Asian Philosophy, 2015

Vol. 25, No. 1, 1–14, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2015.1016733

 gen’s Idea of Buddha-Nature:

Do
Dynamism and Non-Referentiality
Rein Raud

Busshō, one of the central fascicles of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, is dedicated to the

problematic of Buddha-nature, the understanding of which in Dōgen’s thought is
fairly different from previous Buddhist philosophy, but concordant with his views on
reality, time and person. The article will present a close reading of several passages
of the fascicle with comment in order to argue that Dōgen’s understanding of
Buddha-nature is not something that entities have, but a mode of how they are,
neither in itself nor for us, but in the total world-process. The relation between
totality and particularity is not hierarchical, nor one of opposition, but conceived of
a matter of perspective, which, as Dōgen shows, is both mediated and circumscribed
by language. As a result, we can see that particularity of being is precisely what
makes the totality of being accessible to every existent, not an obstacle to be
overcome.

Busshō, the longest and one of the most important fascicles of Dōgen’s
Shōbōgenzō, is dedicated to the problematic of Buddha-nature, which traditionally
in Buddhist thought has referred to the potential of all sentient beings to attain
Buddhahood, and thus served as a foundation for the theory of original enlight-
enment. True to his character, Dōgen is not satisfied with this interpretation and
advances one of his own, a theory of existence, seen both as a totality and from
the perspective of a particular existent. As I hope to show, his view of Buddha-
nature is not something that entities have, but a mode of how they are, neither in
itself nor for us, but in the total world-process. The relation between totality and
particularity is not hierarchical, nor one of opposition, but conceived of a matter
of perspective, which, as Dōgen shows, is both mediated and circumscribed by
language. As a result, we can see that impermanence, an inescapable characteristic
of the particularity of being, is precisely what makes the totality accessible to every
existent, not an obstacle to be overcome.

Correspondence to: Rein Raud, Neeme tee 7, Kasmu, Laane-Virumaa 45601, Estonia. Email:
rein.raud@helsinki.fi

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

2 R. Raud
Preliminary Remarks
Before turning to the discussion of being in the text itself, I would like to address a
few key issues that may influence the way we read Dōgen’s work. One of them is the
question of individuality of being, which is already inherent in the classical way how
Buddha-nature is described: all beings possess it, that is, they are originally enligh-
tened, and only the entanglement in illusions chains them to their particular mode of
existence (see Harvey, 2004, pp. 155–179 for the genesis of the idea). However, this
view seems to re-introduce, through the back door as it were, an idea of if not a stable
self then at least a semi-self-reliant entity that is different from, though at the same
time in possession of, this Buddha-nature. If, however, that entity is itself illusory, as
classical Buddhist doctrine tells us, how can it ‘have’ Buddha-nature? This, in fact,
seems to be one of the motivations behind Dōgen’s idiosyncratic reading of the
opening quote, where he says that beings ‘are’ Buddha-nature instead of possessing
it, as usually had been read.
Nonetheless, Dōgen’s own view of things still also seems to include a certain
dichotomy between the totality of being and particular existents. Moreover, this
dichotomy seems to have been there from the very beginning of his philosophical
career, that is, from the writing of Bendōwa in 1230,1 and that it has been explicitly
brought into the foreground—as a central problem, we may suppose—in the famous
opening statement of the Genjōkōan fascicle (1233), where he juxtaposes two oppos-
ing views of how reality is: there are either delusion-and-enlightenment as well as
birth-and-death, or the context of the non-self where none of these has any meaning.
Some of the commentaries have here yielded to the temptation to view these
postulates as a description of spiritual progress, which, I think, is to mistake the
whole point. Neither, it seems, would it be warranted to view these two views as levels
of a hierarchy, where a higher point encompasses also what is incorrectly seen from a
lower one and gives it a new and more informed interpretation. A more productive
approach, I believe, would be to read these in the light of the Tendai three truths
theory: there is the ultimate truth of impermanence and ingraspability of the nature
of things, and there is the shared truth of what is correct in the world of singular
beings, and the third truth of the Middle Way that states both of the other truths in
the constellation are true equally (see Swanson, 1989). Dōgen’s theory of being and
Buddha-nature, as I hope to show, should be read similarly: while the latter accounts
for the totality of being, it does not make the existence of particular beings any less
real, even though their particularity is not a reason for considering them self-reliant.
On the contrary, it is only through their particularity that existents can have access to
the Buddha-nature that they are.
Closely related to the total-particular axis is another traditional dichotomy of essence
and particular existence—for example, were we to view the totality of existence as
something having a structure, essences would easily prompt themselves as a privileged
level of such a construction. Indeed, the word ‘essence’ is often used for translating the
character shō (such as the second part of the compound busshō, or Buddha-nature), and
in many passages this obstructs reading precisely because it evokes the matrix of types
 Asian Philosophy 3

