·期刊原文
The human body as a boundary symbol:
A comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Dogen
BY Carl Olson
Philosophy East and West
volume, 36, no. 2 (april 1986)
P107-119
(C) by the University of Hawaii Press.
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In the Pali texts of the Theravaada Buddhist
tradition and in many Mahaayaana Buddhist texts, one
can find numerous negative references to the human
body. There are, of course, exceptions in the
Buddhist tradition, especially if one takes into
consideration Buddhist Tantra and the significance
of the body in Buddhist meditation. Western
philosophy, on the other hand, is infamous for its
mind/body dualism. Dogen and Merleau-Ponty tend to
be exceptions, although not necessarily the only
examples, to the prevalent tendencies of their
respective philosophical traditions. The human body,
for Dogen, is not a hindrance to the realization of
enlightenment; it rather serves as the vehicle
through which enlightenment is realized by the
aspirant. Dogen argues that those aspiring to become
enlightened strive with their bodies, practice
seated meditation with their bodies, understand with
their bodies, and attain enlightenment with their
bodies. Thus the body attains a
metaphysico-religious status in Dogen's thought.(1)
Using the phenomenological method in his earlier
work, Merleau-Ponty wants to deliver a fatal blow to
the historical tradition of philosophical dualism
and overcome it.
The intention of this essay is to bring these
two thinkers together to engage in a philosophical
dialogue on the human body. A comparative
philosophical dialogue has several benefits. It can
help us to see not only the similarities and
differences in the respective positions of
philosophers, but it can also enable us to
comprehend the value of philosophical insights
foreign to our own tradition. It thus involves us in
a comparative realm of meaning, places us spatially
between Eastern and Western traditions, transcends
the historical time that separates philosophers,
provides us with a possible common ground on which
to understand each other, and sets us on the path to
truth, which emerges in the dialogic exchange
between thinkers who share similar human problems
and concerns. If the philosophical dialogue retains
a posture of expectant openness, the dialogic
participants can teach us, for instance, something
about the human body. As the comparative dialogue
unfolds, each thinker should be understood to be
engaged in a mutual search for the truth. When
thoughts are compared they must not become isolated,
static intellectual concepts. They must rather
remain alive, open, dynamic, and potentially
creative ideas. A comparative dialogue possesses the
advantage of widening our own horizons by enabling
us to participate in the philosophical tradition of
another culture. By means of comparative dialogue,
the subjects and ourselves are drawn together into a
common human culture, which enhances the
opportunities for authentic dialogue, sharing of
common roots and problems, and a new agreement and
understanding about a common problem.
This essay will bring together Dogen and
Merleau-Ponty on the problem of the human body in a
comparative dialogue. With relation to the latter
thinker, I will concentrate my attention on his
earlier work, The Phenomenology of Perception,
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and on his later work, The Visible and the
Invisible, only to the extent that it throws light
on his understanding of the body. Due to
Merleau-Ponty's extensive discussion of the human
body a certain amount of selectivity seems necessary
in a brief essay.
BODY AND WORLD
When discussing the body, Merleau-Ponty is not
referring to an object or a mere physical entity.(2)
The body cannot be comprehended by measuring its
properties, the causal relations among its parts, or
its causal relation to other such entities, nor can
it be reduced to an object which is sensitive to
certain stimuli. If it is not a thing that can be
measured, is it a thought? It is neither object nor
subject. It is, however, subject and object. The
human body is a lived body; it is mine. Since the
body is primarily my body, it is personal,
subjective, objective, and inhabited by an
intentionality which enables it to express meaning.
For Dogen, the body is both subject and object,
and more. What does Dogen mean by more? Dogen
answers, "What we call the body and mind in the
Buddha Way is grass, trees and wall rubble; it is
wind, rain, water and fire."(3) Since the mind is
all things and vice versa, everything represents a
single and total body. There is an important
consequence of Dogen's position: "If your own body
and mind are not grass, wood, and so on, then they
are not your own body and mind. And if your own body
and mind do not exist, neither do grass and
wood."(4) Therefore, the body and mind represent the
entire world. Consequently, human beings are not
separated from the world by their bodies. In fact,
no one can be absolutely certain where one's body
terminates and where precisely the world begins, and
vice versa.
