DENEGATION, NONDUALITY, AND LANGUAGE IN DERRIDA AND DOGEN

·期刊原文

DENEGATION, NONDUALITY, AND LANGUAGE IN DERRIDA AND DOGEN

By Toby Avard Foshay

Philosophy East and West

Volume 44, Number 3 (July 1994) P.543-558

(C) by University of Hawaii Press

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P.543

Previous discussions of deconstruction and Buddhism
have concentrated on the critique of metaphysics in
Derrida and Naagaarjuna. Impressive parallels in the
deployment of negative dialectic in both thinkers
have been observed, but both Robert Magliola and
David Loy, for instance, conclude their discussions
with an affirmation of the superior flexibility and
subversive power of the Maadhyamikan critique, in,
as Magliola puts it, its capacity to move freely
between logocentric and deconstructive modes of
discourse.(1) Also, both Magliola and Loy, (2) at
certain points, appeal beyond discursive to
meditational and ascetical practices that foster a
liberated, nondual consciousness. My own approach to
the discussion of Derrida and Buddhism will have two
emphases.(3) First, my engagement with Derrida will
be rather specific, concentrating on the role played
by the issue of negative theology in his work,
specifically with respect to his 1987 essay "How to
Avoid Speaking: Denials."(4) The rationale nale for
focusing on the issue of negative theology is that
Derrida confronts there a relation between
deconstruction and the metaphysical tradition that
does not conform in a straightforward manner to the
Heideggerian characterization of that tradition as
ontotheology.(5) Negative theology is the scene of
an explicit confrontation in the discourse of
ontotheology between the planes of the immanent and
the transcendent. This is hardly in itself a
surprising observation, but the role of language and
its relation to the transcendent in the discourse of
apophatic theology is particularly revealing of the
way in which the characteristic bias toward monistic
and theistic positions asserts itself in Western
thought. The result, then, is that, in the context
of his discussion of negative theology, a discourse
that impinges directly on such pivotal "concepts" in
his work as differance, trace, and supplement,
Derrida engages in a more general and "metaphysical"
discussion of language and signification than in his
earlier, more phenomenological- and
structuralist-oriented writings.

Second, in my discussion of Buddhism, I will
focus on the role of language in Naagaarjuna and
Dogen in an attempt to establish a basis for
comparison with the thought of Derrida that engages
more with views of the phenomenal and immanent than
of the conceptual and transcendent. The issue of
language in Maadhyamikan thought bears directly on
its treatment of the doctrine of the "two truths"
and of the unique position of Buddhism with respect
to praxis and, consequently, to the relation between
immanence and transcendence. It is Buddhism's
uncompromising commitment to addressing the problems
of existence from within the horizons of that
existence that marks it off from other philosophical
and

P.544

religious positions, Eastern as well as Western. The
role of language, as the scene of a particular
theoretical and praxial confrontation between the
realms of sa^msaara and nirvaa.na, has received
specific attention in some recent work. After a
brief discussion of language in Naagaarjuna, I will
draw in particular on Hee-Jin Kim's discussion of
language in the thought of Dogen Kigen, (6) as
exemplary of a certain development in Mahaayaana
thinking about the relation between realization and
discursive representation. Kim's discussion of Dogen
provides the basis for my own speculations about the
role of language in a key passage in Dogen's
writings, his description of his enlightenment
experience under his Chinese teacher. The discussion
of Dogen, I will argue, allows for some interesting
observations of affinities with the thought of
Derrida.

I

The role negative theology plays in Derrida's
work is a complex and revealing one. On the one
hand, differance, he says--though it resembles
negative theology occasionally, "even to the point
of being indistinguishable from negative
theology"--is "not theological, not even in the
order of the most negative of negative
theologies."(7) On the other hand, he admits that
the thought of differance "is and it is not" a
negative theology,(8) that it "has been called,
precipitately, a type of negative theology (this was
neither true nor false)."(9) Derrida acknowledges
that negative theology has an irregular position in
the history of classical ontotheological discourse,
that "what is called 'negative theology' (a rich and
very diverse corpus) does not let itself be easily
assembled under the general category of
'onto-theology-to-be-deconstructed,'"(10) that,
respecting negative theology, "we are touching upon
the limits and the greatest audacities of discourse
in Western thought."(11) Hence his often cited
"fascination"(12) with a discourse that subverts
from within the tradition the confident affirmative
(cataphatic) delineations of ontology and theology,
by means of systematic (apophatic) negations of the
adequacy of all conceptual determinations, pushing
to the limits of sense and signification its
attempts to unsay the sayable, and to say the
unsayable. As Pseudo-Dionysius observes of the via
negative as the itinerary of a religious unknowing:

I pray that we could come to this darkness so
far above light! If only we lacked sight and
knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing
and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision
and knowledge. For this would be really to see
and to know: to praise the Transcending One in a
transcending way, namely through the denial of
all beings.(13)

