On turning a Zen ear

·期刊原文
On turning a Zen ear

By David Appelbaum
Philosophy East and West
Volume 33, no. 2
(April, 1983)
P.115-122
(C) by university of Hawaii Press

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P.115

I

It is surprising to discover the extent to which Zen
Buddhist encapsulates a heterodox conception of
language. Much of its novel and shocking
insightfulness derives from its use of an acoustic
language. By 'acoustic language' I mean a linguistic
system whose fundamental rules derive somehow from a
primary emphasis on the activity of listening,
rather than seeing. We should be able to agree at
the beginning that our own linguistic system, even
down to the level correspondent to primordial
experience, is thoroughly visual. Vision has been
the dominant metaphor for knwoing since Plato's
time.(1) To know an object is to have an
image(eidos) of that thing, a pictorial or
preconceptual representation which my then be given
a definite description in accordance with the rule
of discourse.(2) But the non-standard conception of
language in Zen has been overlooked, or camouflaged,
also by the eidetic metaphor strewn throughout its
principal writings. Huang Po, for instance, says in
the Chun Chun Record: "Mind is like the void in
which there is no confusion or evil, as when the sun
wheels through it shining upon the four corners of
the world."(3) Pai Ching states: "What in Buddhas is
called illuminating wisdom is called knowledge in
bodhisattvas.... It is not the same as the
dark-enshrouded ignorance of sentient beings."(4) Ta
Hui puts it: "But when a gentleman of affairs opens
his eyes and is mindful of what he sees, there is
nothing that is not an enemy spirit blocking the
Path."(5) These examples could be multiplied
endlessly. Perhaps they evidence a carelessness in
choice of words. Perhaps they are part and parcel of
the Zen knack for using a straw to drive home a
nail. Without commenting on their meaning, I want to
examine the special efficacy of an acoustic language
in Zen. After some general cautions on regarding the
Zen linguistic system visually, I will turn to the
thinker most sensitive to its acoustic
character--Dogen Kigen. There, I will show that
emphasis on listening imposes a peculiar ontological
status on the human body, which will allow me to say
something about the body's role in attaining a
non-dualistic insight.

II

Taken at face value, an eidetic language collides
with the main presuppositions of Zen Buddhism. It
tends to affirm an unchanging, permanent realm of
truths which exist apart from all phenomenal
appearances, while Zen holds to the doctrine of
annika(mujo(a)), or the unabidingness of all things.
Hence, commitment to an eidetic metaphor as deeply
formative of language favors (as did Plato) a
Parmenidean universe over a Heraclitean one.(6)
Second, it posits an eduring, self-identical soul,
person, or self, in contradistinction to the Zen
belief in annatman(muga(b)), or selflessness. Third,
it places the phenomenal world in a secondary,
derivative position relative to the changeless realm
of the eidos. Zen

P.116

Buddhism, on the other hand, maintains the doctrine
of pratiityasamutpaada, or the essential dependence
of things oil each other, in which, arising and
perishing simultaneously and mutually dependent on
one another, each entity depends solely on the
totality and on the void for its existence. The
impact of this threefold collision is the creation
of a thoroughgoing dualism in language. Use of such
a language to guide a student to the satori
experience is necessarily self-defeating, much in
the same way that utterance of Descartes' primary
proposition, "I am," defeats any attempt to deny
self-existence.(7) The hubris of such a linguistic
system--that which confers duality on it--is that
its use points away from the immediate act of using
it--points to the transcendent truth, or an ideal
subject, or a universe of objects pre-or
post-existent to the act of employing the language.
The point of language, when non-dualistically
encountered, is that its self-identity is the
totality, and on it alone rests the extreme tension
of arising from and out of the void.

III

Dogen adumbrates an acoustic view of a linguistic
system first in his discussion of the mitsugo(c),
"secret words." Commenting on their intrinsic
"secrecy," he says:

The mitsu(d) in question means intimacy
(shimmitsu(e)) and absence of distance.(8)

The mitsugo are "secret" or "hidden" insofar as
their concealment derives from our habitual
objectifying tendencies with regard to the
discriminants of our experience. Our usual
linguistic conventions suppose the referent cleaved
from the reference. Russell is essentially correct
when he tries to reduce all language to names.(9)
Once this assumption is rejected, however, and the
proximity of the two elements reidentified, meaning
takes on another dimension. The word-object complex,
in its transparency, reveals the suchness of mind
(shinsho(f)). Thus, only the mitsugo can serve to
reveal the self-nature of what is, since once the
back of objectification is broken. "nothing is
concealed throughout the entire universe
(henkai-fuzozo(g))." Part of this revelation goes to
show: that convention entails concealment. The
secrecy of the mitsugo results from our eidetically
induced blindness to things.

