Impermanence is Buddha-Nature: Dogen's Understanding of Temporality

153 Pages·1990·3.907 MB·English

by  Joan Stambaugh

^^mpermanence
Is
Buddha-nature
Dogen's
Understanding of Temporality
Joan Stambaugh
Impermanence
Is
Buddha-nature
Dogen's
Understanding of Temporality
Joan Stambaugh
University of Hawaii Press / Honolulu
© 1990 Joan Stambaugh
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
90 92 93 94 95 96 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stambaugh, Joan, 1932-
Impermanence is Buddha-nature : Dogen's
understanding of temporality / Joan Stambaugh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8248-1257-3 (alk. paper)
1. Dogen, 1200-1253. I. Title.
BQ9449.D657S73 1990
294.3'42'092—dc20 90-30062
CIP
University of Hawaii Press books are printed
on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Council
on Library Resources.
To
Masao Abe
Noriko Kameda
Contents
Preface / ix
. Impermanence / i
. Buddha-nature / 18
3. Being-time / 24
Birth and death / 72
5. Dialectic / 78
Time and eternity / 94
7. Thinking / 113
Epilogue / 130
Notes / 133
References / 141
Index / 145
Preface
Dogen is a profoundly original and difficult thirteenth-century
Buddhist thinker whose works have begun attracting increasing
attention in the West. Admittedly difficult for even the most
advanced and sophisticated scholars of Eastern thought, he is
bound, initially, to present an almost insurmountable barrier to
the Western mind. Yet the task of penetrating that barrier must be
undertaken and, in fact, is being carried out by many gifted schol-
ars toiling in the Dogen vineyard.
I do not bring any special or even adequate competence to the
task of explicating Dogen. But I have been fascinated by him for
the last twenty years and have benefited greatly from the writings
and seminars of those more qualified than I to mediate his
thoughts to Western philosophers. If Western philosophy is not to
subside into the dubious role of a kind of "meta" literary criticism
or to pursue similar paths that seem the only way open to a philos-
ophy and theology that have lost access to any "transcendence," it
would do well to listen to the voices of Eastern thinking.
The encounter between Western and Eastern thinkers ideally
should be dialogical, not comparative—a distinction made by
Masao Abe. Comparative studies have their definite role and
worth and provide various stepping stones to understanding. But
eventually the comparison should become somewhat more "exis-
tential," and the form perhaps best suited to existentiality is the
dialogue. A good and fruitful example of such dialogue is that
between Paul Tillich and Shin'ichi Hisamatsu published in vari-
ous volumes of The Eastern Buddhist.
Many of us have lost our receptivity to what for lack of a better
word I shall call spirituality. "Transcendence" is very much out of
fashion; metaphysics is dead. But spirituality does not have to be
tuned into anything metaphysical beyond this world. Dogen can
show us that there are unimaginable dimensions of this world
right here if we will only open our minds to them. Take away the
conceptual overlay constantly generated by our substantializing
and objectifying habitual tendencies, and things look totally dif-
ferent.
Although my interest in Dogen goes back twenty years, this is
still the book of a beginner.
Eternity cannot be explained by duration.
Spinoza
I. Impermanence
For centuries, Western thinkers have been concerned with the
question of time in many divergent ways. Frequently the question
of time included in its scope a possible relation to its u transcen-
dent'' opposite, eternity. More recently, inquiries into time have
come up with various kinds or experiences of time—in other
words, the realization that time can be experienced more or less
genuinely and authentically. This has led to the explicit insight,
which had often been latently present, that the experience of time
is in no way to be equated with objective time measurement, as
the ordinary conception of time might have it.
In his own way, the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist
thinker Dogen was concerned with the two problems just men-
tioned: the relation of time to eternity and, intimately bound up
with that relation, the different experiences of time. On the basis
of his experiential conception of time, Dogen worked out his own
understanding of the relation of the world to something tradition-
ally conceived in Buddhism as transcending the world. The West-
ern formulation for this is the relation between the world and God
(or the Absolute). The traditional Buddhist formulation before
Nagarjuna (second century a.d.) was the relation between the
cycles of birth and death (samsara) and liberation from those
cycles (nirvana). Dogen follows Nagarjuna in his rejection of nir-
vana or liberation as something beyond the cycles of birth and
death. But, instead of primarily conceiving of an "identity" of the
cycles of birth and death with liberation from them, which was
Nagarjuna's innovative insight, Dogen's focus appears to be pri-
marily on the nature of "being-time" (the Japanese word is uji)
and the possible experience of liberation inherent in it. Thus,
while Nagarjuna's orientation was primarily logical, that of
Dogen is experiential and phenomenological.
The title of this study embodies one of Dogen's preferential
characterizations of the relation under consideration here. Imper-
manence expresses our experience of the finite world of birth and
death, and is founded on the bedrock of one formulation of the
three Buddhist statements concerning the nature of that world: (i)
all is impermanent, (2) all is suffering, and (3) all is without ego or
self. Everything is impermanent. Thinkers and poets in the East
and the West have written about impermanence—the fleeting,
transitory nature of everything worldly or earthly. Often they have
stayed with that experience of impermanence, not finding any
way out of it. Others claim to have found a way out, as formulated
in the four noble truths expressed in the first sermon preached by
the Buddha after attaining enlightenment.
1. All is suffering.
2. There is an origin, an arising of suffering.
3. There is a stopping of suffering.
4. There is a way leading to the stopping of suffering.
It was Nagarjuna's startling and radical insight that the "way
out" of the cycles of birth and death lay right in the middle of these
cycles.
In this study, we want to examine briefly this fundamental
Mahayana tenet concerning the "identity" of samsara and nir-
vana and then go on to see how Dogen's conception of being-time,
or uji, affects the understanding of that identity. Although we shall
have occasion to discuss several of Dogen's fundamental concep-
tions, for the purposes of our inquiry we shall focus on the fol-
lowing:
1
genjo - presencing
gujin - total exertion
gyoji - continuous practice
juhoi - dwelling in a dharma-situation
keige - impeding
kyoryaku - taking place
nikon - right now, absolute now