Rein Raud: Casting Off the Bonds of Karma

7/25/2019 Rein Raud: Casting Off the Bonds of Karma

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Journal of Japanese Philosophy , Vol. 3, 2015 53

CASTING OFF THE BONDS OF KARMA: WATSUJI,SHINRAN, AND D GEN ON THE PROBLEM OF

FREE WILL

Rein Raud Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki, Estonian Institute of

Humanities, Tallinn University

Abstract

The article approaches the interpretation of the principle of karmaas suggested in a sideline in Watsuji Tetsurs early reading of the phi-losophy of Dgen: Karma is the historic, conditioned origin of howour being is enacted at every single instant, of which each individualis the constantly renewed product. In a sense, any sentient existence

in the world is thus karmic because it has a history. The consequencesof the problem thus posed are explored in the context of the questionof subjectivity, causality, and free will, reformulated here as the prob-lem of genuine choice, the position where different inputs, such asdesires, moral codes, and duties, prompt a person to choose betweencontradictory courses of action. The results of this analysis are thenused to develop a rationalistic reading of one of Dgens key terms,shinjin datsuraku (casting off the bodymind), building on Tsujiguchi Y ichirs recent work, as the refusal of a person to succumb to herprimary karmic determination or to follow the most readily availablecourse of action that her biological, social, and mental structurespropose to her.

A lot of interesting things in the history of thought have appeared atthe meeting points of two or more heterogeneous traditions. We allknow what has been produced by the dialogue between the rationalityof Greek-Roman antiquity and Jewish religiosity, for instance, or in themeeting of Islam and Hinduism during Akbars reign in India. Quite

obviously the same is true in East Asia, where such meetings have alsotaken place frequently, from the introduction of Buddhism to Chinauntil the Kyoto School and beyond. The Japanese scholars efforts to


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54 Casting off the Bonds of Karma

reappropriate their own intellectual heritage after the modernizationof their country present a particularly interesting dialogical space, where all of its layers suddenly appear in a new light, not as thecomponents of the Buddhist-Confucian-Shinto amalgam traditionalinstitutions maintain in the real world, but particular and histori-cally traceable discourses with internal controversies of their own. Additionally, the authorial voice that interrogates them is not one thatitself speaks with authority. Rather, it is the carrier of a message that isonly being formed as it is articulated, hesitantly and without completecondence, questioning itself just as it questions the texts into which itinquirestexts that have not really ever been read in this way before.

At least this is the impression one gets reading Shamon Dgen,a lengthy section of theInquiries into the History of the Japanese Mind (Nihon seishinshi kenky ) by Watsuji Tetsur (18891960). With thisbook Watsuji almost single-handedly excavated Dgen (12001253)from obscurity and placed him at the forefront of Japanese philo-sophical thought where he has remained to this day. Even thougha fairly interesting discussion of Dgens ideas had been carried on within the St Zen School in Japan,1 this was something not very well known to the academic community, let alone the general public.There is no mistake about Watsujis position: arguing that Dgensprimary motivation was to reach for the truth not as an instrument forattaining a religious experience, but for the sake of that truth itself, heexplicitly places Dgen alongside the Greek philosophers, whose goalhad been exactly that.2 In addition to being an introduction to Dgenfor the uninitiated audience, the book is also a claim to his thought,for moving it out of the sectarian into the public domain, where it canbe discussed and analyzed on par with any other intellectual position,either domestic or Western. Watsujis own early interpretations of tra-ditional Japanese thought should be read in this context, as a reap-propriation of a tradition that suffocates under its own institutionalprotection, as a rereading of texts, which should be approached ontheir own terms and not those their guardian authorities impose.

