Moondrops in Dewlight:
Variations on the Theme of Impermanence

 Hyatt Carter

Zen Nocturne

Impermanence is a central and abiding theme in Buddhism and a variety of metaphors give expression to this idea. A beautiful example is an elegant little poem by Dogen, the thirteenth-century Zen master who founded the Japanese Soto school of Zen Buddhism. This is one of several poems on “impermanence,” mujo in Japanese, that Dogen wrote in the waka style of verse: five lines with 31 syllables in a 5-7-5-7-7 format.¹ The following Table reflects the English translation, the Japanese transliteration, and the Sino-Japanese² text.

English translation by Steven Heine, who offers this commentary on the poem:

“According to this verse, the entire world is fully contained in each and every one of the innumerable dewdrops, each one symbolic of the inexhaustible contents of all impermanent moments. Here the dewdrops no longer suggest illusion in contrast to reality because they are liberated by their reflection of the moon’s glow. Conversely, the moon as a symbol of Buddha-nature is not an aloof realm since it is fully merged in the finite and individuated mani­festations of the dew. Just as the moon is one with the dewdrops, the poem itself becomes one with the setting it depicts.”³

In another astute commentary,⁴ Hee-Jin Kim invites us to pay particular attention to the pivotal word “shaken.” Many examples could be given of static images of the moon in a dewdrop or the moon reflected in still water but, by virtue of being shaken, the metaphor becomes dynamic and interactive. And not just one, but a constellation of dewdrops originate, each one shining with an image of the moon, dependent⁵ upon the shaking of the crane’s bill. Lasting only for a brief moment, only as long as they are airborne, the dewdrops enjoy expansive movement in the air before showering down in a cascade of shimmering light. The poem is evocative of the process theme of the many and the one, the one and the many, and dewdrops are an evocation of tears, which seems appropriate for the deep and poignant feelings that impermanence can evoke. Dogen’s little nocturne, with the crane and moonlight and a mist of dewdrops shaken into the air, overflows with meaning.⁶ Indeed, the word “dew” derives from the Indo-European root dheu-, meaning “to flow.”

And Heraclitus,⁷ who very early sounded the theme of impermanence, reminds us that all things flow: panta rhei. Like Dogen, Heraclitus used a watery metaphor to convey the idea of change or flux: You can’t step twice into the same river . . . or, to say the same thing with a different twist, you can’t even step with the same foot into the “same” river twice.

Alfred North Whitehead invites us to look closely at the word flow, but just as closely at the two words that precede it.⁸ All things flow. But what sort of things flow, and just what is meant by saying that all things flow?

Whitehead then observes that, intertwining with the theme of flux, there is a counter-theme that speaks of permanence in images such as “the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids . . .” The two themes are united in poetic expression in the opening lines of a famous hymn:

Abide with me;
Fast falls the eventide.

Whitehead comments:

“Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide,’ ‘me’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of ‘substance’; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics of ‘flux.’ But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers.”

Darwinian Impermanence

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was almost universally believed that the myriad species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms were created in the beginning and were thereafter permanently fixed once and for all. Today it is commonplace that even the prototypical individuals of the mineral kingdom enjoyed some measure of creativity in the evolutionary advance whereby elementary particles begat the atoms that populate the periodic table and atoms begat molecules. 

Begat?

Given that there was a time when electrons and protons existed, but no atoms, how else explain the coming to be of hydrogen, the simplest of atoms, consisting of one proton and one electron? We could say and then a miracle occurred. But . . .

The evolutionary explanation, with a Whiteheadian nuance, is to say that all the true individuals in nature—particles, atoms, molecules, living cells, animals, the human soul—are centers of creative experience.

The path leading from electrons and protons to atoms is a creative path that can be explained in terms of actualities themselves, in this case: electrons and protons. In short, this means that these two were not mere inert particles but throbs of adventurous actuality. It was somehow through their creative interaction, their “decision” for novelty, that a new creature, a new atomic entity, came into being. This is the first social interplay, a romance if you will, between two opposites who continue to attract each other by one of the strongest forces in the universe.

Novelty doesn’t just float in out of the blue from nowhere; it is, rather, an emergent and creative synthesis that, as Charles Hartshorne says, “feeds on its own previous products, and on nothing else whatever!”⁹ It is thus both creative and preservative.

The emptiness of form¹⁰ is that form reforms . . . endlesslesslessly.

Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and writer, offers us another way of looking at this. In speaking of reality, or what is ultimately real, he says, with maybe a twinkle in his eyes:

　“There is only one Unreality!”¹¹

This idea is grounded in the intertwined Buddhist doctrines of impermanence, no-self, emptiness, and dependent origination, also sometimes called dependent co-arising or reciprocal causality.

Dependent origination means that an extensive causal network underlies the process of becoming to be of all actualities, and that momentary events rather than substances are fundamental. Event thinking replaces substance thinking, relationships replace objects, flux replaces solidity, and, even in conscious experience, there is no enduring self that exists in unbroken continuity from one moment of experience to the next. Experience, yes . . . experiencer, no.

We must resist the urge to reify.

