It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

By Brad Warner

Vol. 2 of Brad Warner’s Radical but Reverent Paraphrasing of Dogen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye

In Japan in 1253, one of the great thinkers of his time died — and the world barely noticed. That man was the Zen monk Eihei Dogen. For centuries his main work, Shobogenzo, languished in obscurity, locked away in remote monasteries until scholars rediscovered it in the twentieth century. What took so long? In Brad Warner’s view, Dogen was too ahead of his time to find an appreciative audience. To bring Dogen’s work to a bigger readership, Warner began paraphrasing Shobogenzo, recasting it in simple, everyday language. The first part of this project resulted in Don’t Be a Jerk, and now Warner presents this second volume, It Came from Beyond Zen! Once again, Warner uses wry humor and incisive commentary to bridge the gap between past and present, making Dogen’s words clearer and more relevant than ever before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Library
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608685127

Brad Warner

A Soto Zen priest, Brad Warner is a punk bassist, filmmaker, Japanese­monster­movie marketer, and popular blogger. He is the author of Hardcore Zen, Don’t Be a Jerk, Sit Down & Shut Up, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, There Is No God and He Is Always with You, and Sex, Sin, and Zen. His writing appears on Suicidegirls.com and in Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and Alternative Press.

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INTRODUCTION

WE CAME VERY close to losing Dogen.¹ When I first heard that Dogen was a Japanese Buddhist monk and writer who lived eight hundred years ago, I just sort of assumed that for the past eight hundred years Dogen’s teachings were part of the philosophical underpinnings of Japanese society and that we in the West were just now learning about him.

Not so. For the first seven hundred or so years of their existence, Dogen’s writings were barely known, outside of a few dedicated monks at monasteries scattered throughout Japan. The general populace did not read them. They weren’t taught anywhere. The copies that existed mostly sat in the backs of temples, slowly rotting away, unloved and neglected, food for mice and moths.

In the eighteenth century there was a small revival of interest in Dogen among Japanese scholars. But it took the Meiji Restoration of the late nineteenth century to get folks really looking into his work. History could easily have gone very differently. If Japan had not been forced to open itself to trade with the Americans, someone else — or even the Americans themselves — could have come into that tiny, unimportant, technologically backward island nation with modern weapons of war and taken it over by force. It would’ve been a piece of cake! They could have demolished a great deal of Japan’s culture. So few copies of Dogen’s writings existed at that time that it would have been easy to destroy all or at least most of his work, and it would have been gone forever.

Even with the way history actually went, it never fails to amaze me that it took centuries before the world was ready for what Dogen was writing. It must have been lonely work for Dogen, spending so much time and effort on a huge-ass book that he knew most of his contemporaries would not understand, one that he could not have been certain would last long enough for the rest of the world to catch up to it.

I’ve always been a fan of so-called cult artists. I have an affinity for people who were unknown in their time. But something like, let’s say, Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys album that waited twenty years to finally be discovered by hipsters, can’t compare to a book that took centuries before it was ever even read by the wider public. At least Pet Sounds made the bottom of the music charts when it was new, before it sank into obscurity for a couple of decades. Dogen’s writings were unknown to anyone except his students during his lifetime. Did twenty people read Shobogenzo when Dogen was alive? Fifty? Maybe. Mayyyyybe fifty. More than that? It’s very doubtful.²

And we are still only at the very beginning of a wider international rediscovery of Dogen. The first English translations only began to appear in the seventies. Hell, I was already in the fifth grade when the first English translations of Dogen started to show up at a few little Zen centers out on the West Coast, a long, long way from Wadsworth, Ohio, where I lived. By the time I was old enough to appreciate them, though, copies of those translations were already nearly impossible to come by, at any price. I was there when my own teacher’s complete English translation of Shobogenzo first came off the printing presses in Tokyo. The book you’re reading represents one of the first attempts by anyone outside Japan to create a book about Dogen aimed at an audience other than scholars and devout Buddhist converts.

When I think about what a doofus I am and how completely unqualified I am to even attempt to understand Dogen, I realize I have somehow accidentally become part of something incredibly significant. That’s a funny feeling.

