Water's Thusness (Anderson)

Part of Ms. Luo’s question at the beginning of class on Tuesday really resonated with something I was also wondering about “Mountains and Waters Sutra”: is Dōgen subtly bringing us back around to an essentialist position of some kind—if in an entirely novel form—after Buddhism had done away with it, seemingly definitively? We know from reading Nāgārjuna that nothing possesses ‘svabhava’—the self-existence of a thing which both defines it and grounds its existence within itself. When we say that things are empty of self-existence, we are simply saying that the basis of their existence resides not in themselves, but in the causes and conditions that give rise to them, and because all things are dependently arisen, nothing at all possesses svabhava.

I think what essences are—and why any Buddhist who accepts dependent origination must reject them—is clear enough. But there are a few moments in what we have read of Dōgen so far where he suggests something that, to my ear, sounds eerily like an essence. Consider the reference to “your original self” in “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (30), or “original water” in “Mountains and Waters Sutra” (159). Like an essence, the ‘original’ form or condition of a thing suggests a primary and authentic something at the bottom of all of our experiences of it: Dōgen seems to be pointing to the true identity of something, prior to the countless interpretations of it that are possible for the myriad beings who perceive it.

Dōgen urges us in “Mountains and Waters Sutra” to “[k]now that even though all things are unbound and not tied to anything, they abide in their own condition”. What could be meant by a thing’s ‘own condition’ besides the essence of that thing, what it really is? It seems that things are ‘unbound’ and ‘not tied’ because they derive their definition neither from themselves (because, arising from a chaotic world, they do not support themselves in their own existence), nor from the beings that encounter them—however definitive that encounter may seem to the beings in question: fish and dragons are as certain that water is a palace as we are that water flows. For a cat, perhaps, water is a wall. Whatever certainty we may feel about the accuracy of our own perceptions is insufficient to establish those perceptions as the correct or definitive way of experiencing what we perceive. But if neither our perception of an object nor the object itself is able to define what it is—that is, if the object is not tied to anything—what would it mean for it to abide in its own condition?

When Dōgen says, rather confusingly, that “it seems that there is water for various beings but there is no original water—there is no water common to all types of beings” (159), the implication, as I read him, is that this is the wrong conclusion to draw. The many different possible experiences of water seem to suggest that water is, in fact, many things, and this seems to indicate that there is no real, original water behind those differing appearances. On the contrary, Dōgen seems to be saying, we must accept that there is original water, but that we have no reason to expect it to match our experience of water.

To me, this position makes substantial sense; nobody wants to claim that what we experience as a flowing river, and what fish experience as a palace, is—at the deepest level—many different things simultaneously. But nor can we say that what we experience is nothing at all; just because things are dependently arisen—and are therefore incapable of defining themselves—this does not mean that they are somehow unreal. After all, something arises dependently, even if humans and fish can’t agree about what exactly it is.

So here is the root of my question about whether what we have here is another form of essentialism: when something arises, what does it mean that it abides in its own condition, other than that it has an essence of some kind? In other words, what is ‘original water’, or ‘original self’? Towards the end of the fascicle, Dōgen will say that “[w]ater is just the true thusness of water. Water is water’s complete characteristics; it is not flowing” (164). If water, like all else, is dependently arisen, what is water’s ‘true thusness’ and ‘complete characteristics’, and how is this different from the self-defining property of essences?

All I have managed to do here is to ask this question, which ought to be easier than answering it. This post is already plenty long, so I’ll leave off here and attempt an answer in a future post.