and tokens, essential properties and contingent forms, which is as far from Dōgen’s views
as can be. It seems the closest equivalent to shō is not ‘essence’ or ‘nature’, but ‘-ity’,
especially since the character is used to convey a similarly functioning Sanskrit suffix in
translated technical terms, an idiosyncratic quality that a thing has that makes it what it is,
as a certain ‘reinraudity’ is what makes me, and no one else, Rein Raud at any given
moment. As I am not totally identical to myself at every given moment, this ‘reinraudity’
is obviously not an immutable essence. On the other hand, it does also not consist of a
limited set of ‘essential’ properties that I have, but necessarily refers to the sum total of all
the characteristics that pertain to me, however fleeting.
Another issue that inevitably affects our view of Dōgen’s Buddha-nature theory is
the relation of the world and language. As we will be returning to this topic later, let
me just say that it is one of the essential difficulties of reading not only Dōgen, but
many Buddhist texts that we are unable to distinguish when they refer to phenomena
and when to concepts. Thus it is quite puzzling that even in some cases, where the
text actually stresses that it is talking about concepts, quite a few interpreters actually
prefer to discard that stress.2 Similar problems occur also in the text of the Busshō
fascicle and there are cases, where we cannot be absolutely sure whether Dōgen is
referring to an alleged ‘thing’ in reality or its representation in language (or the
mind), even though the interpretation of the passage in question would depend
significantly on the choice of the point of view. This is by no means only Dōgen’s
problem. More than a few paradoxes are prone to go away once we look at them from
this perspective, statements of the type ‘A is not A, therefore it is A’ become rationally
intelligible if we take the first and the third A to refer to a phenomenon, and the
second to the word referring to it.
While we are at the subject of language, a few words also need to be said about
predication. Quite often we take an assertion of the type ‘A is B’ to be of the same
logical value as what it would be in an Indo-European language. However, this is far
from what is the case in classical Japanese (or modern, for that matter), because the
language does not express any subject–predicate relationships. What we have instead
is thematic constructions, roughly to be translated as ‘as far as A is concerned, B
applies’. As a result one can use an identical grammatical construction for saying ‘I
am a teacher’ and ‘I want sushi’, when selecting from the menu in a restaurant: in
both cases, we can translate the original Japanese as ‘as far as I am concerned,
“teacher” (“sushi”) applies’. The famous opening statement of Sei Shōnagon’s
Makura no sōshi presents assertions linking the four seasons of the year to specific
moments of the day. But saying ‘spring is the dawn’ does not mean more than
dawntime, in Sei’s opinion, is when her idea of spring is accessible at its best. In other
words, ‘as far as spring is concerned, dawn applies’. Similarly, Dōgen’s own most
famous poem lists things that for him are paired with seasons: in spring, the flowers,
in summer, the cuckoo, in autumn, the moon and in winter, the snow. This is
something to be remembered whenever we deal with a statement that seems to be
of a subject–predicate type in Dōgen’s text: quite a few of them make much more and
entirely different sense when they are treated as thematic constructions, not as
propositions of the type ‘A is B’.
4 R. Raud
The final issue to be addressed here is not so much of a problem than a position-
taking considering the ontological status of reality. Dōgen’s famously endorses
Huineng’s view that ‘the triple world is mind-only’, even dedicating a whole fascicle
to it, which has led Kim, for example, to comment: ‘Dōgen’s “idealism” of mind-only
provides a unique vision of reality in which mind-only is the one and only reality that
is both subject and object (the triple world) and their ground’ (Kim, 2004, p. 124). I
believe this view to be completely mistaken. Dōgen’s position should not be char-
acterised as ‘idealism’, with quotation marks or without. On the contrary: if anything,
Dōgen’s ontology is the most radical version of materialism, even though in
Buddhism neither term makes sense. Dharmas, the elementary units of being, are
not material, because they do not have spatial or temporal dimensions, and they are
not ideal, because they are not produced by conceptualisation, let alone grounded in a
‘higher’ plane of Platonic existence. As such, however, they are responsible for both
the material and the ideal phenomena of our world, or, in other words, anything that
can be individuated as a link in a causal chain. Now in Dōgen’s view, explicated in
detail in the Uji fascicle (see Raud, 2012), everything that exists is a configuration of
dharmas, a way of their arrangement, and thus exists momentarily. How these
momentarily existing, yet somehow both continuous and different materialities follow
(resp. turn into) each other, is one of Dōgen’s central questions.
Dōgen is not alone in this view: a theory of ks:ānikavāda, or ‘momentary existence’
has been advocated by the Sautrāntika school, up to the point that some Brahmanist
critics of Buddhism, such as Udayana, have attributed the statement that all that exists
is momentary to the historical Buddha himself (quoted in Kalupahana, 1987, p. 23).
There are other schools in Buddhism, such as the sarvāstivāda, or ‘everything-exists
school’, which holds that things and events of the past also retain a certain kind of
existence (Dessein, 2011; Matsunaga & Matsunaga, 1974, pp. 36–39). Of course, this
polemic concerns not so much the question of how things actually are in the world, but
of what should properly be called ‘existence’, and in Dōgen’s view only the actual and
predominantly material instance of being merits this term in its strong sense.
What follows from this, however, is that everything that has continuity, everything that
reaches into the past or into the future, is not ‘objectively’ there, but exists, for a bigger
part, only in our minds. So the view that ‘the triple world is mind-only’ is not necessarily
subjective idealism or even psychological fundamentalism, but a simple and realistic
statement that the bigger part of what we consider to exist does not have an actual
referent in the momentary material world, but takes place in our mind, as memories,
anticipations or inferrals. How this continuity is produced is another problem recurrent
in Dōgen’s writing, the Busshō fascicle included, and the proposed solution, as I again
hope to show, is closely related to the conceptualisation of particular and total being.

