Dogen and Peirce, phaneroscopy and zazen

All things have no signs:
This is the real body of Buddha.

Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary 1984, 380)

All thought is in signs.

Peirce (EP1:24)

From Dogen's Fukanzazengi (‘Instructions for Zazen’):

Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.

Could it be that the real body of Buddha is what Dogen called One Bright Pearl?
and what Peirce called the phaneron? He used this word ‘to denote the total content of any one consciousness (for any one is substantially any other), the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value’ (EP2:362).

Can this question be investigated?

The investigator would have to practice both phaneroscopy and zazen,
and be fluent in both Peircean and Buddhist dialects.

Is it possible to investigate such a question while practicing
zazen or phaneroscopy?

This question is left as an exercise for the reader (along with the links provided here).

Energy matters

I'm back to the blog after a busy spring and summer. Much of the time taken from blogging (and from working on Turning Words) went into changes to our homestead, or its connections with the local (Manitoulin Island) community. Meanwhile a bad back and other physical challenges cut deeply into my energy. I'm dealing with that by deliberately changing my habits, so that i move more deliberately … and the same goes for our use of electrical energy, as we adjust to our newly installed solar energy system. It's a kind of ‘mindfulness.’ The details are more relevant elsewhere (such as the Resilient Manitoulin blog), but it's all part of ‘settling our whole being into interpenetrating reality’ – as Shohaku Okumura puts it in his recent book, Realizing Genjokoan: The key to Dogen's Shobogenzo (p. 90).

I didn't do much reading this summer, but Okumura's book was certainly a highlight. He is a lifelong practitioner and scholar of Dogen's work, and the more personal side of this book struck a chord with me as well, because Okumura (who is a few years younger than me) also takes note of his declining energy levels. I can't call myself a Buddhist because i was never taken on by a ‘live’ Buddhist teacher, but immersion in Dogen's way of reading, thinking and nonthinking is deeply affecting what i can say about intimacy, intimologies, interpenetrating reality.

Back to work on (play with) Turning Words. While i still have some energy left, right?

Rehabilitating Information

That's the title of a paper i've just had published by the open access journal Entropy. Yesterday i updated my gnoxic home page to reflect some of the recent work that i've been doing instead of posting here.

While working on all this, it's occurred to me that humanity suffers from a global attention deficit disorder.

The cure won't be found at the end of any path or any rainbow; it's not something lost or hidden somewhere else; it's a matter of raising the quality, breadth and depth of our attention right here and now. What is the path right in front of us?

As Dogen said: a dream within a dream.

(You can be sure that whatever you write about it will be misread.)

Knowing and flowing

If the great ocean knew it was full, the hundreds of rivers would all flow upstream.

— Dogen, Dharma Hall Discourse 447 (Eihei Koroku, 404)

On teaching

It is necessary to get to the reality and reveal to learners the thing in each one of them that is the fundamental matter of great liberation, without dependencies, without contrived activities, without concerns.

— Yuanwu (Cleary and Cleary 1994, 178)

Do not regard the capacity to expound the dharma as superior, and the capacity to listen to the dharma as inferior. If those who speak are venerable, those who listen are venerable as well.

— Dogen, ‘Gyobutsu Iigi’ (Tanahashi 2004, 94)

— and thanks to John Harvey (see his comment) for pointing out that Lao Tzu was there before Dogen!

The source

Entering is the source, and the source means from beginning to end.

— Dogen, ‘Bukkyo’ (Nearman 2007, 312)

Signs and pictures, Peirce and Dogen

There is no meaning without signs, but no sign can say more than its reader can mean with it. The act of meaning is never fully determined by the sign.

C.S. Peirce makes a

distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz.: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign's not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the latter turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he please. It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe — not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth” — that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

— EP2:394 (1906)

What Peirce says there about signs can be compared to what Eihei Dogen says here about pictures:

Because the entire universe and all things are, as such, pictures, both humans and things actualize themselves through pictures. The Buddha-ancestors perfect themselves through pictures.

