Just Sitting and Just Saying: The Hermeneutics of Dōgen’s Realization-Based View of Language

This paper explicates the complex relationship between contemplative practice and enlightened activity conducted both on off meditative cushion as demonstrated in approach of Sōtō Zen Buddhist founder Dōgen (1200–1253). I examine Dōgen’s intricate views regarding how language, or what refer to just saying, can should be used creative yet often puzzling perplexing ways express experience self-realization by reflecting state non-thinking that is attained through unremitting seated meditation sitting (shikan taza). In light sometimes-forbidding obscurity his writing, well occasional admonitions against a preoccupation with literary pursuits, show based close reading primary sources basic hermeneutic standpoint seeks overcome conventional sets binary oppositions involving uses language. These polarities typically separate respective roles teacher learner distinguishing sharply delusion insight, truth untruth, right wrong, speech silence, thereby reinforce hierarchical, instrumental, finite view discourse. Instead, inventively develops expressions emphasize non-hierarchical, realization–based, eminently flexible functions self-extricating rhetoric such that, according paradoxical teaching, “entangled vines are disentangled using nothing other than entwined creepers,” deceptively straightforward example, “the eyes horizontal, nose vertical.”