And, as Meister Eckhart asserts, in more
theological, less ecstatic, terms:

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God is neither being nor goodness. Goodness
adheres to being and is not more extensive. If
there were no being, neither would there be
goodness. Yet being is purer than goodness. God
is neither good nor better nor best of all.
Whoever would say that God is good would be
treating him as unjustly as though he were
calling the sun black.(14)

The "audacities" of Eckhart's negative theology were
sufficient to get him condemned for heresy (the last
two statements above were specifically
condemned),(15) even though he carefully affirms:
"In saying that God is not a being and is above
being, I have not denied being to God; rather I have
elevated it in him."(16) It is precisely this
reserve, this "ontological wager of
hyperessentiality,"(17) that Derrida cites as cause
for refusing the analogy negative
theology/deconstruction, for negative theologies
"are always concerned with disengaging a
superessentiality beyond the finite categories of
essence or existence, that is, of presence, and
always hastening to recall that God is refused the
predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge
his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of
being."(18) The "more or less tenable" nature of the
analogy of the language of differance to negative
theology is unavoidable:

One would thus recognize some traits, the family
resemblance of negative theology, in every
discourse that seems to return in a regular and
insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative
determination, endlessly multiplying the
defenses and the apophatic warnings: this, which
is called X (for example text, writing, the
trace, differance, the hymen, the supplement,
the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.) "is" neither
this nor that, neither sensible nor
intelligible, neither present nor absent, not
even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic
with a third moment, without any possible
sublation.(19)

However, what this "X" "means" "is 'before' the
concept, the name, the word, 'something' that would
be nothing, that no longer arises from Being, from
presence... or even less from some
hyperessentiality."(20) On the one hand,
deconstructive "X" eludes the dialectical relation
essential/hyperessential. On the other hand, "the
onto-theological reappropriation always remains
possible--and doubtless inevitable insofar as one
speaks, precisely, in the element of logic and of
onto-theological grammar."(21)

In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida
finally takes up the challenge of his earlier
refusal of the supposed analogy between negative
theology and the thinking of the trace and of
differance, a refusal that "amounted to a promise:
one day I would have to stop deferring, one day I
would have to try to explain myself directly on this
subject, and at last speak of 'negative theology'
itself."(22) But, of course, to speak of negative
theology "itself, " Derrida observes, is to be
governed by the language, the structure, the
strategy of negative theology: "Is one not

P.546

compelled to speak of negative theology according to
the modes of negative theology, in a way that is at
once impotent, exhausting, and inexhaustible? Is
there ever anything other than a 'negative theology'
of 'negative theology'?"(23)

Negative theology presents an unusually
difficult case for Derrida, then, because, as
dialectical and consciously aporetic in its relation
to ontotheological predication, it is itself
transgressive and subversive of the tradition, while
still perhaps (though this needs to be investigated)
affirming the intentions of that tradition. Whereas
negative theology acknowledges the tensions within
and surrounding ontotheological affirmation, Derrida
sees these tensions as calling into question and
fundamentally challenging the coherence of
logocentric discourse. However, he says, as we know:

There is no Trojan horse unconquerable by Reason
(in general). The unsuipassable, unique, and
imperial grandeur of the order of reason, that
which makes it not just another actual order or
structure (a determined historical structure,
one structure among other possible ones), is
that one cannot speak out against it except by
being for it, that one can protest it only from
within it; and within its domain, Reason leaves
us only the recourse to stratagems and
strategies. The revolution against reason, in
the historical form of classical reason... can
be made only within it, in accordance with a
Hegelian law.(24)

The "stratagem" that would subvert this "Hegelian
law" with respect to negative theology, then,
clearly must focus not on the dialectical moves or
the language of hyperessentiality, but on moments of
aporia, moments which "secrete" an other-than-reason
not comprehended by a logic of noncontradiction
either positive or negative, cataphatic of
apophatic.

Such an aporetic secretion Derrida locales
precisely in the way in which the notion of secrecy
itself secretes the arbitrary, or at least
unknowable and mysterious, sources of its authority
and authenticity-secretes authority both in the
sense of hiding its origins (the authority of its
authority) and of exuding, asserting, or authorizing
it at the same times and in the very same moment and
movement Not only is initiation into the mysteries
of the via negativa beyond conceptual predication,
but it is beyond mere dialectical negation, is prior
to all distinctions, prior even to the privation of
distinctions. Here, in this "beyond," this place
beyond place, Pseudo-Dionysius says: "Here, being
neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely
united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all
knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing
nothing."(25) Such as initiation into the mystery
must be both secret and also shared with other
initiates, and it must govern one's relations with
the uninitiated. It constitutes a society of the
esoteric and a hierarchical relation to the
exoteric--entailing a spiritual politics and
pedagogics, that is, a

P.547

mystagogics. But, the emanant terrain of the
mystagogic, the eso/ exoteric, is, Derrida argues,
more properly seen as an immanent domain of
conscious/unconscious, of a psychagogics.