Watsujis Views on Karma and Salvation

In chapter 5 ofShamon D gen , Watsuji compares Dgens views oncompassion to those of Shinran (11731263), the founder of the Jdo Shin (True Pure Land) School of Japanese Buddhism, the most


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powerful and largest Japanese Buddhist institution today. Comparedto Dgen, Shinran has usually been viewed as a religious reformer,a man of practice rather than an original thinker. Nonetheless onenotoriously perplexing dictum in theLamentation of Divergences (Tannish ), a short but widely read treatise on Shinrans thoughtby his disciple Yuien, has caught Watsujis attention for severalpages. Even a good person can attain [rebirth in the Pure Land],how much more so an evil person. The traditional interpretation,offered in theTannish itself, claims that consciousness of the good-ness of ones deeds equals mistrust in the power of Amida (Buddha Amitabha), to whom an adept should entrust himself or herself com-pletely and absolutely. Obviously this is not a commendation of evilbehavior, but rather a statement on the uselessness of knowinglyaccumulated merit.

Watsuji elaborates his theory of karma and human nature in thiscontextnot necessarily a central topic of the book, but nonethelessone that merits careful attention. At the end of the passage in ques-tion, he admits that quite possibly his interpretation is at odds withShinrans own original intentions,3 but to elucidate these, it seems,has never been his purpose. Quite the opposite: just as with Dgen,he is moving the one best-known statement from Shinrans teach-ing into the public, academic, philosophical domain by interpretingit from a standpoint that looks back at its tradition with modernityalready internalized, at least to a certain extent. But the theory ofkarma is not articulated as a historical critique; on the contrary, Watsuji is constructing a view in which the discourse on karma canalso meaningfully speak to a carrier of modernity.

In summary, Watsujis theory runs as follows: Shinran does notapprove of evil, and yet he trusts Amida will save evil people. Thisis because karma conditions good and evil deeds, that is, a forcegenerated in the past that controls and determines the fate ofhuman beings. As long as they identify with their own deeds, they justly deserve what is coming to them. However, if they disassoci-ate themselves from their karmic destiny by reciting the name of Amida (calling for help, recognizing their own inability to cope withthe situation), they also cease to be responsible for the evil of their

karmically conditioned actions and therefore deserve to be rebornin Amidas Pure Land. Residual karma is the principle that makesthe presently available human life possible,4 he writes, and karmiceffects reach the details of the composition of our bodies. But where


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does residual karma come from? Thinking with Dgen here ratherthan Shinran, Watsuji asks, Where is the past? and answers thatin fact each instant contains both the past and the future. This is what karma is: the historic, conditioned origin of how our being isenacted at every single instant. As living beings, we are (currently,or for ourselves) the nal links in a chain of being that contains ourcountless ancestors. Each of us is the product of a process. This pro-cess, and nothing else, is the formation of karma. We might extrap-olate a little: what we call karma consists of our biological as wellas our intellectual or spiritual heritage (including the values andideas we hold without questioning them), and it reects the acts andchoices of those who have been forming it in the past. (Watsuji fol-lows the Buddhist nondual understanding of bodymind and doesnot make a distinction between the material and mental processesthat together comprise the individual, so the material and the men-tal side of the individual are treated together as a whole.) My karmais thus not necessarily the fruit of what I have done myself as a subject in a previous incarnation, as an individual being responsible forits actions beyond a single existenceit is the result of the deeds mypredecessors have committed, but as a biological being I am a con-tinuation of them (carrying their DNA, so to speak), as a social andcultural being I have been formed by what they (and others) havetransmitted to me, and thus I also contain those who have producedthis karma that conditions me in my present condition. This is atotally rational and logical interpretation of what karma means, com-patible at the same time with a scientic worldview and with the basicBuddhist doctrine that negates the existence of individual souls,although tting this interpretation into the original Brahmanisticcontext of the term would be difcult. Any sentient existence in the world is thus karmic because it hasa history. The question is whether it can be reduced to its history? According to Watsuji, this is not the case. No doubt the actions of abeing that have been determined by its biological needs and herit-age are its own and not imposed on it from the outsidethe beingis inescapably the subject of its own karma (which it contains) andthus responsible for its actions. However, while we are conditioned

by our karma and carry it around in ourselves, we are not bound byit. We are in possession of a world that transcends karmic condition-ing, Watsuji writes. We are in possession of an individual soul thathas never existed before or anywhere else. We are in possession of


