contemporary religious discussion in the world at large but only how his thought might serve as a resource for his followers in our time. I’m interested here simply in those elements in Dōgen’s religious thought that may (or may not) “work” for a modern Sōtō Zen with an international following.
I called my talk, “Living with Dōgen”. By this title, I wanted first of all simply to signal the particular approach that I’ve just described: that is, an approach concerned with how (and whether) Dōgen’s thought might serve as a model for living a modern Sōtō life. But I also wanted to suggest two other points. First, I take it as more or less axiomatic that, however one may want to define a modern Sōtō life, it will have to be lived with Dōgen. This may sound so obvious as to seem silly, but we should recall that, for much of its medieval history, the Sōtō school did not particularly feel the need to live with Dōgen. Before the eighteenth century, the study of books like Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō was not necessarily central to Sōtō religious life. Since that time, however, Dōgen has become so famous and Dōgen’s thought so fixed in Sōtō doctrinal definition that it’s difficult now to imagine a modern version of the religion that didn’t feel obliged to deal in some way with that thought. Modern Sōtō Zen has become Dōgen Zen, and insofar as Dōgen’s thought is a basis for Dōgen Zen, we have to live with it, whether we like it or not.
Second, I wanted to suggest by my title that we may not like it. Frankly speaking, Dōgen isn’t particularly easy to live with. I don’t mean by this only that his thought is so difficult that we have trouble understanding it, or that his thought is so demanding that we live in awe of it. I mean also that, alongside inspiring passages of spiritual insight and sublime flights of literary genius, Dōgen’s writings contain much that seems alien to us, much that seems peculiar to the concerns of a (sometimes somewhat cranky) medieval Japanese monk. At least so it must surely seem to many modern readers coming upon Dōgen for the first (or even the second) time. So it certainly seems to my students when I assign them readings from Dōgen’s work. I’m sorry to say this at a celebration of Dōgen’s birthday, in a room full of his followers. But if we’re serious about living with Dōgen, we’re going to have to face the facts of such a life and deal in some way with the parts of Dōgen we don’t like.
I’ll come back to this problem at the end of my talk, but first I want to reflect a bit on some broad themes in Dōgen’s thought and one model of the religious life that he provides us. I say “one model” because of course, like all readings of Dōgen, I’ll be making choices. I can well imagine other readings, and in fact I should warn you that my choices may be somewhat idiosyncratic, not necessarily those most familiar in many versions of Dōgen Zen. In order to draw attention to the difficulties we face in living with Dōgen, I’ve purposely chosen a model that highlights elements in his thought that may not lend themselves easily to a modern version of Sōtō. I hope by this to encourage a discussion of how we should think about such elements.
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Many treatments of Dōgen’s thought focus especially on his famous metaphysical teachings of being, time, and buddha nature. His pronouncements on such topics are often extremely difficult to grasp, but the topics themselves are probably easier to appropriate into a modern version of Zen than some of Dōgen’s other, less abstract interests. Yet it’s precisely in these other interests — in his descriptions of the Buddhist tradition and his prescriptions for living the Buddhist life — that his abstract ideas of universal buddhahood and the rest take on flesh and blood, and he comes alive as a religious thinker. If we’re to take him seriously as a religious thinker, we can’t simply remain at the level of first principles: we must follow him down into the human realm and ask how the principles actually play themselves out in the history of Buddhism and the life of the Buddhist believer. Let me, then, try to work my way down through these three levels of thought in Dōgen’s writings — what we may loosely call the metaphysical, the historical, and the ethical — with an eye always on their implications for the religious life.
Dōgen begins, so to speak, by defining our very existence as buddhahood. Not only our existence as humans but existence itself is somehow by its very nature imbued with the spiritual perfections of the buddha. Whatever exactly he means by this, it’s clear that Dōgen sees our lives as grounded, or embedded, in an ultimate and ultimately valuable mode of being — what Buddhists like to call the dharma body (hosshin) of the buddha. As is regularly pointed out, for Dōgen, this “body” is not so much a cosmic “thing” that contains or projects the world as it is the fundamental activity of the world itself; in effect, the “ground” of our existence is simply the way the world is really happening.
This way of defining our metaphysical situation itself as buddhahood sets what we might call the “negative terms” of the religious life - the absence of any value beyond our existence itself. Our situation is such that what is ultimately valuable can’t be avoided: it’s built into our very being and the being of things around us, whether we recognize and appreciate it or not. Hence, there’s nothing special we can or need do beyond what we’re doing already by existing. This “nothing special to do” is always a starting point of Zen, the starting point to which Zen keeps calling us back by reminding us just to sit, just to lie down when we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry - just to go on existing, without, as they say, “putting a head on top of our head” and running around looking for enlightenment.