To have a body means, for Merleau-Ponty, that
one is involved in a definite environment, because
our body is our vehicle for being in the world.(5)
Although the body is to be distinguished from the
world, it is our medium for having a world and for
interacting with it. If to be a body means to be
tied to a certain world, this implies that being a
body involves being in the world, a primordial form
of existence which is preobjective. The body is not
in space in the same sense that water is in a vase,
because the body is a point from which space
radiates and around which things arrange themselves
in an orderly way. Since the body is both
being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the spatiality
of the body indicates that it is itself the author
of space, the low and high, the far and near. If the
world possesses spatiality for me. it is because I
inhabit it by means of my body, which involves a
dynamic, living relationship and not a conceptual
relation. The spatiality of the body is not a
position it is rather a situation, because existence
includes space and time in this primordial relation
to the world.(6)
Dogen agrees that the body includes space and
time and occupies a situation. Somewhat analogous to
what Merleau-Ponty intends to state in his
philosophy is Dogen's use of the image of a bright
pearl to express reality.
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One bright pearl communicates directly through all
time; being through all the past unexhausted, it
arrives through all the present. Where there is a
body now, a mind now, they are the bright pearl.
That stalk of grass, this tree, is not a stalk of
grass, is not a tree; the mountains and rivers of
this world are not the mountains and rivers of this
world. They are the bright pearl.(7)
Dogen, like Merleau-Ponty, states that the human
body participates in the external world. In fact,
the mind, body, and things of the world
interpenetrate one another without the possibility
of a lucid demarcation among them. As we will see,
this nondualistic position is similar to what
Merleau-Ponty calls the flesh.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the human body and
the perceived world form a single system of
intentional relations;(8) they are correlations,
which implies that to experience the body is to
perceive the world and vice versa. Since the body is
the medium of things, its presence to the world
enables things to exist.(9) Thus the body and world
are an inseparable, internal relation.
The body and world are also inseparably
interconnected for Dogen. Like everything else, the
body is dynamic, a position with which Merleau-Ponty
would concur. For Dogen, life is analogous to riding
in a boat in which the voyager uses its sails and
tiller to guide and move one to his destination.
Although the sailor can perform certain tasks to
assist him in his journey, it is the boat that
carries him. Even though the boat is the sailor's
mode of transportation, it is he who makes it a boat
which becomes a world for the sailor. "It is for
this reason that life is what I make to exist, and I
is what life makes me. In boarding the boat, one's
body and mind and the entire surrounding environment
are all the boat's dynamic working; both the entire
earth and all space are the boat's dynamic
working."(10) Thus the body, mind, and world are
nondual and dynamic.
When I experience my body, according to
Merleau-Ponty, an ambiguous mode of existing is
revealed to me because the traditional distinctions
between object and subject are called into question.
I can, for instance, touch an object with my right
hand, and my right hand can be touched by my left
hand. Ceasing to be a sensing subject, my right hand
becomes a sensed object. Thus the body possesses the
ability to turn back on itself and take itself for
its own object, manifesting its ability to be for
ifself (subject) and in itself(object). Thus the
body can be both touched and touching.
Since the experience of one's body reveals an
ambiguous mode of existing, which is especially true
in sexual experience,(11) Merleau-Ponty attempts to
overcome this ambiguity of the body by turning to
ontology in his later work. The Visible and the
Invisible represents an attempt, although it is an
incomplete work, to discern the metaphysical
structure of the body. What Merleau-Ponty calls the
flesh, an opening of being or wild being, is not a
fact or a collection of facts; it is neither matter
nor spirit. The flesh represents an element,(12) an
essential
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element, which enters into the composition of
everything and thus appears in everything; it makes
everything be what it is. As an element, flesh is
the style of all things and appears in everything
and everywhere, but it does not itself appear. Thus
there is an underlying unity between an individual,
a lived body, and the world because both are
flesh.(13) In other words, beneath the apparent
duality of consciousness and object lies "wild
being," which entails that humans are mixed in with
being and gathered up with things into a fabric of
being.
BODY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The body and consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty, are
interrelated because the latter is dependent on the
body, although consciousness is not reducible to the
body. Thus consciousness is incarnate for
Merleau-Ponty, a position to which Dogen agrees
because he affirms that the body participates in an
individual's inner world. Merleau-Ponty refers to
the tacit cogito, a prereflective, silent
consciousness, an intentional operative, which
supports reflective consciousness, forming the basis
of all evidence and certainty that originates in the
act of perception and not the prior correspondence
of consciousness with itself.(14) In other words,
the certainty of perception is the certainty of
being present to the world, to be conscious that
something appears to me. This beginning
consciousness represents a primitive
self-consciousness which is simultaneous with the
consciousness of the world. Consciousness, an
opening upon the world, mutually implies the world
because its ultimate correlate is the world and vice
versa.(15) Due to the fact that consciousness is
conscious of something other than itself, it is able
to be conscious of itself. Thus consciousness can
possess itself only by belonging to the world.(16)
This line of reasoning is a trap or a dead end
for Dogen. Rather than a consciousness of the world,
and rather than an intentional consciousness which
originates in perception, Dogen wants to go beyond
intentional thinking to nonthinking (hishiryo), a
simple acceptance of ideas without affirming or
denying them. Nonthinking is more fundamental than
the prereflective, silent consciousness of
Merleau-Ponty. It unites thinking, an intentional
weighting of ideas, and unthinking, a negation of
mental acts, and possesses no purpose, form, object,
or subject. Nonthinking, the pure presence of things
as they are, is realized in zazen (seated
meditation) (17) and is a "thinking" of the
unthinkable or emptiness. There is importantly,
however, no bifurcation of the body and mind in the
state of nonthinking.