The enlightenment or awakening to the darkness
of unknowing is, Derrida Says, an enigmatic "sharing
of the secret":

Not only the sharing of the secret with the
other, my partner in a sect or in a secret
society, my accomplice, my witness, my ally. I
refer first of all to the secret shared within
itself; its partition "proper," which divides
the essence of a secret that cannot even appear
to me alone except in starting to be lost, to
divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as
secret, in showing itself: dissimulating its
dissimulation.(26)

This "partition 'proper'" is the source of both the
distinction and the intersection of the aporetic and
dialectic moments of apophatic discourse, the
"double inscription" of negative theological
knowledge:

Here Dionysius evokes a double tradition, a
double mode of transmission (ditten paradosin);
on the one hand unspeakable, secret, prohibited,
reserved, inaccessible (aporreton) or mystical
(mystiken), "symbolic and initiatory"; on the
other hand, philosophic, demonstrative
(apodeiktiken) , capable of being shown....
Dionysius recognizes these two modes
"intersect." The "inexpressible" (arreton) is
woven together or intersects (sympeplektai) "the
expressible" (to reto).(27)

As for the crossing itself, the "symploke," it
necessarily "belongs to neither of the two modes and
doubtless even precedes their distribution. At the
intersection of the secret and the nonsecret, what
is the secret? " What I have myself called
"secretion, " this simultaneous occlusion and
exudation, Derrida names denegation
(denegation--translated inadequately as "denial" in
the English version of "Comment ne pas parler:
denegations"), "a word," he says, "I would like to
understand prior even to its elaboration in the
Freudian context":

There is a secret of denial and a denial of the
secret. The secret as such, as secret, separates
and already institutes a negativity; it is a
negation that denies itself. It de-negates
itself. This denegation does not happen to it by
accident, it is essential and originary. And in
the as such of the secret that denies itself
because it appears to itself in order to be what
it is, this denegation gives no chance to
dialectic.(28)

Denegation, then, names the "partition 'proper'"
of a secret.'that cannot even appear to one alone
except in starting to be lost." It occurs in the
place-which-is-not-a-place, where, as Dionysius
says, one is "neither oneself nor someone else,"
neither self nor other, prior to the discursive
topoi of theology, philosophy, or psychology,
neither a Freudian unconscious nor a Hegelian
negation of the negation, but an "essential and
originary" self-negating negation, that in its
double movement con-

P.548

stitutes and deconstitutes self (and other). The
place which is no-place contains a secret which is
no-secret, Derrida says: "There is no secret as
such: I deny it. And this is what I confide in
secret to whomever allies himself to me. This is the
secret of the alliance. If the thee-logical
necessarily insinuates itself there, this does not
mean that the secret itself is theo-logical."(29)

II

The Buddhist tradition is a striking instance of
a world "religion" that formulates itself in a
nontheological manner. As a religion its focus is
firmly pragmatic; defining the human condition as
one of suffering (Skt, du.hkha, "turmoil"), the aim
is to achieve a total liberation from suffering.
Suffering is said to arise from ignorant desire, and
liberation is achieved by the practice of the
"middle way," the "eightfold path" of renunciation,
virtuous action, and meditation. In the first seven
centuries after the life of the Buddha (ca. 563-483
B.C.) , of the several schools of Buddhist
philosophy, the Abhidharmic (a scholastic tradition
of analysis) and the Praj~naapaaramitaan (a more
dialectic tradition of wisdom-realization) met in
the thought of Naagaarjuna and the Maadhyamikan
school. The Praj~naapaaramitaan tradition viewed the
ignorance that gives rise to suffering as the
misconstrual of the impermanence (anitya) of all
things, including and especially that of the
self--thus, the central Buddhist doctrine of the
nonpersistence of the self (anaatman) . The
fundamental character of reality as impermanent for
the Praj~naapaaramitaan tradition was `suunyataa,
emptiness or voidness, and its formulation of the
thought of emptiness was in terms of a negative
dialectic: reality is neither this nor that.
Naagaarjuna made the doctrine of `suunyataa central
to his thought and extended the Praj~naapaaramitaan
negative dialectic into a full-blown critical
nondualism.