The trouble, of course, with this identification of buddhahood with existence itself is that, taken by itself, it seems to undermine all rationale for a Buddhist, as opposed to any other sort, of life. At the starting point of Zen, we’re perfectly free to do whatever we want, with no good reasons to shape existence in any particular patterns. But Dōgen isn’t content to let us simply let our existence as buddhas take its natural course, and in fact he’s often quite critical of styles of Zen rhetoric that celebrate what he calls “naturalism”: the claim that there’s nothing more to Zen than going about our business in the world as usual. He wants us, rather, to take our buddhahood seriously and make it our business, by actively engaging in it: i.e., by recognizing what it means to be a buddha and committing ourselves to being one. He wants us to become what he calls a “practicing Buddha” (gyōbutsu), engaged in “the practice of buddhahood” (butsugyō).
What does Dōgen mean by the practice of buddhahood? One attractive account of what he means is that the key to such practice lies not in what we do but in how we do it. Since buddhahood is going on all around us all the time, our first job as buddhas is to give ourselves over to the time and place in which we find ourselves and attend to what we’re actually doing there. Whatever we’re doing there, if done with wholehearted, conscious commitment, is the practice of a buddha. This account is attractive because it makes the practice of buddhahood possible for everyone all the time. So long as we’re fully conscious of what we’re doing, we can be a practicing buddha while walking across the Stanford campus. Unfortunately, by this same account, we can also be a buddha while raping and pillaging in Kosovo, so long as we do it with wholehearted enthusiasm. Clearly, we need something more than enthusiasm for what we’re doing to validate what we do.
Whatever we may say about buddhahood as a state of mind, it’s clear from his writings that Dōgen’s own practice of buddhahood was not just a matter of enthusiasm for and attention to whatever he did; it was also a highly specific activity modeled on the practice of the Buddha Śākyamuni. At the center of this model was the image of the Buddha, seated in the posture of his perfect enlightenment under the bodhi tree. Throughout his writings, Dōgen often returns to this image and urges us to take up this posture and make it our own. In many passages in his writings, it seems that adopting the posture of the Buddha’s enlightenment is itself the practice of buddhahood. In many passages, it seems that the transmission of this posture and its proper understanding is at the very heart of the Zen tradition of the patriarchs, what Dōgen calls the “treasury of the eye of the true dharma” (shōbōgenzō) itself.
Of course there is much that can be, and has been, said about seated meditation (zazen) and its proper understanding in Dōgen’s thought. There is in particular the famous business of “non-thinking” (hi shiryō), so central to so much discussion of Dōgen Zen. This expression, “non-thinking”, is usually interpreted as the psychological state in which, during meditation, we bring the mind into perfect accord with the enlightenment of the universal buddhahood going on all around us. Given that we tend to think of meditation and enlightenment as psychological states, this is undoubtedly the business that most interests us. Yet, given that Dōgen himself tended to think of enlightenment less as the object, or content, of the mind than as a fundamental mode of activity embracing both body and mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that he should be interested in meditation as a physical activity, the act of embodying the buddha’s practice of sitting.
Insofar as he’s interested in the act itself, what we usually translate as “non-thinking” might as well be rendered, “it’s not a matter of thinking”: it’s “just sitting” (shikan taza), an empty physical form in which we enact Zen tradition through the iconic representation of its central image. Rendered in this way, Dōgen’s famous “realized kōan” (genjō kōan), sometimes taken as the enlightened psychological content of just sitting, may in the end have somewhat less to do with our inner realization of the mystery of the world around us than with our outer conformity to the kōan, or normative models, of the past masters of Zen. We realize, or actualize, the kōan by performing it.
I’m purposely pushing this way of thinking about seated meditation as a ritual act in order to make a larger point. Whether or not I’m right in this way of thinking about the specific practice of meditation, it does seem clear that, for Dōgen, Zen practice consisted not only of being in the “here and now” but of being in the “there and then” — of situating oneself in the historical context of Buddhism. To practice the posture of the seated buddha was only the central symbolic act of a larger commitment to study what Dōgen calls “the great way of the buddhas and patriarchs” (busso no daidō) handed down by tradition. As you know, in one of his most famous passages, Dōgen wrote near the beginning of his ministry that “to study Buddhism is simply to study the self”; yet as he developed his ministry he made it increasingly apparent that to study the self is to study the teachings and practices of those who studied Buddhism in the past — to master the stories of the Zen literature and to model oneself on the deeds of the Zen masters. If, as Dōgen went on to say in that same famous passage, “to study the self is to forget the self,” it was also to recreate the self in the image of a master. To “drop off [one’s own] body and mind” (shinjin datsuraku) was simultaneously to take on the body and mind of a patriarch.