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a spirit that is capable of rejecting this karmic conditioning.5 Heuses two different terms to describe that individuality, tamashii (translated here as soul) and seishin (spirit), neither of whichis strictly compatible with Buddhist doctrine. A soul that has notexisted anywhere or anytime else is also not the popular subject oftransmigration, something to come from previous livesas I saidearlier, my previous lives are those of my countless ancestors whosechoices and actions have resulted in what I am. This soul seems to bea rather Western idea, the unit of individualismthe unrepeatableand irreducible element of a singular human existence. And this, Watsuji proceeds, is the genuine human subject:

This existence above karmic conditioning is the mostprecious essence of our individual being. Accordingly,acts resulting from karmic conditioning are notthe manifestation of this essence of our individualbeing. Even though our individual being appearsthus tied up in karmic conditioning, the essence ofthis being is what negates such acts, seeks absolutionfrom them. For a human, to live in this worldmeans to be bound by karmic conditioning. Notobe human means already to be bound by karmicconditioning. Accordingly, until he does not havethe force to live as an overhuman and transcend this world entirely, the human being will not be able toescape karmic conditioning. And anyone who cannotescape that will inevitably be led to evil deeds of vari-ous kinds. However, this is what being human means.It is just that having a mind that does not endorsethese deeds, in other words, having a mind that rest-lessly, of its own accord, calls out to the Buddha in themidst of all this karmic conditioning, is why absolu-tion from these evil deeds can be granted.6

Obviously this is Watsuji the former Nietzsche scholar (note the jabto the bermensch7) and not some impartial proponent of Shinran who is speaking here. For a serious adept of the Jdo Shin School,the idea of an unrepeatable human soul capable of transcendingthe effects of karma and addressing the Buddha of its own accord would most likely seem quite preposterous. That much should havebeen known also to Watsuji, even though at the time of his writing


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the letter of Shinran8 wherein he explains the doctrine of jinen h ni ,or natural deeds, the mechanism by which even the adepts call to Amida is attributed to the will of Amida and not to that of the adept,may not have been commonly known outside Shin Buddhist circles.

Importantly, however, we should note how Watsuji distanceshimself from Nietzsche here and shows that transcending human-ity is not the only way to emancipate oneself from karma. Not at all.The way this is supposed to happen may not be quite compatible with Buddhist orthodoxy, but it is nonetheless a sample of quintes-sentially Japanese reasoning. Freedom from the binding ties, we aretold, can be achieved within these ties, by an act of separation ofoneself from the deeds to which one is inevitably led by karmic (bio-logical, social) conditioningan act of ultimate free will.

Subjectivity, Causality, and Free Will

This reading touches on two important and related questions thatbecause of space can be dealt with here only cursorily. The rst ques-tion is that of self and selfhood. We know Buddhist doctrine asserts the

illusory nature of selfhood, so any fundamental assertion about howthings are cannot be built on that concept. On the other hand, Buddhistauthors do not abstain from terms meaning self or I. Quite to thecontrary, discussions of selfhood and the position of self both vis--visother things and other selves in the world and the road of spiritual pro-gress are so frequent that no version of Buddhist philosophy can reallydo without them. So even if selves are illusory, they must have someconceptual reality. We get a feeling of that when we compare the useof the root of self in different contexts also in Englishfor example,doing anything selessly is not possible unless you do it yourself.On the other hand, in Buddhist ontology, it is not just selvesthat are illusory. Reality is a metaprocess, and any thing we canpoint out in it is there only by virtue of the action of our mind. Slicesof reality are not self-sufcient substances; they have been carved outof the bigger picture by our linguistic designations of convenience.No doubt these things may appear to us as stable and durable, butthis is only from our perspective of timespace perception: were we to

look at them from the point of view of a microbe or (why not) a rock,they would appear vastly different. Any thing we can talk about isa meeting point of heterogeneous streams of being, a meeting pointof a multitude of causal chains.