Dynamic Existence
As it is well known, in the opening statement of the Busshō fascicle Dōgen recon-
ceptualises ‘Buddha-nature’ from the ground of the original enlightenment into
 Asian Philosophy 5

something encompassing the whole existence. Additionally, he states that Buddha-

nature is not just a characteristic of sentient beings, but all particular existents. Given
the two premises (1) that all existents that have temporal continuity are of the mind,
as explained above, and (2) that ideas as such do not exist separately or objectively,
this is only logical. Particular existents, sentient or not, derive their ontological status
from mental processes, and therefore their particular existence, conceived of apart
from the totality of being, is predicated on mental processes. Mountains, in other
word, are ‘sentient beings’ not in the virtue of being sentient themselves, but in their
inability to have a continuity anywhere else than in a sentient mind.
In his comments, Dōgen also hastens to underscore that ‘the totality of being’ is not
the same as ‘being’ in opposition to ‘not-being’. Indeed, Dōgen often uses juxtaposed
opposites not for expressing them together, but for describing a system defined by
their opposition: thus ‘“not-being” and “being”’ points to a situation where the
distinction between the two is relevant, similarly as in the first sentence of the
Genjōkōan fascicle (‘in a temporal junction where all dharmas are Buddha-dharma,
there is, accordingly, [the dichotomy of] illusions and enlightenment, there is prac-
tice, there is life, there is death, there are all Buddhas, there are sentient beings’,
Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 35) we have ‘illusions and enlightenment’ together pointing to a
view of the world where these two are conceived of as separate from each other. The
whole quotation thus describes two registers of being: that of particulars, which is
dynamic, and the totality of being, which is not properly a subject and cannot have
any characteristics or predicates. How these two registers relate to each other is the
central topic of the fascicle. Let us note immediately that it is not a relation of
hierarchy, encapsulation, manifestation of principle or any other such thing that
might come to mind.
Dōgen has chosen another quote to briefly touch on the problematic of existence
and time and causation, treated extensively in the Uji fascicle that was written the
year before: ‘If you wish to understand the meaning of Buddha-nature, you will find it
when you look at temporality and causality (jisetsu-in’en). As the moment arrives,
Buddha-nature is explicitly manifest’ (Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 47). Translators sometimes
highlight one aspect of the term jisetsu-in’en—Abe and Waddell render it as ‘tem-
poral conditions’ (Dōgen, 2002, p. 65), Tanahashi as ‘cause and effect over time’
(Dōgen, 2010, p. 237)—but it seems that a better way would be to see the two as
equals in a conceptual compound. Jisetsu, combining the ideograms for ‘time’ and
‘bamboo joint’ is a word frequently used by Dōgen to designate a ‘temporal knot’, so
to say, a moment during which everything exists, together with the traces of all the
processes that have led to it, that is, its causal background. This is to be done through
one’s opening up to the immediate reality around oneself, and not by intellectual
activity:
For looking at temporality and causality, you look through temporality and caus-
ality. You look at your fly-whisk or your staff. You don’t use knowledge of limited
wisdom and limitless wisdom, original enlightenment and acquired enlightenment,
unenlightened and correctly enlightened mind in order to look at them. (Dōgen,
1972:I, p. 48)
6 R. Raud
In other words, Dōgen says that Buddha-nature is to be apprehended through the
discernment of causal roots in the momentarily existing reality, not in its conceptua-
lisations. But what is probably even more relevant in the passage is the apparently
paradoxical way how Dōgen reads the phrase ‘as the moment (jisetsu) arrives,
Buddha-nature is explicitly manifest’. In his view, the ‘as arrives’ should not be
read as a conditional or a future construction, but means ‘has already arrived’
(1972:I, p. 48). Strictly from the point of view of grammar, this is, of course,
stretching things. However, if we take into account that existence is always momen-
tary, then a moment that is real is necessarily also already present. To construe its
being in a conditional future would mean to speak about something else, a product of
the mind. ‘During the twelve hours of the day, there is no empty passing’, he
continues, that is, measurable temporality cannot exist apart from the moments of
existence. And, he concludes, ‘there has never yet been a time that had not arrived, as
there is no Buddha-nature that is not explicitly manifest’ (1972:I). As Steven Heine
points out, the ‘arrival’ of a moment is only possible in the paradigm of measurable
time, the adaptation of which is what leads us away from experiencing our existence
properly: ‘There is no “if” from the standpoint of uji [the existential moment] because
there is no time of the twenty-four hours that is not the “proper” time… The time
already here is itself the full presencing of Buddha-nature, which does not have to
“arrive” on the scene’ (1985, p. 60).
Next, Dōgen takes the expression ‘arising’ from a passage by Aśvaghośa to refer
directly to the phenomenal world (‘mountains, rivers and the great earth’) in its
momentary being, or becoming-itself (1972:I, p. 49). This adds an important aspect
to the momentariness of existence: even though reality ‘takes place’ only in the
dimensionless ‘now’, this ‘now’ itself contains a dynamic. ‘Arising’ (kenritsu) has
also been rendered as ‘forming’ by Abe and Waddell (Dōgen, 2002, p. 67), ‘con-
struct[ion]’ by Nishijima and Cross (Dōgen, 1994:II, p. 6) and even left untranslated
altogether by Tanahashi (Dōgen, 2010, p. 238). All these solutions are problematic
because the term should not be understood to refer to the process of something that
pre-exists becoming manifest, or, even worse, given its shape by some other agent.
Kenritsu is the dynamic process of being, of a thing becoming what it uniquely is at
that precise moment. Even ‘becoming’ is not really a correct word, because of its
hint of finality, arriving at the endpoint of a transformative process, but this
becoming-itself never stops, the ‘itself’ is never reached in a final, tangible form.
It seems fair to assume that kenritsu, taken from the original quote, is here a stand-
in for Dōgen’s usual term, genjō, ‘apparent maturation’, which combines gen,
‘appearing’, ‘becoming manifest’ with jō, ‘becoming’ or ‘maturation’—I prefer the
latter for the above-mentioned goal-oriented character of ‘becoming’, since ‘mature’
is not a condition attained after crossing a discrete threshold.3 ‘Manifestation’,
which is sometimes used as an equivalent for this term, is more problematic,
because it leaves the impression of a quasi-Platonic two-tiered structure of reality,
of essences that somehow become manifest in the phenomenological world, while
what Dōgen means is rather that the way how our mind conceives of the given
reality is imperfect, which is why we experience it in a distorted way. That
 Asian Philosophy 7