To be a patriarch, one must be a member of the family, a “legitimate heir” (chakushi), as Dōgen called it. It’s not enough to study the self by oneself or forget the self in the study of the past; one must give the self to the lineage for which the patriarchs are ancestors and transmit the way of the patriarchs to future generations. For Dōgen, this meant that one must join the community, don the robe, and take up the life-style of the patriarchs. It’s the commitment to this life-style that forms the model for his ethical teachings. He calls on us not just to sit but to sit with others, in the context of a shared acceptance of the norms of the community and a shared obligation for its work. For Dōgen, the community meant in particular the Zen monastery, and its norms meant the “pure rules” (shingi) through which the monastery was governed. The work of the community was to observe these rules, and the obligation of each member was perfectly to embody them in his or her daily behavior. As Dōgen said, “the rites [of the church] are themselves the essential point” (sahō soku shūshi); or as Sōtō teachers still say today, “[monkish] deportment is itself Buddhism” (igi soku buppō).
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The model of a communal religious life in obedience to the monastic rule is a far cry from the classical image of the iconoclastic Zen master wielding the sword of wisdom to cut through all distinctions and cut off all attachment to forms. This classical image is powerful because it forces us back to the starting point of Zen, where, as Dōgen would say, “body and mind have dropped away”. But more powerful for Dōgen, it seems, was the problem of how to start over again once we’re back at the starting point and all we have left to work with is buddhahood. According to his traditional biography, this is, in effect, the question that was supposed to have launched the personal spiritual quest that eventually led Dōgen to China and his encounter with Zen. What is the point, he’s supposed to have asked, of Buddhist practice if we’re all by nature already buddhas? How do we understand the Buddhist life if buddhahood is its starting point rather than its goal? We should notice here that, in terms of his own spiritual development, Dōgen’s encounter with Zen was not the cause of this problem but its solution. The cause of the problem lay in his Japanese Buddhism, and the solution he brought back from China was intended for Japanese Buddhists.
Like virtually all Japanese Buddhists of his day, Dōgen’s own starting point was provided by Mikkyō, the “esoteric teachings” of the Mantrayāna that depicted the world as an expression of the sacred realm of the cosmic dharma body of the Buddha Vairocana and conceived of Buddhist practice as the ritual performance of the “three mysteries” (sanmitsu) of the body, speech, and mind of the buddha. Like many Japanese Buddhists of his day, Dōgen seems to have been dissatisfied with the abstract theological structures and elaborate mystical correspondences of the esoteric systems; but the basic pattern of the esoteric vision remained: a universal buddhahood expressing itself in (or as) our world; a Buddhist practice based on the personification of this buddhahood through symbolic action.
This is the vision that Dōgen took with him to China, a vision that allowed him to see in the Zen he studied there not merely a means to human awakening but a vehicle for human enactment of the buddha’s enlightenment. He returned from China with a Zen version of the vision, in which the model for the expression of buddhahood on the temporal plane was now supplied not by the powers of the cosmic Buddha Vairocana but by the practice of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, as handed down in the lineage of the Zen patriarchs and preserved in the monastic forms of the Chinese Zen monasteries. Back in Japan, he sought to import this vision into the world of Japanese Buddhism, urging conversion to the Zen lineage, mastery of the Zen canon, and dedication to the Zen forms as at once the means and the end of his new religion.
I use the expression his “new religion” advisedly here. Dōgen’s religious thought is often celebrated as “pure Zen”, untainted by accommodation with existing forms of Japanese Buddhism; it is also sometimes criticized as “too Chinese” because of this very purity. Yet, if there is purity here, I prefer to think of it as “pure Dōgen” — the new, highly idiosyncratic religious vision of an unusual medieval Japanese monk who studied in China and came home to create his own brilliant synthesis of foreign and domestic styles. We should not confuse Dōgen’s exclusive devotion to the lineage, literature, and forms of the Chinese masters with a Chinese style of Zen: it was at least as much the style of a Japanese convert to Zen, seeking to convert his fellow countrymen to his new religion, as it was the way of the masters themselves.
