Which of the following two statements is Dogen more likely to have made?

1. We should unite body and mind to see and hear things, because this will allow us to grasp them directly, unlike a reflection in a mirror

2. Striving with body and mind to look at and listen to things may bring us closer to reality but ultimately is not the enlightened model

We are looking at an often-overlooked portion of Genjo Koan, which the overwhelming consensus says is correctly interpreted as (1). But I think it’s (2). How about you?

Let’s start off looking at the Tanahashi/Aitken translation:

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illumined the other side is dark.

To oversimplify, he’s saying that full engaging body-and-mind is good, reflected stuff is bad, and that one side being dark is good again.

But first let’s make some minor stylistic criticisms

• In the original Dogen repeats “fully engaging body-and mind” with regard to both seeing and hearing, but Tanahashi omits this. All else being equal, we’d prefer to retain such stylistic devices in the original. But it may be more than merely stylistic: Dogen could be using the repetition to indicate excessive exertion..

• Dogen uses the terms kenshu and choushu for seeing and hearing, the words in question being comprised of the character for “see” and “hear” followed by that for “take”. If Dogen had simply intended “see” and “hear” he would have used the corresponding terms, but instead he makes a point of using compounds with “take” as the second element. In other words, he is emphasizing the perception aspect: “take in sights”, “take in sounds”. This is missing from Tanahashi.

• In the original, there is a but (J. suredomo ) after “grasping things directly”, but Tanahashi has omitted this and instead brought the sentence to a full stop. Again, this may not be a merely stylistic matter; the “but” can easily be read as casting a negative nuance on the “grasping directly.”

• In the original, it says “moon and water”, but Tanahashi has rendered this as “the moon and its reflection in the water.” It may be OK for him to add “reflection”, but in that case at a minimum it needs to be “the moon and the water [in which it is reflected].”

What other clues do we have about what the sentence might mean?

• The “fully engaging” part (in Japanese, koshite) reminds of the “setting forth” (J. hakobite) phrasing used a few paragraphs earlier, where Dogen says disapprovingly that “setting forth on your own to practice and illuminate things is delusion”. Actually, “fully engaging” is pretty much of an invention on Tanahashi’s part, trying to make the sentence read better under what he thinks its interpretation is. The dictionary for this character gives “raise”, or “act”. One translator uses “muster”. Many translations, including modern Japanese ones, interpret this as “bring together”, which does have some justification, but this would seem to be another after-the-fact attempt to justify an a priori interpretation.

• “Body/mind” appears in the immediately following paragraph, the famous one which states that learning the way means learning yourself, and ends by saying that letting yourself be enlightened by all things means casting off body and mind. So it seems odd that Dogen would be telling us here to gear up body and mind to perceive things and then turn around and tell us to cast off body and mind in the very next paragraph.

• Of course, the moon and water recall the famous analogy further down in the essay, where Dogen says “gaining enlightenment is like the water cradling the moon.” Again, it’s counterintuitive that he would be using the water/moon here in a negative sense, referring to unduly intermediated perception of reality, and then turn around and use it as a beautiful metaphor for enlightenment. (Although eminent commentators such as Nishiari Bokusan, the early 20th century abbot of Eiheiji, say that this is precisely what he is doing. So what do I know.)

• There is one confusing factor, which is that some versions of the original place this sentence as a continuation of the previous, which talks about how buddhas are not conscious of being so but are nevertheless buddhas and go on being so. Other versions break the portion we are looking at into a new paragraph. If it is a continuation, then it should be talking about what buddhas do. In fact, some translators even make that explicit, rendering this as “Buddhas unite body and mind to see things…”.

But beyond purely textual analysis, we can also think about what Dogen is likely to be saying. Modern neuroscience teaches us that every perception is mediated through a series of neural subsystems. In other words, there is no such thing as “direct” perception, much as we might like to think there was. Even buddhas have optic nerves and a primary visual cortex.

I’m therefore going against the tide and interpreting this paragraph as follows:

Straining with body and mind to take in sights, or straining with body and mind to take in sounds, may get you closer to reality, but this is not the way the mirror reflects things, or the way the moon and the water work. Focusing on one thing, you will lose sight of the others.

This picture shows the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, the site of a program featuring nine organists performing the complete organ works of Mendelssohn on Sunday, June 25, 2006.

Mendelssohn lived to only 39, dying in 1847 after a series of strokes. The world would be much poorer without the brilliant set of sonatas he had completed just two years earlier—arguably the most powerful, lush, compelling works in the entire organ oeuvre.