I don’t claim to be the final word on Dogen. Far from it. Throughout this book I constantly encourage you to look beyond what I’m giving you here. Please find the more orthodox translations and check them out for yourself. Dogen’s writing contains a depth and a beauty that this book barely even hints at. But I also have to warn you: if you think the stuff you’ll be reading here is a brain twister, you should see the more reliable translations.

With this book and some of my others, I am hoping to bring Dogen’s ideas to a broader audience than they’ve ever enjoyed before. His philosophy shouldn’t just be something that a few academics and religious nuts jealously guard for themselves. Commentaries on them shouldn’t be buried in so many brainiac buzzwords that you have to stop and consult a dictionary every third page. His stuff is much too important for that. It needs to be exposed.

Dogen shows us a new and better way to understand ourselves and the world we live in. He shows us, in fact, that the way we’ve been thinking about stuff for centuries borders on insanity. He’s showing us how to get sane.

Eihei Dogen lived and died in Japan almost eight hundred years ago. And just in case you were wondering, Eihei is pronounced like the letter a followed by the word hey, as in Hey! Ho! Let’s go! Dogen is pronounced with a hard g, as in Godzilla — so it’s not Do-jen. Don’t ever say Do-jen around me! I’ll smack you!

His first name wasn’t even Eihei, by the way, nor was Dogen his family name. No one knows for certain what name, first or last, he was given when he was born. Dogen was the dharma name bestowed on him when he became a monk at around age twelve, after which he never used his birth name again, as far as we know. Eihei-ji was the name of the temple he founded much later. As the master of that temple he was called Dogen of Eihei-ji, or Eihei Dogen for short.

Dogen was Japanese, meaning he was from a country whose main exports these days are pornographic comic books and toy robots. In Dogen’s day, the forerunners of today’s porno comics were just beginning to emerge in the form of naughty picture books printed from woodblocks, but toy robots were still a long way off. At the time Dogen lived, Japan was generally regarded as an utterly insignificant island nation populated mostly by ignorant bumpkins who liked to dress up in weird costumes and slice each other up with swords. It was a long way from the economic powerhouse it briefly became in the twentieth century.

Dogen was the founder of the Japanese branch of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, and for this he has been held in high regard as a famous figure for the past eight hundred years. And yet, as I’ve said, for most of that time almost nobody read his extensive writings about Zen practice and philosophy.

When I say he wrote a lot, I mean he wrote a lot a lot. Most contemporary versions of his masterwork, Shobogenzo, or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, consist of ninety-five chapters, some of which are very long. As I said, it’s a big-ass book!

Shobogenzo wasn’t even the only thing Dogen wrote. He also wrote a number of shorter pieces about monastic rules and practices that were collected centuries later, plus a bunch of poetry. And Dogen’s students made notes during the talks he gave that were put together as Eihei Koroku (Extensive Record of Eihei) and Shobogenzo Zuimonki (Diary of the True Dharma Eye Treasury).

And even though his writings reached only a minuscule audience when he was alive, he wrote as if he was addressing a vast audience. Who was he writing for? The means to publish his written work barely even existed when Dogen was alive. What few copies did exist were made by hand. Yet he wrote anyway.

Dogen was born in 1200 CE. This makes it very easy to figure out exactly how old he was at any given year listed in the dates he gives at the ends of most of his writings. Dogen was the illegitimate son of a nobleman who was assassinated when Dogen was two years old. His mother died when Dogen was seven. He entered monastic practice at age twelve in the Tendai sect of Buddhism because he wanted to find out if there was something more to life than pain and heartbreak.

One question in particular always troubled the young monk. He asked the older monks and teachers, Buddha said we are all perfect just as we are. So why do we have to do these strange practices like chanting, meditating, wearing robes, and so on?

No one could answer him. But he heard about a new temple that taught a form of Buddhism called Zen. The temple was called Kennin-ji. It was the first Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, where Dogen lived, and only the second one in Japan. In 1217, at the age you and I were when we were in high school and our only concerns were acne and where to score weed, Dogen went to that temple and became a monk.

The difference between Tendai Buddhism and Zen Buddhism is that Tendai Buddhism tends to emphasize study and ritual, whereas Zen Buddhism focuses on meditation practice.