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In that sense, it seems fair to Watsujis position to assume that thespirit or soul he speaks about is a similar phenomenon, whichemerges in that unique conguration of different histories that col-lide, as karmic conditioning, in a single individualthat the soul isnot an entity, not something pre- or postdating the conscious actsof a particular human being, but the relation that binds all singleelements that have contributed to that beings emergence. In fact,this agrees with contemporary views on consciousness, which cannotbe located in any particular section of the brain, but appears as arelation between their various activities.9 This view is also compat-ible with the traditional Buddhist understanding of selfhood at leastsince Milindapah, where Ngsena explains the illusory nature ofself to King Menandros by likening it to the carriage the king hastaken to their meeting place: the carriage is neither to be locatedin the wheels, pole, or axles and so on, nor are all these heapedtogether a carriagethe actual meaning of the word is found inthe manner in which these single elements are organized together.10 As a relation, carriage is neither to be found in material reality,nor is it to remain if all the composing elements are taken away. Thesame applies to self, although calling it soul and spirit perhapsmakes a more forceful, more substantialist claim.

And this brings us to the second question. This self, as we saw, thesubject of free will, is able to run counter to the determinations thathave formed it. This is something not necessarily shared by otherrelation-entities such as carriage. To be sure, being part of a car-riage puts quite strong restraints on any of its elementsnone of the wheels can move at random; they all have to follow the direction ofthe whole. But a carriage is not able to set its own course. Is a human?

Regardless of what Watsuji says, for Shinran, the answer is no.It is the endless grace of Amidas original vow that allows a humanto seek refuge in the Pure Land. This is not an act of free will, butone of submission, the recognition of ones own powerlessnessandeven that recognition is not actually something that the individualcan take credit for because it only reects Amidas grace. For thebroader Buddhist tradition, the question is not so simple. However,before we address the problem, we should dene what we mean by

free will with more precision.In comparison with the discussions of selfhood, which occupy acentral, if not the central place in Buddhist philosophical discourse,the problem of free will receives relatively little attention. Indeed, on


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the basis of available textual material, as Federman writes, one canconclude that Buddhism teaches both unlimited free will and strictdeterminism.11 This is because, Gier and Kjellberg argue, the prob-lem was for Buddhists (as it was for Greeks) a nonissue: the questionarises in Western thought as a logical consequence of monotheism when it is confronted by an emerging human-centered worldviewand thus is a modern thing. Indeed, as they say, the problem wasnever solved by medieval thinkers, who, on the one hand afrmedthe omniscience and unlimited power of a monotheist god, but onthe other hand placed the responsibility for the actions of humanson the humans themselves.12 The latter indeed logically presupposesat least a certain degree of free will; the former, however, precludesit completely. With the postulation of the Cartesian subject, how-ever, the human mind resolutely asserts control over its thoughtsand actions, which proceed from the results of its mental process.Obviously determining whether this process is self-sustaining to asignicant degree or conditioned by outside factors unknown to thesubject itself now becomes extremely important.

Much of the confusion, Federman writes, arises from confusingtwo denitions of free will that assign different limits to it: free willas a power that belongs in the soul, transcends the physical, and hasultimate control over the body and free will as the agents abilityto control action in conformity with will, when there are no con-straints that limit performance.13 A move from the rst denition tothe second, Federman suggests, is what happened in Buddhism andis happening in current philosophical discourse as well. However,the solution may not be that simple because in a world of strict cau-sality the second denition is nonsensical: a situation with no con-straints that limit performance is just something that never happens.Everything emerges from previous process; everything is the effectof a cause. So is the action of the agent, and so is the opinion of theagent that she acts of her own free will.

We may thus perhaps reformulate the problem of free will asone of genuine choice. There is free will where the agent can choosebetween two courses of action that are equally possible. I am beingoffered a choice between two cakes and I take the meringue. Free

will? No way. My preference for the meringue has been biochemi-cally conditioned and fostered by previous experience. I would havetaken the sacher torte if the meringue would not have been available,but with both present, no genuine choice was involved.


