Dōgen’s Vedic Imagination (Anderson)

I have been thinking about this sentence that appears at the end of “Painting of a Rice Cake”: “Know that the entire heaven and earth are the roots, stem, branches and leaves of the tall bamboo” (448). What strikes me about this passage is just how Vedic the image is. Compare this to Ṛg Veda 10.90, “Puruṣa-Sūkta, or The Hymn of Man”, which tells of the creation of the world through the dismemberment of the cosmic giant, Puruṣa: “the moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born. […] From his navel the middle realm of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear. Thus they set the world in order”. Or, recall the opening lines of Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad: “The head of the sacrificial horse, clearly, is the dawn—its sight is the sun; its breath is the wind; and its gaping mouth is the fire common to all men”. Vedic literature is inclined to think by analogy in this way; to suggest that one seemingly earthly thing is identical with a larger, cosmic thing, is to combine the close and intimate with the distant and vast, rendering the broader world more knowable by way of its similarity with something already familiar.

I’m not saying that Dōgen is working by analogy in quite the same way. Ultimately, his task is not to connect particular things to other particular things—heaven and earth and the parts of a bamboo plant; he seems instead to be showing that the connections between things are total, that each thing is also every other thing. “[A] painting”, as he says, “is all-inclusive, a rice cake is all-inclusive, things are all-inclusive” (446). This approach might take the connections between things further than the Vedic writers are comfortable with. If you carry it too far, they might reply, the structures inherent within the world break down in the resulting overabundance of connection; the world ceases to be a horse sacrifice when it is understood to be every other thing too.

But insofar as there is a common approach here, it draws my attention towards Dōgen’s inclination to lean heavily into the poetic possibilities of thought and expression, which is also the Vedic orientation. Until now, I have been thinking about Dōgen as a philosopher first and whatever else he may be—even a Buddhist—second. Philosophy is inclined to make distinctions and seek specificity and clarity, while poetry draws connections with abandon, reveling in the surfeit of meaning thereby created, and casting a suspicious eye upon neatness and precision. The image put forth by this line—and practically every other line of this text—is the unmistakable work of a poetic imagination.