If we step back a moment to ask after the origin
of linguistic distance--the opposite of the
mitsugo's proximity--a subtle projection of the
eidetic metaphor becomes apparent. To see visually
any object requires us, given our bipedal stance in
the world, to be physically separate from that
object. As Erwin Straus claims. our visual
perceptive capacities, with their entailed epistemic
values, do not function properly until the object is
held at length, at the focal point of our binocular
system.(10) Visual perception is necessarily a sense
of distance. When vision is allowed to order the
sensorium. then language, which reflects sense
experience. mirrors the original act of
distantiation. If the mitsugo exist, as Dogen says
they do, they must belong to a language not so
committed. In their "intimacy," they intimate a
language which echoes the ear.

P.117

Surely, such a language is primarily a spoken.
and only derivatively a written, one. It is parole
rather than langue, socratic rather than platonic.
But, it is not just the speaking of a language that
confers a different ontological character. Words can
fall on deaf ears, or on ones which reiterate the
distance-making structure of eidetic speech. Dogen
indicates the addition prerequisite:

Nevertheless it is possible to realize and penetrate
into the inaudible in speech (gowaji no
fumon(h)).(12)

Speech (gowa) persists in conveying a subject-object
dualism until the listener enters it proximately and
discerns the silence which arises simultaneous to
it. Speech hears the eidetic distance once the
listener becomes attuned to (and hears) that which
makes no sound because it can make no sound. Speech
acoustically announces itself as a message from
no-speech (fugowa(i)).(13)

The dissolution of visualism in Zen language
results, according to Dgoen, in gaining perception
of the ground which audibly unites the auditor with
what is spoken. Such "penetration" uncovers that
which is neither audible (mon(j)) nor inaudible
(fumon(k)), but which represents that continuity at
whose poles the latter two reside. At the level of
continuity, where neither predication nor its
privation obtains, the essential suchness of things
stands forth: such is "the essential substance of
the Buddha", as Huang Po calls it.(14) If we now
pose the question as to the mode of perception Dogen
has in mind, he refers us to Tung-shan, who says: "I
await the time of no-speech (fugowa) and hear
immediately." The activity of
hearing-immediately(sokumon(l) ) is that which
contacts the ground of an acoustic language. Dogen
explains:

When speech is uttered ordinarily there is no
immediate hearing at all. Hearing-immediately is
realized at the time of no-speech. But no-speech
does not wait for a special occasion.... In
hearing-immediately, speech is not removed from its
own place to a distant location. When speech is
uttered, hearing-immediately--hitherto hidden in the
bosom of speech--does nor thunder suudenly....In
other words, you apprehend hearing-immediately when
speech is uttered.(15)

Hearing-immediately is a form of audition which
exists as a possibility during any auditory :
experience. It differs from ordinary hearing in at
least three characteristics: (1) direction, (2)
objective, and (3) evidence.

(1) The direction of ordinary listening is
toward the object, a word-sound, while
hearing-immediately is directed exclusively toward
itself, the activity of audition. It thus occupies
itself with the inner relations of audition. rather
than with the conventional relations the word-sound
assumes by participating in the rules attaching it
to an object.

(2) The objective of or-dinary listening is
comprehension of the meaning of the word-sound,
supplied by the set of conventions and rules,
subsisting apart from the speech (gowa) .
Hearing-immediately, directed toward no-speech, as
Dogen says, seeks to understand the polar tension
binding the universe of speech to its emanation from
the void. Such understanding occurs as spontaneous
entry into

P.118

the field created by the polarity speech itself
marks. It is the eruption of the ineffable into the
audible continuum speech participates in. It does
not annihilate speech, but simultaneously affirms it
and displaces it.

(3) The evidence of ordinary listening is given
by the consequences or implications of having
received the word-sound---for example, listening to
the question, "What is the Buddha's real name?" and
responding on the basis of memory or deduction.
Hearing-immediately, on the other hand, evidences
itself, in the transformation of the auditor's total
understanding. Hence, responses to spoken
interrogation are notorious non sequiturs by
conventional measures. Examples abound in Zen
literature. One is:

A monk asked Yun Men, "What is talk that goes beyond
Buddhas and Patriarchs? '' Men said, "Cake."(16)

The utterance, when spoken, remains in contact with
the vector pointing from speech to no-speech, by
which vector hearing-immediately is impacted.

