Watsuji's Reading of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō: Ralf Müller
Watsuji's Reading of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō: Ralf Müller
Watsuji's Reading of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō: Ralf Müller
Ralf Müller
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110 | Watsuji’s Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
1. Many authors implicitly or explicitly follow the line of analysis of Kim Hee-Jin
(2004) without questioning its presuppositions, deepening its systematic ramiica-
tions, or pointing to inconsistencies with subsequent approaches. See, for example,
Heine 1994, 93, 120, 121, 199; Olson 2000, 47; and Elberfeld 2004, 326–7.
Kasulis presents the clearest alternative understanding of language within the Japa-
nese tradition, though without arriving at a systematic standpoint that allows for a
basis in an elaborated notion of the symbolic. See K asulis 1991 for mention of two
promising sources of a theory of the symbol: Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer.
112 | Watsuji’s Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
More important to the present essay is the fact that Watsuji was the
irst to point out Dōgen’s unreserved airmation of language. He was
also the irst to tackle the question head on and address objections in
direct and methodical fashion. He does so by giving an account of how
to complement the important role of religious experience with that of
language, which in turn gives him entrance into a philosophical explora-
tion of Dōgen’s thought. My own position is in accord with Watsuji’s
insofar as it recognizes the need to begin from language if we are to talk
about Dōgen philosophically. My criticism will have to do with the way
that Watsuji sets out to achieve this goal, more speciically with its tacit
reductionist and metaphysical assumptions.
2. Pang 1971, 56. The original Chinese sources reads as follows: 靈一日問居士、道得
道不得倶未免、 汝且道未免箇什麼、 士以目瞬之。(zz, section 2, vol. 25/1, 29a).
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3. Heine 1994 lays the groundwork for a convincing analysis of Dōgen’s use of the
kōan in rhetorical terms.
114 | Watsuji’s Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
the importance of his rediscovery in both the short term and the long
term. Similar lacunae persist in the careful scrutiny of his predecessors
and successors, who often are not even mentioned by name.4
Watsuji’s own path to Dōgen is diicult to discern. There had been a
growing interest in Buddhism beginning around 1910, as we read in a
“Memorandum” published posthumously by Yuasa Yasuo.5 In it Watsuji
takes up terms from the Buddhist tradition—”nirvana,” for instance”—
under the inspiration of inspired by existentialist or vitalist thinkers like
Nietzsche, Bergson, and Schopenhauer, to suggest their relevance to
philosophy.6 Later, in 1917, Watsuji records in his diary a shift of interest
to the Buddhist culture of Japanese antiquity. That was the year in which
he traveled to Nara, culminating two years later in the book Koji junrei 古
寺巡礼. Furthermore, his 1918 book Resurrection of the Idols (Gūzō saikō
偶像再興) clariies this renewed interest in Eastern culture and art. Finally,
from 1920 to 1923 he published his essays on the Zen-Buddhist Dōgen
in the journal Shisō 思想. These essays formed the foundation of “Dōgen,
the Monk,” published in 1926 in the pages of Studies in the History of
Ideas of Japan (Nihon shisōshi kenkyū 日本思想史研究).
From that point on, at least to judge from Watsuji’s published work,
his interest in Dōgen receded into the background. Privately, however,
he continued to read and study Dōgen writings, as we see from the
glosses in a copy of the 1939 edition of the Shōbōgenzō. left behind in his
4. As an example one may point to the irst review to appear of Watsuji’s Shamon
Dōgen (Kimura 1937). Tanabe’s explicit appreciation and indebtedness to Watsuji is
no better known than is his implicit critique of the missing systematic point of view
in Shamon Dōgen (see Tanabe 1939). Finally, Yamauchi Shun’yū (2001) should be
mentioned for analyzing out Watsuji’s inluence on the modernization of secterian
studies of Dōgen.
5. メモランダム (1913) has been included in the irst supplement to Watsuji’s Collected
Works, 1–112.
6. Watsuji published Nīchie kenkyū『ニイチェ研究』(Nietzsche Studies) in 1913, but
he inished his academic education with a thesis on Schopenhauer. Two years later he
published Zēren Kierukegōru ゼエレン・キエルケゴオル (Søren Kierkegaard). Soon, how-
ever, he lost his sympathy for Western philosophy and became more critical towards
individualistic and existentialistic movements within philosophy. His Resurrection of
the Idols of 1918 documents well his growing interests in Eastern culture, arts, and
thought.