I say becoming to be, rather than coming to be, because the latter is too static a concept to catch the perpetual flux of all reality . . . or should I say Unreality? Buddhism likes to use the rainbow as a metaphor of how “things” co-arise.

Whitehead, in conceiving his process philosophy, came to much the same conclusion, and his way of phrasing it, following Plato, is to say that it is the nature of any actuality that . . . “it never really is.”^12a This is backed up in quantum theory by the principles of complementarity (Bohr) and uncertainty (Heisenberg). There’s simply no way to pin down an elementary particle. Why? Position and velocity are mutually exclusive determinations.^12b

Finally, in Whitehead’s new language and “grammar” of reality, the subject is a Verb.

Icy Absolutes or Living Water?

A deeply entrenched prejudice against the idea of “change” in Western religious and metaphysical thought goes all the way back to Plato, with his Eternal Realm of Perfect Forms. There’s a certain irony in this since Plato himself moved away from this position in his later writings. The basic misconception ties in with the idea of perfection. To move either toward or away from perfection is construed as negative, the former implying an initially incomplete state; the latter, a degradation. But why cannot change be seen as positive, even as applied to deity, in the sense of self-surpassing, with God as the unrivalled but self-surpassing surpasser of all? Surely the vast saga of evolution, with its billions of years of adventure and novelty, has been something on the order of aesthetic satisfaction for God.

Using the metaphor of God as supreme dramatist, Charles Hartshorne writes, “But the drama would be nothing if the players had no decision-making power of their own; in subtle ways the actors always ad lib, make up their own speeches. If God’s world were merely the exact echo of divine thoughts coming back to God it would be pointless.”

Indeed, it is far from obvious that the so-called idea or ideal of immutability is always a positive value. The movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, seems to suggest that the realm of the unchanging, or ceaseless repetition, may be more hellish than heavenly. Sartre’s No Exit is another variation on this time-honored theme. Rather than praising the Holy Reality with a metaphysical compliment, perhaps there can be no greater insult than attributing to God complete immutability.

Among process thinkers, the primacy of “becoming” over “being” is so non-controversial as to be axiomatic and accords with the revelations of contemporary physics. This, along with the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity, is what partly constitutes the revolution in metaphysics that I discuss in an essay by that title.

It boils down to a question of the concrete or the abstract, the dynamic or static, event or substance, change or permanence. Western thought still suffers a bad hangover from the old Greek intoxication with abstractions and with a Newtonian addiction to “substance” abuse.

The process solution is to see these “ideal opposites” as requiring each other, with the concrete as the inclusive category. I invite you to turn to a single moment of your own experience as a clue to the nature of all reality.

All natural unities in the universe—particulate, atomic, molecular, cellular, vertebrate, human, divine—are self-creative, from moment to moment, through a definite process of becoming. Mind is quantum, or episodic. What endures is abstract essence, character, or what Whitehead calls “defining characteristic.” We are personally ordered “societies” of momentary occasions of experience.

Surely it is not God’s abstract essence that thrills in our veins, nor are the “icy absolutes” of medieval theology the object of our veneration; rather, it is God’s living actuality that is worthy of worship. To exalt the abstract over the concrete implies that we should value objects over subjects, the possible more than the actual, and that the movement from cause through effect is a descent from better to worse, from more to less. It seems to me that we sometimes have a tendency to forget, or to selectively ignore, some of the obvious insights and implications of evolutionary theory.

Four Dimensions of Impermanence

In a perceptive analysis of “Genjokoan,” a key fascicle in Dogen’s Shobogenzo, Steven Heine discusses the multiple dimensions of impermanence that Dogen identifies.¹³ In this concluding section, I follow the general contours of Heine’s thought while adding some of my own particular observations and the names of the four dimensions that I explore: Prosaic, Poetic, Philosophic, and Paradoxical.

　1. Prosaic

This refers to the universal sense felt by everyone of the brevity of time and of how moments, hours, days, and years go more and more fleetingly by. It is reflected in common sayings that have become almost clichés, such as “time flies,” or tempus fugit, the Latin phrase formerly inscribed on some hourglasses wherein one could literally see the incessant flowing of the sands of time. The change of seasons can summon up this feeling, with the change of color of autumn leaves and, later, their falling or scattering to the ground serving as a perennial symbol.

　2. Poetic

Over the centuries, our poets and bards, drawing on their heightened apprehension of reality, have given the world a deeper and more complex understanding of, and feeling for, the sense of impermanence. The theme finds expression in Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” some of the lyrics of A.E. Housman, or these three lines by Willa Cather:

　Oh, this is the joy of the rose:
　That it blows,¹⁴
　And goes.

In some of these poems, such as Cather’s, we begin to glimpse something positive about impermanence and change. On this point, Alan Watts observes:

"This is perhaps why, in both East and West, impermanence is so often the theme of the most profound and moving poetry—so much so that the splendor of change shines through even when the poet seems to resent it the most.

　Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
　Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
　To the last syllable of recorded time,
　And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
　The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
　Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
　That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
　And then is heard no more: it is a tale
　Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
　Signifying nothing.