Communication between consciousness and the
world is possible, according to Merleau-Ponty, due
to the body, the third aspect of the dialectic of
existence. The body functions as the mediator of
consciousness and world; it opens them up to each
other in the sense that the body forms the immediacy
of the world by placing consciousness in direct and
immediate contact with the world.(18) Thus there is
a dependency of consciousness on the body and
expression in speech, a means by which consciousness
stabilizes itself. If thought, the product of
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consciousness, is dependent on perceptible
expression grounded in a lived body, then it is
fundamentally temporal and historically
conditioned.(19)
Dogen argues that the human body is the ground
from which consciousness evolves. Since the body and
consciousness penetrate each other and are
inextricably interwoven, they are nondual. "You
should know that the Buddha Dharma from the first
preaches that body and mind are not two, that
substance and form are not two."(20) Although the
mind ultimately transcends them, it is both subject
and object; it is consciousness and
nonconsciousness.
BODY AND PERCEPTION
A theory of the body presupposes, for Merleau-Ponty,
a theory of perception. If one presupposes that to
see the world means to be situated so that objects
can show themselves, and that to perceive the world
one must dwell within it, then one perceives an
object when one inhabits it. "My body is the fabric
into which all objects are woven, and it is, at
least in relation to the perceived world, the
general instrument of my 'comprehension'."(21) Human
perception of the world and its objects is
contingent upon the lived body. Therefore,
perception is embodied for Merleau-Ponty and also
for Dogen, who writes about seeing forms and hearing
sounds with the body and mind.(22) Merleau-Ponty
states that one perceives with one's body, which
implies that the position and movement of one's body
not only allows one to see, but also determines what
is accessible to one's view, since one can see no
more than what one's perspective grants.(23) If one
loses an arm or a leg, not only is one's world
altered, but one's perception of the world is
changed due to the contingency of one's perception
upon one's body.
In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, what is important
to perceive for Dogen is not simply objects that
appear, but rather Buddha-nature, which represents
both beings and being itself. The individual does
not necessarily have to do anything special to
perceive Buddha-nature because he should simply be
attentive to ordinary temporal conditions. However,
what is to be perceived does not refer to the
perceiver or that which is to be perceived. There is
neither a correct nor an incorrect way to see. It is
just see. This type of perceiving refers neither to
my own seeing nor to the seeing of another. "It is
'Look! temporal condition!' It is transcendence of
condition."(24) If is simply seeing Buddha-nature in
a flash without conditions, without intention, and
without duality.
As a perceiving being, one finds oneself,
according to Merleau-Ponty, in a particular
situation, which entails being intertwined with a
body, an object, and other individuals within a
general milieu. A given situation refers to a
sedimented situation, "which enables us to rely on
our concepts and acquired judgments as we might on
things there in front of us, presented globally,
without there being any need for us to resynthesize
them."(25) The result enables situations to become
immediately familiar to us, which means that
sediments are closely interrelated in the form of a
schema of sedimented structures.(26) This fact
possesses three important implications: (1) since a
sensation can be sensed only by means of a
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structure, a sensation is only possible if it is of
a certain type; (2) every type of sensation is
closely related to every other type of sensation to
form a unified schema of sensory structures; (3) if
sensations are structural, they are meaningful.(27)
In his later work, Merleau-Ponty argues that the
body can prevent perception, even though one needs
it to perceive. It is not entirely one's body that
perceives because it is built around a perception
that dawns through the body. Thus perception emerges
in the recess of a body.(28) The body is a
perceptible reality which can perceive itself,
become visible for itself, and become tangible to
itself because it can touch itself. For the body to
actualize the possibility of becoming a perceiving
perceptible is to realize a potentiality which is
inherent in the being of the world.(29) Beneath the
perceiver and perceived or toucher and touched--a
crisscrossing--is a shared, preestablished harmony,
which takes place within the individual forming an
underlying unity of perception.