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7. Cf. Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, edited by Etō Sokuō (1939), available from Watsuji’s
private library housed at Hōsei University.
8. The book was published in 1959; I assume that Watsuji himself bought or
ordered the book before his death, but the Hōsei catalogue needs to be checked for
proof.
9. Cf. his postscript in Watsuji 1998, 356.
116 | Watsuji’s Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
10. I would note that the question of Nishida’s impact on Watsuji is debatable and
that it is therefore particularly important to avoid drawing conclusions from the use
of single terms, even though it seems clear that Watsuji’s use of Fichte’s “intellektu-
elle Anschauung” (chiteki chokkan 知的直観) in Shamon Dōgen falls into place with
Nishida’s Intuition and Relection in Self-Awareness” of 1917 (nkz 2).
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even a lay practitioner. This poses a problem: How reconcile the inner
perspective of a practitioner and believer with an objective, scientiic
approach? The second objection involves the particular approach Watsuji
takes from this vantage point of an outsider: How is his cultural-herme-
neutic method related to the inner perspective of Dōgen’s thought? In
Watsuji’s own words:
Firstly, is it possible that you, as someone who is foreign to Zen,
understand Dōgen who emphasized particularly sitting meditation? In
trying to get a grip on something sublime and profound, do you not
debase and latten out something that you have not grasped yourself?
Secondly, even if you were capable of understanding this sublime and
profound to a certain degree, of what use is it to put the personality of
such a great and religious man and his manifesting truth in the service
of a cultural-historical understanding? What does cultural-historical
understanding mean if one accepts the truth of a religion…? Of what
use at all is an understanding based on “secular wisdom”? (Watsuji
1998, 237–8)
ciic forms of religion evolve historically? Watsuji maintains that there are
universal phenomena of human culture (religion, for example) religion
that appear in the guise of local forms (244). From an intellectual point
of view, the plurality of religious creeds obliges reason to favor a kind
of secularized religion. And since Watsuji himself can only take a stance
from the “outside,” he cannot believe anymore in the truth of a factual
religion. Therefore he reads all signs as religious ways of expression and
explanations “symbolically” (247), but never takes them as designating
ontological facts. He cannot bring himself, he says, to anything more
than an intuitive feel for the metaphysical, a sense of for a certain “pres-
ence of the eternal” within the empirical that cannot be explained in a
rational way. The net result of his reasoning is a sympathetic skepticism,
that shares in the religious concern but not in its factual beliefs. Each
religion, for Watsuji, has a partial validity but is ultimately grounded in a
universal striving for truth (245–6).
(282) in the present life and in this world, based on a personal experience
and realization of the truth. This practice is grounded in the everyday
in the sense that “even if one does not know a single word,” there is an
eternal drive in the human heart for truth.
But the twofold truth in Watsuji’s reinterpretation of Dōgen becomes
clearest here as he diferentiates the solution of the “one great matter”
of life from its reduction to anything verbal. It is impossible to replace
the practice of zazen and lived enlightenment with any explanation or
articulation of its experiential content. But this does not mean that ver-
bal expression as such is impossible. Quite to the contrary, every enlight-
ened person is also capable of expressing the experience in symbolic
fashion (264). That said, the inal step for Dōgen, from the “periph-
eries” of truth to its “center,” entails elucidating the truth in his own
conceptual terms (314). This is what Watsuji does in the ninth and inal
chapter of Shamon Dōgen, though he warns against expecting too much,
since he has not studied the Shōbōgenzō in its entirety. Instead he presents
Dōgen’s thinking through selected examples and chooses four fascicles
and their related terms to give a sketch of Dōgen’s thinking.
The first theme he develops through a presentation of the fascicle
“Attaining the Essence in Veneration.” The ultimate prerequisite to
acquire the Buddhist truth is a teacher and the resolve to follow him
(315). To devote oneself to the Buddha way under the tutelage of a
teacher requires strong faith on the one hand, and letting go of one’s
personal needs on the other. Here Watsuji points to the inter-subjective
dimension of realizing the truth. Truth is not bound to a purely objec-
tive world of metaphysics, just as the Buddha is not a transcendent being.
The truth is necessarily actualized and realized by worldly individuals in
interaction (322). That is why the historical Buddha Shakyamuni is put at
the very center of religious practice in Zen.