In 1223 Dogen accompanied the head teacher of that Zen temple, a guy named Myozen, to China to learn about Zen practices there. At first Dogen was disappointed in Chinese Zen. But in 1225 he met a teacher named Tendo Nyojo,³ who told him, To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment, or between zazen and daily life. This impressed Dogen, and he became Tendo Nyojo’s student.

In 1227 Tendo Nyojo made Dogen one of his dharma heirs. This means he publicly declared that Dogen had an understanding equal to his own and gave him permission to teach independently. Soon after this, Dogen returned to Japan. He then began writing about the practices he had seen in China and the philosophy he had learned from Tendo Nyojo.

In 1233 he founded a temple in the city of Uji, near Kyoto, which was the capital of Japan and the center of Buddhist study. Ten years later he moved to the remote province of Echizen (now called Fukui Prefecture) and started a temple called Eihei-ji. Some say that he moved because the leaders of the older, more established Buddhist temples were jealous of his growing popularity and forced him to leave Kyoto. There are even suggestions that his life would have been in danger if he didn’t get out of Dodge.

Dogen continued writing and revising Shobogenzo until he died in 1253 at the age of fifty-three. He never completed Shobogenzo, but he produced about eighty-four finished chapters and about eleven other chapters that were nearly finished. Scholars argue about the exact number, and about which ones were intended as part of Shobogenzo and which ones were independent pieces. Plus, as late as the 1930s, previously undiscovered writings of Dogen’s were found. This raises the possibility that there might be other unknown writings by him still out there or that some pieces he wrote have been lost for all time, having turned to dust in the back room of some temple.

Dogen’s students established many temples throughout Japan, and the Soto school of Zen became extremely popular. However, as we know, Dogen’s book Shobogenzo was not widely read. Dogen was revered as the founder of the sect, but that’s about it.

From 1633 until 1865, Japan closed its borders to outsiders. In 1865 the American Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open itself to international trade. If you’ve seen the film The Last Samurai, it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of that time. Except Tom Cruise wasn’t really there.

Japan suddenly realized it was very much behind the rest of the world and needed to modernize. This led the Japanese people to try to find Japanese things that were as good as similar things in Europe and America. This included philosophy and religion.

In 1925 a scholar named Tetsuro Watsuji published a book called Shamon Dogen (The Monk Dogen) in which he presented Dogen as one of Japan’s most important philosophers. This led to a widespread rediscovery of Dogen’s work. For the first time since Dogen wrote Shobogenzo seven hundred years earlier, his book was being read by ordinary people instead of just a few monks.

As I mentioned, the first English translations began to appear in the 1970s. The first translation of the entire thing was by Kosen Nishiyama and John Stevens. The second complete English translation of Shobogenzo was made by my teacher Gudo Wafu Nishijima and his student Mike Cross in the 1990s. Since then two more complete English translations have appeared, one by Kazuaki Tanahashi and the folks at the San Francisco Zen Center, and one by the Reverend Hubert Nearman of Shasta Abbey. Yuho Yokoi of Aichigakuin University in Japan apparently also published a complete English translation, but good luck finding a copy. I have only ever been able to track down one volume of the dozen or so I believe exist. A few books in English have been written since then that have attempted to make Dogen’s work accessible to nonscholars. I myself have written two of those, Sit Down and Shut Up and Don’t Be a Jerk. But we are still in the early days of this attempt.

I think one of the reasons it’s taken so long to really discover Dogen’s work is that he was ahead of his time. He understood aspects of human nature that we take for granted today but for which there weren’t even words in his time.

He says amazing stuff constantly. For example, he’ll point out that even the things the traditional Buddhist sutras warn us against, like doubt and anger, take place within what the Buddhists call original enlightenment. Reality isn’t some pristine thing far off in outer space where there is no doubt or anger or greed or delusion. Reality is what you are living in at the very moment when you doubt you are living in reality.

But more than that, Dogen takes the basic premise of Buddhism to its ultimate conclusion. And he does so fearlessly. He doesn’t accept any doctrine without question. He is the ultimate skeptic — he’s skeptical even of himself, his own senses, and his own conclusions. That kind of attitude would paralyze most people. Yet Dogen manages to take that skepticism and turn it into something that’s freeing rather than paralyzing. It’s also a very contemporary attitude.

