What, exactly, is a rice cake? (Anderson)

I keep finding myself wondering: what, exactly is the painted rice cake? Is it a symbol? Does it represent something? A class of things? Reading “Painting of a Rice Cake”, my great temptation is to think about this image as though it was a metaphor for something. This assumes that the rice cake somehow harbors within it the unifying logic that holds this short text together; if I can crack the riddle of the meaning of the rice cake—or so my thinking goes—I will gain insight into the whole. Although I am increasingly suspicious of any attempt to find Dōgen’s skeleton-key, here is a highly provisional swipe in that direction. What follows is a crude oversimplification of what seems to be happening in these six short pages.

What does it mean that a rice cake is painted? In the West we often interpret representational painting—or, more broadly, representation as such—as a false copy of an otherwise real object. The actual rice cake and the painted rice cake, we might say, have two different degrees of realness: that of the rice cake itself, which is exactly what it purports to be—and satisfies hunger accordingly—and that of the painting, which is absolutely real to the extent that it has the power to produce some of the same (primarily visual) experiences as an actual rice cake, but lacks the substance required to satisfy hunger. Thought of in this way, it makes some sense to distinguish between them, and to say, with Dōgen’s learned “skin bags”, that the former has the power to satisfy hunger, while the latter does not (445). Of course, these distinctions don’t end with rice cakes and paintings of rice cakes; when we think this way, the whole world begins to sort itself into categories which reflect different degrees of realness. Dōgen on the other hand, seems to want to correct this sort of dualistic thinking, insisting that “the coming and going of birth and death is a painting. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire universe and the open sky are nothing but a painting” (446). That is, we must not distinguish between a painting and even life’s most serious concerns, exalting one as the weighty matter that it is and denigrating the other as a mere facsimile.

What about the rice cake itself? Here, Dōgen’s point seems to be that we are inclined to make an even more basic distinction between a rice cake and any other object. Or, more to the point, we distinguish between any one object and any other object. Perhaps another version of this same distinction is that between a particular object and the general category to which that object belongs. Dōgen says at one point that “a painting is all-inclusive, a rice cake is all-inclusive, things are all-inclusive”, seeming to suggest that our customary distinction between any particular thing and all other things is nothing but an illusion (446). A painting, a rice cake, or anything at all, he seems to be saying, is also every other thing.

With this idea, Dōgen seems to be picking up philosophy’s most pervasive and fundamental question: the relationship between the many and the one, between the general and the particular. But how can it be that a singular thing—such as a rice cake or a painting—can also be said to be all things? If we accept that a thing is all-inclusive, doesn’t that all-inclusiveness undermine our ability to identify it as the particular thing that it surely is? Is it not, in other words, robbed of its identity? We certainly seem to treat things as though there are differences between them. Is that a mistake? It appears to be a perilous path that Dōgen is starting down.

In the hands of another thinker, the question about what connects one thing and the general class to which it belongs might find a solution in the form of an account that holds that the world is made up of individual things which somehow belong to, or participate in, general classes containing many such objects. An account of this kind might have good reason to claim to have reconciled the general with the particular if it can explain just how that ‘belonging’ or ‘participating’ works. But Dōgen seems to want to do something entirely different, insisting instead on what strikes me as a much more radical view that holds that a particular already is the general, and that there is essentially no distinction between things in the first place. If a rice cake is all-inclusive, as Dōgen suggests, it is unnecessary to explain how that rice cake is related to all other things. Rather than solving the underlying philosophical problem, this approach instead implies that there is no problem to be solved at all. Moreover, Dōgen’s position seems to be that, inasmuch as we do perceive the relationship among the world’s myriad objects as a problem requiring an explanation, it is we ourselves who are projecting that problem onto a world which, encountered on its own terms, requires no explanation.

Viewed in this way, a painting of a rice cake is a rice cake; a painting of a rice cake also satisfies hunger. As Dōgen says, “[r]ice cakes are not separate from hunger. Rice cakes are not separate from rice cakes” (446). If we perceive a need for distinctions here, we aren’t seeing things for what they are.