Impermanence Is Buddha-Nature: Dо̄gen's Understanding of Temporality by Joan Stambaugh

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this book which could be described as a dialogical encounter between Dogen and several western thinkers, including Spinosa Leibnitz and Heidegger. She doesn’t try and uncover influence of the first on the latter, nor does she compare their work in general. Her work is dialogical in the sense that she brings in these European philosophers in order to better illuminate Dogan in a way that the readers the book might understand —presumably many of which don’t have access to the Japanese.

I don’t know if she even has access to the Japanese. I think she relies on translations.

As my son says, I am not gonna lie. This book is challenging. As soon as I finished it, I immediately turned back to the front to start again. Reading cover to cover, back to back twice, I am not putting it away yet as I need one more round. I also do not think I could have understood the book if I hadn’t studied philosophy as an undergraduate with a focus on Heidegger.

Stambaugh is a heavy-hitter. And this book is gold.

She is not the first thinker to do a deep dive on Dogen with an eye toward Heidegger (See Steven Heine’s work). But her laser focus on “time” vis-a-vis Buddha nature is penetrating. She begins by noting there is a similar tension in Heidegger and Spinoza. Transcendence versus Immanence (Absolute versus world). She maps this roughly onto the time” versus Buddha nature tension and off we go.

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Uji (有時), usually translated into English as Being-Time

The key to unlocking the tension of Buddha Nature is in understanding time. Not in terms of Newtonian time (ie, a container that time occurs “in”) but more in tune with Heideggerean “flow” “worlding” and being. Each “dharmas” (event) is time itself.

It is not terribly surprising that before Newton, there were many differing understandings of the nature of time and that our understanding of being was informed by that in different ways across the centuries.

If you have a sense of time that is more akin to how physicists today understand it, to suggest that the fundamental nature of reality is Impermanence because time is a constant appearing and extinction in each moment, Dogen’s thinking can be more easily understood from there. More on Dogen someday soon.

Essay this monday on Dogen and translation issues at 3QD.

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「人の悟りをうる、水につきのやどるがごとし。月ぬれず、水やぶれず。ひろくおほきなる光にてあれど、尺寸の水にやどる。全月も弥天も、草の露にもやどり、一滴の水にもやどる。」

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. The moon does not become wet, nor does the water become disturbed. The light is so vast and yet it is reflected even in a drop of water. The entirety of the moon and all of heaven (the sky?) can be glimpsed in a dewdrop on a glade of grass.

For me, what is interesting is the metaphor of reflection. This is neither transcendence nor immanence. As reflected Light, the image evokes the “world in a grain of sand idea,” which is short-hand for that of an inter-dependent, co-arising reality. A radical denial of duration. (As Spinoza said, eternity cannot be explained by duration).

The short poem unlocks a multitude of ideas and images, philosophies, and understandings of being. It is what is so endlessly interesting about literary translation.