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On the other hand, if I had remembered that my doctor toldme that although eating cakes is not really prohibited, it shouldnonetheless be monitored for health reasons, I might have declinedthe cake for the selsh and egoistic reason of wanting to live longer(albeit in a cakeless world). This indeed seems to be a genuinechoice. I have two contradicting motivations, both of them resultsof separate causal chains, and I decide which one to follow. Or letus raise the stakes: the choice between pain and no pain is not reallygenuine; the choice between pain and the betrayal of ones country(which may well become the prerequisite of no pain for an interro-gated prisoner) is genuine to an extreme degree.

Of course, in a world of strict causalityand whether such a worldoperated because a monotheistic god wants it or for some other rea-son is, in fact, irrelevantsuch a choice is still not quite genuine.It occurs as a result of heterogeneous causal chains colliding, nodoubt, but the result of the collision is nonetheless predeterminedas is the weather after 100 years if we have enough knowledge ofhow things work. And just as with the weather, normally not just twoprocesses are colliding, but an almost endless multiplicity. My choiceis not something I make; it is the resulting balance not so differentfrom what results, say, when several liquids of different temperatureand chemical composition are poured into the same jug.

But this argument rests on a series of implicit premises that shouldnot be taken for granted. In particular, it separates the maker of thedecision from the decision itself as well as from the space where thedecision is formed. There is my consciousness where the balancesettlesas if myself and my consciousness somehow exist indepen-dently of each other. Similarly, this view presupposes that the mentalprocesses taking place in my consciousness are related to it like alm related to a screen. This, too, is surely not the case: the mentalprocesses are not distinct from my consciousness. They make it up.

In other words, if we look at the subject as something thatemerges as a result of heterogeneous causal chains, physical as wellas cultural or mental, merging into one internally contradictory butcontinuous process of balancing them with each other, we do nothave to say that the subject makes choices. It is those choices. I am

not deciding whether to take the meringue or to heed to my doctorsadvicethe decision is what I am at that very moment.But at this point we may also freely assume that this process has

a more chaotic nature than a world of strict determination would


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allow. The streams that co-occur are, after all, so numerous and theirinput is contradictory. So the sheer number of all the factors puttingtogether who the seless I is at any particular moment is such thatit exceeds the limit of possible determinationat least to the extentof what is conceivable to the human mind itself or any of the toolsat its disposal. Thus the question of whether the world operates asa (theoretically) predictable clockwork or as a more Lorenzian cha-otic system or in a wholly Prigoginian world is empirically no longerimportant: each of these discourses is grounded in premises that areultimately reducible to matters of belief, denitions of basic con-cepts, or both. For the present purposes, this means that we can safelyassume that genuine choice is possibleand, as a corollary, that this very possibility is what makes particular individuals accountable fortheir own actions. Unlike what Shinran would have us believe. Whatabout Dgen?

D gen on Casting off the Bodymind

The turning point in Dgens religious development, according tothe most popular version of the story, took place during a meditationsession under the supervision of his teacher Rujing, who chastised afellow monk for having fallen asleep and shouted, Cast off your bodyand mind! (datsuraku shinjin ), which opened Dgens mind to theactual goal of his meditative practice. Most scholars follow the tradi-tion of the St School commentators in interpreting casting offthe bodymind (reversed as a technical term toshinjin datsuraku ), asa profound shift in the persons perception of the world and herself,experienced in the state of meditation and equivalent to (Dgensown understanding of) enlightenment. Thus, Nishiari Bokusanexplains the result of casting off as the mind that arises in theplace of non-abiding14 and Yasutani Hakuun describes it as becom-ing a pure white sheet of article, and living the life of ones ownintrinsic nature,15 leading Abe Masao to dene it as overcom[ing]all conceptualization and objectication,16 and Hee-Jin Kim todene it as the true human body function[ing] freely and authenti-

cally in harmony with the entire universe not dissolved, but seenin the light of emptiness and thusness, something he characterizesas the epitome of Dgens mystical realism.17 Perhaps even moreforcefully, Steven Heine writes: Beyond will and not-will, self and


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other, independence and interdependence,datsuraku is the powerof the emergence of phenomena and the discarding of purpose ordirection, or the abandonment of a causal or teleological perspec-tive. The conceptual structure of datsuraku rests on a temporalfoundation encompassing the coexistence of arising and desisting;its nonsubstantive nature is based on the uidity and dynamism ofimpermanence.18