As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. We are watching all our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dogen saw his world fall apart when his parents died.

Religions don’t seem to mean much anymore, except maybe to small groups of fanatics. You can hardly get a full-time job, and even if you do, there’s no stability. A college degree means very little. The Internet has leveled things so much that the opinions of the greatest scientists in the world about global climate change are presented as being equal to those of some dude who read part of the Bible and took it literally. The news industry has collapsed so that it’s hard to tell a fake headline from a real one. Money isn’t money anymore; it’s numbers stored in computers. Everything is changing so rapidly that none of us can hope to keep up.

All this uncertainty has a lot of us scrambling for something certain to hang on to. But if you think I’m gonna tell you that Dogen provides us with that certainty, think again. He actually gives us something far more useful. Dogen gives us a way to be okay with uncertainty. This isn’t just something Buddhists need; it’s something we all need.

We humans can be certainty junkies. We’ll believe in the most ridiculous nonsense to avoid the suffering that comes from not knowing something. It’s like part of our brain is dedicated to compulsive dot-connecting. I think we’re wired to want to be certain. You have to know if that’s a rope or a snake, if the guy with the chains all over his chest is a gangster or a fan of bad seventies movies. Being certain means being safe.

The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff.

Dogen is interesting because he tries to cut right to the heart of this. He gets into what is real and what is not. Probably the main reason he’s so difficult to read is that Dogen is trying to say things that can’t actually be said. So he has to bend language to the point where it almost breaks. He’s often using language itself to show the limitations of language. Even the very first readers of his writings must have found them difficult.

Dogen understood both that words always ultimately fail to describe reality and that we human beings must rely on words anyway. So he tried to use words to write about that which is beyond words. This isn’t really a discrepancy. You use words, but you remain aware of their limitations. My teacher used to say, People like explanations. We do. They’re comforting. When the explanation is reasonably correct, it’s useful.

But there will always be things we can’t explain. In fact, our explanations are always provisional. This isn’t a problem unless we start to confuse the explanation with the reality it’s trying to explain. We have a strong tendency to do that because we like explanations so much.

It’s ironic that you have to use words to explain why words are so limited. But it can be done. If you understand exactly why explanations are always limited, you can use explanations in a practical way.

I’ve studied Dogen’s words for more than thirty years, and I’ve also studied myself for those thirty-some years. Dogen studied himself for forty-some years, and did so much more deeply than most of us have ever attempted. Certainly much more deeply than I have in my thirty-odd years of study. His words are based on his explorations of himself and on his explorations of the words of others who had explored themselves. That’s a huge contribution to the philosophical outlook of humanity. Dogen is not just a Japanese philosopher or the representative of some religion. He is a world philosopher, a human philosopher.

One thing that Dogen explores in detail is the Buddhist teaching that mind and matter are not two different things. Rather, they are contrasting aspects of one unified reality that is neither mind nor matter. Even though this insight goes all the way back to the Buddha, 2,500 years ago, it’s somehow still startling. I think that’s because even Buddhists themselves have often failed to understand it.

I have a theory that our inability to see the unity of mind and matter may have roots in human evolution. We are extraordinarily good at imagining things that are not real. We use this ability to reason abstractly and to help us survive, not only individually but as a species. Perhaps because of this ability we have had to evolve ways of constantly making a clear distinction between what we imagine and what is actually out there in the real world. This leads us to be almost incapable of comprehending that mind and matter are really two aspects of the same thing, which is neither mind nor matter.

Which brings me to my own big question: Does it matter whether or not we have a realistic point of view?

You could argue that it doesn’t matter much. A person can have a completely unrealistic outlook and still live a very happy life. For example, I have a high school friend who believes that one day Jesus will return and send evildoers to hell and take him and his family back up to heaven to live with Him in paradise everlasting. This belief brings him comfort and helps him manage the sadder aspects of life. Jesus won’t return, but my friend will die happily believing that one day He will.

On an individual level, this can work, to some extent. As I said, this belief makes him happy. But on a collective level, beliefs like that can be tremendously harmful. They lead people like my friend to being negligent about the environment, for example, and to push for political action that damages the world. So, long after my friend is gone, his children and grandchildren, as well as your children and grandchildren, may suffer because of my friend’s mistaken belief that Jesus will return before that can happen. A realistic outlook is necessary for our overall survival and well-being.

