Just Sitting and Just Saying: The Hermeneutics of Dōgen’s Realization-Based View of Language

Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen, developed a distinctive approach to language that overcomes conventional binary oppositions—such as delusion versus insight, truth versus untruth, or speech versus silence—by using creative and perplexing expressions to reflect the state of non-thinking attained through unremitting seated meditation (just sitting, or shikan taza). This paper argues that Dōgen's basic hermeneutic standpoint is non-hierarchical, realization-based, and flexible, enabling what the author calls "just saying" to express self-realization. Dōgen's paradoxical teaching holds that entangled vines are disentangled using nothing other than entwined creepers, exemplified by statements like "the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is vertical."

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Abstract

This paper explicates the complex relationship between contemplative practice and enlightened activity conducted both on and off the meditative cushion as demonstrated in the approach of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist founder Dōgen (1200–1253). I examine Dōgen’s intricate views regarding how language, or what I refer to as just saying, can and should be used in creative yet often puzzling and perplexing ways to express the experience of self-realization by reflecting the state of non-thinking that is attained through unremitting seated meditation or just sitting (shikan taza). In light of the sometimes-forbidding obscurity of his writing, as well as his occasional admonitions against a preoccupation with literary pursuits, I show based on a close reading of primary sources that Dōgen’s basic hermeneutic standpoint seeks to overcome conventional sets of binary oppositions involving uses of language. These polarities typically separate the respective roles of teacher and learner by distinguishing sharply between delusion and insight, truth and untruth, right and wrong, or speech and silence, and thereby reinforce a hierarchical, instrumental, and finite view of discourse. Instead, Dōgen inventively develops expressions that emphasize the non-hierarchical, realization–based, and eminently flexible functions of self-extricating rhetoric such that, according to his paradoxical teaching, “entangled vines are disentangled by using nothing other than entwined creepers,” or as a deceptively straightforward example, “the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is vertical.”