— Dogen, ‘Gabyo’ (Kim 2007, 116)

Is ‘pictures’ a sign of signs? Is ‘signs’ a picture of pictures? Consider this comment by Hee-jin Kim (2007, 118):

Dogen once wrote: ‘The monastics of future generations will be able to understand one-taste Zen based on words and letters, if they devote efforts to spiritual practice by seeing the universe through words and letters, and words and letters through the universe.’ Replace ‘words and letters’ in the above passage with ‘pictures,’ and its gist is the same — the reason is that for Dogen, picture is language and language is picture. Both in turn belong to thinking. Thus the visual and linguistic, the spatial and temporal, imagination and conceptualization, the material and the mental, the sensuous and rational coalesce in Dogen's religious method and hermeneutics.

Kim also comments that Dogen's method ‘amounted, in essence, to critical, reflective thinking as an integral part of meditation’ (Kim 2007, 122). Peirce's ‘critical common-sensism’ was likewise an integral part of his philosophical practice.

As for me, i'm taking a break from digging out after the first big snowstorm of this winter. It seems all the time i've been shovelling signs.

On reading translations

The Internet connection is not always working here in the backwoods — hence the hiatus in posting here, if anyone noticed —

Still not healthy enough to do much walking in the woods, i'm reduced to walking through words. Often this means relying on translators to help me engage with a writer i can count on to shake me out of a mental rut, such as Dogen. So it's cause for celebration to discover, as i did last week, a complete English translation of Dogen's masterwork, the Shobogenzo, at the Shasta Abbey website.

The translation is by Rev. Hubert Nearman, who dedicated 14 years to the task and seems well qualified for it. Of course i can't compare his translation with the original, since i don't read medieval Japanese, so there's no point in my passing judgment on the quality of his translation. But this observation opens a deeper question about the wholehearted reading of ‘scriptures’ in translation.

The question can perhaps be put best in semiotic terms, since translation is paradigmatic of semiosis itself: a sign-process produces an interpretant, and translation is prototypical of interpretation. For example, take one fascicle or ‘chapter’ of Dogen's Shobogenzo: the title, ‘Kokyo’, is translated ‘On the Ancient Mirror’ by Nearman; the Nishijima/Cross translation (the only other one i've seen) calls it ‘The Eternal Mirror’. The whole essay is about this ‘mirror’ — in other words, the whole Japanese text is a sign and this Mirror is its object. Like any sign, Dogen's essay ‘determines its interpretant to stand in the same triadic relation to the same object for some interpretant’ (Peirce, CP 1.541). The original text ‘determines’ the text of the translation by constraining it to say the same thing as the original in another language; if it didn't, we wouldn't call the new text a ‘translation’.

This implies at least that both texts are about something which can be spoken of in either language (and perhaps in any language). The object of these signs is therefore independent of, and external to, any language used to direct attention to it. And each sign of that dynamic object, as Peirce called it, generates an interpretant which works in turn as another sign, generating a further interpretant, and so on — each sign in the sequence having the same object.

The catch is that whatever this object called a Mirror is, you must already have some acquaintance with it before you can interpret any signs as describing, defining or informing you about it. The sign itself can't supply this acquaintance; it can only give you some hints about how to renew that acquaintance and carry it forward. In terms of Dogen's essay, this is equally true of the original Japanese text and of any translation of it. Indeed the original text was itself a translation, namely of the eternal buddha-dharma, as reflected in Dogen's own reflections on his experience of the Ancient Mirror. And your reading of any translation is another translation of these signs directing your attention to the ancient mirror itself.

The word mirror is a symbol of the object of this infinite succession of signs. Most of Dogen's essay is about how to read this symbol, as used by various ancient masters in their koans and conversations. And this blog post is about how we read translations of that essay.