When I was in Germany earlier this year I met a guy who had recently started keeping bees. He told me that to understand bees you can’t just look at them as individual insects. You have to think of the entire hive as if it were a single being.

I think people are the same.

If you study evolution, you’ll know that all multicellular creatures evolved from colonies of creatures that banded together as a single organism. This allowed these collective organisms to have specialized structures that cooperated as if they were a single being. So even though we think of ourselves as individuals, we are actually all just hives of beings that had once been individual beings on their own.

Just as our individual bodies are collectives, our societies function as single beings. Ultimately, the whole of humanity is a single being. Perhaps the entire planet Earth can be considered a single living being. It may even go further than that. Dogen certainly believed it did. He believed that we were part of, and intimately connected to, absolutely everything in the universe. He not only believed this; he knew it deeply in ways that you and I can also come to know it.

A lot of the greatest conflicts in our human hive have been clashes between idealistic or religious philosophies, that is, clashes of philosophies that value the mind or spirit, and philosophies that value matter. Religions say that spirit/mind is real while matter is negligible. Materialistic philosophies, such as classical science, say that mind is just an illusion caused by the interactions of material objects and processes.

Contemporary physics is starting to dimly comprehend that this distinction is false, but it will probably take a long time before this view becomes widely accepted.

This is much more than just a dry philosophical debate. People get killed over this stuff. Part of what happened on September 11, 2001, was that people who believed mind or spirit was more important than matter were trying to prove that was true by destroying some of the great emblems of materialism. Of course, there was more to the attacks than that. But this aspect was crucial.

Classical science is based on the materialistic outlook. It seems to work pretty well, but it fails to address a lot of our deepest concerns. We live in greater comfort than ever before, with all sorts of conveniences, yet we’re still just as sad and confused as ever. Material prosperity clearly does not lead to happiness. Religious people argue for a return to spirituality, but we can’t go back. Buddhism offers a middle way that includes materialistic and idealistic or spiritual aspects but doesn’t favor either of these outlooks.

The Buddhist idea is revolutionary because if you take it to its logical conclusion, not only does it overturn all religions and all idealistic philosophies, but it also makes materialism seem ridiculously incomplete and inadequate. That’s a scary prospect to a society that’s heavily invested in one or the other of these outlooks. But it’s a far more realistic way of looking at things. Once we put the Buddhist view into wider use, we’ll find that we human beings are capable of things we have never even dreamed of.

If we can find a way as a society to integrate these two opposing outlooks, we’ll no longer have to fight about them. Right now we deal with the contradictions between science and religion by allowing them to operate in completely separate arenas. The Buddhist outlook allows us to fully integrate them. I don’t think this integration will happen for a few hundred years, at least. By then Buddhism will probably no longer be called Buddhism and won’t have much connection to ancient Indian cosmology and mythology. But I think future historians will see the connection between Buddhism and a more fully integrated and realistic view of life.

Part of this process will involve understanding Dogen’s philosophical outlook. I don’t think I can stress enough how important Dogen really is. His philosophy is the key to seeing the world in an absolutely new way that is more realistic than the way you saw things before. Once you get it, you’ll never be the same. Once you go Dogen, you never go back.

One of the biggest hurdles in understanding Dogen is the simple fact that he wrote in Japanese eight hundred years ago. Dogen is of a very different cultural background from ours. So not only do you have to translate what he wrote from Japanese into your chosen language, but you also have to translate his worldview. This means that any strictly literal translation of Dogen’s writing contains large portions that make very little sense. The cultural references are lost on us. We don’t know who the famous historical figures he refers to even are, let alone what they did and why he’s writing about them, and we’ve never heard of the books he quotes from.

So the best Dogen translations, like the Nishijima/Cross version, are filled with cumbersome footnotes and worse yet are written in painfully difficult language in an effort to match Dogen’s way of expressing himself. Other translations just leave the obscure references in, and it’s up to the reader to puzzle them out. Some translators are so in love with Dogen’s beautiful similes and metaphors that they neglect to tell you what the heck they mean. Unless you’ve got a whole lot of time and patience, there’s no way you’re gonna get into it.