distortion, however, does not appear in the process of a ‘pure’ idea manifesting itself in
the contaminated environment of reality, but in the process of imperfectly encoding
this reality in the particular mind. A detailed analysis of the relation of this process to
another central category of Dōgen’s thought, gyōji, usually translated as ‘activity’,
though perhaps more adequately rendered as ‘dynamism’, has to remain beyond the
scope of this article—let it just be said that I take this ‘dynamism’ to be a ground-level
characteristic of the totality of being, its inability of standing still, and by proxy the
force that makes existential moments turn into each other, thereby producing the
illusion of continuity, seen from the perspective of a particular being. ‘Activity’ is
misleading as an equivalent for this notion firstly because it presupposes an opposition
to ‘passivity’, which, in its home context, is inconceivable, and secondly, because it
strongly invites the idea of an active agent, or more precisely an agent whose will it is to
be active, again something quite out of the question.
It should also be clear under the circumstances that shō, the ‘nature’ part of busshō,
which is also used independently, should in those cases not be understood or
translated as ‘essence’, as it is customary (see, for example, Dōgen, 2010, p. 493ff.),
because ‘essences’ make sense as opposed to ‘manifestations’ or ‘contingencies’. But
shō is by no means a core part of a particular existent—on the contrary, as suggested
above, it designates the sum total of all the properties that characterise something as
itself on any given moment. Therefore, shō does not denote something that has
temporal continuity. Perhaps we could understand it as the momentary end result
of the ongoing becoming: the unrepeatable and impermanent way how a particular
thing takes place in the dimensionless ‘now’.
To recapitulate what has been said so far: on the one hand, we have momentary
materiality that is brought about by processes of causation, traces of which it
inevitably contains; on the other, a never-ending dynamism that always takes place
in the dimensionless now, in which everything—the totality of being as well as each
particular existent—are becoming what they are at that precise moment, only to arise
as something new, something else at the next one. Buddha-nature is thus not some-
thing that existents have, nor is it something that can be predicated of them, but a
mode of being, not what they are, but how they are. Seeing Buddha-nature as some-
thing apart from their own existence is a result of the distortion that particular
existents impose on it while constructing it in their minds.