The body actualizes itself and achieves a
preestablished harmony, for Dogen, in the process of
zazen, which is not entering into realization, but
is already realization even when one begins to
sit.(30) Zazen, a fundamental form of spiritual
life, represents the nonthinking mode of
consciousness where body and mind are cast off(31)
and one takes a leap to enlightenment. By casting
off body and mind, one severs one's defiled
thoughts, which originate in one's discriminating
consciousness.(32) To advocate casting off body and
mind, Dogen does not mean that one should reject
one's body. He wants to affirm that one should not
be attached to the body. He still recognizes that
the path to realization is through the body.
An assertion that Merleau-Ponty does not make
because he adheres to his phenomenological
convictions,(33) even though he recognizes that the
body is material and spiritual, is that the body can
manifest the absolute. Even though Dogen
acknowledges the impermanent nature of the body and
the necessity of the aspirant for enlightenment to
become detached from his body, he asserts that the
body manifests Buddha-nature, beings and being
itself. Dogen writes, "The Buddha-body is the
manifesting body, and there is always a body
manifesting Buddha-nature."(34) This revealing is at
the same time a concealing, because Buddha-nature
eludes the grasp of knowledge. By the power of the
Buddha-nature to subsume and transcend existence and
nonexistence, the manifesting of Buddha-nature by
the body negates the body and transcends it. Thus,
to grasp the essence of the body truly is
intuitively to grasp emptiness, the dynamic and
creative aspect of Buddha-nature.
TIME AND BODY
Just as the body inhabits space, it also dwells in
time for Merleau-Ponty. Like a work of art that is
indistinguishable from the existence that expresses
it, the body inhabits time, and its temporality is
indistinguishable from it.(35) In a sense, within my
body I am time. "My body takes possession of time;
it brings into existence a past and a future for a
present; it is not a thing, but creates time instead
of
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submitting to it."(36) The primordial significance
of the body is to be discovered on the preobjective
level of experience--not as a mere object among
other objects, but rather as radically temporal.
Thus the essential intentionality of the body is its
temporality, which is also its being.(37)
Dogen's position on this point is remarkably
similar to that of Merleau-Ponty. Our body and mind
are time, for Dogen, just as all dharmas (things)
are manifestations of being-time (uji). "Entire
being, the entire world, exists in the time of each
and every now."(38) Thus the mind, body, being,
world, and time form a unity. Not only are entities
time, and not only is time in me, but activities are
time: "As self and other are both times, practice
and realization are times; entering the mud,
entering the water, is equally time."(39)
The unity of time is manifested most lucidly,
for Dogen, when applied to Buddha-nature, whose
being is time itself, a position diametrically
opposed to that of Merleau-Ponty, "As the time right
now is all there ever is, each being-time is without
exception entire time."(40) Within the
Buddha-nature, both future and past signify the
present. Dogen emphasizes the now moment because
there is never a time that has not been or a time
that is coming. Dogen writes, "...all is the
immediate presencing here and now of
being-time."(41) Thus time is a continuous
occurrence of "nows." This position has important
consequences for Dogen's philosophy, because the
Buddha-nature is not a potentiality to be actualized
in the future, but it is a present actuality. In
other words, every moment of illusion and
enlightenment contains all reality.(42) Therefore,
Buddhanature is both illusion and enlightenment.
Time, a transitional synthesis of the world, is
literally, for Merleau-Ponty, the presence of the
world in which the multiple ways of being in the
world are gathered together and dispersed. The
present moment contains both past and future;
although they are never wholly present, past and
future spring forth when one reaches out toward
them. In fact, the body unites time. Merleau-Ponty
writes, "In every focusing movement my body unites
present, past and future, it secretes time, or
rather it becomes that location in nature where, for
the first time, events, instead of pushing each
other into the realm of being, project round the
present a double horizon of past and future and
acquire a historical orientation."(43) Just as space
enables one to be present to others, time makes it
possible to be mutually present to other beings. In
contrast to Merleau-Ponty's position, Dogen denies
the continuity of time because each instant of time
is Independent and distinct of every other moment of
time.(44) The discontinuity of time means, for
Dogen, that each point of time is independent of
each other moment of time.(45) Present time, for
example, cannot be conceived as a linear,
evolutionary process. Each moment of time--past,
present, or future--is distinct from every other,
whereas Merleau-Ponty argues that past and future
are supported by an objective present. Since each
moment of time constitutes a discrete reality for
Dogen, all moments are lived times. Dogen asserts
that time does not pass because in one moment all
time is viewed simultaneously.(46)
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Consequently, the past is retrievable, the future is
not beyond grasp, and the present is not merely
transient. Rather than being a form of bondage, time
becomes an opportunity for human creativity and
transformation. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Dogen by
referring to the ecstatic character of temporality,
which implies that one can reach out beyond the
present into past and future time.
