I tend to shy away from things that feel too deeply rooted in "philosophy" or the traditional dialectic. Not because I don't like philosophy or think it unimportant, I'm just .. leery of it in terms of the cessation of Dukkha. š
And ontological discussions DOUBLY so!
In a recent discussion with brother Kokuu about philosophy and Uji (which we are reading right now along with John Fraser and some other Dharma friends), Kokuu observed:
It is important to apply what Dogen is saying to practice but for me Uji does just that - what time looks like in practice, and how not getting fixed in linear time is very freeing.
The Birdeye speedwell flowers are blue because mind painted them so. The first green shoots of Yellow Crownbeard are love for the same reason. And mind is conditioned by all dharmas that came before, made sweet and bitter and neutral. This happens over and over faster than the speed of thought. If this happens IN time, or IS itself time is hard for me to get too worked up about.
One of the struggles I once had with Dogen is that I know I have a sort of reflexive dislike of ontological discussion when it creeps into Buddhism / Zen (AVERSION!). The Buddha is sometimes described as "observing noble silence" when people questioned him about things that were abstract and philosophical (instead of focused on practice and the cessation of Dukkha) - e.g. avyÄkata questions.
I'm happiest with Dogen if I allow his words to primarily describe experience instead of explain reality. But maybe I'm way off on that? In fact, is my language here already a problem because it tries to force Dogen's words into a box when I think perhaps part of his methodology is simply not sit cleanly on either side (of description vs. explanation)?
"A few moments later..." / after some reflection.
"Mind is conditioned by all dharmas that came before" is a claim with some structural commitments built into it (e.g. "came before" assumes a "field of time" in which "events happen"). It forces dependent origination into doing a lot of work. This is perhaps what John Fraser has tried to keep any of us from slipping into in our reading group! š„°
Is Dogen trying to dislodge a habit of mind that has already smuggled an ontology in - the ontology of discrete substances persisting through time, of an observer over here and observed objects over there. That dislodging requires language that sounds ontological because that's the conceptual framework the confusion lives in.
Uji isn't a theory of time so much as an entreaty to not keep time and being in separate boxes, because keeping them separate is itself one of the moves that generates dukkha-flavored confusion.
And this "field of time" assumption is the foundation for many views and fetters. Once one allows a container-time in which dharmas are arranged in "before" and "after" relations, you've also tacitly got dharmas as the kind of things that can occupy positions in such a container: e.g. we've given them enough self-identity to be at a position. Doing so, we've traveled a long way from dependent origination: where the arising and conditioning aren't two things and where there is not a prior dharma that then exerts influence on a later one. "Priorness" and the "influence" and "later one" are all the same event seen from inside.
One way (overly simplistic in its formulation perhaps) one can try to explain "dharmas" in Mahayana Buddhism (or maybe even "all post-Sarvastivada Buddhism") is that "dharmas exist only insofar as one can point to them". One can point to a tree and say "tree", or to a can and say "cat". Such a particular "tree" and particular "cat" occupy their dharma-positions. But the actuality is that each is ultimately empty of any abiding "self". They are mind-created, which does not make them "not real", they exist insofar as we can point to them (including counting them, weighing them, photographing them, etc.). Try telling the cat who is stuck in the top of the tree that neither she nor the tree exist! But it is still the case that neither she nor the tree have an inherent self-existence and are not separate. This is the not-one-not-two of Zen.
My understanding of Madhyamaka is that things exist as dependent designations, and the designating is part of what makes them the things they are, but this doesn't collapse into "they're just made up" because the designating itself is constrained. We cannot successfully point to a sky-flower or a hare's-horn, and the cat in the tree is going to keep being stuck regardless of our views about her emptiness. The pragmatic test (can we count it, weigh it, photograph it, get scratched by it) functions like "conventionally established" doesn't pretend to a clean line between the conventional and the ultimate.
"Moments of time" feel the same to me - they exist insofar as we can point to them. We can count them. We can do amazing experiments at tiny tiny timescales at CERN. But like dharmas, "moments" have no self-existence.
The difference is, when we point to a cat, the pointing and the cat are happening together in some shared situation; the cat is, in some sense, available to be pointed at. When we point to a moment, the pointing is itself temporal, and the moment being pointed at is either (a) the moment of pointing itself, which is strange because the pointer and the pointed-at collapse, or (b) some other moment, which puts us back into reaching toward a kind of "field of time" we are trying to avoid.
Even with the CERN experiments, what is pointed to isn't moments but intervals and rates and correlations; "moment" is a limit that the measurements approach but never quite touch. Can we take away from this that "moments" are just as dependent on designation as any dharma is?
Aaaand I've fallen down into ontology can complexity by even think through this, where simplicity would be preferred! š Simplicity in this realm is a feature, because it keeps us from accidentally dragging in the heavier machinery that makes "emptiness" sound like a doctrine about a hidden "true nature" rather than a reminder about how pointing works.
The cat in the tree is the perfect koan-lesson: she and the tree know the score.
Comments