The Particular Perspective

It is easy to see how such an ontology makes sense for the totality of being, which
turns from one interconnected cross-section to another, but it is much more difficult
to describe the status of a particular existent in the same terms. As we have seen,
particular existents are ‘mind-only’ in that their ontological status depends on their
conceptualisation in an imaginary continuity. On the other hand, so are referents of
words, because shared language cannot possibly capture the momentary truth of
being. This is evidently why Dōgen now moves his focus to the relationship between
8 R. Raud
existence and language, looking at them from the perspective of a particular existent.
A crucial observation in this respect is to be found in his comments on the first
reported conversation (Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 52) between Hongran and Huineng, the fifth
and future sixth patriarch of the Zen school, respectively:
Hongran said, From which place have you come here?
Huineng said, I am a Lingnan person.
Hongran said, And now that you’ve come here, what do you seek?
Huineng said, I seek to become a Buddha.
Hongran said, But Lingnan people have no Buddha-nature. How you could
become a Buddha then?

Reading this, we should again keep in mind the impossibility of quotation marks. It is
not people from Lingnan, but ‘Lingnan people’, who have no Buddha-nature. As long
as they are ‘Lingnan people’, people defined by their being from Lingnan and nothing
else. ‘Baseball fans’ have no Buddha-nature, nor do ‘Beatles fans’ nor ‘Harry Potter
fans’, if this is all that they are. Anyone who lets herself to be identified by a
simplifying conceptual structure, a map, a network, has this Buddha-nature problem.
This is the starting point that Dōgen takes for his own explanation of the passage:
The phrase ‘Lingnan people have no Buddha-nature’ does not mean that people
from Lingnan do not have Buddha-nature, nor does it mean that people from
Lingnan have Buddha-nature. It means that ‘Lingnan people’ have ‘there-isn’t-
Buddha-nature’ (mubusshō). The phrase ‘how you could become a Buddha’
means ‘what is the act of becoming Buddha you are looking forward to’.

Various translators and commentators have treated the compound ‘there-isn’t-

Buddha-nature’ in different ways.4 The word for negative being is thus usually
supposed to characterise Buddha-nature in a specific way. However, this does not
seem to do justice to the logic of the text. The aim of the essay is to comment on
Buddha-nature, not on some specific (positively absent) form of it, whatever that
means.5 Stambaugh’s effort to construe this opposition as a special dialectic without
continuity, structure and process (1990, pp. 92–93) also fails to explain clearly what
‘there-isn’t-Buddha-nature’ actually means, even though the phrase continues to be
used as a term with a seemingly stable meaning throughout the fascicle.
Another avenue of approach is suggested by Ōtani Tetsuo, who takes mubusshō to
mean ‘not the negation that all beings are the manifestations of Buddha-nature, but
that this Buddha-nature itself does not have substance and thus transcends [the
dichotomy of] being and nothingness as the absolute Buddha-nature’ (2012,
p. 360). Indeed, Dōgen’s explanations make much more sense if we read them as
an identification of ‘there-isn’t’ with what ‘Buddha-nature’ means6: precisely the
absence of an ever-present, immutable substratum, of a fundament on which every-
thing else rests, of a permanence that makes impermanence contingent. Translating
the term properly is certainly a challenge. ‘Nothingness’ is a word that radiates
mystifying connotations, and ‘absence’ presupposes something that is absent, so
there really is no readily available direct equivalent for the ‘there-isn’t’ of this context.
For the lack of anything more precise, I would like to propose ‘non-referentiality’, the
 Asian Philosophy 9

absence of any particular entity of any kind that can be referred to. If we read the
compound as a phrase saying ‘non-referentiality is Buddha-nature’, this means that
‘Buddha-nature’ should not be understood as a quality, or a potential that entities
have, or a promise, or a stable self-identity, but simply as an absence of all of these.
Accordingly, there is also no such special form of Buddha-nature as ‘no-Buddha-
nature’ or ‘mu-Buddha-nature’, we are still talking about the same Buddha-nature all
along—thus no need for a dialectical construction.
An interesting elaboration of the topic is to be found in the following passage,
which in the fascicle actually precedes the one just discussed (Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 50).
This conversation takes place between the fourth and future fifth leaders of the Zen
school, Daoxin and Hongran. Here is how it sounds in traditional reading:
Daoxin says, What is your name?
Hongran says, I indeed have a name, but it is not a usual name.
Daoxin says, What is this name?
Hongran says, It is ‘Buddha-nature’.
Daoxin says, You do not have Buddha-nature.
Hongran says, Buddha-nature is empty, and this is why you can say I don’t
have it.

After we read Dōgen’s comments through, we can understand that he reads the same
passage in quite a different way:
Daoxin says, Your name is ‘what’.
Hongran says, This name corresponds to immediate reality, but it is not a
constant name.
Daoxin says, It is a what-name.
Hongran says, It is ‘Buddha-nature’.
Daoxin says, But ‘you’ does not have Buddha-nature, or: The fact that ‘you’ is
non-referential is what Buddha-nature means.
Hongran says, Buddha-nature is empty, this is why you can say it is non-referential.

