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Enlightenment,
from Dogen’s perspective, consists of clarifying and penetrating one’s muddled
discriminative thought in and through our language to attain clarity, depth,
and precision in the discriminative thought itself. This is enlightenment or
vision.
Hee-Jin
Kim, Dogen on Meditation and Thinking, p.63
If anything demands ‘clarifying and penetrating
one’s muddled discriminating thought’ it is an accurate appreciation of Dogen’s
Zen masterpiece, Shobogenzo.
Fortunately, like other comprehensive literary
expressions, the work itself provides its own key, or rather, eye – the
True Dharma-Eye – through which ‘clarity, depth, and precision’ are attainable.
Two significant points clearly seen through the True Dharma-eye are
·
Everything that is accurate or
meaningful can be expressed.
·
Anything that cannot be
expressed is neither accurate nor meaningful.
The widespread notion that Zen is antithetical to
language is, from Shobogenzo’s viewpoint, a serious delusion based on a
false assumption; specifically,
the dualistic assumption that the reality of verbal expressions (spoken or
written) is separate and independent
of the reality of what the expressions concern. Of the host of fallacies
about Zen spawned by dualism, the delusion that the reality of Zen somehow exists independently
of the expressions of Zen is the most pernicious. It is to
this distortion that we owe all the vulgar claims that Zen is some kind of
mysterious or ineffable reality, condition, or experience that is somehow
transcendent to, thus independent of, the normal human capacities of
communication.
Here it is worth stating the obvious; since claims
asserting that the truth about Zen cannot
be communicated through language, are themselves constituted of language, they thereby
refute their own validity!