"Stated thus—as R. H. Blyth observes—it seems not so bad after all."¹⁵

Or take the poet Basho’s most famous haiku, a poem that has retained its freshness for over three hundred years . . . 

. . . where the evanescing sound of the splash, and the ripples, disappearing more slowly, express the theme of impermanence imbued with the feeling of loneliness or solitude that, in Japanese aesthetics, is called sabi.

　3. Philosophic

By “philosophic” I mean not so much the sense of academic philosophy as the sense that the poetic takes a philosophic turn, as in Wordsworth’s great Ode where he speaks of the “years that bring the philosophic mind.”¹⁶

And that turn is toward a deeper understanding, a more nuanced understanding, of the intertwined ideas of impermanence and emptiness. At the end of exhaustive analysis, it is found, at the most fundamental level, that the true nature of actuality is impermanence. What is ultimately there is not substance, but emptiness, with emptiness meaning no inherent self-nature that endures from one moment to the next.

For each actuality there is continuity from one moment to the next, but it is a reiterative continuity, a continuity of re-enactment, with each momentary occasion coming to be through the process of dependent origination, or mutual arising.

And so, with this philosophic turn, we have—impermanence, emptiness, no-self, and dependent origination. These are intertwined ideas. At one and the same time, they both share and differ in meaning, and stand together in a relation of mutual implication.

As a description of reality, no single one can stand alone. It takes all of them (and then some) to even begin to catch the complexity of reality. To say the same thing in metaphor: only by many glimpses, through all four seasons, do we see the one Mount Fuji.

A multi-dimensional reality requires, for its apprehension, a multi-perspectival approach.

　4. Paradoxical

The philosophic takes a paradoxical turn when language must rise to subtle and felicitous levels to express the meaning of insights into the nature of ultimate reality. This finds a unique intensity of expression in Dogen 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.

A famous koan that is often the first koan that many beginning Zen students take up in their practice is called Joshu’s Dog. The koan itself is a model of brevity:

　A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature, or not?”
　Joshu answered, “Mu.”¹⁷

In the “Bussho” fascicle of the Shobogenzo, in his commentary on this koan, we can catch a glimpse of Dogen’s wily way with words. The pivotal line reads:

“The nothingness (mu) of all the various nothings (shomu) must be learned in the nothingness of no-Buddha-nature (mu-bussho).”¹⁸

And thus mu, fully empty to begin with, is, paradoxically, emptied even more, and more, as the sentence unwinds. A sleight abbreviation of Dogen’s sentence, in its original Sino-Japanese, brings this out even more clearly:

　諸無ノ無ノ無佛性ノ無

Translation:

. . . the nothingness of all nothings of the nothingness of no-Buddha-nature . . .

And notice that mu (無) is clustered around Buddha-nature (佛性) not once but, count them, 1-2-3-4 times. Buddha-nature has been mu-ed into emptiness, nonsubstantiality, and impermanence.

The following quotation, from the “Uji” fascicle of the Shobogenzo, shows a linguistic twist or turn that Dogen sometimes uses to express what can be called a crosswise mode of thought:

The arousing of aspiration [in different] minds at the selfsame time is the arousing [at different] times of the selfsame mind.¹⁹

This is an example of chiasmus,²⁰ a rhetorical figure wherein the writer reverses the terms of the two clauses that make up the sentence. President John Kennedy made good use of this figure in a famous speech when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Here are the four key terms in the two clauses of Dogen’s sentence:

　同時發心 . . . 同心發時

Notice how, in the second clause, he “crosses,” or reverses, the order of the characters for time (時) and mind (心)

Dogen was very fond of this rhetorical figure and it enjoys pervasive expression in his writings. Some of Dogen’s ideas are congenial to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and I find it of interest that Whitehead too made ample use of chiasmus in his philosophical works.²¹

If Dogen and Whitehead found it necessary to use the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, over and over again, to express some of their insights—this made me stop and wonder whether the form of chiasmus might be related to some crosswise forms found in the structure of reality. A browse of the Internet then revealed that chiasm is the name of an X-shaped structure in the hypothalamus  where the optic nerves intersect or “cross” . . . and, in the science of genetics, there is a crossing-over process, also called chiasm, in the division of cells called meiosis.

Furthermore, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty uses chiasm as a technical term to refer to a reversibility whereby we humans, by means of our bodies, our flesh, can both see and be seen, listen and be heard, touch and be touched.²²  

With yet another chiasmus we can return to our theme:

　The impermanence of Buddha-nature;
　the Buddha-nature of impermanence.

　無堂佛性
　佛性無堂

If even Buddha-nature is impermanent, is there, then, no permanence, no rock whatsoever under the shifting sands of time? Dogen provides an inspiring answer in terms of four related terms: gyoji, ippo gujin, dotoku, and genjokoan²³—but that is the subject of another essay.