Thus, we have in the Buddhist tradition an
example of a foundationally apophatic orientation of
thought. A significant question, then, arises as to
how, if Buddhism manages to avoid the dualistic
this-world/ other-world formulations of a theology,
does it manage the more immanent, but still
dualistic, tendencies of ontology, and of its own
discursive articulation. One way it has done so in
various of its schools and teachings is by pointing
to apparently nonlinguistically dependent religious
practices that give access to ostensibly
extralinguistic orders of consciousness and
experience. Of course, there is an inherent problem
in such claims, insofar as appeals beyond language
must demonstrate their validity, and it is certainly
difficult to do so without an apparently
contradictory reliance on language and discourse as
means to do so. The radically immanent practice
orientation of Buddhism, primarily soteriological in
its commitment not to knowledge but to liberation,
is rigorously propelled, then, toward an equally
radical apophatic discourse that, in the very act of
arguing discursively for the nondualist structure of
reality, is

p.549

capable of articulating and demonstrating its own
nondual character as `suunya, empty of
self-subsistent reality.

Such claims for the self-dissolving,
nonsubsistent character of discourse, including
discourse of the dharma, are explicit in
Naagaarjuna. He says, for instance: "We interpret
the dependent arising of all things as [`suunyataa].
[`Suunyataa] is a guiding, not a cognitive, notion,
presupposing the everyday. It is itself the middle
way."(30) The very character, then, of the
foundational notion of reality as emptiness,
`suunyata, is itself empty of essential,
self-subsistent significance; `suunyataa is not a
cognitive definition of ultimate reality, but a
"guiding notion" that encourages recognition of its
own nondual nature, as well as that of all reality.

The apophatic or negative character of the
relation between immanent and transcendent in
Maadhyamikan thought is expressed in its position on
the doctrine of "two truths, " the distinction
between temporal reality, sa^mv.rti, and ultimate
reality, paramaartha. As Naagaarjuna affirms:

The teaching of the Dharma by the various
Buddhas is based on the two truths; namely, the
relative (worldly) truth and the absolute
(supreme) truth.

Those who do not know the distinction
between the two truths cannot understand the
profound nature of the Buddha's teaching.(31)

The question becomes, of course: if reality is
ultimately empty and nondual, why is the doctrine of
two truths affirmed so uncompromisingly? As
Naagaarjuna goes on to point out:

A wrongly conceived `suunyataa can ruin a
slow-witted person. It is like a badly seized
snake or wrongly executed incantation.

Thus the wise one (i.e., the Buddha) once
resolved not to teach about the Dharma, thinking
the slow-witted might wrongly conceive it.(32)

The danger of the notion of emptiness is that it
will itself be taken precisely as self-subsistent
and definitive of ultimate reality, ensconcing that
reality in a contradictory way precisely within the
realm of language and conceptual determination, in
an attempt to capture truth in a monism. This would
undermine nondualism in dissolving the distinction
between sa^mv..rti and paramaartha, rather than
sustaining it in nondual relation. But, in the
bridging verse between the two passages above,
Naagaarjuna asserts:

Without relying on everyday common practices
(i.e., relative truths), the absolute truth
cannot be expressed. Without approbching the
absolute truth, nirvaa.na cannot be
attained.(33)

Language, as partaking of the dualistic, finite
realm of sa^msaara, then, is on the one hand
dangerous in fostering the illusion that it can
capture essential truth in conceptual terms. On the
other hand, Naagaarjuna affirms, language is
absolutely necessary in fostering our awareness that

P.550

the relation between relative and absolute reality
is precisely nondual, rather than monistic. As
Naagaarjuna says: "The ontic range of nirvaa.na is
the ontic range of the everyday world. There is not
even the subtlest difference between the two."(34)
Language, as one of the "everyday common practices,"
is inescapable in the pursuit of liberation, but one
must be careful that one grasps it rightly--that is,
in the light of the `suunya character of all
phenomena, including the very notion of `suunya
itself.

III

The Ch'an/Zen tradition of Buddhism in China and
Japan arose in continuity with Indian Maadhyamikan
thought, and contained tensions between Maadhyamikan
(nondualist) and Yogaacaaric (idealist)
tendencies.(35) As an appeal to direct realization
of nondual consciousness (praj~naawisdom), Ch'an/Zen
described itself as "a special tradition outside the
scriptures," emphasizing meditation practice rather
than scriptural study, devotional acts, or
philosophical reflection. The focus on meditation
practice and on direct realization of `suunyataa
tended to externalize the role of language in the
Zen tradition. Even the central role played by koan
in Rinzai Zen is conceived as external and
instrumentalistic, insofar as the koan is viewed as
designed to frustrate discriminating thought and to
force the mind into an immediate, transintellectual
and translinguistic, apprehension of
praj~naa-wisdom. This commitment to "sudden
realization" in Rinzai Zen, in its firm orientation
toward practice rather than theory, is a
considerable distance from Naagaarjuna's concern for
discourse and the necessity to make fine
distinctions in its employment in the service of the
Dharma. In an essay titled "`The Reason of Words and
Letters': Dogen and Koan Language," Hee-Jin Kim
argues that Dogen, the founder of the Soto school in
Japan, has a conception of language more analogous
to that of Naagaarjuna. For Kim, Dogen views
language as the scene, rather than a mere
instrument, of realization. Kim observes:

The fundamental difference between Dogen and
most other commentators has to do with his
awareness of the vital realization potential of
language. As Dogen sees it, the koan does not
castigate the intellect only to supplant it with
praj~naa or transcendent wisdom; rather it
liberates the intellect in the direction of its
own ontological and soteriological
possibilities.(36)

Kim explains that Dogen's Soto-school emphasis on
zazen-only, singleminded sitting (shikan-taza), was
accompanied by a development of koan, not as in the
Rinzai school in which they were used as paradigms
of enlightenment experience, but in a sense
transformed by Dogen's understanding of zazen: "As
he transformed zazen into single-minded sitting, so
Dogen adopted the koan as the 'realization-koan'
(genjo-koan). For Dogen, single-minded sitting and
the realization-koan were aspects of a single
methodology. In brief zazen was koan, koan was
zazen."(37)

P.551

Kim describes the Rinzai use of the
paradigm-koan as instrumentalist, viewing the koan
as a ".stratagem" designed to thwart dualistic
thinking. In is tradition, "the koan thus functions
to disturb, exasperate, and finally bankrupt the
intellect with a view to allowing the mind to see
things `as they truly are in the allegedly
trans-intellectual state of consciousness."(38)
Dogen describes his own experience when studying in
China of the Rinzai use of paradigm-koan as
strategies to foil reason: "The idea is that... only
incomprehensible utterances are the task of the
buddhas and patriarchs... and [these koan] are never
concerned with discriminating thought. This is known
as the great enlightenment prior to the time when no
incipient sign has yet emerged."(39) But Dogen has
no patience with such dualist notions:

If [these utterances] were ultimately
incomprehensible, what they now allegedly
comprehend must be wrong. A good many such
fellows abound in Sung China, and I have seen
them myself. How pitiable are they who are
unaware that discriminating thought is words and
phrases, and that words and phrases liberate
discriminating thought!(40)

Dogen points out that the supposed
incomprehensibility of koan is being comprehended by
its claimants in terms of discriminating thought
(that is, in terms of thought that distinguishes
between the comprehensible and the
incomprehensible). That "words and phrases liberate
discriminating thought, " Kim explains, informs
Dogen's notion of the "realization-koan," in which
"koan language presents the workings of the
Buddha-nature, in which self-limitation and
self-liberation are interfused in a paradoxical
way."(41)

Kim locates this interfusion of self-limitation
and self-liberation at the core of Dogen's teaching,
identifying it as "the dialectical relationship of
nonduality and duality."(42) in other words as
Dogen's apprehension in terms of practice of the
doctrine of "two truths," the "gathered" (dual) and
"ungathered" (nondual). Central to Dogen's view of
the implications of the "interfusion" of limiting
and liberating thought is his notion of "total
exertion" (ippo-guujin) as the priority of ascetic
practice. "Total exertion" is a total practice
orientation in which both zazen (that is,
nonlinguistic) and koan (that is, linguistic) are
embraced nondually. This produces in Dogen a dynamic
notion of dharmas (actualities that are not
dualistic entities). Kim explains: "In this view, a
particular actuality is never devaluated or
obliterated; to the contrary, the uniqueness,
freedom, and purity of the single dharma emerges
unequivocally into the foreground."(43) The
implications for Buddhist practice and understanding
are in Dogen's teaching profound. Dogen says:

We should study, then, the moment when we
consider the water of the ten directions in
light of the ten directions. It is not only when
humans and gods see water that we should study
this; there is also a study in which water sees

P.552

water. Because water practices and verifies
water, there is a penetrating study in which
water speaks of water.... Water liberates itself
through water.... [W]ater is the koan
realized.(44)

Thus, through "total exertion" of awareness
(that is, of the nondual body-mind) , what is
self-limited is realized to be nondual, so that the
liberating effect derives from the nondifference
between the perceiver and the perceived, a
nondifference in which the actuality of their
particularity, which is also a linguistic
materiality (that is, a differance), is neither
dissolved nor reified. As Kim points out, perception
and comprehension here, in which language is
necessarily involved as koan, is not understook, as
with the paradigm-koan in the analogy of a "finger
pointing to the moon"; the realizationist view, as
Kim describes it, is that "the finger not only
points to the moon [,] it is the moon":

To put it differently, the finger, according to
the realizationist view, is not the moon, but
the moon is invariably the finger, because it
completes itself as the finger. Thus the
realizationist view does not and should not
reject the instrumentalist view; it only
perfects it.(45)

Dogen's position on language, as argued by Kim,
is precisely in harmony with Naagaarjuna's assertion
that "without relying on everyday common practices
[such as language], the absolute truth cannot be
expressed."(46) As you will recall, the previous two
verses find Naagaarjuna emphasizing the absolute
centrality of the doctrine of two truths: "Those who
do not know the distinction between the two truths
cannot understand the profound nature of the
Buddha's teaching."(47) Naagaarjuna also implies
that this distinction between the two truths depends
on grasping `suunyataa correctly. I will suggest
that the Western distinction between signified and
signifier (as the conceptual and phonic aspects of
the sign, respectively) is helpful in sustaining and
rightly grasping the distinction between the two
truths, in its operation within the relative,
immanent domain of language as sa^mv.rti.