An interesting feature of the PPC organ is the so-called “Echo organ” of 14 ranks in the rear of the church. Such multiple-organ setups often work less than ideally, but is an absolutely perfect fit here, especially for Mendelssohn’s favored loud/soft counterpoints, in the first and other sonatas.

Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith is a critically insightful book.

He understands that at the heart of religion lies a realization about our own experience, but that that realization has been corrupted.

A particular way in which it has been corrupted, he says, is in the form of an Islam which preaches hatred and death. He makes a compelling case that that ideology represents a major threat to the entire world order. I myself am not nearly knowledgeable enough about that religion to judge his conclusions, but the case he makes is very strong.

Harris’ book resembles Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in its condemnation of “faith”, but is much more coherent and closely reasoned.

However, it fails to address a potentially key aspect of the problem: the neurological roots of people’s belief in religion.

David A. Shaner discusses Dogen’s “dropping off body and mind”, something I’ve taken up more than once (here and here ), in “The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism: A Phenomenological Perspective of Kukai and Dogen”, an excerpt from which can be found here, in the Digital Library and Museum of Buddhist Studies, a Taiwan-based initiative.

Excerpts of interest:

Shinjin datsuraku is a phrase traditionally translated as “cast off body and mind.” The importance of this phrase cannot be underestimated. It occurs throughout Shobogenzo, works by Dogen not included in Shobogenzo, and is most evident in Shobogenzo Zuimonki, which was edited by Dogen’s disciples shortly after his death…In fact, Dogen stated explicitly that this is all you need to understand Buddhism.

“From the first time you meet your master and receive his teaching, you have no need for either incense-offerings, homage-paying, nembutsu, penance disciplines, or silent sutra readings; only cast off body and mind in zazen.” (Bendowa)

“Casting off,” interpreted phenomenologically, is parallel to the neutralization of thetic positings characteristic of first order bodymind awareness. Dogen is emphatic in his emphasis that casting off is not a denunciation (negative positing) of body and mind. One must cast aside all thetic positings, for example, “accepting good” and “rejecting evil.”

In keeping with the terminology utilized throughout, it would be more accurate but also more cumbersome to translate shinjin datsuraku as “cast off the mind-aspect and body-aspect.” In other words, cast off all abstractions in order to become aware of the bodymind ground at the base of all experience.

The NYT magazine has an extended article on Cheryl Chase, my friend and former business partner, and the incredibly important work she is doing on medical, cultural, and societal aspects of intersex, or ambiguous genitalia.

See also the website for the Intersex Society of North America.

TIME magazine had an immensely stupid article called “God vs. Science” on the cover of its Nov. 13, 2006 issue. They couldn’t even decide who the combatants were in this supposed duel. Right off the bat, they confuse science with “Darwinism” and religion with “God”. Then they make the ludicrous suggestion that science might not be able to “withstand the criticisms” of Christians.

The article does make the somewhat useful point, however, that the “debate” may be becoming more polarized (as in my opinion it should), although there are also now more “informed conciliators”, by which Time apparently means people who believe in magic but have letters like PhD after their names.

Unfortunately, Time chose not to actually report further on the subject—which encompasses minor topics such as, oh, how a scientific explanation of religious belief and experience could affect the history of the world, including Islamic terrorism. Instead, it printed a painful dialog between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins (Wikipedia), eminent genome decoder and devout Christian.

Painful because of how stupid Collins sounds. He starts off by rolling out the tired old theory about God setting the machine in motion, “activating evolution” at the moment of creation of the universe (or at least all parts of it other than Himself), but in this contorted version apparently having foreknowledge of everything including the ridiculous discussion itself. Somehow, this is supposed to reconcile God’s omniscience with free will. Of course, God didn’t want to make things too easy for us, so he hid all the clues to His existence—which is why Dawkins can’t see them! God tweaked the universal physical constants so we could exist (what were they set to before?). The existence of God satisifies Occam’s razor, since it’s such a simple explanation—God made everything! Collins accuses Dawkins of holding an “impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as ‘Is there a God?’”. But if by this he means Dawkins thinks such questions are invalid, he’s just wrong. Of course Dawkins’s view is that humans can ask such questions. He simply answers them in the negative.

But wait! Collins now zigzags and says God, instead of being the Guy that sets up the model train layout and twiddles the knobs, is actually “something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.” But if that were the case, how could we understand Him fiddling with the gravitational constant or setting evolution in motion? And then suddenly he has God not just setting things up at the beginning, but micromanaging miracles like the virgin birth, because “it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so.” Collins is also apparently ignorant of all the recent research on human ethics and altruism, continuing to flog the old notion that only God can make us ethical.