Suffice it to say that a primary characteristic of emptiness is that it flowers and thus we have the Zen expression flowers of emptiness. To contemplate, in the evolutionary saga, the sudden arising of flowering plants—the flower, an epiphany, a fecundity, of form, fragrance, and color—is to see beauty arising. The emptiness of Nature and the nature of Emptiness are intensely kalogenic.²⁴

I will close this section with another waka²⁵ by Dogen:

Emphasis mine. With the first waka in mind, Dogen would have us stop and wonder once again about the word shaken. And about impermanence. The flowers from which his petals of words are shaken loose and blown free are, perhaps, the flowers of emptiness.²⁶

Ontology or Hauntology?
That Is the Question

The French writer Jacques Derrida coined the word “hauntology” for his variation on the philosophical term “ontology.” Since the initial “h” is silent in French, the two words are the same in sound. For my purposes, the general sense of “hauntology” is about revealing the absences that haunt, or are present in, all presences.²⁷

Whereas ontology is the study or knowledge of being, presence, or reality, hauntology concerns non-being, absence, and unreality. From the perspective of hauntology, to be absent-minded becomes a positive virtue.

This seems especially relevant, or should I say revenant, to the Buddhist insight about the nature of reality as characterized by emptiness, impermanence, no-self, and dependent origination. And to Whitehead’s observation about an actuality—that “it never really is.” Dogen spoke of “Not’s thinking” and of course Martin Heidegger famously said, “Das Nichts nichtet—The nothing nots.²⁸ By this logic, or the metaphysics of absence, when someone is talking, what is heard is not his voice, not the “personal” voice, but the voice of the ventriloquist. Each voice comes trailing clouds of spectral voices. All houses are haunted, or unheimlich, and all stories are populated with ghosts and spirits. There is a ghost in the machine. All identity is an alias. Every “original” text is a mosaic of ghostly citations. All writers are ghost writers. Counterfeit is key. And, as time goes by, not only is time out of joint, as Hamlet said,²⁹ but time itself is haunted by multiple temporalities.

There is an element of linguistic play in this, of course; but, in a presence haunted by a real absence, it is quite sane to be a little loco, or jocoserious, to use a word that James Joyce coined. Dogen was supremely gifted at linguistic play³⁰ and so sanely loco that he once remarked, “My life has been one continuous mistake.”³¹ Taking a hint from the title of Johan Huizinga’s seminal book, Homo Ludens, this deployment of language could be called lingua ludens, or language at play.

This is levity: buoyancy or light-heartedness.³² I’ll coin a word—ludibundity,³³ meaning the state, or the process, of  being full of play. When levity and ludibundity arise, we are all lost in the funhouse. Absinthe-minded. On the path of playful samadhi.³⁴

A ghost plays a key role in Shakespeare’s most famous play—Hamlet. Indeed, as the story unfolds, the absent king makes his presence felt throughout the play. And in the subtle play of words in Prince Hamlet’s most memorable line—To be or not to be—we have the whole issue in a nutshell.

The ont- in ontology³⁵ derives from the Greek root on-, meaning “existence” or “being,” and on- is the present participle of the verb einai, meaning “to be.”   

This yields what Whitehead would call two ideal opposites³⁶:

　Ontology:      to be
　Hauntology:   not to be

To be or not to be—that is the question.

Going beyond its Greek derivation, onto- can be traced all the back to a Indo-European root es-, meaning “to be,” and is it not interesting to learn that not only “present” but also “absent” derive from this root; and from the participial form sont- derives an unexpected word: “Bodhisattva,” and from the suffixed form esti- comes “swastika,” ( 卍 ) one of the most pervasive and ancient symbols. Other family members include—entity, essence, yes, soothe, sin, interest, proud, and Parousia. Juxtaposing the last word, which refers to the “Second Coming,” with Bodhisattva, we forge a link between Christianity and Buddhism. I place “forge” in italics to indicate, at one and the same time, both senses of the word, as there are forgers, and then there are forgers.

A contrast between Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian tradition can be clearly seen by comparing two sentences from respective scriptures:

Siddhartha:
The end of the conceit “I am”—
this is truly the greatest happiness of all.³⁷

Exodus 3:14—
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said,
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

I’ll conclude with a hauntological koan brimming with levity and ludibundity:

　趙州和尚因僧問神還有佛性也無。

　州云無。

Translation:

　A monk asked Joshu, “Does God have Buddha-nature, or not?”
　Joshu answered, “Mu.”

Or . . . was it a yelping Yiddish Nu . . . or a shivering shuddering Boo . . . or a bucolic bovine Moo . . . or an eerie eldritch Who . . . or an ’ooting ’owling ’Ooo³⁸ . . . ?

The play’s the thing . . .

Long live language, levity, and ludibundity!

A.E.I.O.U.³⁹

Notes

1. This poem is from a collection of waka by Dogen called Sanshodoei—傘松道詠— (Verses on the Way from Sansho Peak).

2. Heine provides the transliteration, as in column two of the Table, but not the Sino-Japanese text, as in column three. Sino-Japanese is a combination of Chinese characters, or ideographs as they are sometimes called, and the Japanese hiragana (or katakana) syllabary. I found the Sino-Japanese text online at:

http://koten.bungaku1.com/chusei/sanshodoei.html

Here’s the text in a larger font, with the Chinese characters in blue:

　世中は
　何にたとへん
　水鳥の
　はしふる露に
　やとる月影

水鳥, the first two characters in the third line, which literally mean “water bird,” is the term translated as “crane.”