All of this seems to leave little or no space for an effort to imaginecasting off the bodymind as something that can be conceived inrational terms. And yet, Tsujiguchi Y ichir has persuasively arguedfor just such a reading. Although he concedes that these wordsrefer to Dgens personal enlightenment experience,19 he decisivelyrejects any effort to interpret this experience as a mystical realizationof any kind, although this is what Dgens insistence to cast off thebodymind of oneself and others seems to imply.20 Tsujiguchi readsDgens enlightenment story in the context of how the term cast-ing off appears in the transcript of his conversation with Ej in theSh b genz Zuimonki . Although this work does not contain the entirephrase casting off the bodymind, casting off is spoken of in ahighly signicant context when Ej asks Dgen about karmic causal-ity.21 When Dgen asserts that karmic cause and effect are immova-ble, Ej asks: How can we cast them off then? Given the importanceof the term in Dgens teaching (and its relative rarity elsewhere) Ej most likely had heard it before and takes it up here as a student doesfrom his teacher. Cause and effect are cotemporaneous, Dgen says.Is the effect then the next cause, or the cause come together witha predetermined effect, Ej wonders? Instead of a more detailedclarication, Dgen recounts the story of Nanquan killing the cat when two groups of monks quarrelling over who should have it wereunable to say the right thing to keep it alive.22 So is Nanquansaction a crime, Ej asks. Yes, it is, Dgen agrees. But it is also an act ofthe Buddha. How is that possible, Ej asks? These two are separate,although they occur at the same time. Apparently Ej is satised withthis explanation because the discussion diverts to a different topic.

This separation, Tsujiguchi argues, is the key to understand-ing what casting off means. Nanquan knowingly and deliberately

brings upon himself bad karma by killing the blameless animal, buthe does that in order to foster the understanding of the monks hefeels responsible for. Thus it is at the same time a laudable and acensurable action. As Tsujiguchi sees it, the true meaning of casting


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off ones own bodymind and that of others consists precisely inorienting oneself and ones actions wholly toward the world, feelingresponsible for every other being rather than oneself. This reading,he claims, is supported as well by passages from theSh b genz , suchas the following from the Jish sammai fascicle: All in all, study-ing the way of the Buddha and the predecessors does not lie in thestudy of single laws and principles. It lies rather in letting the aspi-ration to act for the benet of others rise toward the heavens. Ifthis happens, the casting off of self and other is accomplished.23 Tsujiguchis argument is persuasive and wholly rational. But a fewclouds of doubt remain. For one thing, Thomas Kasulis has demon-strated how the feeling of the bodymind of others is not necessarily amystical or irrational experience at all. This is what dancers or gureskaters, or even two people walking on a slippery street do, whereone instinctively grasps the arm of the other, feeling an unexpectedmovement at her side.24 The question here is not whether this kindof feeling is empirically possibleit is or why would Dgen want usto get rid of this. Isnt it precisely the hallmark of Zen to cultivate thiskind of unity with ones environmentthis feeling of oneness thata driver feels with her car, an artist with her brush, or a martial artspractitioner with her weapon and her adversary at the same time? Soshould this be something that is achieved as a result of, or facilitatedby, an effort at casting off the bodymind of oneself and the other?

The second question is: what is with this duality? How can some-thing be explained by two actions taking place at the same time whena large part of intellectual effort has been precisely to eradicate andovercome all forms of duality, to reach beyond the domain wherebinary oppositions are the most convenient if not the only tool avail-able for the description of things at their most basic level? But Dgenclearly tells Ej that Nanquans killing of the cat is both an act of theBuddha and a crime at the same time. Though separately.