This is how Dōgen explains his reading:

When Daoxin says, ‘Your name is ’what’, he makes an important point. In the past,
there once was a person coming from the country of What, bearing the name of
What.7 This is what he means by the explanation. It is like saying, for example, ‘Me,
too, am like This. You, too are like This.’ Hongran says, ‘This name corresponds to
immediate reality, but it is not a constant name.’ What he means is: the name of
precisely-being is not a constant name, a constant name cannot correspond to
precisely-being. When Daoxin then says ‘it is a what-name’, he means that ‘What’ is
the same as ‘It’, ‘It’ corresponds to ‘What’. And that is what ‘a name’ (or ‘naming’)
means. The constitution of ‘What’ happens because of ‘It’. The constitution of ‘It’ is
a capability of ‘What’. It makes your mugwort broth what it is. It makes your tea
what it is. Your daily rice is what it is because of it (1972:I, pp. 50–51).

All of this may sound rather cryptic because of the limitations of the language at
Dōgen’s disposal. However, it becomes a lot clearer if we replace the recurrent ‘what’
by a more familiar term, namely ‘variable’, and read ‘it’ as ‘the given’ or ‘the
immediate reality’. Then we can see that in Dōgen’s treatment Daoxin’s first phrase
10 R. Raud
becomes a statement: any name that you might have is actually a variable. Hongran
agrees, but with an important qualification: words can be used to refer to reality, as
long as we do not think that they have a permanent relation to it. In the context of
‘naming’, anyone with the least education in East Asian classics would have recog-
nised the character, its primary meaning being ‘usual’ as the one that appears, in the
meaning of ‘constant’, in the famous opening phrases of the Daodejing, ‘The way that
can be taken is not the constant way, the name that can be named is not the constant
name’. The idea behind this claim that Dōgen now makes Hongran turn around: a
constant name is useless, because it is unable to refer to reality, and this is something
that we should not forget. So Dōgen disagrees strongly with Saul Kripke, according to
whom proper names are ‘rigid designators’ that refer to the same individual in all
possible worlds, and while all kinds of contingent events might happen one way or
the other, the name always has the same referent (1990, p. 48ff.). Not for Dōgen: such
a ‘constant name’ would claim to establish a permanent relationship with a specific
entity, but this, according to him, is not possible, because reality itself is fundamen-
tally impermanent.
What Daoxin (in Dōgen’s interpretation) says next, however, could come straight
from W.v.O. Quine: to be is to be the value of a variable (1963, p. 15), any ‘It’ is
always the value of a ‘What’. On the deeper level, the sentences ‘What is this bird
called?’ and ‘This bird is called a pheasant’ contain the same amount of real
information about reality, because ‘pheasant’ is a non-constant name replacing
‘what’, not a word that somehow essentially and uniquely relates to its referent in
the world. This is also a good time to remember that Japanese only has thematic
constructions, not straightforward predications. However, we need and use such
names to navigate our reality at our daily life level. And ‘mugwort broth’ is certainly
not ‘tea’, not even in a thematic way. Immediate reality gives rise to our capacity of
analysing it with the help of variables, and variables provide the logical structure for
thinking individual phenomena as they are. This is what naming things is all about.
Dōgen continues:
Hongran says, ‘It is Buddha-nature’. The gist of what he says is, ‘It’ is Buddha. ‘It’ is
Buddha because it is ‘What’. But can ‘It’ be exhausted through the What-name?
When ‘It’ is already [also] ‘Not-It’, then it is Buddha-nature. So, although we say
that ‘It’ is ‘What’, ‘It’ is ‘Buddha’, it is only when we have cast it off, seen it through,
that it is necessarily a name. That name is Zhou, ‘all-encompassing’.8 Although this
is so, it is not a name one receives from one’s father or ancestors, or one resemblant
of the maternal line. And how could it be likened to any other? (1972:I, p. 51)

The word Buddha, of course, does not refer to any historical or fictional being, nor
even to the perfect state of being that a practitioner of Buddhism would like to attain.
‘Buddha’ is simultaneously the totality of being, everything there is, because every-
thing has Buddha-nature, and also the absolute clarity of it being self-identical at any
given moment, both in itself and as realised in the mind of a particular existent. Or let
us put it this way: anything that adheres to the law of Leibniz has Buddha-nature, is
Buddha.9 There is the celebrated story about Leibniz walking in the park of the
Hannover palace with princess Charlotte and some other members of her coterie on
 Asian Philosophy 11

an autumn afternoon, talking about the nature of things, when Leibniz said that no
two tree leaves were exactly alike. Ridiculous, said one of his opponents, and spent the
rest of the evening looking for two identical leaves to prove his point, without, of
course, finding any (Leibniz and Clarke Leibniz, Clarke & Ariew, 2000, p. 22). It is the
absence of a perfectly matching pair in each of the leaves that constitutes its Buddha-
nature. Or, as Dōgen goes on to say:
The utterance by the Sixth ancestor, ‘People have North and South, Buddha-nature
is without North and South’ is something you should quietly grasp while letting it
go. What stupid bums think this says is that people are grounded in their essence
and therefore have North and South, while Buddha-nature is empty and unsub-
stantial, and therefore cannot be captured by a discourse of North and South. One
couldn’t be more mistaken than that. (1972:I, p. 54)