The second theme revolves around the concept of buddha-nature
(busshō 仏性) and its interpretation through generations of buddhas and
patriarchs. Face to face transmission does not mean that there is a single
and universal expression of truth. Devotion and veneration still demand
a critical appropriation of the dharma in a creative and intellectual way,
even though Dōgen defends the common truth of Buddhism against any
kind of plurality and against arbitrary, personal belief. This is why Watsuji
120 | Watsuji’s Reading of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō
This is the reason that the practice of zazen does not become super-
luous. On the contrary, the practice unfolds in direct correspondence
to a verbal articulation that is based both on reading traditional texts
and expressing what has been understood from them. (Watsuji recalls
Dōgen’s demand to express the truth in one’s own words in the
Shōbōgenzō zuimonki.) This gives Dōgen a basis from which to criticize
the Zen claim to fūryū monji kyōge betsuden. Moreover, he dismisses all
names, “Zen” included, that separate any tradition from the Buddhist
mainstream. There is no special transmission of any kind that could be
reason enough to propose a new name within Buddhism as a whole. This
one ind explicitly stated in the Shōbōgenzō.11
Watsuji points out that there is yet another condition for the verbal
and even logical expression of truth to become authentic. It is not only
the meeting of two buddhas at the right time, but also a right under-
standing that supersedes verbal expression. This condition is met by
resolve and practice, but it also requires a special kind of internaliza-
tion of truth. Watsuji sees intellectual intuition (chiteki chokkan 知的直
観, translated from the German intellektuelle Anschauung) as more than
just loose-limbed of fantasy totally detached from reality (341). It must
encompass sense perception as well. Intellectual intuition begins from
with empirical reality only to go beyond it. It is the capacity to grasp the
meaning that is mediated in and through perception. This becomes clear
in what Watsuji has to say about the encounter between the Buddha and
Mahākāśyapa, interpreting the understanding of the latter as a recogni-
tion of the symbolic meaning contained in the simple gesture of holding
up a lower (342). Of the many who looked on, only one understood
through what he perceived.
As Watsuji stresses, Dōgen battles against traditional interpretations
of the Rinzai school that try to lead language to its disappearance by
playing on the borderlands of grammar and semantics. Theirs is basi-
cally a skeptical attitude as far as the means of language is concerned. For
his part, Dōgen avoids pure philosophical speculation and delegates its
expression to practice and progress in one’s meetings with a teacher. But
he does not detach it from the writings, concepts, and means of expres-
sion embodied in the tradition. He adopts language and rational means
as a whole (342–3). It is in particular his productive usage of language
and traditional terminology that make Dōgen an accomplished thinker
in the Buddhist tradition. All of his work is based on the reinterpretation
of texts handed down over generations from the Chinese and Indian tra-
ditions. He works out their authentic and underlying sense.
12. “To begin with, dō means ‘to say.’ Therefore it is language as well as that which
expresses the truth. The word was used to translate bodai, the Sanskrit term for awak-
ening (what Japanese calls satori). I would surmise that Dōgen used the word in
all these meanings. It is therefore comparable to . Dōtoku thus means ‘to be
able to speak.’ Moreover, it means to be capable of expressing the way to awakening.
Therefore it has the meaning of the ‘expression of truth’ as well as the ‘attaining of
truth’.” (Watsuji 1998, 344)
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References
Abbreviation
nkz 『西田幾多郎全集新版 』[Complete works of Nishida Kitarō, New edi-
tion] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003–2009), 24 volumes.
zz 『大日本續藏經』[The Kyoto supplement to the Manji edition of the
canon], ed. by Maeda Eun 前田慧雲 and Nakano Tatsue 中野達慧
(Kyoto: Zōkyō Shoin, 1905–1912).
Other Sources
Elberfeld, Rolf
2004 Phänomenologie der Zeit im Buddhismus. Methoden interkulturellen
Philosophierens (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog).
Heine, Steven
1994 Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition: A Tale of the Two Shōbōgenzō Texts
(Albany: State University of New York).
Inoue Enryō 井上円了
1893 『禅宗哲学序論』[Outline of the philosophy of the Zen school] (Tokyo:
Tetsugaku Shoin).
Kasulis, Thomas P.
1991 “The Origins of the Question: Four Traditional Japanese Philosophies of
Language,” in Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity: East-West Phil-
osophic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press), 213–26.
Kim Hee-Jin
2004 Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist (Boston : Wisdom Publications)
Kimura Uno 木村宇野
1937 「『沙門道元』を読みて」 [Reading Shamon Dōgen], in『道元と日本哲学』
[Dōgen and Japanese philosophy] (Kyoto: Aohitogusasha).
Olson, Carl
2000 Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from
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