3. Steven Heine, The Zen Poetry of Dogen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace, p. 69.

4. “This poem teaches a familiar Buddhist truth that the moon (Buddha-nature) is completely reflected in each and every one of the countless dewdrops (all things) . . . namely one in all, all in one. The poem, as I see it, however, goes further than such a formulaic understanding. The complete reflection of the moon is ‘shaken’—each dewdrop has a full yet shaken reflection of the moon.”

Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen, pp. 10-11

5. Dogen’s rich metaphor thus incorporates the idea of pratitya samutpada, or dependent origination.

6. As I reflected on the “shaken” motif of Dogen’s waka, it brought to mind the opening lines of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “God’s Grandeur”:

　The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
　It will flame out, like shining from shook foil . . .

Emphasis mine. Hopkins explained what he meant by shook foil: “I mean foil in the sense of leaf or tinsel. Shaken gold-foil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to its zigzag dents and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too.”

And I hear Clair de Lune playing in the background, or is it the Moonlight Sonata?

The “shaken” motif also brought to mind a quatrain from Goethe’s great drama, Faust, wherein Faust himself utters the following lines:

　Doch im Erstarren such’ ich nicht mein Heil,
　Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil;
　Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteure,
　Ergriffen, fühlt er tief das Ungeheure.*

Two translations:

　And yet in torpor there’s no gain for me;
　The thrill of awe is man’s best quality.
　Although the world may stifle every sense,
　Enthralled, man deeply senses the Immense.

　Natheless in torpor lies not good for me,
　The chill of dread is man’s best quality.
　Though from the feeling oft the world may fend us,
　Deeply we feel, once smitten, the Tremendous.

(“Natheless” is an archaic form of “nevertheless”)

Although the second translation comes closer, neither conveys the full impact of what Faust utters in the second line:

　Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil

Schaudern means “to shudder” and so the line reads:

　Shuddering is the best part of being a man

When we shudder, awe is no longer an abstract notion; it becomes a concrete feeling, a visceral feeling. And what is felt, and felt deeply, is the Ungeheure: the vastness, the immensity, the darkness of reality. Is this one of the reasons why Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies—to invoke in us feelings of the Ungeheure?

Pascal experienced this feeling and left us a memorable line:

　“Le silence éternel de tous ces espaces infinis m’effrayent.”

In his book, The Life of the Drama, Eric Bentley observes:

“Pascal’s words, reduced to banality, say: ‘I am frightened by the silence and size of the universe.’ The phrasing, the diction, the rhythm are what indicate the awe to which fear rises: ‘The eternal silence of all those infinite spaces terrifies me.’

“Pascal is the purest and greatest of tragic thinkers: an intellectual conception has put him in an intellectual panic. We do not have tragic poetry, however, until the intellectual element has been, not indeed eliminated, but fused with the sensuous. The poet must root the intellect in the sensuousness, as God did when he made each one of us.”

* The quatrain is in Goethe’s Faust, Zweiter Teil, “Finstere Galerie” (lines 6271-6274).

7. If Heraclitus is the early champion of change, the partisan of permanence is another early Greek philosopher, Parmenides, who asserted that there is no change, period.

His position contra change can be stated as follows: Being is and Being is One; change and plurality are both illusions. If anything becomes, it either comes to be out of being or non-being. But if out of being, then it already is; there is no real coming to be. And from non-being, or nothing, only nothing can come. Becoming, therefore, is an illusion.

Now, since becoming, or change, is clearly apparent in the everyday world of ordinary sense perception, Parmenides is not talking about appearances but about a truth known to reason which can see beyond appearances. This is a first approximation of a distinction that Plato would later make, with more generality, between knowledge and opinion, thought and sense. It is an important distinction, philosophically, since it forms the basis of all varieties of idealism.

Because of this distinction and his assertion that Being is unchanging, uncreated, and complete just as it is, Parmenides has been called the father of idealism. Indeed, these are central tenets of idealism but, as Frederick Copleston* convincingly argues, Parmenides used them to establish not idealism but a monistic materialism.

Although the One of Parmenides can be grasped only in thought, there is, as Copleston points out, a big difference between “being grasped in thought” and “being thought.”

* Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece & Rome (Vol. 1). His discussion of Parmenides is on pages 64-70.

8. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 209.

9. Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method, p. 8

10. The Heart Sutra says:

　Form itself is emptiness;
　Emptiness itself is form.

　色即是空
　空即是色

“Presence” always includes the “presence of absence,” or emptiness, sunyata.

11. Matthieu Ricard & Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet, p. 167.

12a. “This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: ‘But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.’ Bergson, in his protest against ‘spatialization,’ is only echoing Plato’s phrase ‘and never really is.’” — Process and Reality, p. 82.

12b. Way back in the 13th century, over 700 years ago, Dogen expressed an insight that is evocative, hauntingly evocative, of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

　“When one side is illumined, the other is darkened.”

　一方ヲ證スルトキハ。一方ハクラシ。

　　　(Ippo o shosuru toki wa, ippo wa kurashi.)

