FINALIST for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Philosophy category Meditating on the work of American poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder and thirteenth-century Japanese ...Zen Master Eihei D?gen, Jason M. Wirth draws out insights for understanding our relation to the planet's ongoing ecological crisis. He discusses what D?gen calls "the Great Earth" and what Snyder calls "the Wild" as being comprised of the play of waters and mountains, emptiness and form, and then considers how these ideas can illuminate the spiritual and ethical dimensions of place. The book culminates in a discussion of earth democracy, a place-based sense of communion where all beings are interconnected and all beings matter. This radical rethinking of what it means to inhabit the earth will inspire lovers of Snyder's poetry, Zen practitioners, environmental philosophers, and anyone concerned about the global ecological crisis.
Echoes of No Thing seeks to understand the space between thinking which Martin Heidegger and the 13th-century Zen patriarch Eihei Dōgen explore in their writing and teachings. Heidegger most clearly ...attempts this in Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and Dōgen in his Shōbōgenzō, a collection of fascicles which he compiled in his lifetime. Both thinkers draw us towards thinking, instead of merely defining systems of thought. Both Heidegger and Dōgen imagine possibilities not apparent in the world we currently inhabit, but notably, find possible, through a refashioning of thinking as a soteriological reimagining that clears space for the presencing of an authentic experience in the space which emerges between certainties. Jenkins elucidates this soteriological reimagining through a close reading of both authors’ conceptions of time and space, and by developing a practice of listening that is attuned to the echoes that resonate between the two thinkers. While Heidegger often wrote about new beginnings (as well as about gathering oneself, preparing the site, clearings, and practicing) in preparation for the evental un-concealing of truth, nowhere is this as present as in the enigmatic, difficult, and in fact beautiful, Contributions. To call a text beautiful, especially a work of philosophy, risks committing an act of disingenuity, and yet Contributions, like Jacques Derrida’s Glas or Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, rises to this acclaim through its very resistance to a system, its refusal to be easily digested, or even understood. Contributions is unfinished, partial, even at times muttered; it is the beginning of a thinking which takes place on a path and as such cannot imagine—or refuse—its final destination. It invites us to take up towards, but not to insist on, its thinking; it is a “turn” away from the reason and logic of a technologized world and returns philosophy—as a thinking—to a place of wonder and awe. Dōgen’s Shōbogenzō, from another culture and time entirely, is also a beautiful text, for similar reasons. The Shōbogenzō, gathered first as a series of talks given by Eihei Dōgen (and later composed as written texts) details the process of understanding which leads, for Dōgen, to a position of pure seeing, or satori, and yet these talks are not simply rules for monks, nor merely imprecations and demands for a laity; rather, they open a being’s thinking to the possibility of something purely other and work as a transition across worlds that also opens us to an other world. What both thinkers illustrate, as do the other thinkers drawn on in this project—most notably, those philosophers associated with the Kyoto School, who were both intimately aware of Dōgen’s work, and studied, or studied with, Heidegger—is that world is not a fixed, stable entity; rather it is a fugal composition of possibility, of as yet untraversed—and at times un-traversable—spaces. Echoes of No Thing seeks to examine, within the lacunal eddies of be-coming’s arrival, that space between which both thinkers point towards as possible sites of new beginnings.
In this book scholars of Buddhism from both sides of the Pacific explore the life and thought of Zen Master Dōgen (1200–1253), the founder of the Japanese Soto sect. Through both textual and ...historical analysis, the volume shows Dōgen in context of the Chinese Chan tradition that influenced him and demonstrates the tremendous, lasting impact he had on Buddhist thought and culture in Japan. The chapters provide critical new insight into Dōgen's writings. Special attention is given to the Shobogenzo and several of its fascicles, which express Dōgen's views on such practices and rituals as using supranormal powers (jinzu), reading the sutras (kankin), diligent training in zazen meditation (shikan taza), and the koan realized in everyday life (genjokoan). The book also analyzes the historical significance of this seminal figure: for instance, Dōgen's methods of appropriating Chan sources and
his role relative to that of his Japanese Zen predecessor Eisai, considered the founder of the Rinzai sect, who preceded Dōgen in traveling to China.
Applies Dogen Kigen's religious philosophy and the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro to the philosophical problem of personal identity, probing the applicability of the concept of non-self to the ...philosophical problems of selfhood, otherness, and temporality which culminate in the conundrum of personal identity.
Zen Buddhism is perhaps best known for its emphasis on meditation, and probably no figure in the history of Zen is more closely associated with meditation practice than the thirteenth-century ...Japanese master Dogen, founder of the Soto school. This study examines the historical and religious character of the practice as it is described in Dogen's own meditation texts, introducing new materials and original perspectives on one of the most influential spiritual traditions of East Asian civilization. The Soto version of Zen meditation is known as "just sitting," a practice in which, through the cultivation of the subtle state of "nonthinking," the meditator is said to be brought into perfect accord with the higher consciousness of the "Buddha mind" inherent in all beings. This study examines the historical and religious character of the practice as it is described in Dogen's own meditation texts, introducing new materials and original perspectives on one of the most influential spiritual traditions of East Asian civilization.
This paper examines Zen Master Dogen's philosophy of shinjin datsuraku, dropping off body and mind, through his dialectical standpoint on sunyata. In our efforts, we shall learn of the philosophical ...affinities Dogen shares with early Mahayana thinkers, particularly Nagarjuna and his philosophy of emptiness. A demonstration of this connection will in turn open up a new conceptual window for viewing and interpreting various themes and passages within Dogen's writings. Some ideas we will explore in order to frame out a dialectical discussion of shinjin datsuraku are the mind-body problem and its relationship to the problem of time, as well as his philosophy and practice of zazen, seated meditation.
Following from this examination, we will then probe Dogen's dialectical standpoint on shinjin datsuraku. In our attempt to unfold the philosophical layers of meaning that encapsulate this teaching, we will provide a novel reading of his philosophy of Buddha-nature, a philosophy that is free from all traces of essentialism.