Quite possibly this conversation offers indeed the key to thepuzzle, albeit in a slightly different way than Tsujiguchi would sug-gest. Remember, the topic of their discussion was karmic causality.Something that according to Dgen is xed in spacetime: therehave been causes; there will be effects. But this is also how our

bodyminds should be seen at any given moment: the interim resultsof certain heterogeneous processes that have produced these tem-porary units we call ourselves, renew every single instant. They areproduced by karmic causality, that is, by the past actions and choices


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of ourselves and our ancestors whom we contain, and this karmiccausality indeed cannot be budgedit reaches to the present fromthe pastbut it does not wholly determine our actions whenever wehave a genuine choice.

I think this is what casting off the bodymind means in Dgensown thought: the refusal to succumb to the primary karmic determi-nation, to follow the most logical path that our biological, social, andmental structures propose to usand not to expect such automatismfrom others either, not to mention imposing it on them. On the face ofit, this may seem to be a wholly rational decision without any enlighten-ment factor involved, but against the background of Dgens worldview,it is not as simple as that. By casting off the determination that claims usfrom the past, we also open up to the present. Thus, casting off theimmovable karmic logic that makes up our bodymind at each momentalso necessarily means the autonomization, the authentication of thatmomentthe only moment when something really existsand livingit with ones total presence. As we see, this interpretation is, in princi-ple, not incompatible with the practical implications of Hee-Jin Kimsreading: when one chose and committed oneself to a special course ofaction, one did so in such a manner that the action was not an actionamong others, but the actionthere was nothing but that particularaction in the universe so that the whole universe was created in andthrough that action. Yet even this action was eventually cast off.25 For the Zen adept, the clarity and authenticity of ones relation to the world may have rst been realizable in meditation, but eventually it wasto pervade the whole being of that personsomeone realized anew bythe whole world at each moment.

Concluding Remarks

Watsujis own treatment of the shinjin datsuraku idea is fairly closeto what has been proposed here. He treats the idea of castingoff in passing when he talks about the utterance of truth, and hecompares it to HegelsAufhebung , the overcoming of differenceson a higher level where they do not matter.26 Nonetheless he sees

this experience primarily as a psychological event brought aboutby strenuous meditative practice, and not as much as a total movethat includes an ethical aspect of asserting ones unique momentover karmic determination. It is a moment when absolutely all


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viewpoints, absolutely all practices are killed off in their singularstandpoints, so that they could live in a higher united position where they all form one whole.27 This ismost likely without suchintentionalso a statement that could very well be extended to themoment of genuine choice: an individual act that unites and at thesame time overcomes all the causal chains, the effects of choicesand actions of the past, both personal and inherited, as well as theactions of others that have been transmitted as ideas. Casting offthe bodymind thus acquires a very real ethical dimension, whichgoes very well with Dgens view of daily life and practice as thebig miracle that is opposed to the small miracles of supernaturalcharacter,28 and the forgetting of oneself that is the result of theserious study of oneself.29

Thinking of casting off the bodymind as the usual stance ofan enlightened person who is able to reject the choices that karmicconditioning would normally impose upon her also highlights thedifference between Dgens and Shinrans ideas of personal eman-cipation or, more broadly, between those of the self-power andother-power attitudes. Summarizing his interpretation of the latter,Kanamatsu Kenry writes:

The spiritually awakened man delights in acceptingthe bondage, and does not seek to evade it. He allowsthe law of causality (inga ), submits himself to it, hedoes not sever himself from it, he does not make anydistinction between it and himself; he identies him-self with it, he is it. He simply goes along his waynonchalantly and fearlessly with the undying faith inhis inmost self who is immortal, who is not afraid ofdeath or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as onlythe other side of joy. For it is Amida Buddha, andnot his narrow self, that is operative here. Here is hisactive passivity or passive activity.30

Dgen, on the other hand, is committed to just the opposite:the severance of the karmically conditioned past history of theperson, casting off the body and the mind, in order to experiencethe only real existencethe present momentto its fullest. He,too, identies himself with his selessness, and is his selessness,except that this selessness derives not from the past that has madehim but the present that makes him anew at each moment.


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NOTES

1. Kim, Eihei D gen: Mystical Realist , 56.

2. Watsuji, Shamon Dgen, 191.

3. Ibid., 196.

4. Ibid., 195.

5. Ibid., 195.

6. Ibid., 19596.

7. In the quote I have followed Graham Parkes, who explains at length whyNietzsches term should be translated like this; see Parkes, Introduction, xviii.