A very striking instance both of the
implications of Dogen's Maadhyamikan view of
language, and of the usefulness of the
signifier/signified distinction within language
occurs in Dogen's own accounts of his pivotal
enlightenment experience in China, under his
teacher, Ju-ching. According to Dogen, Ju-ching
described the nondual practice of zazen-only (Jpn,
shikan-taza) as "dropping off body and mind": "To
study meditation under a master is to drop the body
and mind; it is single-minded intense sitting
without burning incense, worshipping, reciting,
practicing repentance or reading sutras."(48) In the
two detailed accounts (by others) of Dogen's
enlightenment experience, he is said to have
achieved profound awakening and resolution of his
long-term quandary over the relation between
practice and enlightenment. Takashi James Kodera
conflates the two accounts as follows:

P.553

One day during the intensive summer training in
the first year of Pao-ch'ing (1225), Ju-ching
shouted at a disciple, "When you study under a
master, you must drop off body and mind; what is
the use of single-minded intense sleeping!"
Sitting right beside this monk, Dogen suddenly
attained a Great Enlightenment. Immediately, he
went up to the abbot's quarters and burned
incense. Ju-ching inquired, "What is the burning
of incense fo?" Dogen replied, "The body and
mind have been dropped; that is why I have
come!" "The body and mind have been dropped; you
dropped the body and mind!" said Ju-ching
approvingly.(49)

In discussing Dogen's predilection for
homophonous wordplay, Kim mentions a hypothesis
about "casting off body and mind" ventured by
Takasaki Jikido:

According to Takasaki, the term "casting off
body and mind" (shinjin-datsuraku) never appears
in the works of Ju-ching, Dogen's master.
Another expression "casting off the mind's dust"
(shinjin-datsuraku) does appear, however, though
just once. It is possible, therefore, that Dogen
may have understood Ju-ching's "casting off the
mind's dust" as "casting off body and mind."
When we consider the fact that these two
expressions are homophonous in Japanese..., it
is not too far-fetched to think that he may have
hit upon this central idea of "casting off body
and mind" by way of homophonous association,
which in turn triggered his
religio-philosophical imagination.(50)

Though Kim cites Takasaki's hypothesis as a
potential explanation for Dogen's later yen for
homophonous wordplay, I would argue that more than
surface wordplay and arbitrarily sliding
signifier/signified relations may be at work here.
By hearing "mind's dust" as "body and mind," Dogen
may have heard not only the two signifieds in the
one signifier,(51) but a signification also of the
relation between signified and signifier. "Mind's
dust" may be seen to signify not only a metaphoric
state of dullness, but also an actual state of
dividedness of the mind and, as such, a mind-body
dualism. The "mind's dust" as metaphor is itself
"mind's dust," because it signifies and enacts the
dividedness of body and mind.

As metaphor, "mind's dust" asserts a certain
relationship of body/mind: what is "dust" in/on the
mind is its imagining itself as mind alone, not
body/mind.(52) The metaphor, "mind's dust," not only
signifies metaphorically (that is, by analogy, by
asserting atension of similarity/difference, a
state observable in the world, that is, of dust on
some "thing"), but it also enacts as metaphor what
it signifies, insofar as metaphor exploits a tension
between identity and difference between entities,
maintaining that what is different is somehow the
same. "Dropping off the mind's dust" and "dropping
off body and mind" are the same, are homophonous, as
signifiers; they also have an equivalance as
signifieds.

P.554

Further, rather than merely nondifferent as
signs, they are nondual, insofar as they sustain
their own registers of signifying structure:
metaphorical/differential and conceptual/identical.
So that, even more pertinently, the
nondifference/homophony at the level of signifiers
is accompanied by an equivalance at the level of
signifieds: "dropping off the mind's dust" is (or
can be argued to be) "dropping off [the difference
of] mind and body."(53) And this eqivalance is
itself a signifier/signified relation that, in being
interchangeable (one can be read as the signifier of
the other; each can be read as both signifier and
signified of the other), enacts the nondualism of
the realms of mind and body, of metaphor and of
concept, of identity and of difference, of sa^msaara
and nirvaa.na. But this enactment is borne by and
nondually related to signification. We have a
nonduality of constative and performative, of
instrumentalist and realizationist, and of language
and experience, and therefore within this "total
exertion" of signification a "practice of the koan"
and a "koan of practice"--what Dogen calls the
nonduality of "practice-realization." But what I would
emphasize at the moment is the "dharmic" character
of signification as its own "total exertion," as a
"self-exertion," not unrelated to our effort in this
essay, with/in language, to grasp the
`suunya-character of language itself constructively.