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As I’ve said, my primary purpose here is not to situate Dōgen’s thought in the history of Buddhism but to reflect on its relevance for contemporary Dōgen Zen. Nevertheless, the historical perspective reminds us of something that may be helpful to such reflection: that, whatever Dōgen himself thought about his brand of Buddhism, it was itself a new religion, created by the intertwining of two cultures. Remembering Dōgen’s own historical situation may make the religion of this medieval Japanese monk a bit less alien than it might otherwise appear. His time may seem far from us, but like us, he had to struggle to create a Dōgen Zen for his time. Thus, if not always in its outcome at least in its spirit, his struggle gives sanction to our own. He may have inhabited a world quite different from our own, but his Zen, like ours, had to bridge the gap between two worlds. Thus, if not in all its detail at least in its synthetic structure, his thought may be a model for our own.
Still, as usual, the devil will be in the details, and there are surely features of Dōgen’s religion that will be difficult to bring across the gap between his world and ours. Perhaps the most obvious is his identification of the “practice of a buddha” with the monastic life-style. A religion that begins with a sublime metaphysical vision of universal buddhahood seems to come down in the end to an ethic in which it’s the monk alone who can actually be expected to master Buddhist practice and enlightenment. In a medieval Japanese context, this was not so surprising: probably most Buddhists, both monk and laymen, throughout history have assumed that the mastery of Buddhist practice and enlightenment was a matter for monks — for religious specialists, or virtuosi, not for ordinary folk going about their business in the world. For most Buddhists throughout history, the serious practice of Buddhism has been a kind of “spectator sport”: a few people do it; the rest of us watch.
This seems to me a perfectly reasonable approach to Buddhism, but of course it clashes with our modern egalitarian values and our inherited ideals of universal salvation. Clearly, Dōgen’s position poses a problem for Dōgen Zen in the modern world, and we’ll have to make some difficult choices here. Do we take Dōgen’s position as normative and accept it as a direct challenge to our values and ideals? Frankly, I doubt that many will want to make this choice, at least at the explicit level. Do we, then, simply overlook it and let it pass, saying, “That’s not my Dōgen”? Do we dress it up as Dōgen’s “skill in means”, a teaching intended simply to encourage monks but not his final word? Do we historicize it, saying in effect, “If Dōgen were alive today, he would share our ideals and values”?
The issue of lay practice is perhaps the most obvious stumbling block to the universalization of Dōgen’s thought, but it’s only one of a closely nested set of issues we’ll have to face in the formulation of a Dōgen Zen for our time. What do we do, for example, with Dōgen’s ritualism, which often seems to define Zen practice and enlightenment as the mastery of a specific set of behaviors? This will hardly sit well with the many people who look to Zen as a religion that celebrates our inner freedom from the outer trappings of cultural convention. What do we do with his historical fundamentalism, which bases its faith on a particular view of the sacred history of the Zen patriachate? In a world where everyone’s sacred histories have been explained away as the stories we tell ourselves, this kind of faith will not come easily. What do we do with Dōgen’s uncompromising sectarianism, which often seems to call for conversion to a particular orthodoxy and deny any validity to religions other than his own? This is hardly a promising model for a modern world desperately in need of models for religious and cultural accommodation with the other.
Whether or not, if Dōgen were alive today, he’d recognize our need, the fact is that we have needs that Dōgen never thought of. We live as a species defined by Darwin, with personalities by Freud. We have bodies made up of DNA and minds that work by electrochemistry. We have race and class and gender; we have ideology and the ozone layer. We can’t expect Dōgen to take a position on world capitalism or human cloning; but by the same token, we can’t expect Dōgen Zen to be relevant to our world if it can’t escape the world of a medieval Japanese monk.
If we’re going to live with Dōgen, then, we’re going to have to make some choices: whether to take the whole body of his thought, warts and all, and live with it in a stormy relationship of faith and doubt, attraction and repulsion; or rather decide to overlook the warts and focus on the lovely bits. Probably, when we can’t bring ourselves to face the choice, we’ll find ourselves defining the warts as somehow lovely. Probably, as is usually the case when we live with someone difficult, we’ll need to use a mix of all three of these strategies, depending on the mood we’re in. This ongoing process of choosing and redefining by people trying to live with Dōgen is precisely what has created Dōgen Zen as it has come down to us. We can’t avoid becoming involved in this process if Dōgen Zen is to be relevant for our time.
