“The reason of words and letters” is a translation of monji no dori,1 a central concept in the thought of Eihei Dōgen, the great Zen master who founded the Soto school of Zen in Japan. The power of language, to facilitate realization, is made explicit in the following sentence that ends with a chiasmic twist:
“The monks of future generations will be able to understand one-taste Zen (ichimizen)2 based on words and letters, if they devote their efforts to spiritual practice by seeing the universe through words and letters, and words and letters through the universe.”3
This concept challenges the second line of the traditional four-phrase summary of Zen:
Outside the teaching, apart from tradition,
Not relying on words or letters,
Directly pointing to the human mind,
Seeing into one’s nature and attaining Buddhahood.4
Indeed, the challenge is made explicit in a verse that Dōgen wrote in the waka5 style of Japanese poetry:
Not limited
By language,
It is ceaselessly expressed;
So, too, the way of letters
Can display but not exhaust it.
The way of letters? Zen, as the Way of Letters, sounds somehow strange to ears accustomed to hearing one traditional claim that language must be transcended for transcendence to be realized. Dōgen’s response to this, though he didn’t put it in these words, would be to say that Zen does not transcend language, but uses a language of transcendence.
The language of transcendence finds a unique intensity of expression in Dōgen with his creative wordplay, metaphysical puns, dislocations of grammar and syntax, rhetorical figures such as metonymy and chiasmus, linguistic twists and turns, and his original way of looking into koans. His way with language was so creative that it has been likened to alchemy.6
As with words and letters, thinking, or using the intellect, are, according to one school of Zen, detours into existential fog, and skillful means such as koans are one way to derail intellectual trains of thought and pave the way to direct experience.
Dōgen turns this around, says just the opposite, and makes thinking the very pivot of practice, but with a difference that really makes a difference. He conjures authentic thinking in terms of a triad:
thinking (思量) shiryo
not-thinking (不思量) fu-shiryo
nonthinking (非思量) hi-shiryo
Thinking is just what we ordinarily mean by the word.
But to think about thinking is to shift to a different level of thinking and to make the thinking that is thought about an object of thought. From this perspective, what formerly may have been conceptual commotion can be stilled so that it does not continue. This is not-thinking—not the absence of thinking but that thinking which is not thinking.
In addition, not-thinking provides a perspective on thinking in terms of a sense of its limitations, and a sense of possibilities yet to be realized.
The core of Dōgen’s Zen was zazen, seated meditation, but a form called shikantaza,7 meaning “just sitting” or, better, “wholehearted sitting.” After settling down on the meditation cushion, and centering oneself, the way to proceed, according to Dōgen, is:
“Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen. It is genjokoan . . . the presence of things just as they are.”8
To sit in this ancient way is to move into a pre-reflective state of consciousness, and to enter such a state is to become transparent to the wondrous workings of emptiness, or dependent co-arising, the core doctrine of Buddhism and the truth that Siddhartha awakened to as he sat under the Bodhi tree.
This is nonthinking. This is zazen . . . the presence of things just as they are. Or, to turn a noun into a verb, as Dogen so often does, it is just . . . presencing (genjosu)9.
Finally, rather than silence in face of the ineffable, Dōgen reimagines “expression” (dotoku),10 making it dynamic expression, in terms of second triad with formal and substantive relations to the first:
the already expressed
the not yet expressed
the expressible
With “ineffability” seen as a lure for linguistic adventure, expressing the inexpressible then becomes possible and Dōgen’s writings provide examples of how that possibility can be realized by relying on . . . the reason of words and letters.
To enact what is impossible to enact,
to express what is impossible to express.
行不得底を行取し、
説不得底を説取するなり。11
—Dogen—
Notes
1. In Japanese, the phrase monji no dori is: 文字の道理.
2. “One-taste Zen,” or ichimizen: 味禪.
3. The quotation is from Dōgen’s Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Zen Cook).
4. The traditional four-phrase summary of Zen in Chinese:
教外別傳、
不立文字、
直指人心、
見性成佛。
5. The waka style of verse has five lines with 31 syllables in a 5-7-5-7-7 format. The transliteration of Dōgen’s poem, in the original Japanese, shows this syllable count:
Ii suteshi (5)
Sono koto no ha no (7)
Hoka nareba (5)
Fude ni mo ato o (7)
Todome zari keri. (7)
6. “A medieval aristocrat in origin, Dōgen could not help being literary and poetic in his writing. It is therefore not surprising that he also devotes his reflections to such emotive subjects as baika (‘plum blossoms’), koruyo (‘the radiant light’), tsuki (‘the moon’), keisei sanshoku (‘valley sounds, mountain sights’), shunju (‘spring and autumn’), ryugin (‘a dragon’s song’), and sansui (‘mountains and waters’). A true alchemist of images and symbols, Dōgen evokes the vicissitudes of the dharmic drama of the universe through his exquisite, matchlessly poetic, and refined manipulation of them, without ever aggrandizing them. At his hand, they are regarded not as the means to edification but as the workings of ultimate truth itself.” — Hee-Jin Kim, Dōgen on Meditation and Thinking, p. 73
7. Shikantaza: 祗管打坐.
8. The quotation is from Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi (Universal Recommendation of Zazen) (普勸坐禪儀).
9. Genjosu: 現成す.
10. Dotoku: 説.
11. The quotation is from the Gyoji (行持) fascicle of Dōgen’s Shobogenzo.