IV

Derrida asks: "At the intersection of the secret
and the nonsecret, what is the secret?"(54) This
intersection is the meeting, interweaving, or
symploke of the expressible and the inexpressible.
As Dogen exclaims: "How pitiable are those who are
unaware that discriminating thought is words and
phrases, and that words and phrases liberate
discriminating thought! "(55) Or as Naagaarjuna
warns: "A wrongly conceived `suunyataa can ruin a
slow-witted person."(56) What is this intersection
or symploke between the expressible and the
inexpressible, the right and wrong understanding of
`suunyataa, such that words and phrases liberate
rather than delude the speaker and hearer? As
Derrida says, the essence of a secret is divided so
that it "cannot even appear to one alone except in
starting to be lost." When Derrida makes bold to
assert something that is "essential and originary,"
it is this self-divided function of "denegation," a
"negation that denies itself."(57) Like the notion
of `suuyataa; which declares its own provisional and
inessential character, denegation asserts the
self-dividedness of every articulation--not only its
participation in two registers of significance, of
the expressible and the inexpressible, of sa^mv.rti
and paramaartha but also the self-negating or empty
character of the relation, or intersection, or
symploke, of these dimensions.

What Pseudo-Dionysius refers to as the place of
mystical unknowing, where "being neither oneself nor
someone else, one... knows beyond the mind by
knowing nothing, "(58) Derrida locates within
language, ac-

P.555

companying every articulation, and present to it as
its very condition. But, for Dogen, fully
self-realized expression is a more radically
immanent activity still. Rightly viewed, all
entities articulated, in a self-liberating activity.
"[T]here is a penetrating study," he says, "when
water speaks of water.... Water liberates itself
through water....[W]ater is the koan realized."(59)
As one of the activities common to all human beings,
language cannot be seen as necessarily obscuring the
truth of our nature. Everything depends on grasping
language rightly. That language cannot be rightly
grasped apart from the exercise of language itself
is surely a vivid instance of the paradoxical
fullness and emptiness of our experience, of our
representation of experience, and of our experience
of representation.

NOTES

1 - Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West
Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press,
1984), pp. 126, 128; David Loy, Nonduality: A
Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988).

2 - Magliola, Derrida, p.126; David Loy, "The
Cloture of Deconstruction: A Mahaayaana critique
of Derrida, " International Philosophical
Quarterly 27 (1987): 77.

3 - An earlier version of this essay will appear as
"Derrida and Dogen: Denegation and the
Liberation of Discriminating Thought, " in
Negation Theory: Negotiations and Contexts, ed.
Daniel Fischlin (Kluwer, forthcoming). I would
like to express my gratitude to David Loy for
his comments on and suggestions for revision of
this essay.

4 - Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking:
Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable, ed.
Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989), pp.3-70.

5 - Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference,
trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row,
1969).

6 - Hee-Jin Kim, "'The Reason of Words and Letters':
Dogen and Koan Language," in Dogen Studies, ed.
William LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1985), pp. 54-82.

7 - Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), p.6.

8 - Jacques Derrida, "The Original Discussion of
'Differance' (1968)," in Derrida and Differance,
ed. Davi Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988),
p.84.

P.556

9 - Jacques Derrida, "Letter to a Japanese Friend,"
in ibid., p. 3.

10 - Jacques Derrida, "Letter to John Leavey, "
Semeia 23 (1982): 61.

11 - Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General
Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve," in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
p. 271.

12 - See Derrida, "Original Discussion," p. 85;
"Letter to Leavey," p. 61; "How to Avoid
Speaking," p. 12.

13 - Pseudo-Dionysius, "Mystical Theology, " in
Complete Works, ed. and trans. Colm Lubheid and
Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987),
1025A.

14 - Meister Eckhart, "Sermon 9," in The Essential
Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense,
ed. and trans. Edmund College, O.S.A., and
Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981),
p. 257.

15 - Bernard McGinn, "Introduction" to ibid., p. 27.

16 - Eckhart, "Sermon 9," p. 256.

17 - Derrida, "Differance," p. 8.

18 - Ibid., p. 6.

19 - Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking," p. 4.

20 - Ibid., p. 9.

21 - Ibid.

22 - Ibid., p. 12.

23 - Ibid., p. 13.

24 - Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of
Madness," in Writing and Difference, p. 36.

25 - Pseudo-Dionysius, "Mystical Theology," 1001A.

26 - Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking," p. 25.

27 - Ibid., p. 24.