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Fortunately, it’s not my job here today to try to construct a Dōgen Zen for our time, a job in any case better left to others more qualified; but in closing I would like to point out one theme I see in Dōgen’s religious thought that might be helpful for such a project: the virtue of what I’ll call “participation”. This is not, I grant you, one of the traditional Buddhist virtues. You won’t find it among the items of the eightfold path or the six bodhisattva perfections. I can’t think of an exact equivalent to the term “participation” in the Buddhist technical lexicon, or in the sayings of the Zen masters, or even, frankly, in Dōgen’s own writings. Perhaps it’s only a term of art in Carl’s own personal version of Dōgen Zen. Still, something like this virtue of “participation” seems to be a thread running through the various levels of Dōgen’s thought that ties together his grand vision of the world and his highly specific recommendations for how to live in the world.
By “participation”, I have in mind a virtue arising from the general notion that the individual is, and ought to be, always embedded in some context, and that the religious life consists in recognizing and committing oneself to this embeddedness. Such a general notion is in sharp contrast to those more familiar models of Buddhism that see it as a religion of liberation from all contexts, of flight from all that binds us to the world of conditions and relations. For Dōgen, as we’ve seen, buddhahood is not a release from life into the unconditioned but the very conditions under which we live; our cultural traditions and institutions are not merely artificial, second-rate realities to be left behind in enlightenment but precisely the arena in which we practice enlightenment. For Dōgen, it seems, the individual is always involved in something, and he wants us, if anything, to become more involved — to become, as he sometimes says, fully “entangled” (kattō) in our lives as buddhas and in the historical and social contexts in which we live those lives.
The weakness of such an ideal, let us be honest, is that its emphasis on our embeddedness, or “entanglement”, in the world around us can undermine our autonomy and encourage an ethic of acquiescence to the particular historical and social contexts in which we find ourselves. Especially when these contexts are given sacred sanction as the human arena of buddhahood, the ideal can lend itself to a reification of the norms of tradition and community and to an ethic that has more to do with looking good than with being good. As the recent Sōtō reform movement known as “Critical Buddhism” (hihan bukkyō) is fond of pointing out, this weakness may be endemic to any form of Buddhism that begins by imagining the world around us as the expression of a sacred ground. A Buddhism that just sits on this sacred ground, repeating the mantra, “Homage to this, the best of all possible worlds”, is not going to be in a good position to notice that people are suffering, let alone to rouse itself to address the conditions of this suffering.
We would do well to recognize this weakness, but we need not exaggerate it. To “participate”, after all, means not only to accept whatever happens but to accept a role in what happens, to “partake”, or “take part” in what happens. Accepting a role, or playing a part, in what happens need not mean merely fitting ourselves into preordained scripts; it can also mean redesigning the scripts and actively shaping what happens next. It’s no doubt true that, to become “participants”, we need to locate ourselves and settle down somewhere — be it in buddhahood, tradition or community — but settling down somewhere means not just stopping there but getting to work fixing up the place and making it a proper home. This is one way of understanding the old bodhisattva ideal of service and, perhaps, part of what Dōgen means by “practicing buddhahood”.
The ideal of “participation” may not necessarily represent a virtue in the ethical sense. In itself, it doesn’t tell us where we ought to settle down or what company we ought to keep, let alone what roles we ought to play. For these, we’ll have to look elsewhere. The strength of the ideal lies rather in urging us to look elsewhere — to look up from ourselves and look around at the world in which we find ourselves, to look for where we belong and what we can do really to belong there. Even if what we end up doing sometimes has more to do with looking good than doing good, this is not necessarily something to scoff at: the world can always use a bit more beauty, and we can probably use a little more attention to religion as public performance, if only to balance a modern internalized “spirituality” that so often seems so narrowly focused on feeling good about ourselves as individuals.
Dōgen’s own sense of where we belong and what we can do there may not always be our own, but his ideal of a “participatory” Buddhism could offer a tempting model to a modern world groping for ways of re-imagining the individual as part of an organic whole and re-integrating ourselves into sustainable traditions and meaningful communities. In the end, the value of the ideal will depend heavily on how we go about contextualizing the individual and how we negotiate the relationships among our various entanglements — metaphysical, historical, and social — and between such entanglements and our individual autonomy as intellectual and moral beings. These are, needless to say, difficult, perennial problems for which we can’t expect final solutions, but if we can find something that works fairly well for our time, as I think Dōgen did for his time, then we might end up with a Dōgen Zen quite relevant indeed.
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