From the “Genjokoan” fascicle of the Shobogenzo.

Note: this does not entail dualism, nor, in denying dualism, does it imply unity.

The idea of “unity” is only a first approximation in thinking about the ultimate nature of reality. And what is beyond unity? Nonduality. The doctrine is stated succinctly in four words:

　Not one. Not two.

Neither of these can stand alone; like yin and yang, one requires the other for completion. If the perfect symbol of unity is a circle, the imperfect symbol of nonduality is an ellipse, which requires two foci to determine its form.

Two foci:

　Not one. Not two.

Or in Chinese:

　不一。不二。

Let us take the prefix bi-, meaning “two,” and combine it with u-nity, to form “binity,” stipulating that these two do not merge but are held in dialectical tension. Held at just the right distance apart, two magnets will strain for union but will not be united.

Binities abound: yin and yang, particle and wave, electrons and protons, positive and negative poles of electricity, the double helix, right and left hemispheres of the brain, space-time, the bilateral symmetry of the human body, male and female, the I Ching, spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, permanence and change, East and West.

東　西

East　West

13. Steven Heine, “Multiple Dimensions of Impermanence in Dogen’s Genjokoan,” in his book A Dream within a Dream, pp. 115-33.

14. One meaning of blow is “to bloom.”

15. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 42-43.

16. William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

17. The word mu means “no,” “not,” or “nothing.”

18. Translation by Steven Heine in his book, Dogen and the Koan Tradition, p. 32. Here’s the original text from the “Bussho” fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo:

　シカアレハ諸無ノ無ハ。無佛性ノ無ニ學スヘシ。

I found the digital edition of the Sino-Japanese text of the Shobogenzo online at:

http://21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/SAT/database_en.html

19. Translation by Steven Heine in his book, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dogen, p. 155. From the “Uji” fascicle in Dogen’s Shobogenzo, here’s the quote in the original language:

　コノユヘニ同時發心アリ、同心發時アリ。

20. A definition of chiasmus from The Complete Stylist by Sheridan Baker:

Chiasmus (ky-az-mus). “A crossing”—from the Greek letter chi, X, a cross.
You “cross” the terms of one clause by reversing their order in the next.

And, since we’re talking about it, one more crossing, one for the road:

　The impermanence of reality
　is the reality of impermanence.

21. Examples of chiasmi in Whitehead and Dogen:

　Whitehead:

When they perish, occasions pass from the immediacy of being into the not-being of immediacy.

. . . physical time expresses some features of the growth, but not the growth of the features.

Thus there is no continuity of becoming, but there is a becoming of continuity.

In other words, extensiveness becomes, but becoming is not itself extensive.

The extensiveness of space is really the spatialization of extension; and the extensiveness of time is really the temporalization of extension.

　Dogen:

Mindfulness of the body is the body’s mindfulness.

Thus you ought to know that the total man is mind and the total mind is man.

By the dependence of all, we understand that all is the Buddha-nature and the Buddha-nature is all.

The absolute inclusiveness of the Buddha-nature does not mean that the Buddha-nature is immanent in all existences, but that all existences are immanent in the Buddha-nature.

Such is the I that is life, and the life that is I.

So Dharma is eating, and eating is Dharma.

It should be water-thusness, the moon-thusness, thusness-on, on-thusness.

Good and evil are Dharma, but Dharma is not good and evil.

As it is already realization in practice, realization is endless; as it is practice in realization, practice is beginningless.

This discourse on Dharma is the Dharma’s discourse.

[ Some of Dogen’s sayings are so uniquely sui generis that they have come to be called Dogenisms. And so finally, two gnomic, or should I say gnomonic, Dogenisms that will repay reflection: ]

　Time is already none other than beings, and beings are all none other than time.

　時すでにこれ有なり、有はみな時なり。

　A full being-time half known is a half being-time fully known.

　たとひ半究盡の有時も、半有時の究盡なり。

22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses chiasm in the fourth chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” of his book, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 130-55, and touches on the idea here and there in the “Working Notes” that conclude the book.

23. gyoji (行持) “activity” . . . dotoku (道得) “expression” . . . ippo gujin (一法究盡) “total exertion of a single thing” . . .genjokoan (現成公案)

Genjokoan, a key term in Dogen’s Zen, has been defined in a variety of ways by different people. A definition by Steven Heine — “the complete and spontaneous manifestation of the Zen realization of true suchness.”

Dogen offers us this sentence, as tantalizing as a koan:

　The Way, called now, does not precede activity;
　as activity is realized, it is called now.*

In Sino-Japanese:

　イマトイフ道ハ。行持ヨリサキニアルニハアラス。

　行持現成スルヲ。イマトイフ。

The term translated as “activity” is gyoji (行持) and I understand gyoji as equivalent to Whitehead’s term “creativity.”

(from the “Gyoji” fascicle of the Shobogenzo):* Translation by Hee-Jin Kim in his book, Dogen Kigen—Mystical Realist, p. 94.

