Effortless Expressions: Dōgen’s Non-Thinking about ‘Words and Letters’
Religions February 10, 2021 Joe Markowski
What is the relationship between Zen experience and language? Is Zen awakening/enlightenment ineffable? In this article, I will address this general question by providing a panoramic treatment of Dōgen’s (道元) philosophy of language which Hee-Jin Kim characterizes as “realizational”. Building on the research of Kim, Victor Sōgen Hori and Dale S. Wright, I maintain that the idea of ineffable...