The difference between ordinary audition and
hearing-immediately can be more sharp or less.
Repeated investigation of its occurrence in a
person's experience constitutes for Dogen the
process of "ongoing enlightenment"
(bukkojoji(m)).(17) His recommended training regimen
is simply a preparedness for the unexpected advent
of hearing-immediately.(18) The examination forms a
natural progression. At the furthest extreme lies
the satori experience of Chi Hsien, whose
realization of the force binding the audible to the
inaudible arose from the ping with which a broken
tile hit a bamboo stick. He wrote:

The sound of a blow causes all knowledge to cease,

Gone is my need of further practice and
observance.(19)

Dogen claims that an acoustic language supplies
a sounder basis than an eidetic one for a continuing
investigation of how the phenomenal world arises
moment-by-moment from the void. Why does he believe
a language of the ear sustains "ongoing
enlightenment"? Or, to ask a corollary question,
what peculiarity of structure in immediate-hearing
(sokumon) opens onto nntological possibilizing? In
part, as suggested, it is its proximate nature that
immediate hearing comes from so close as not to be
entirely captive to the conventions of speech
(gowa). It retains cognizance of what is other than
speech.(20) In part, its understanding is actional,
to use Bergson's phrase. Hearing necessarily is
temporal: it registers a tempo and a rhythm, which
can be translated musically to a score.
Hearing-immediately thus pertains to activity,
unfolding, doing. It is less prone. therefore, to
fall prey to a Parmenidean illusion. And, in part,
it is its character as sensate. Immediate-hearing,
unlike ordinary sense experience, does not yield a
sense datum, as object of a perception-event, nor
does it fall easily into Hume's distinction between
sensation and perception.(21) If it did, it still
would be cast under the mold of the eidetic: it
would image an outer event, along the model of the
photographic plate. Rather, immediate hearing is
sensate perceptivity, or, by the same token,
perceptive sensation.

P.119

These three attributes of immediate hearing--its
proximity, its actional nature, and its sensate
nature--remind one of Marcel's analysis of the
body-as-mine." Their commonality allows us to
conclude without the shadow of a doubt that it is
the management of the lived-body experience, through
the means of immediate-hearing, that produces its
special ontologizing possibilities.
Immediate-hearing converges with the general field of
sensation underlying all organic movement, willed or
no. The experience of this general field Marcel
calls sentir; Husserl derives his notion of
kinaesthesia from it; others have spoken of it as
proprioception.(23) By whatever name, this
experience, it is clear, lays open the path leading
through the inaudible in speech (gowaji no fumon) to
a non-dualistic understanding of language.
Immediate-hearing functions then like a broad
conduit, through which the auditor is enabled to
pass toward the general field of sensation. Once
participating in this field, he is able to orient
himself along the line extending from the audible to
the inaudible, through on to the void.(24)

It is clear likewise that these deliberations
were not unknown to Dogen. The engagement of the
general field of sensation, Marcel's sentir. Dogen
speaks of as "mustering the body-mind" (shinjin o
koshite(n)). He states:

Mustering our bodies and minds, we see things and
mustering our bodies and minds we hear sounds,
thereby understand them intimately.(25)

To muster the body-mind, to enter into the
lived-body experience, is to cast off the perceived
objects together with their reliance on the
dualistic tendencies of eidetic language. It is to
relinquish the outer-directedness of the body's
senses, which distance the world by positing sense
data. Furthermore, until the mustering, one has
failed to understand the first truth about
shingakudo(o) , the activity of understanding
(gakudo(p)) through the body:

Shingakudo is to learn the Way with the body--the
study on the part of the naked bodily whole
(seki-nikudan or shaku-nikudan(q)).(26)

Dogen's Way is that of the "naked bodily whole," not
intended as a poetic metaphor, but as an acute
insight into the efficacy of the organism's own
structure for elucidating the Real.