This is because it is not the particular existents who have a discourse of oppositions,
of ‘North and South’, but vice versa: the discourse of ‘North and South’ is what makes
them particular. As Dōgen has put it in the Uji fascicle,
…the idea foils the idea and sees the idea, the word foils the word and sees the word,
the obstruction foils the obstruction and sees the obstruction, this is how the moment
works. It is said that obstruction is what other dharmas can make use of, but there
has not yet been an obstruction that obstructs other dharmas itself. I meet a stranger,
a stranger meets a stranger, I meet me. Going out meets going out. If any of this is
not happening in a moment, it is not really happening at all. (1972:I, p. 262)

‘Foils’ here refers to the circumstances that make the particular what it is, in other
words, to what sets it apart from the totality. ‘Ideas’, ‘words’, ‘obstructions’, all
happenings of the mind, are the delimitations of a particular, its ‘North and South’.
Without these, ‘I’ would not be ‘me’, and neither would the stranger be himself. But
these happenings are not to be conceived of merely as hindrances, something to get
rid of, because at the same time—in the same singular existential moment—as they
delimit the particular, they also make it possible for it to see reality-as-it-is, the
totality of being. And they are the only way this can happen. In summing up this
section of the Busshō fascicle, Dōgen spells this out quite unambiguously.
Commenting on a statement by Huineng that equates the impermanent with
Buddha-nature, he first criticises the traditional understanding of ‘impermanence’
and then proceeds to formulate his own:
When the impermanent itself explicates the impermanent, activates it, authenticates
it, this is [really] impermanence. ‘Right now conforming to the measures of one’s own
manifest body means using one’s own manifest body to explicate the Law’ means the
same. This is Buddha-nature. […] This is how grasses and trees, thickets and woods
are all impermanent—and therefore Buddha-nature. The bodyminds of people, too,
are impermanent, and thereby Buddha-nature. Countries and lands, mountains and
rivers, all impermanent, are what they are because of Buddha-nature. The perfect and
irreversible enlightenment is Buddha-nature and therefore impermanent, great nir-
vana is impermanent and therefore Buddha-nature. (Dōgen, 1972:I, pp. 54–55)

What this view actually argues for is Dōgen’s understanding of the relationship
between the total and the particular: it is not by overcoming one’s particularity that
12 R. Raud
an existent avails itself of the total. On the contrary, it is only through one’s particularity
that this is possible. There is no final destination to be sought outside and in opposition
to one’s own being. For every existent, the only way to realise its Buddha-nature, or
more precisely, to be at one with it, is to live its life with a full awareness of each
particular moment. If there is anything that should be overcome, it is precisely the need
for permanence and the idea that it is to be found somewhere else.

Conclusions
What I hope to have shown is, first, that Dōgen’s highly idiosyncratic treatment of the
concept of Buddha-nature should not be reduced to a mystical identification of the
enlightened consciousness and the totality of existing things. Instead, it should be
understood as a mode of being, namely a dynamism characterising it in the dimen-
sionless present moment, in which everything becomes precisely what it is, only to be
something new at the next instant. Second, we should pay attention to the difference
between the totality of being and particular existents, which are ‘mind-only’, not
because their existence would be primarily ideal, but because they are endowed with a
continuity and an ontological status by the mind that observes them and carves them
out of the totality-process. This work is largely language-dependent, which makes the
relation between Buddha-nature and the conceptualising powers of language a central
issue. Dōgen’s idea of ‘there-isn’t-Buddha-nature’, derived from a manipulated read-
ing of several source texts, should be understood in this context. I have argued that it
means non-referentiality, the inexhaustibility of a particular existent with linguistic
means: when Dōgen interprets the phrase ‘Lingnan people have “there-isn’t-Buddha-
nature”’, it is not a comment on what people from Lingnan are like, but that no one
who is defined by some external and stable characteristic is adequately described as an
unrepeatable and impermanent individual. And finally, the sum total of the char-
acteristics that do define a particular existent as the individual it is should not be
viewed as burdens on the road to emancipation. On the contrary: it is only through
the fulfilment of one’s own particular being that an individual can relate to totality.
Dōgen’s idea of Buddha-nature is thus immensely life-affirming and supportive of the
individual and the particular—of the concrete imperfection of the here-and-now,
rather than a mystical perfection still to be reached.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
[1] In the Bendōwa, he claims, on the one hand, that ‘whenever you sit in meditation, you transcend
the limits of delusions and enlightenment, feelings and measures and will not care for the paths of
stupidity and enlightenment’ (Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 18), on the other hand, however, he also says that
 Asian Philosophy 13