Collins concludes:

…there are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

So now, finally, God is reduced to the concept of all the Unknown Stuff Out There. And it doesn’t compromise Collins’ ability to think rigorously that he believes in the resurrection (but not, of course, in the creation story in Genesis; which he says cannot be interpreted “narrowly”, was not “intended as a science textbook”, and is actually “very consistent with the Big Bang”).

Collins asserts that God provides the answer to the “why” questions, presumably of the “why are we here” variety. But he never explains what those answers are, how there could be such answers, or what the nature of those answers might be.

Collins should have followed the advice he quotes St. Augustine as giving, warning against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If he had, he would have skipped this whole discussion. That would have let Time do what it should have in the first place, which is to actually report on the issue.

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge is B. Alan Wallace’s new book. It’s packed full of challenging insights.

For instance, I hadn’t realized that:

• It was scientific materialism that was responsible for the death of millions of people under Hitler, Mao and Stalin.

• Scientists, the majority of whom are materialists and reductionists, adamantly refuse to consider the life of the mind. (The broad-ranging field of psychology apparently doesn’t count. Anyway, a lot of psychologists used to be behavioralists a long time ago.)

• Scientists don’t know the first thing about reality because they don’t even know what consciousness is. (Just like medieval scientists also could not explain “vapors” and “humors” and the “ether”.)

• Scientific materialism strips our lives of meaning.

• It also removes our free will. (And that’s one thing I insist on having.)

• It undermines our sense of moral responsibility.

• The more progress is made in physics, the more it proves we don’t know anything at all.

• The fact that this scientific materialism stuff just doesn’t cut it is proved by the 80% of Americans that believe in ghosts and virgin births.

• Voters supported Bush in 2004 because of his moral values, and not Kerry because he appeared to “stand for so little”.

• But still, we need to find a “fresh, integrative perspective” to reconcile these two “traditions”, even though “scientific materialism is a modern kind of nature religion or neoanimism, whic had innumerable precedents int he preliterate history of humanity”.

• The First Amendment’s establishment clause has been interpreted in an overly broad way by generations of judges.

And all that’s only from one chapter. Maybe elsewhere in the book there’s some good stuff about Buddhism, since that’s in the book’s subtitle? Sorry. We find nothing more than a mind-numbing, academic analysis of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, that has nothing to do with neuroscience or science of any kind. (This chapter, like most (all?) of the others, apparently was cut-and-pasted from some earlier publication to fill out page count.) Maybe we’ll find out something about Zen and neuroscience? Sorry. Zen is not mentioned in the book once. Maybe we’ll learn about lots of neuroscientific research into meditation? Sorry. Wallace barely mentions the names of leading researchers and doesn’t even bother to summarize their results. Richard Davidson appears just once, in a parenthetical reference claiming that his work “shows that the idol of the brain has been toppled by empirical evidence.” Crick and Koch are brought up only to blithely accuse them of reducing consciousness to whatever science has the abililty to study, even as Wallace claims that scientists refuse to study consciousness. Perhaps we will learn about scientific theories of reincarnation memories? Sorry. We’re left with a couple of references to studies of kids who remembered past lives.

There is much that is simply stupid in this book, repetitive, superficial, or irrelevant. What is not stupid is basically wrong or at best wildly misinformed. Overall, one gets the impression that Wallace would rather be living in medieval Tibet than 21st century America; back then, there were no evil scientists and no pesky walls between the secular and spiritual.

The journal Psychopharmacology reports on a fascinating study claiming that psilocybin-induced trips are indistinguishable from “true” mystical experiences and have long-lasting, positive effects. Leading the study was Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Roland Griffiths.

60% of the 36 educated, adult participants in the study had so-called complete mystical experience, based on tests such as the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which measures feelings of internal and external unity, transcendance, ineffability, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, and mood of joy/peace/love.

One third of the participants reported the experience was the most meaningful of their life, with an additional 50% placing it among the top five such experiences.

An intriguing aspect of the study was that friends and family of the subject were also interviewed, several months after the experiment, reporting sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior.

The study was random and double-blind, but of course any study like this will have built-in assumptions. In this case the subjects were regular participants in religious or spiritual activities, which might have made them more prone to ascribe religious significance of personal meaning to the experience. They were also first-time users of hallucinogens.

