we try to be independent, but the truth is, we all depend on each other. One cannot exist without the other. The sea without the fish, the air without the birds, water without air, fish without birds or air, and so forth.

Life is this minuscule-ly mis-mashed triangle of relationships.

Err. I just read your last post yep thats what I was trying to say too:D

At the purely syntactical level, it seems unlikely. At the semantic level, it seems even more unlikely, given what we know about this expression and its components. And finally at the philosophical level, the only justification for the “A is B” translation is a preconception on the part of the translator that that “must” have been what Dogen meant because “that’s the kind of thing Dogen or other Zen teachers say.”

The philosophical level is highly subjective and we cannot criticize other translators’ choices, as long as their interpretations are based on sound lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse flow analysis of the original text. All too often they’re not. This is one of those cases.

I myself do not pretend to interpret or elucidate on Dogen’s deeper meaning. I simply try to go where the original text takes me. However, that does not prevent me from noting when the result makes pleasing sense. In this case, to my untutored mind the idea that life, bird/fish, and sea/sky are connected in a cycle of interdependency makes more sense than that they are somehow all mushed into one.

I’ll go back to “sustain”, and drop nurture and even nourish if using those words obscures the central point.

I tried to capture the intent of this section in my talk today … Please see if I succeeded or missed the mark ….

http://treeleafzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/sit-long-with-jundo-genjo-koan-xxxix.html

Thank you for sending me this.

I feel most comfortable in looking at the issues you raise from the point of view of Master Dogen’s overall philosophical perspective. I understand the points of your criticism, but I do not think that the translations by the others or incorrect. I rather lose you where you take a bit of “poetic license” with “nurture”, which seems like an even more serious leap of faith from the original than the other translations. In fact, the other translations succeed in overcoming some of the dualistic separation between fish/bird/water/sky that is important to understanding Dogen’s ‘whole-istic” image. Fish/water/life/water/fish” are not two. So, it is better to keep the general structure “fish is water is life is water is fish”. I think.

Gassho, Jundo