28 - Ibid., p. 25.

29 - Ibid., p. 26.

30 - Naagaarjuna, Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa XXIV.18,
in Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way: The
Essential Chapters from the Prasannapadaa of
Candrakiirti, trans. Mervyn Sprung (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) (hereafter MMK;
Sprung), p. 238. 1 use Sprung's translation
here because it was suggested to me by Peter
Ebbatson of the University of Hamburg that
Inada's rendition of this particular verse is
unreliable.

P.557

31 - Naagaarjuna, Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa XXIV.8, 9,
trans. Kenneth Inada (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press,
1970) (hereafter MMK; Inada), p. 146.

32 - Ibid., vv. 11, 12.

33 - Ibid., v. 10.

34 - MMK XXV. 20; Sprung, p. 260.

35 - Magliola, Derrida on the Mend, p. 96.

36 - Kim, "'Reason of Words and Letters,'" p. 79.

37 - Ibid., p. 56.

38 - Ibid., p. 57.

39 - Dogen, quoted in ibid.

40 - Dogen, quoted in ibid., p. 57.

41 - lbid., p. 58.

42 - Ibid., p. 54.

43 - Ibid., p. 59.

44 - Dogen, quoted in ibid., p. 60.

45 - Ibid., p. 80 n. 12.

46 - MMK XXIV.10; Inada, p. 146.

47 - Ibid., v. 9.

48 - Dogen, quoted in Takashi James Kodera, Dogen's
Formative Years in China: An Historical Study
and Annotated Translation of the Hokyo-ki
(Boulder: Prajna Press, 1980), p. 58.

49 - Ibid., p. 61.

50 - Kim, "Reason of Words and Letters," p. 74.

51 - Kodera points out (P. 107) that while the two
expressions are homophonous in Japanese, they
are not in Chinese, the language in which
Dogen would have heard them at the moment of
his enlightenment experience. Though Dogen's
grasp of Chinese was not extensive, it is too
speculative, given usual perceptions of the
immediacy of such enlightenment
experiences--though, I would maintain for all
that, not utterly implausible--to hypothesize a
scenario which would have Dogen shifting from
Chinese to Japanese, at this moment, as well as
between the homophonous expressions in
Japanese. It is, however, in keeping with the
way we see Dogen working elsewhere with
language to claim with some confidence that the
shift from "mind's dust" to "body and mind"
took place in later reflection and writing
about his central "insight." Kodera claims

P.558

"enormous consequence" for the difference
between Ju-ching's "mind's dust" and Dogen's
"body and mind," should the latter indeed be
original to Dogen: "Because Dogen's words thus
alleviate even the last resort for clinging and
because they explain the liberation from the
objects of clinging more exhaustively, it could
be argued that they derive from his own answer
to the 'Great Doubt,' which was only aided by
Ju-ching's instruction regarding the 'dorpping
the dust from the mind'" (p. 107). There are,
then, grounds for claiming a considerable
advance in subtlety in Dogen's grasp of
nonduality, whether we locate this insight in
his enlightenment experience itself, or in his
subsequent reflection on and expression of the
implications of this experience. In either
case, language plays an intimate role in the
nonduality of "dropping off body and mind." On
the notion of "intimate (esoteric) words"
(mitsugo) in Dogen's conception of language,
see Thomas Kasulis, "The Incomparable
Philosopher: Dogen on How to Read the
Shobogenzo, " in Dogen Studies, ed. William
LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1985) , pp. 83-98; I am also grateful to
Professor Kasulis for our discussion of the
issues above following the oral presentation of
the present essay at the conference "Buddhism
and Western Thought, " Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, 3-5 July 1992.

52 - This is parallel to the sixth patriarch
Hui-neng's implied criticism of Shen-hsiu in
the Platform sutra. See The Platform Sutra of
the Sixth Patriarch, trans. Philip B. Yampolsky
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967),
pp. 129-132.

53 - In "Dogen Casts Off 'What': An Analysis of
Shinjin Datsuraku," in A Dream within A Dream:
Studies in Japanese Thought (New York: Peter
Lang, 1991), Steven Heine argues that the more
crucial notion is that of "casting off"
(datsuraku), rather than of "mind's dust" or
"body-mind" (shinjin). Though he argues this
using a formulation, "What is this casting
off?" that does not occur in this form in
Dogen, his conclusions about the nondual
functioning of language in Dogen's thought seem
to me compatible with my own in the present
essay.

54 - Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking," p. 25.

55 - Dogen, quoted in Kim, "Reason of Words and
Letters," p. 57.

56 - Naagaarjuna, MMK XXIV.11; Inada, p. 146.

57 - Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking," p. 25.

58 - Pseudo-Dionysius, "Mystical Theology," 1001A.

59 - Dogen, quoted in Kim, "Reason of Words and
Letters," p. 60.