In that last sentence, i put ‘translations’ in the plural for a reason. It is obvious, but perhaps worth noticing for that very reason, that a single text can be translated in more than one way. In practice, this implies that if we compare two translations, we begin with the assumption that they are equivalent, even when they are different. This has to be our assumption because we are reading them as interpretant signs which have the same dynamic object as Dogen's original essay. So our working assumption is that where they differ, they have chosen different ways of directing our attention to that object, namely the Ancient or Eternal Mirror. For example, compare these two translations of a single Dogen sentence:

Nearman:

We should by all means have as our investigation through training and practice an exploration that broadly spans the sayings of all the Buddhas and Ancestors.

Nishijima/Cross:

There must be learning in practice that widely covers the teachings of all the buddhas and all the patriarchs.

We notice right away that latter parts of the two translations, from the word ‘that’ to the end of the sentence, are quite similar. But the part of the sentence before that consists of 15 words in the first translation, but only 6 words in the second. Yet we must assume that both say what Dogen was saying in the source text. We might decide eventually that one says it better than the other, but we certainly can't begin with such an assumption. Besides, the differences may be entirely a matter of style, and quirks of style should be considered innocent of misrepresentation until proven guilty of it. Since ancient Japanese and Chinese tend to be more economical in their use of words than contemporary English, i would guess that the Nishijima/Cross translation is closer to being word-for-word than the Nearman. But that in itself doesn't make it a better or more accurate translation. Nearman's Dogen appears a bit more verbose than the Dogen of other translators (for instance, the famous Genjokoan has a four-word title in many English translations; Nearman entitles it ‘On the Spiritual Question as It Manifests Before Your Very Eyes’). But perhaps Nearman captures more of the nuances of the text this way.

One implication of all this is that a translation can work as well as the original text, or maybe better, for ‘scriptural’ purposes — just as one artist can sometimes perform a song better than the artist who wrote it in the first place. A translation need not be a ‘second-hand’ substitute for the original. It can be the real Word itself, if it successfully ‘determines’ your reading to recognize the universal Truth, or some face of it, which dwells in the deepest layers of experience, which is your own because it is everyone's. Just don't be too sure that your reading is the right one! The trick is to recognize the Truth when it comes to you in another new (dis)guise. Are you ready for that?

Just walking

Awoke this morning to a white surprise: not only the ground but the trees, now stripped of their leaves, are covered with snow, the first of this coming winter. Since it's barely below the freezing point, the snow sticks to the branches despite the fairly strong breeze. This burst of brightness in the normally dismal November weather must be beautiful even to those who don't like winter.

I've been out this morning only long enough to bring in the day's supply of firewood. Some kind of cold or flu has kept me mostly indoors for over a week now, which is even more of a nuisance than the sluggishness of bodymind it brings. I can't claim as much outdoor time as Thoreau did, but enough to bear witness to the truth of this journal entry (4 Nov. 1852):

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present. Let a man have thought what he will of Nature in the house, she will still be novel outdoors. I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.

It's important to escape from an artificial environment for at least part of each day — something difficult for city dwellers to do, since the surroundings of the buildings are hardly less artificial than the interiors. We are blessed to live here in the backwoods of Manitoulin! But that's not the only factor in Thoreau's practice which kept him grounded in reality: the aimlessness of his walking was equally important. Just walking, or ‘sauntering’ as he called it, corresponds to what Dogen called ‘just sitting’ — not trying to get somewhere, not aiming to become a Buddha. Even an indoor-oriented thinker such as Peirce could see the value of aimless thinking, or the ‘play of musement’ as he called it. It seems to short-circuit our self-deceptive tendencies. Thoreau was as much a reader as a walker, but his reading too was often aimless, ‘just reading’ as i might call it — aimless and yet urgent in its immediacy, its being-time.

My own reading practice is similar. And even that i often interrupt by immersing myself in music, usually the wordless kind. But as Thoreau says, it's not enough to dwell in the world of words and feelings, and you need to get outdoors to shed that cultural cocoon. So i'm looking forward to getting out there again, when my lungs will let me.