In an editorial accompanying the article, Harriet de Wit notes (my paraphrase):

It may be time now to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences. The Griffiths study is unique in applying rigorous, modern methods of psychopharmacological research and in studying the lasting, life-changing effects that have been attributed to such experiences. It will likely take an important place in the history of human psychopharmacology research. We would do well to be prepared to consider the entire scope of human experience and behavior as legitimate targets for systematic and ethical scientific
investigation.

So, is this “God in a pill”? In interviews, Griffiths said answering questions of religion or spirituality “far exceeds the scope of studies like these. We know that there were brain changes that corresponded to a primary mystical experience,” he said. “But that finding—as precise as it may get—will in no way inform us about the metaphysical question of the existence of a higher power.” He likened scientific attempts to seek God in the human brain to experiments where scientists watch the neurological activity of people eating ice cream. “You could define exactly what brain areas lit up and how they interplay, but that shouldn’t be used as an argument that chocolate ice cream does or doesn’t exist,” Griffiths said.

Anticipating a common objection, the researcher noted “My guess is that there will be people saying ‘You’re looking for a spiritual shortcut’”. He stressed that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: “There’s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.”

See Google News for other reports.

In a future post I’ll ruminate on whether psychoactive drugs can be an element of spiritual development.

I recently posted on a mention of the game of Go in the “Spring and Autumn” fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo.

You’ll recall the setting: Chinese Zen master Wanshi is commenting on an old story about heat and cold. I translated Dogen’s paraphrasing of Wanshi’s comment as:

Discussing this is like two players playing Go, where you’ve got to answer my move if you don’t want to get taken for a ride. You won’t grasp what Tozan is saying until you’ve internalized this.

Dogen then comments on the commentary:

Sticking with the go analogy for now, the real question is what’s happening with the two players. The minute you talk about two players playing go, you’ve become a bystander, which is no good because bystanders can’t play go. Playing go means one player and his opponent facing each other, it must be said.

I’ve now belatedly come across a translation of this fascicle by Francis Dojun Cook, in his How to Raise an Ox . This is an excellent, readable translation, with solid commentary, by someone who is a Buddhist scholar rather than a Zen master. I recommend it. For this section, however, he gives:

Now, the example of playing checkers is quite appropriate, but what sort of thing is this business of two people playing? If you speak of two people playing, you are still caught in duality [literally, “there will be eight eyes”]. And if you are caught in duality, there is no checker game. How can there be? Therefore, shouldn’t it rather be said that only one person is playing checkers and that he is his own opponent?

Quite a jump from “eight eyes”—which has a perfectly well-understood translation as “bystander”—to “duality”. And it is not “if you are caught in duality, there is no checker game”, but the opposite: you can’t play in the Go game if you’re outside looking at it.

I also recently acquired the three-volume Nishiyama/Stevens translation, the first complete English translation of SBGZ, done back in the ‘70s, which is now inexplicably out of print (perhaps it suffered from a lack of notes and commentary). This translation, as well, was done by Buddhist scholars and translators rather than Zen masters, and it shows it. Their translation of this portion of Shunju is the most accurate yet:

What is the meaning of “two people playing go”? If we say “Two people are playing go” it means we are a third party not actually playing. If we say such things then we must stop talking and directly face our opponent.

Shobogenzo is Dogen’s opus magnum, but what kinds of things did he really write about? What was his focus? I’ve done a simple analysis by fasicle:

• Philosophy: 42
• Practice: 22
• Doctrine: 14
• Rules: 10
• Tradition: 4
• Ethics: 4

As expected, philosophical topics dominate; these are the “famous” fascicles such as Genjo Koan and Uji. Next comes practice, ranging from Bendowa, Dogen’s chatty overview of Zen, to Zanmai-O-Zanmai, a discussion of samadhi.

Doctrine follows, although of course, the fascicles I’ve classified as “doctrine” are also somewhat philosophical in nature, typically with Dogen taking up some Buddhist doctrine and putting his own unique spin on it, such as in Sokshin-ze-butsu, sometimes translated as “Mind Here is Buddha”.

In addition to being a thinker and writer, of course, Dogen was also running a big monastery, accounting for the 10 fascicles about rules, down to details of how to run a summer practice period (Ango), what to write on message boards in the kitchen (Jikuinmon), and how to wash yourself (Senmen and Senju), these fascicles among the longer ones, meaning that they occupy a greater proportion of the whole in terms of page count.

Bringing up the rear are tradition, the topic of fascicles such as Shisho (“Certificate of Transmission”), and ethics, under which I’ve categorized fascicles like Shoaku Makusa (“Do no Evil”).