To inhabit space and time, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is to encounter other bodies in a
common world. My body and other bodies form a system
of competing or cooperative intersubjective beings.
My body perceives the body of another person and
recognizes that it possesses the same structure as
my body. "Henceforth, as the parts of my body
together comprise a system, so my body and the other
person's are one whole, two sides of one and the
same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of
which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth
inhabits both bodies simultaneously."(47) Dogen
would be sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty's position to
a certain extent. Just as there is no separation
between body and mind for Dogen, there is no
division between oneself and others in the state of
nonthinking, since isolation from others only arises
upon reflection.(48) Dogen expresses the unity of
being and time as follows: "The time has to be in
me. Inasmuch as I am there, it cannot be that time
passes away."(49) Again, "`Time being' means time,
just as it is, is being, and being is all time." 50
The common denominator of being and time is
impermanence,(51) which is characteristic of all
existence. Dogen argues that Buddha-nature is
impermanent; it is that aspect which eternally comes
into being and passes out of being. Dogen's
nondualistic equation of being and time results in a
radical temporalization of existence and a radical
existentialization of time.(52)
Although time is immeasurable, intangible, and
elusive, both thinkers radically temporalize being,
oppose a quantitative view of time, see time as a
lived reality, and propose a nondualistic equation
of being and time and body and time. Merleau-Ponty
disagrees, however, with Dogen's contention that
things and events of the universe are time. This
position leads Dogen to a nondualistic assertion
that mountains, oceans, pine trees, and everything
else are time.(53) The universe, for Dogen, is not
something fixed and motionless; it is a being in
time.
METHOD AND REALITY
To alleviate any possible mistaken impression that
Merleau-Ponty and Dogen are in total philosophical
agreement with respect to their thinking about the
lived body, it could prove useful to indicate
briefly some of their major distinctions with
respect to their methodology and understanding of
reality, since there are considerable philosophical
differences between them.
The phenomenological method of Merleau-Ponty is
an attempt to grasp what is or what appears to one's
perception. By attempting to grasp what is
fundamental to one's experience of the world, the
phenomenologist is akin to an archeologist, who must
often dig deep to discover the artifacts of a
civilization.
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Just as the archeologist returns to the artifacts of
a civilization in order to understand it, so the
phenomenologist returns to the things themselves,
which is to return to that world which precedes
knowledge.(54) Once the phenomenologist makes a
discovery, or once something appears to one, it is
essential that one describe what appears to one
without constituting it. "The real has to be
described, not constructed or formed."(55) When a
thing appears, there must be something to which it
appears. This something is consciousness, which for
Husserl is the fundamental structure--intentionality
--of consciousness, but its major function, for Mer-
leau-Ponty, is to reveal the world as present. Thus
Merleau-Ponty widens the concept of intentionality to
include consciousness, the world, and our relationship
to others. For Merleau-Ponty, intentionality is pre-
conscious, preobjective, dialectic, and an ontological
relationship. When we penetrate into our existence
we discover our fusion with the world and others.
When things appear to our consciousness we must
stand back and not prejudge these appearances. This
does not mean that we bracket-out the world or
refrain from any judgment, because nothing would
appear to consciousness if the world were held in
suspension. "The world is not an object such that I
have in my possession the law of its making; it is
the natural setting of, and field for, all my
thoughts and all my explicit perceptions."(56) The
world and the one who perceives it cannot be
separated from each other. Thus reflection is not an
introspection accomplished by an isolated self; it
represents an extrospection, a reestablishing of
one's direct contact with the world in which one
finds oneself and things interrelated in the world,
a system in which all truths cohere. Therefore,
Merleau-Ponty does not find a place in his thought
for Husserl's eidetic reduction, a method used to
capture the facts in their primordial uniqueness,
because Merleau-Ponty is not attempting to find
universal essences, which have only a provisional
character imposed on us by the nature of
language,(57) but is rather trying to grasp the
living stream of existence. One does not think the
world; rather one lives through the world, is open
to it, does not doubt one's communication with it,
and recognizes that one does not possess it.(58)
In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, the primary method
for Dogen is zazen (motionless sitting in
meditation). The practice of zazen is one's passport
to freedom. "To sit crosslegged is to make a leap
straightaway transcending the entire world and find
oneself exceedingly sublime within the quarters of
the Buddhas and patriarchs."(59) Thus zazen is not a
practice prior to enlightment; it is rather Practice
based on enlightenment. "It is entering into
realization."(60) Since there is no distinction
between acquired and original enlightenment and
since practice and realization are identical, zazen
is not the cause of enlightenment. Zazen enables one
to cast off body and mind. Thereby one is able to
sever disordered thoughts emanating from one's
discriminating consciousness.(61) Egoism is
overcome, and all is emptiness.