With this and my other books I have tried to simplify Dogen without dumbing him down. I’ve removed a lot of that cultural stuff or tried to translate it into more contemporary equivalents. Since I am not even pretending to give you a faithful translation, I have also felt free to edit his often cumbersome, convoluted, and lengthy sentences and paragraphs into something easier to follow. I’ve also added jokes. This may seem like just a way to spice things up, but Dogen’s writing is full of puns and wordplay. I believe a lot of it was intended to be funny, but this never comes across in translation.

For each of Dogen’s essays we’ll be looking at in this book, I have provided a short introduction, a simplified paraphrase of the essay in question — with requisite jokes — and a commentary. The commentary gives you details about what I’ve changed in my paraphrase as well as alternative ways of reading certain problematic parts. It will also tell you what I think Dogen means and why I think so.

Let’s take a look.

1Maybe you’re used to seeing his name as Dōgen. In this book I’ve decided not to use any diacritics. In Japanese, diacritics are those little marks over certain vowels that show which ones are to be held longer. When speaking Japanese it makes a big difference if certain vowels are held longer than others. For example, the Japanese word for granny is obaa-san (with a long a), and the Japanese word for aunty is oba-san (with a shorter a sound). Sometimes Japanese people address women they don’t know as aunty as a form of polite familiarity. Foreigners often hold the a sound a little too long when they try to do this and end up saying, Hey, granny when they mean to say, Excuse me, ma’am. Since this book is not intended for studying Japanese, I’ve decided these differences don’t matter that much in this context. Diacritics are just confusing for people who don’t know what they mean and redundant for those who do. So I left them out. Just be careful when speaking to Japanese people about things you’ve read in this book!

2Some of Dogen’s sayings from his lectures were preserved more carefully than his writings and were taught at certain Zen temples through the centuries. But it’s really in his extensive and detailed written work where Dogen shines, and most of that stuff was put away and more or less forgotten not too long after he died.

3This is the Japanese pronunciation of his name. When Japanese people read Chinese characters, they pronounce them differently from the way the Chinese do. The Chinese pronunciation is usually written in roman letters as Tiantong Rujing. I prefer the Japanese pronunciations because that’s how I learned them.

1. IT CAME FROM BEYOND ZEN!

Inmo

It!

IN THE FIRST half of this book, I will be looking at some of Dogen’s easier, more straightforward stuff and then I’ll transition into the harder, more abstract and philosophical stuff in the second half. But, just to be contrary to myself, I’m going to lead off with one of Dogen’s most difficult and deeply philosophical pieces. The main reason for this is that I think this piece lays the groundwork for much of what is to come.

Most translations of Shobogenzo give the title of this essay as something along the lines of Thusness (Tanahashi), Suchness (Nishiyama/Stevens), That Which Comes Like This (Shasta Abbey), or some other such fairly pretentious designation. Nishijima and Cross translate the title simply as It.

The word Dogen actually used is 恁麼, which is pronounced inmo in Japanese and renme in contemporary Mandarin Chinese. Online Chinese-English dictionaries tend to give this way or what as the contemporary meaning, though one I consulted also gave me do you. Do they mean as in you do you? I do not know.

Anyhow, in his intro to this chapter in his translation of Shobogenzo into contemporary Japanese, Nishijima explains the more ancient meaning as being akin to the Japanese words ano or are. These words are used to suggest a thing you don’t know the name of but that you have to indicate, as in the English phrase that thingamajig over by the whatchamacallit. So the word is kind of a catchall term for something you can’t name.

The words suchness and thusness are very popular among English-speaking Buddhists in general, and not just to be used as the title of this essay. Suchness is often used as a translation of the Sanskrit word tathata, which is part of the word tathatagata, which is one of the nicknames that Buddha gave himself, according to the ancient sutras. This name means something like that which comes and goes in the same way, or to quote Shasta Abbey, that which comes like this. It’s a weird nickname, to be sure.

By the way, the h in the word tathatagata is pronounced like a kind of short puff of air, so it’s tat-(h)a-gat-a. The h does not affect the t that comes before it and make it into the sound that begins words like thistle or thwack. It’s the same with the th in Siddhartha and in Theravada, by the way. It always annoys me when people who should know better mangle those words, pronouncing Theravada kind of like they’d pronounce Thera-Flu®.