24. “Kalós” is the Greek word for “beauty” and so “kalogenesis” means the creation or coming to be of beauty. For more on kalogenesis, see my book, Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel, “Kalogenesis: Beauty Arising,” pp. 126-31, and “A Kalogenic Universe,” pp. 244-46.

The sudden origin of flowering plants, the angiosperms, baffled Darwin, as is evident in this sentence of a letter to Joseph Hooker: “Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden and abrupt development of the higher plants.” — Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 3, p. 248.

The pervasive symbiosis of flowers and insects is cause for still more wonder.

25. English translation by Steven Heine. He comments:

“The personification ‘flower’s song’ (hana no uta) makes an association with ‘petals of words’ (koto no ha), highlighting the twofold nature of language. From a conventional standpoint Dogen criticizes philosophical discourse and poetic symbolism as being no more than mere ornaments or artifice like shimmery blossoms in the spring breeze. Yet the deeper significance of the association between words and flowers indicates that language, as a manifestation of impermanence, is fully identical with the true realization of the Dharma.” —The Zen Poetry of Dogen, p. 173

The Sino-Japanese text of this waka can be found online at:

http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~jinnouji/page9/houwa08/page201.htm

A verse by Saigyo sounds a resonant theme:

　Wooed by the wind,
　The petals fall, and off they go,
　Together to who-knows-where . . .

26. For more on flowers of emptiness, see Note 27 of my essay, “Flowers of Emptiness: Bodhi Blossoms in the Buddha’s Mind.” Available on the Internet at:

http://hyattcarter.com/flowers_of_emptiness.htm

27. Derrida coined this neologism in his book Specters of Marx.

Whitehead used the word “haunt” with some frequency in his writings. Three examples from Process and Reality:

Philosophical thought has made for itself difficulties by dealing exclusively in very abstract notions, such as those of mere awareness, mere private sensation, mere emotion, mere purpose, mere appearance, mere causation. These are the ghosts of the old ‘faculties,’ banished from psychology, but still haunting metaphysics. (PR 18)

Thus the immediate percept assumes the character of the quiet undifferentiated endurance of the material stone, perceived by means of its quality of colour. This basic notion dominates language, and haunts both science and philosophy. (PR 77)

But, just as physical feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of causality, so the higher intellectual feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of another order, where there is no unrest, no travel, no shipwreck: ‘There shall be no more sea.’ (PR 340)

28. In regard to Heidegger’s jeu d’esprit, Charles Hartshorne observes: “True, none of the Americans or English had said that the ‘nothing nullifies,’ das Nichts nichtet, and I do not wish to say that this adds “nothing” to our wisdom!”

Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process, p. 21

29.  The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
       That ever I was born to set it right.
　　—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v.215-16

30. In a essay presented in a conversational format reminiscent of Plato’s dialogues, William LaFleur discusses Dogen’s creative use of language. “Ghost” writing under the guise of a First Philosopher and a Textual Critic, LaFleur states his case thus:

First Philosopher: Some years ago I thought I had learned classical Japanese quite well . . . but then later I tried reading Dogen! I go along totally with those scholars who say the text of the Shobogenzo looks like Japanese but really must be called something like “Dogen-ese.” 

Textual Critic: To me it is a fascinating and extraordinarily rich text because of its verbal and linguistic finesse. Dogen seems to have been a very self-conscious writer; his rhetoric is marvelous and, from everything I can detect, the text has a texture, and that texture is remarkably consistent throughout.

First Philosopher: But is that just an accident or some kind of literary “spit and polish” that he added to what he wanted to say? I would maintain that this was due to the depth of his religious and philosophical penetration of ultimate issues. Dogen’s style is evidence of his freedom and his freedom is the freedom of the enlightened mind. It is shown on every page. The religious profundity is patent for anyone to see and it clearly shows up in his capacity to “play” with language. His language is that of a man in samadhi.

William R. LaFleur, “Dogen in the Academy,” Dogen Studies (edited by LaFleur), pp. 1-20.

Later, in the same conversation, the Textual Critic talks about how ancient Zen masters “played”  with the truth. (p. 15)

And in another essay in the same book, Hee-Jin Kim describes Dogen’s gifts as those of a alchemist of language who weaves a complex linguistic universe:

“It is abundantly clear that in these linguistic and symbolic transformations Dogen acts as a magician or an alchemist of language conjuring up an infinity of symbolic universes freely and selflessly as the self-expressions of Buddha-nature.

“As often happens in the Shobogenzo, some such modulated expressions cannot be easily rendered in intelligible statements; perhaps Dogen did not wish them to be reduced to conventional locutions, but rather to be appreciated visually and aurally, as they are, like the images of a dream. Incidentally, this fanciful, even playful trait in Dogen’s diction has been largely overlooked by most Dogen scholars.

“As we have seen repeatedly, metaphor, simile, parable, and the like in Dogen are not mere instruments or vehicles of communication, but the bearers and workings of ultimate reality/truth. In this sense Dogen views language itself as realization rather than as a mere vehicle for communicating truth.

“Our investigation here is but a modest beginning in the direction of a systematic treatment of Dogen’s enormously complex linguistic universe.”