It does not necessarily follow, for Dogen, that
an aspirant should cease Practicing zazen upon
gaining enlightenment. On the contrary, zazen must
be
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continued because awakening must continually be
confirmed in seated meditation.(62) When the moment
of enlightenment dawns for the aspirant, there is a
simultaneous attainment of the way (doji-jodo). An
important implication of this position is that once
one gains enlightenment, everything in the universe
attains enlightenment simultaneously.(63)
The essential art of zazen consists of thinking
of not-thinking, which is accomplished by
nonthinking.(64) One must cease the following:
involvement in worldly affairs, all movements of the
conscious mind, and making distinctions. The
aspirant must simply sit silently and immobile and
think of nonthinking, which is the essence of sammai
(Sanskrit, samaadhi: concentration). Nonthinking, a
mode beyond thinking and unthinking, functions by
realizing both thinking and unthinking.(65) It is
thinking of emptiness, a thinking of the
unthinkable, which implies that nonthinking is
objectless, subjectless, formless, goalless, and
purposeless. There is nothing comparable to Dogen's
position in Merleau-Phonty's philosophy.
The methods of both thinkers are radically
different, although their methods share an
experiential emphasis and foundation. The method of
Merleau-Ponty enables him to elucidate a bodily
scheme which operates within its own field of
existence. In a more radical way, Dogen's method,
which leads to a state of nonthinking, involves
somatic transformations of one's body, enabling one
to achieve a true human body (shinjitsu nintai)
which is an expression of Buddha-nature. Furthermore,
for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy, an interrogative
approach to problems grounded in history, does not
provide final answers. Dogen's method does provide
final answers because it enables one to realize
Buddha-nature, reality itself.
Buddha-nature, for Dogen, is neither a process
nor an entity. It is not something to be achieved;
it already is. Dogen modifies a famous passage from
the Mahaaparinirvaa.na Suutra: "All sentient beings
possess the Buddha-nature without exception." The
Buddha-nature is not a potentiality possessed by
sentient beings. It is rather all-inclusive in the
sense that it includes both sentient and insentient
beings. Since Dogen equates all existence and
sentient beings, the Buddha-nature includes plant
life, animal life, and the inanimate world.(66) The
Buddha-nature is, however, the possession of neither
sentient nor insentient beings; it is beings and
being itself. The absolute inclusiveness of the
Buddha-nature does not imply that it is immanent in
all existences; rather all existences are immanent
in it.(67)
Although Buddha-nature already exists for Dogen,
in contrast, Merleau-Ponty thinks that philosophy is
an act of bringing truth into being and not a
reflection on some preexisting truth or reason,
because the only preexistent Logos is the world
itself.(68) It is the duty of philosophy to bring
the world into visible existence. Thus philosophy,
for Merleau-Ponty, is the art of relearning to
perceive the world. Philosophy must reject any idea
of eternal truths, refuse to speculate about the
absolute, and acknowledge that it cannot become an
absolute knowledge. Since reationality is
contingent, and since we cannot experience
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or have access to eternal truths, we must refuse to
strive to know that which is impossible to grasp,
although it can be admitted that we, as lived bodies
within the world, are condemned to meaning.
BODY, LIMITATION, AND BOUNDARY SYMBOL
In conclusion one can ask: What does the
philosophical dialogue on the body by Merleau-Ponty
and Dogen teach us? These thinkers help us
understand that the individual is capable of
expressing himself in language, exercising freedom,
intuiting, and thinking; none of these activities of
the individual are possible without a body.
Therefore, to be a human being is to be embodied,
which entails being pretheoretically and
precognitively "with" things and others or in the
midst of objects and other embodied beings. Even
though we may experience the body as a biological
and physical organism, it is fundamentally the locus
for one's life and experience. Without reviewing the
significant differences of their respective
positions, both thinkers arrive at very similar
positions at several points, using, oddly enough,
very different methodologies: phenomenology for
Merleau-Ponty and seated meditation for Dogen.
Although their methods are different, both thinkers
have placed us in a comparative realm of meaning
concerning the human body.