‘from the very beginning, we lack nothing of the unsurpassed enlightenment, but even though we
partake of it constantly, we are never able to realise it’ (1972:I). This, indeed, is a way to answer his
own famous question about why spiritual efforts are needed at all if sentient beings already
possess original enlightenment: practice is necessary because (or as long as) particular existents
can be meaningfully opposed to the totality of being.
[2] For example, elsewhere I have shown how some usually very cryptic-sounding remarks on
‘passage’ or ‘shifting’ (kyōryaku) become quite lucid if, instead of trying to figure out how it is
that today passes into yesterday we do not gloss over the word ‘so-called’ in the original and
think of how what we now call ‘today’ will tomorrow be called ‘yesterday’ (Raud, 2012,
pp. 164–166).
[3] Elsewhere in Dōgen’s work one can find sentences that convey a similar meaning to the quote
from Aśvaghośa, with genjō expressing the same sense as kenritsu does here, for example in
the Sansuikyō fascicle: ‘The mountains of waters of precisely this moment are the apparent
maturation of the way of the old Buddhas’ (Dōgen, 1972:I, p. 331).
[4] Abe and Waddell have given it terminological status and left it partially untranslated as mu-
Buddha-nature (Dōgen, 2002, p. 71), Tanahashi opts for ‘no Buddha nature’ in italics (2010, p.
240), Nishijima and Cross render the mu as ‘being without’ (Dōgen, 1994:II 10), but what they
all have in common is that they consider the relation between mu and Buddha-nature to be
attributive. Kim’s reading stands apart from these interpretations and distinguishes between ‘the
Buddha-nature of existence’ and ‘the Buddha-nature of non-existence’ (2004, pp. 131–132),
which, in principle, is a more correct way to go, but then he starts to speak about the ‘inner
structure’ of Buddha-nature and non-existence and existence as ‘poles in the non-dual structure’
(2004, p. 132), which places the difference between yū (‘there is’) and mu (‘there isn't’) in the
objective reality, instead of the perspective of looking at it.
[5] It is true that the idea of ‘there-isn’t’ (mu) has been raised into the status of a specific technical
term in the Zen tradition, but this happened largely because of its treatment in the ‘The
Gateless Barrier’ collection (Wumenguan, jp. Mumonkan) by Wumen, first entering circula-
tion in 1228, at a time when Dōgen had already returned from China. Of course, there was
still significant traffic between Japan and the monasteries of the continent, and as
the ‘Buddha-nature’ essay was written in 1241, it is technically possible that Dōgen might
have been familiar with Wumen’s work. Nonetheless his treatment, later in the fascicle, of
Zhaozhou’s dialogue on the Buddha-nature of the dog shows no evidence of it, so even he had
read it, this does not mean he automatically had to accept its views.
[6] Technically, what we have here is an embedded thematic construction. ‘There-isn’t-Buddha-
nature’ can be rendered as ‘as far as “there-isn’t” is concerned, “Buddha-nature” applies’, and
this statement is then in turn inserted into ‘as far as “Lingnan people” are concerned, “there-
isn’t-Buddha-nature” applies’. Similarly, I would read yūbusshō, ‘there-is-Buddha-nature’ not
as ‘having Buddha nature’ or ‘the Buddha nature of being’, but as a short version of Dōgen’s
original statement at the beginning, ‘[the totality of] being is Buddha-nature’, or technically,
‘as far as “being” is concerned, “Buddha-nature” applies’. If we do not consider ‘being’ and
‘absence’ as mutually exclusive, as Dōgen tells us not to, these two statements are by no means
mutually exclusive.
[7] This refers to Sengqie (628–710), a Chan master whose original surname and region of birth
were, according to his own testimony reported in the Jingde Zhuandenglu (ch.27), written
with the same character as the word ‘what’ (Daoyuan, 2009, p. 2112).
[8] This was indeed the meaning of the character of Hongran’s original surname.
[9] Tsujiguchi (2012, pp. 195–196) arrives at a similar conclusion, even though through a rather
different route, reading the ‘there-isn’t’ as a designation of an absence of a separate level of
enlightenment, and consequently a need to ‘become’ Buddha, in other words, the denial of a
dual structure of selfhood, one level of which would be the existent’s own being, the other its
Buddha-nature. However, he then goes on to argue that ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ are two
14 R. Raud
aspects of the same coin of existence, divided by the existent’s consciousness, which is able to
verify its own particular being, but not its identity with all other existents on a total level,
except through religious experience (2012, p. 199). Even though Tsujiguchi’s reading on the
whole is coherent and illuminating, by this move he nonetheless seems to introduce precisely
the kind of dualism he has been trying to avoid all along. Also, the kind of contact with the
totality of being that he presupposes can well be provided by an aesthetic experience, or the
awe inspired by the beauty of nature, which does not imply any religious mind. When Dōgen
speaks of the ‘great miracles’ of daily toil (as opposed to the ‘small’ miracles like a mustard
seed containing Mount Sumeru and other such things (1972:I, p. 403)), he is advocating an
attitude towards reality that would produce such an experience in anything one does.

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