8. Nabata et al.,Shinransh , 12223.

9. For example, Kelley and colleagues have shown that distinct neural regionsare activated when a person answers questions about herself, as opposed tothe same type of questions about someone else or different types of questions

(Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study). What their data seem toindicate, however, is that though the medial prefrontal cortex is essential forself-related mental activity to occur, the latter is possible only when severalregions of the brain operate in conjunctionthat is, the self is not to be local-ized in one particular region, but emerges in the relation between their pat-terns of activity.

10. Horner,Milindas Questions , 3438 (II.1.2528).

11. Federman, What Kind of Free Will Did the Buddha Teach?, 1.

12. Gier and Kjelleberg, Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will, 27980.

13. Federman, What Kind of Free Will Did the Buddha Teach?, 3.

14. Dgen, D gens Genjo Koan , 58.

15. Yasutani, Flowers Fall , 38.

16. Abe,A Study of D gen , 123.


18. Heine, Dgen Casts off What, 58.


16/17


19. Tsujiguchi,Sh b genz no shis teki kenky , 94.

20. Ibid., 98.

21. Dgen, Sh b genz , 33537.

22. Iriya et al.,Hekiganroku , 28190 (cases 63 and 64).

23. Dgen, D gen Ge , 243.

24. Kasulis,Zen Action, Zen Person , 91.


26. Watsuji, Shamon Dgen, 239.

27. Ibid.

28. Dgen, D gen J , 403 (Jinz fascicle).

29. Ibid., 36 (Genjkan fascicle).

30. Kanamatsu,Naturalness , 8990.

REFERENCES

Abe, Masao.A Study of Do gen: His Philosophy and Religion . Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1992.

Dgen. D gen Ge . Edited by Tru Terada and Yaoko Mizuno. Tokyo: Iwanami

Shoten, 1972.. D gens Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries . Translated by Nishiari et al. Berkeley,

CA: Counterpoint, 2011.

. D gen J , edited by Tru Terada and Yaoko Mizuno. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,1972.

.Sh b genz . In Sh b genz Zuimonki , edited by Minoru Nishio, Genry Kagamishima, Tokugen Sakai, and Yaoko Mizuno. Tky : Iwanami Shoten,

1969.Federman, Asaf. What Kind of Free Will Did the Buddha Teach?Philosophy East

and West 60, no. 1 (2010): 119.


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Gier, Nicholas F., and Paul Kjelleberg. Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Paliand Mahayanist Responses. In Freedom and Determinism, Topics in ContemporaryPhilosophy , edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael ORourke, and David

Shier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.Heine, Steven. Dgen Casts off What. Journal of the International Association of

Buddhist Studies 9, no. 1 (1986).

Horner, I. B., trans.Milindas Questions . London: Luzac, 1969.

Iriya Yoshitaka, Y z Mizoguchi, Fumihiko Sueki, and Fumio It , eds.Hekiganroku .Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992.

Kanamatsu, Kenry . Naturalness . Kyoto: Bummeido, 1978.Kasulis, Thomas P.Zen Action, Zen Person . Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1989.

Kelley, W. M., et al. Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study. Journal ofCognitive Neuroscience 14, no. 5 (2002).

Kim, Hee-Jin. Eihei D gen: Mystical Realist . Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004.

Parkes, Graham. Introduction. InThus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyoneand Nobody , translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford, UK: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008.

Nabata jun, Reishun Taya, Shk Kabutogi, and Shinichi Shimma, eds.Shinransh Nichirensh . Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1969.

Tsujiguchi, Y ichir. Sh b genz no shis teki kenky . Tokyo: Hokuju Shuppan, 2012.

Watsuji Tetsur. Shamon Dgen. InWatsuji Tetsur zensh , vol. 4. Tokyo: IwanamiShoten, 1977.

Yasutani, Hakuun. Flowers Fall: A Commentary on Do gens Genjo ko an . Boston:Shambhala, 1996.

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