The body comes forth from the study of the Way, and
what originates from the investigation of the Way is
likewise the body. The entire universe is precisely
the very human body....(27)

In a similar fashion, Dogen's supportive
concepts indicate a knowledge of the general field
of sensation. The very idea of the non-dual unity of
body and mind (shinjin-ichinyo(r)), as implied by
the phrase "the body-mind.'' represents his search
for descriptive power in a region of experience
where description is nil. Or, at least it must
remain moot whether description can ever be cleansed
of its eidetic supposition which tends to picture or
portray an object, thereby separating mind from
body, body from mind. In its intimate alliance with
audition, the naked bodily whole--and the Way with
the body it points to--is there simply for

P.120

the mustering. Similarly, immediate-hearing is there
simply for the speech. Activity is all. Movement is
all. Dogen's practice runs in Heraclitus' universe.
Attuning the ear means attuning it to incessant
change. Mustering the body-mind means re-mustering
it under the changeful conditions of its newly
reinhabited state. Devising a language which
captures this changefulness, an acoustic language,
is surely a job to be done by casting the conceptual
net into new waters, if it is to be done at all.

V

Dogen is fond of saying, "Mindfulness of the body
(kanshin(s) ) is the body's mindfulness
(shinkan(t))." He goes on to explain:

It is the body's mindfulness, but no others. While
the body's mindfulness is realised, the mind's
unmindfulness cannot grasp anything though groping
for it, and it is not consummated.(28)

Here, we are given a justification for the Way with
the body (shingakudo) , in conjunction with
immediate-hearing, as contrasted with the way with
the mind (shingakudo(u) ). The latter plays an
integral part in developing an understanding which
can penetrate the continuum from the arising of all
phenomena to the void. This role involves the
student in the rigorous meditation training of the
conscious mind, the cosmic mind, and the
transcendental mind, But, left to its own devises,
the mind's mindfulness remains shot through with the
suppositions of eidetic language. These necessarily
are dualistic. The defilements of the mind--its
inborn and acquired inherencies to seek its
object--are apparently ineradicable so long as the
mind is used to slay the mind.(29) It is at this
juncture that Dogen's radical. redefinition of the
enlightenment experience comes to the fore. To hold
enlightenment to be an event which transpires and is
over "once and for all" is to conceive it in eidetic
terms. The atemporal nature of vision again looms,
threatening the fundamental Buddhist belief in
impermanence, annika. Because enlightenment is
objectified, reified, and expected to remain
confined to a specified event. it is misconceived.
Hence. the mind's mindfulness is "not consummated."

By contrast. the power of bukkojoji, ongoing
enlightenment, lies in avoiding the tendency to
leave time behind. The naked bodily whole
(sekinikuden) possesses an organic continuity which
registers the temporal passage by means of its own
mortality. Here, by joining to it a sensate
perceptivity, we can study cosmic movement,
participate in it mindfully, and, thereby, come to
realize it. Indeed, as Dogen indicates, the movement
of our sensate perceptivity is precisely our
realizing our understanding as beings having a
lived-body experience. It is ongoing in the way that
there is no end to redirecting the sensate
perceptivity back to the naked bodily whole; there
is perpetually a fresh field of general sensation
requiring a readjustment of our perceptivity. The
attunement of these two is what Dogen calls ongoing
enlightenment.

P.121

Indeed you should know that ongoing enlightenment is
neither the process of practice nor the result of
enlightenment.(30)

Curiously, it is at the point of ongoing
enlightenment that we encounter the inaudible in
speech. We had hitherto listened to the inaudible in
speech the way we listen to things eidetically, in
expectation of a result external to our listening.
In the threes of ongoing enlightenment, we listen to
our own listening. Finally, we are able to listen
across the expanse of the two realms, the eidetic
and the acoustic, the objective and the
non-objective. For, we listen to what is being said
conventionally. and we listen to that from where our
conventional notions arise in listening. We listen
to the void. Or, as Tung-shan says,(31) regarding
when we listen in this way, "I understand the
meaning of speech a little."(32)

NOTES

1. The extent to which this is true in Plato's
thought is shown by recalling that the essence of
what can be known---the proper object of
knowledge-is the Form, or the Eidos. Vision plays an
equally important role in the key epistemic myths of
the Cave and the Divided Line.

2. Wittgenstein brings this idea to finest
clarity when he notes: "In the proposition we hold a
proto-picture up against reality." (Notebooks,
1914-1916 (New York: Harper Row. 1961), p. 32).

3. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. John
Blofield (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 31.