Anyway, the problem with translating the title of this chapter as suchness or thusness is that 恁麼 (inmo) is not the character combination Chinese and Japanese Buddhists use for tathata. The character combo they use is 真如 which is pronounced shinyo in Japanese. For tathatagata they use 如来 which is pronounced nyorai. So Dogen doesn’t seem to me to be specifically trying to draw a connection to the Buddha’s ancient nickname, the way a lot of English translators tend to.

Having said that, there is some justification for making a connection. In his English intro to the chapter Nishijima says, "The word inmo was used to indicate the truth, or reality, which in Buddhist philosophy is originally ineffable." Shasta Abbey’s introduction to the chapter says of the word inmo, It was used by the Chinese Zen Masters to designate ‘That Which Is,’ the Ultimate Reality which goes beyond any words we can employ to describe It. The weird capitalization is theirs. Perhaps the Buddha also chose his nickname to indicate that he was the voice of that ineffable something. Could be.

Maybe that’s why translators like froufrou-sounding words like suchness and thusness when titling this chapter. So, okay, suchness or thusness. Fine. Personally, I prefer It because it reminds me of fifties science fiction films like It Came from Beneath the Sea; It: The Terror from Beyond Space; and the Roger Corman classic, It Conquered the World. These are films in which the big, ugly, gross, tentacle-y thing in question could not be named. Even though Dogen was not writing cheap science fiction, I feel that he was going for the same sort of feeling that’s evoked by these film titles.

In a lecture he gave in 1969, Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and author of the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, explained the meaning of the word inmo like this: In English you say, ‘It is hot.’ That ‘it’ has the same meaning as when you say, ‘It is nine o’clock,’ or, ‘It is half-past eight.’ We are also ‘it,’ but we don’t say ‘it.’ Instead we say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ or ‘me’ or ‘I.’ But actually we mean ‘it.’ Everything can be ‘it.’ It’s the same as using a question mark. When I say ‘it,’ you don’t know exactly what I mean, so you may say, ‘What is it?’ ¹

Dogen used the word inmo a whole lot in his writings, as we shall soon see. He uses the word four times in one of his most famous essays, Fukanzazengi (Universal Guide to the Standard Method of Zazen). Two of those usages occur in the closing sentence. English translations usually split that sentence into two sentences that go something like, "If you practice the state like this for a long time, you will surely become the state like this itself. The treasure-house will open naturally, and you will be free to receive and to use [its contents] as you like (Nishijima/Cross) or If you practice suchness continuously, you will be suchness. The treasure-house will open of itself, and you will be able to use it at will" (Shohaku Okumura). The italicized words are their translations of the word inmo.

As far as Dogen was concerned, zazen wasn’t intended to induce some special mental state. Rather, it was a practice in which you try to experience clearly the state you’re already in. You can’t understand that state, no matter what it is. So it’s ineffable, unnameable; it’s it because you can’t call it much else.

To me, this use of the word inmo is Dogen’s way of indicating something like the Western concept of God. I don’t mean the concept of God as a giant guy with a white beard who smites the Peloponnesians with lightning bolts for carving unto themselves a graven image of a horned beast. I mean a subtler idea of God. It’s more akin to what the Irish philosopher and poet Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who lived 815–77 CE (four hundred years before Dogen), talked about when he said, Every visible and invisible creature is an appearance of God and We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being. Or, to put it in more Buddhist-friendly terms, this it that Dogen refers to is the ineffable something that pervades the universe with what we humans perceive as meaning, order, and intelligence.

Let’s see what Dogen has to say about it.

Master Ungo Doyo (Ch. Yunju Daoying, d. 902 CE) said, If you want to get it, you gotta be it, since you already are it, why worry about it?

That means if you want to experience the unnameable, you need to be a person who is the unnameable. Since you already are a person who is the unnameable, why worry about the unnameable?

I’m using the word it to describe directing yourself toward the supreme truth. The whole universe in every direction is just a teeny-weeny bit of the supreme truth. Maybe the supreme truth² is bigger than everything there ever is, was, or could be.

We ourselves are just tools it uses to experience itself. How