Dōgen’s Transcendental Moment (Anderson)

I thought I would add to the blog something I was trying to articulate towards the end of class last Thursday, in order to try to see it more clearly and to understand its implications a little better.

In broad terms, I understand Buddhism—particularly in its origins—to be challenging the common-sense idea that there is a substantive connection between one moment and the next. Nāgārjuna turns his critical gaze upon everything from motion and change to the Tathāgata and nirvana, but the underlying argument is consistent throughout. Versions of the argument in the Pali texts are applied both to the temporal and spatial dimensions, but they amount to the same thing: moments and things are not continuous with each other, but are instead discrete.

Non-Buddhist metaphysics, on the other hand, might say that A and B are genuinely connected to each other by a causal relationship that they have in common, and the robustness of this causal connection is the reason we can say that A causes B. Since a cause without an effect is the cause of nothing, and an effect without a cause is no effect at all, A and B mutually constitute the other as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, with each demanding the existence of the other in order to be what it is. Moreover, this relationship is only possible because A and B are substantially real objects to begin with; to say ‘A causes B’ means very little unless A and B are both something in the first place. Thus, A causes B because A, an object possessing self-existence, has within itself the power to bring about that which does not yet exist—namely B. That is to say, the cause can be said to be wholly adequate to the effect it brings about, because A alone is responsible for B’s transition from non-existence into existence. If A and B are successive moments of a single self, this sufficiency in A’s ability to bring about B is what is responsible for the continuation of the self’s underlying identity throughout the transition from A to B.

Nāgārjuna is especially effective at dismantling these notions and revealing what nonsense this turns out to be when we examine these assumptions closely. But the attitude of the Pali texts themselves already seems to dismiss the sufficiency of the causal relationship, highlighting instead the causal isolation of each moment from every other moment before and after. What results is a situation where the present moment—which alone has true being—is ontologically distinct from its past and future.

Here is the passage I read in class, spoken in the Pali texts’ usual exhaustive verbosity. The Buddha asks:

“Citta, if someone were to ask you: ‘Was your past acquired self your only true acquired self, and the future and present ones false? Or, will your future acquired self be your only true acquired self, and the past and present ones false? Or, is your present acquired self your only true acquired self, and the past and future ones false?’ Having been questioned in this way, Citta, how would you explain the matter?”

Citta’s satisfactory answer could not be clearer:

“Having been questioned in this way, sir, I would explain the matter in this way: ‘My past acquired self was, at that time, my only true acquired self, and the future and present ones false. My future acquired self will be, at that time, my only true acquired self, and the past and present ones false. My present acquired self is, at this time, my only true acquired self, and the past and future ones false.’ Having been questioned in this way, sir, this is how I would explain the matter.” (147-8)

At this point in their discussion, the Buddha introduces the famous image of the milk and its many transformations which we have talked about a number of times in class, and which Nāgārjuna also uses as an illustration of the present moment’s reality compared with the falsity of past and future moments—the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’. As I read it, the point both in Citta’s reply and in the transforming milk example that follows is that these successive moments are insufficiently connected to one another to construct a persisting ‘self’ capable of maintaining its identity over time. If the present alone is real and the past and future are false, there are no ontological grounds on which to stitch together a self that encompasses successive moments.

I don’t think the view being put forth here is that time itself is an illusion or that the past and future are totally unreal; experience alone is enough to establish the passage of time and the duration of the self as psychologically—or, in Nāgārjuna’s language, conventionally—real. Rather, the argument is that, from a philosophical standpoint, there is no basis to insist that the self of a moment ago is as real as the self of the present moment—or, for that matter, that there exists any self who survives essentially unchanged time’s ceaseless passage.

Some version of this view seems to be the perspective of the ‘ordinary person’ whom Dōgen engages at the bottom of pg. 105 and onto pg. 106 of “The Time Being”. This is the person who, having crossed rivers and climbed mountains on a long journey, now asserts that “[t]hose mountains and rivers are as distant from me as heaven is from earth” (106). That is to say, this present moment is unconnected to those past moments during which I was crossing the rivers and climbing the mountains. “For a while”, the opponent continues, “I was three heads and eight arms. For a while I was an eight or sixteen-foot body” (105). We can hear the milk from the Buddha’s example echoing these same words:

For a while, I was milk. For a while, I was curds. For a while, I was butter. For a while, I was ghee…

But Dōgen doesn’t find any of this satisfactory. “At the time the mountains were climbed and the rivers were crossed”, he replies, “you were present”, reminding his opponent that those past moments are not separate from the present one at all, because each moment is united with every other moment by the immediacy of our experience of it (105). “Time is not separate from you”, Dōgen continues, “and as you are present, time does not go away” (105). If, at the deepest level, time is the being of the present moment, ‘time’ is always present—the same ‘time’ that was present when the rivers were crossed, and the mountains climbed.

By suggesting that ‘time’ is present in each moment, what Dōgen is doing may resemble non-Buddhist metaphysics, which had also maintained a substantial connection between each moment and the next. But while he does seem to be saying that A and B are connected on a level that the Pali texts had rejected, Dōgen still denies that they are connected in the manner of cause and effect. On Dōgen’s account, what connects past, present and future is not some naïve construal of causal integration, but the nature of time itself, which is equally present in the very being of all things; as he says in the text’s opening lines in a phrase which we should allow to guide us as we read the pages to come, “time itself is being, and all being is time” (104). This seems to mean that, although time is nothing more than the present moment, the present moment is nothing less than the immediate ‘thusness’ of every experience we can ever have. Past and present aren’t related causally, but nor do they need to be: all of time—what we experience as temporal duration—is unified under something like a ‘transcendental moment’.

In a way that I can only just glimpse, this ‘moment’—or, in Dōgen’s terminology, the time being—seems to capture what is meant by ‘thusness’ in his other fascicles. Both concepts suggest the way that a single moment infinitely overflows its apparent boundaries, connecting with all other moments of all the other beings we encounter in the world. But that is perhaps grist for a future post. This one has become massively too long and wildly over-budget, and will have to suffice—for the time being.