In order to avoid a static result for our
dialogue, I want briefly to take the problem of the
body in a slightly different direction without
claiming that Merleau-Ponty or Dogen would
necessarily agree with the following comments. I not
only experience the body as mine, but, just as
fundamentally, I recognize my body as radically
other than me.(69) If I can recognize that I am both
my body and that I am also not my body, this
realization expresses that I am radically limited by
my body, which irrevocably determines my life by its
limitations. In the sense of potential frustration,
anguish, pain, fear, dread, and death, I am at the
mercy of my body.(70) One does not have to be a
medical student to know that there are bodily
processes over which I have no control, which
indicates that the body possesses a biological life
of its own. Since my body is a temporal and
biological process, it can proceed without my being
aware of it, although Merleau-Ponty and Dogen want
to make us aware of our bodies and their
philosophical significance.
Dogen would agree to some extent with
Merleau-Ponty when he states, "The body can
symbolize existence because it brings it into being
and actualizes it."(71) The body, although it is
observable, is the hidden form of our being. As an
expression of total existence, the body expresses a
unity. Bodily actions are gestures of humans which
are not mere signs; they are symbols of themselves
and express significance and meaning beyond
themselves.
Even though human beings are rooted in time and
the world, their bodies symbolize transcendence of
biological and natural existence. To be in the world
and to be at the mercy of unseen biological forces
of the body represents a human limitation. Although
humans experience their incarnation as a limitation,
this
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experience is already an overcoming of this
limitation.(72) Thus the body restricts our freedom
and affirms it.
Just as the dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and
Dogen takes place on the boundary of Eastern and
Western philosophy, our body is a boundary symbol,
which expresses that we are on the border of freedom
and bondage. Our incarnation points to our ambiguous
situation. As embodied beings, we are not totally
free nor are we entirely bound. Our embodiment
affords us the possibility of freedom, an absence of
inhibiting coercion, and a capacity for continual
creativity. A person on the boundary eludes normal
classification and structure. Such a person
overcomes, at least potentially, sexual distinction,
the cosmic rhythms of life and death, the spatial
polarities of here and there, the temporal
polarities of past and future, the ethical
opposition between good and evil, the dichotomy of
human relationships, and the ordinary distinction
between body and self. Such a boundary person seems
to be an ideal candidate for an intercultural,
philosophical dialogue. One's "between-ness" affords
one the freedom to listen to both sides and decide
for oneself.
NOTES
1. Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist
(Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press,
1975), p. 128.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Rout-ledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 236.
3. Francis Dojun Cook, trans., "Hotsu Mujo
Shin, " in How To Raise An Ox (Los Angeles,
California: Center Publications, 1978), p. 120.
4. Ibid., p. 121.
5. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 82.
6. Ibid., p. 130.
7. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans., "One
Bright Pearl: Dogen's Shobogenzo Ikka Myoju," The
Eastern Buddhist 4, no. 2 (October 1971): 113.
8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 205.
9. Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,
1981), p. 30.
10. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Dogen's Shobogenzo Zenki 'Total Dynamic Working and
Shoji, Birth and Death'," The Eastern Buddhist 5,
no. 1 (May 1972): 75.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 167.
12. For a more complete discussion of the notion
of element, see Madison, Phenomenology, pp. 176-177,
and Remy C. Kwant, From Phenomenology to
Metaphysics: An Inquiry into the Last Period of
Merleau-Ponty's Philosophical Life (Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1966), pp.
62-63.
13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the
Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p.
136. Three articles that discuss Merleau-Ponty's
notion of flesh at length are: Raymond J. Devettere,
"The Human Body as Philosophical Paradigm in
Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty," Philosophy Today 20
(Winter 1976): 317-326; Atherton C. Lowry, "The
Invisible World of Merleau-Ponty," Philosophy Today
23 (Winter 1979): 294-303; Francois H. Lapointe,
"The Evolution of Merleau-Ponty's Concept of the
Body," Dialogos, April 1974, pp. 139-151.
14. Merleau-Ponty, Phenonzenology of Perception,
p. 403. James F. Sheridan, Jr. notes the danger of
this type of approach to the problem of
consciousness in Once More from the Middle: A
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Philosophical Anthropology (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1973) when he writes, "The
temptation to found the conscious upon the
pre-conscious, the deliberate upon the
pre-predicative always leads us to run the risk of
committing the error of making the indefinite
fundamental and our formulation of the relation
between indefiniteness and definiteness as the
articulation of experience or as a development from
the implicit to the explicit suffers from that
temptation" (p.12).
15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 297.
16. Madison, Phenomenology, p. 55.
17. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Dogen's Fukanzazengi and Shobogenzo zazengi," The
Eastern Buddhist 6, no. 2 (October 1973): 123. For a
comparison of Martin Heidegger and Dogen on
thinking, see my article entitled, "The Leap of
Thinking: A Comparison of Heidegger and the Zen
Master Dogen," Philosophy Today 25 (Spring 1981):
55-62.
18. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
pp. 138-139.
19. See John D. Glenn, Jr., "Merleau-Ponty and
the Cogito," Philosophy Today 23 (Winter 1979):
310-320.
20. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Dogen's Bendowa," The Eastern Buddhist 4, no. 1
(May 1971): 146-147.
21. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 235.
22. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Shobogenzo Genjokoan," The Eastern Buddhist 5, no.
2 (October 1972): 134.
23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 203.
24. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Shobogenzo Buddha-nature I," The Eastern Buddhist
8, no. 2 (October 1975): 103.
25. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 130.
26. Samuel B. Mallin, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press,
1979), p.113.
27. Ibid., pp. 20-21.
28. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the
Invisible, p. 9.
29. Lapointe, "Evolution," p. 148.
30. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans., "The
King of Samdhis Samadhi: Dogen's Shobogenzo Sammi O
Zammai," The Eastern Buddhist 7, no. 1 (May 1974):
121.
31. See T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person
(Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii,
1981), who notes that the term "molting" is to be
preferred because it is a recurrent event (p. 91).
32. Waddell and Abe, trans., "Dogen's Bendowa,"
p. 134.
33. See Remy C. Kwant, The Phenomenological
Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1963), pp.
96-111.
34. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Shobogenzo Buddha-nature II," The Eastern Buddhist
9, no. 1 (1976): 98. A fine article on Dogen's
understanding of the Buddha-nature is presented by
Abe Masao, "Dogen on Buddha Nature," The Eastern
Buddhist 10, no. 1 (May 1971): 28-71. The key to
understanding Dogen's concept of Buddha-nature lies
in his notion of guujin (throughness), according to
Masanobu Takahashi, in The Essence of Dogen, trans.
Yuzuru Nobuoka (London: Kegan Paul International,
1983).
35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 153.
36. Ibid., p. 240.
37. Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment:
Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). p. 181.
38. N. A. Waddell, trans., "Being Time: Dogen's
Shobogenzo Uji," The Eastern Buddhist 12, no. 1 (May
1979), p. 118.
39. Ibid., p. 121.
40. Ibid., p. 118.
41. Ibid., p. 123.
42. Kim. Dogen Kigen, p. 117.
43. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
pp. 239-240.
44. Waddell and Abe, Shobogenzo Genjokoan, p.
136. See also Hee-Jin Kim, "Existence/Time as the
Way of Ascesis: An Analysis of the Basic Structure
of Dogen's Thought," The Eastern Buddhist 11, no. 2
(October 1978): 43-73.
45. Waddell and Abe, "Shobogenzo Genjokoan," p.
136.
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46. Kim, "Existence/Time," p.64.
47. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p.354.
48. Kasulis, zen Action/Zen Person p.91.
49. Waddell, trans., "Being Time," p.119.
50. Ibid., p.116.
51. Abe, "Dogen on Buddha Nature," p.69.
52. Kim, "Existence/Time," p.52.
53. Waddell, trans., "Being Time," pp.120,126.
54. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p.ix.
55. Ibid., p.xi.
56. Ibid., p.xi.
57. Ibid., p.xv.
58. Ibid., p.xvii.
59. Waddell and Abe, trans., "The King of
Samadhis Samadhi," p.118.
60. Ibid., p.121.
61. Waddell and Abe, trans., "Dogen's Bendowa,"
p.134.
62. Reiho Masunaga, trans., A Primer of Soto
Zen: A Translation of Dogen's Shobogenzo Zuimonki
(Honolulu, Hawaii: East-West Center Press, 1971),
p.103.
63. Abe, "Dogen on Buddha Nature," p.45.
64. Waddell and Abe, trans., "Dogen's Fukanzazengi,"
p.123 and p.128.
65. Kim, Dogen Kigen, p.77.
66. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, trans.,
"Shobogenzo Buddha-nature III," The Eastern Buddhist
9, no. 2(October 1976):72.
67. Waddell and Abe, trans., "Shobogenzo
Buddha-nature I," p.100.
68. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p.xx.
69. Richard Zaner, "The Alternating Reed:
Embodiment as Problematic Unity," in Theology and
Body, ed. John Y. Fenton (Philadephia Pennsylvania:
Westminster Press, 1974), p.61.
70. Ibid., p.62.
71. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,
p.164.
72. Madison, Phenomenology, p.70.
’The article proofread by Chen, ch'ang-ji(朝﹡)