4. Sayings and Doing of Pai-Chang, trans. Thomas
Clear) (Los Angeles. Center Publications, 1978), p.
63.

5. Swampland Flowers, trans. Christopher Cleary
(New York: Grove Press, 1977), p. 39.

6. It also favors realism and verificationism
over constructivism and a phenomenological,
diachronic analysis of experience.

7. Meditations, II. Cf. J. Hintikka, "Cogito,
Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?" Philosophical
Review 71 (January 1962): 3-32.

8. Translations from the Shobogenzo of Dogen are
taken from Hee-jin Kim. Dogen Kigen--Mystic Realist
(Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 1975), p.
108. Hereafter designated as Shovogenzo. Kim's
translations are from Dogen zenju zenshu, ed. Okubo
Doshu, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. 1969 1970).
English translations of the more familiar ]2-chapter
version of the Shobogenzo can be found in Yuho
Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen (New York: Weatherhill,
1976): and in Thomas Cleary, Record of Things Heard
(Boulder: Prajna Press, 1980).

9. "On Denoting". Mind 14(1909): 479-493. Quine
continues the argument by claiming that all language
can be reduced to the names of sets of things
(predicates) and the relation of class-membership
(Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (New York
and London: The Technology Press of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley
Sons, 1960)).

10. Cf. "The great abstraction of suchness is
achieved in the beholding gaze: the eidos discerned
from the hyle." (Erwin Straus, "Born to See, Bound
to Behold." in Spicker, ed., The Philosophy of the
Body (Chicago: Quadrangle Books. 1970), p. 343).

11. Socrates says, "And once a thing is put in
writing, the composition. whatever it may be, drifts
all over the place. getting Into the hands not only
of those who understand it. but equally of those who
have no business with it; it doesn't know how to
address the right people, and not address the
wrong." (Phaedrus, 275E).

12. Shobogenzo, "Bukkojoji."

13. Cf. the Surangama Suutra:

At the start, by directing the hearing (ear) Into
the stream (of meditation) , this organ became
detached from Its object. (In Luk, Ch'an and Zen
Teaching (Berkeley: Shambala, 1970), p.89).

P.122

14. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p.73.

15. Shobogenzo, "Bukkojoji."

16. The Blue Cliff Record (Pi Yen Lu), trans.
Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary (Boulder: Shambala,
1977). vol. 3. p. 506.

17. Bukkojoji means literally "on (the matter
of) going beyond the Buddhas." Zengaku daijiten
defines this as follows: "The Buddha is the ideal of
the practice of Buddhism; but true practice is not
to attach to the practice itself, but to achieve a
state that transcends the Buddha." Kim's translation
as "ongoing enlightenment" relies on the thought
that the investigatory practice is itself no
different from enlightenment, that enlightenment is
not the end result, attained only after the
practice, that the fully embodied (and fully
audited) practice is enlightenment itself.

18. Shikan-taza, or just sitting, the persistent
confrontation of the vector leading through the
general field of sensation of the naked bodily
whole, was Dogen's recommendation for engaging the
process of ongoing enlightenment.

19. Luk, p.130.

20. Cf. Heidegger's analysis of the voice of
conscience, in Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), sections 56
and 57.

21. Hume. David, A Treatise of Human Nature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), book I, part 1,
section 2.

22. Gabriel Marcel, Being & Having, trans. J.
Collins (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

23. Cf. my "Medicine as the Moral Basis of Human
Destiny,'' in Husserliana Analecta 9, forthcoming.

24. But Dogen warns: "However, it is not like a
reflection dwelling in the mirror, nor is it like
the moon and the water. As one side is illumined,
the other side is darkened." (Shobogenzo,
"Genjokoan").

25. Ibid. Kosu means "bring up a previous remark
or comment," to 'cite.'

26. Shobogenzo, "Shinjin-gakudo.'' Sekinikudan
means "lump of red flesh.''

27. Ibid.

28. Shobogenzo, "Sanjushichihon-bodaibumpo".

29. Dogen says suggestively that use of the mind
"means also that after having the thought of
enlightenment through cosmic resonance (kannodoko),
you devote yourself to the great Way of the Buddhas
and patriarchs...." Shobogenzo, "Shinjin-gakudo.''
That is, the mind is turned toward listening and
acoustical reality.

30. Shobogenzo, "Bukkojoji."

31. Ibid

32. I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the
assistance of Philip Yampolsky and Marleigh Grayer
Ryan with regard to the translations I have used.
Any errors in this final version are my own
responsibility.