A Film Recommendation (Anderson)

“Know that a painted rice cake is your face after your parents were born, your face before your parents were born.” “Painting of a Rice Cake”, 445

“In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.” “The Time Being”, 106

Last Friday, after our final class of the semester, I did something I hadn’t done in months—watch a movie. Indulging, somewhat arbitrarily, an inborn pull towards science fiction, I put on Arrival (2016), and, by the film’s final moments, I had become convinced of several subtle and surprising connections to Dōgen. For those who have already seen it and are skeptical, I’m willing to concede the possibility that whatever resemblances may exist, they are apparent only to a Dōgen-steeped brain such as my own, and that the discrepancies—even major ones—are much more pronounced than the similarities. But for just that reason, I want to recommend it to anyone else who has been reading Dōgen and is interested in a thought-provoking—if somewhat tortured—comparison.

I won’t include any significant spoilers for the movie in this post, but I’m also a big believer that an initial encounter with a film is enhanced by the viewer’s total ignorance prior to watching it. If you agree, you may want to stop reading at this point. I think I would.

It really won’t give anything away to say that this is a film about an alien visitation of Earth, an event which unfolds in its first few minutes. The plot soon mirrors a scene which, truth be told, I have often imagined in the thrall of many daydreams over the last few months of reading Buddhism: if humans were ever to encounter intelligent extraterrestrial aliens, and if we could engage them in a conversation about what could broadly be called philosophy or religion, asking them to describe to us how they perceive ultimate reality, it is at least conceivable to me that they might report something that sounds to our ears like a Buddhist world.

This is exceedingly strange because, alternatively, I find it quite inconceivable that they would articulate something resembling, say, Christianity. Wouldn’t it be too astonishing a coincidence to learn that these aliens worship an individual savior who is thought to have died in place of other aliens, or that they believe in a single omniscient God who is somehow also three? But the thought that they might view the world as Dōgen does—as a fabric of causes and conditions that gives rise and ceases to give rise to certain phenomena, where time itself is present in each moment of being—and that they might have developed a set of practices around these views which put them into more immediate contact with this fundamental truth, strikes me as a real possibility.

Just what the plausibility of this scenario says about Dōgen’s contribution to Buddhism, I’m not sure—and perhaps I am alone in finding it plausible at all. To me, this thought experiment foregrounds the phenomenological naturalism of Dōgen’s world: it doesn’t rely on revelation of any kind, as Abrahamic traditions do, but on a set of experiences that—I assume—isn’t uniquely human at all, but which attends the temporal existence of any being, no matter where in the universe it may be located. From a conventional and perhaps uniquely human perspective, we are individual selves with unique identities, along with all the other objects in the world around us. But when viewed from a perspective that takes causation seriously, it becomes clear that there is really nothing other than dependently originated phenomena situated somewhere between arising and ceasing. Perhaps this detached perspective of no-self, which the Buddhist strives to achieve and maintain, comes more naturally to other lifeforms, outfitted with a different array of psychological characteristics.

After seeing the movie, I read through “Story of Your Life”, the short novella by Ted Chiang which the movie is based on—in many respects very loosely. The film and the story together prompt in me many more thoughts about Buddhism than I can express here, especially if I am to resist giving away anything crucial about the plot. But if you have a chance before the start of next semester, and are interested in a beautiful story that may or may not have something to do with Dōgen, I recommend both.

As an allurement, I’ll end with this provocative passage from the novella:

“I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no ‘train of thought’ moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedents.”