Dogen

Their big question

Is now just the way you get to later?

Dogen wanted to know whether time is something that happens to you or something you are. That sounds abstract until you notice how you actually live it: most of the present is spent as a corridor to somewhere else. Washing up is getting to the end of washing up. Being nine is getting to being ten.

His argument is that this is a mistake with real consequences. When you cook, you are not practising cooking to become a good cook; the cooking is the thing. Paying attention is not preparation for life. There is nothing left over once you subtract the paying of attention.

He also had a warning about meditation, which is odd for a man who spent his life doing it. He said: do not sit down to become a Buddha, because that treats the sitting as a means and the awakening as a prize, and the whole shape of the thing is wrong. Sit, and that is what it is. If you sit down being certain that attention will pay off later, you have turned it into a transaction, which is exactly what he was arguing against.

It is a hard position to hold honestly, because it sounds like a reason to stop trying to improve at anything. The reply Dogen gives is that attention is not passivity — it is the whole effort, moved from the future into the present, which is the only place it could ever have been applied.

“To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”

From the opening of his Genjokoan. He meant attention as a discipline, not a mood.

Three things worth knowing

• He travelled to China and came back saying the thing he had been looking for was not in the books he had been studying.
• He was famous for insisting on ordinary practice — sitting, cooking, washing — done with complete attention rather than as a step towards something else.
• He wrote that time is not something you move through, and that a moment of attention is not a small piece of a larger whole.

Try it — think like Dogen

Wash one plate as if it were the only thing in the world. Then wash the next one badly, on purpose. Compare the two. You will have learned something a description cannot give you.

We have no portrait of Dogen that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.