Hee-Jin Kim, “The Reason of Words and Letters,” pp. 54-82

And finally, this quote from “one of the finest Dogen scholars in Japan” who is not identified:

“Dogen did not write the Shobogenzo in Japanese. No other Japanese before or after Dogen wrote in the language of the Shobogenzo. It is Dogen’s own language.” (p. 90)

31. Dogen’s remark can be found entangled in the vines of the “Katto” (葛藤) fascicle of the Shobogenzo.

Norman Fischer comments on Dogen’s remark:

In our practice, the process goes on forever. Continuous implies that. We don’t come to the place where we say, Now, I’ve got it. I’ve got the whole thing down. It’s perfection. The sense of an ever more subtle, ever more refined understanding and development without end is what this saying implies. It always unfolds in front of you. I wouldn’t want any other way of practice.

Forum: Understanding Dogen
online at:
http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/issues/2004/summer/panel.htm

And this by Alan Watts: “. . . the sage gets by with a perfect appearance of imperfection, such as we see in the gnarled pines and craggy hills of Chinese painting.”

Emphasis mine.

Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, p. 109.

32. For a discussion of multiple dimensions of levity, see “Let There Be — Levity!” in my book, Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel, pp. 33-42.

Peter Matthiessen describes his buoyant experience of levity:

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky. . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!”

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, p. 176.

That Daoist master Lieh-tzu was well-versed in levity is clear from the following quotation:

At the end of nine years my mind gave free rein to its reflections, my mouth free passage to its speech. Internal and External were blended into Unity. After that, there was no distinction between eye and ear, ear and nose, nose and mouth: my mind was frozen, my body in dissolution, my flesh and bones all melted together. I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on, or what was under my feet. I was borne this way and that on the wind, like dry chaff or leaves falling from a tree. In fact, I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind.

九年之後，橫心之所念，橫口妝狳央．內外進矣．而後眼如耳，耳如鼻，鼻如口，無不同也．心凝形釋，骨肉都融；不覺形之所倚，足之所履，隨風東西，猶木葉幹殼．竟不知風乘我腹，我乘風乎．

From the Book of Lieh-Tzu, translation by Lionel Giles.

列子
Lieh-Tzü (Wade-Giles)
Liezi (Pinyin)
Liezi, whose full name was Lie Yukou, means Master Lie and refers both to the man and his book, the Leize.

This passage calls to mind another Daoist master, Chuang-tzu (莊子) and his dream of fluttering around as a butterfly only to awake wondering whether the dream was his or the butterfly’s. 

Chuang-tzu was well aware of Lieh-tzu’s avian abilities:

Lieh Tzu could ride the wind (御風) and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around.

Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, p. 32.

I will let JJ have the last word on this:

　Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 505.17.

33. Since there is an entry for “ludibund” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but not for “ludibundity,” my coinage can really lay claim only to the “-ity.” In light of this, my claim to coinage reminds me of my favorite line from the movie, Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson (in his role as Jake Gittes) says, “Well, to tell you the truth, I lied a little.”

34. Katsuki Sekida provides a good description of “playful samadhi” (戲三昧) in his book, Two Zen Classics, p. 30:

“Merry and playful samadhi. A merry and egoless activity of mind, such as that of an actor who, playing a part on stage, is freed from his own ego-centered thinking. In just this way, when a student of Zen fully realizes that there is no constant ego to which he can attach his notions of self and identity, the constrictions of egotistically motivated behavior and thinking are broken. Activity in this free frame of mind is called playful samadhi.”

35. Please note that the three letters that spell “ont-” also spell “not.”

36. Alfred North Whitehead, “The Ideal Opposites,” Process and Reality, pp. 337-41.

Instead of “ideal opposites,” Charles Hartshorne spoke in terms of “ultimate contrasts.” See “A Logic of Ultimate Contrasts,” an essay in his book, The Zero Fallacy, pp. 109-32.

37. Siddhartha’s quote is from the Udana 2:1 (Pali Canon)—cited in James H. Austin, M.D., Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, p. 94.

38. The Cockney owl, no doubt, who haunted My Fair Lady.

39. A.E.I.O.U.

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al, 9.213.

“A.E.” refers to George Russell, the Irish poet and essayist, and “I.O.U.” to the rumor that Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, owes him money. Are the five vowels also an allusion to this passage in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost? —

　Armado: [To Holofernes] Monsieur, are you not lettered?
　Moth: Yes, yes; he teaches boys the horn book.
　　What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
　Holofernes: “Ba, pueritia [child], with a horn added.
　Moth: Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
　Hol.: Quis [what], quis, thou consonant?*
　Moth: The third of the five vowels, if you repeat them; or the fifth, if I.
　Hol.: I will repeat them: a, e, I—
　Moth: The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, U.

(V.i.44-56).

Note the genial play of words, and the capital “I” and capital “U” in the last two lines that rhyme (wryme) with the “you” and the “I” in Moth’s clever line immediately above.

* Consonant = nonentity. Why?—because it requires a vowel to be voiced, and thus another binity: consonants and vowels.

Not one. Not two.

And all language . . . riding on the wind of our insubstantial breath.

御風