Truth and Zen

·期刊原文
Truth and Zen

By T. P. Kasulis
Philosophy East and West
Volumn 30. no. 4(OCTOBER, 1980)
P 453-464

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Truth and Zen Buddhism--it is difficult to imagine a
pair of more abstruse. yet fascinating, topics,
Rather than discuss either one of the two, I will
consider them both simultaneously in hopes that,
like some schoolboy magician in a chemistry
laboratory, I might mix together two murky, colored
concoctions and thereby effect-abracadabra-a
transparent, clear solution.

To begin our analysis of truth, we need the same
general framework. Aristotle points us in a
classical, though still relevant, direction. In an
argument for the validity of the principle of the
excluded middle. Aristotle makes the well-known
definition:

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not
that it is, is false, while to say of what is that
it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.

Metaphysics, 1011(b)

This definition sets down the general principle of
correspondence and captures quite well the
man-on-the-street view of truth. Aristotle, however,
is not the man on the street (he may be peripatetic,
but he is hardly pedestrian); if we wish a clearer
picture of Aristotle's view of truth, we must look
more closely at what he says in other parts of his
writings. In this regard. it is helpful to see how
Aristotle defines "false" in the lexiconical section
of the Metaphysics (1024(b)). For Aristotle, there
are three kinds of falseness: false as a thing,
false as an account, and false as a person. The
second of this triad obviously relates directly to
the preceding definition, but what of the other two?
A thing (pragma) may be false in either of two ways.
First, a false thing is a state of affairs that does
not always pertain, for example, the
commensurability of the diagonal of a square with
its sides (which never pertains) and my sitting down
(which is not always the case). Aristotle's point is
not very clear here. Perhaps for a state of affairs
to be "true" in his proposed sense, it must be true
in itself without reference to any particular
configuration of reality at a given time. That is,
Aristotle may have in mind states of affairs that
can be known to be true on a priori grounds.
Fortunately, for our purposes, the other sense of
the falsehood of things is more important so we will
not dwell on this point any further. The second way
for a thing to be false is for it to appear to us to
be other than what it is really. Thus, Aristotle
gives the examples of dreams and sketches, things
which actually exist (as dreams and sketches) but
which lead us to believe they have an existence of a
different sort. Thus, dreams are confused with sense
perceptions and our perception of the sketch is
confused with a perception of the thing the sketch
portrays. The important point here is that the
confusion is based in the thing's appearance, not in
our evaluation. Hence, we are here speaking of false
things, not false judgments, according to Aristotle.

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What of falsehood insofar as it applies to
persons? A false person is one who likes to give
false accounts for their own sake and who is skilled
in convincing others of their truth. Persons.
Aristotle comments, are false in one of the ways
that things are false, namely, they "produce a false
appearance." In one sense, the truth of persons
amounts to truth-telling or honesty, but again we
would do well to view this in the larger
Aristotelian context. For Aristotle, a person who
knows true accounts. but delights in misleading
others, is one who corrupts his own character. That
is. false persons present not only accounts, but
also themselves, falsely. Behind this standpoint is
the classical position that what one knows cannot be
separated from what one is: to distort willfully the
truth of one's own knowledge is to distort the truth
of one's own personhood.

In short. even though it may be correct that
Aristotle is a straightforward correspondence
theorist in his formal definition of truth, it is
equally clear that Aristotle wants to say more about
truth than can be encompassed by that definition.
Why? Why is Aristotle not satisfied with just the
truth of accounts? Is there some intimate and
profound relationship among the three truths? I
believe there is. Aristotle is not only interested
in the definition of truth; he is also interested in
the acquisition of truth. In contemporary philosophy
as well, we are familiar with the distinction
between theories of the meaning of truth and
theories of the means to acquiring truth, so
Aristotle's concerns are not really foreign to us.
We should not be too hasty with this comparison,
however. In our framework, we may say the question
of the meaning of truth is a metaphysical one, but
the issue of the means to truth falls in the domain
of epistemology. Aristotle differs in that his
concern for the acquisition of truth is, at least in
part, metaphysical as well as epistemological. That
is to say, as a metaphysicia... Aristotle feels
compelled not only to define truth, but also to
explain metaphysically how it is that the
acquisition of truth is possible. In this respect,
for true accounts to be possible, there must be true
things and true persons a well. If things did not
generally appear as they are and if persons were not
generally honest with themselves and with others,
there would be no touchstone for us in making
judgments about what is. In other words, a
stipulation for the correspondence between
what-is-said and what-is is that what-is show itself
as what-it-is and that what-is-said be a genuine
expression of what-one-experiences. This is the
fundamentally metaphysical connection among
Aristotle's three truths.

This Aristotelian account of the metaphysics of
truth will be a useful Guide in our discussion of
the Ch'an and Zen tradition. Let us begin with the
Platform Suutra of the Sixth Patriarch, one of the
first major works to be distinctively Ch'an in
orientation. Its author, Hui-neng, lived in the
seventh and eighth centuries and supposedly founded
the eventually dominant southern school of Ch'an
Buddhism. If we take "truth" to correspond roughly
to the Chinese character chen(3), Hui-neng speaks of
truth most often in terms of the "truly-so"
(chen-ju(b)). the sinification of the Sanskrit term
tathataa. In the

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Platform Suutra this tathataa is understood to be
the essence or substance of thought; thoughts are
taken to be the functioning of tathataa (ch. 17). In
this way, tathataa becomes equivalent to the primal
or original nature. that to which one awakens when
one sees into one's own mind (ch. 31). In short,
Hui-neng's language is reminiscent of the basic
Fa-hsiang(c) or Yogaacaara position. there is an
original nature (pen-hsing(d) ) that, when left
unpolluted in no-thinking (wu-nien(e)), becomes the
functioning truly-so. Thus. it seems that Hui-neng
is saying that at the base of the mind, we find the
basis of truth. We must be cautious with this
interpretation, however. Various Yogaacaara texts,
especially the La^nkaavataara Suutra, were very
influential in the early development of Ch'an
Buddhism and Hui-neng's choice of words reflects
this connection. Therefore, even though Hui-neng may
use terminology that correlates. in some ways, with
Yogaacaara's idealistic view of reality, this may be
more a matter of historical accident than deep
philosophical commitment.

The question that now arises is whether
Hui-neng's view is in any way similar to any aspect
of Aristotle's threefold view of truth. In certain
respects. Hui-neng's truly-so and Aristotle's truth
of things serve a similar metaphysical function.
That is, in both cases, the nature of reality
appears as it is. In fact, Hui-neng is more radical
in this regard in that Aristotle recognizes the
existence of at least some false things, but the
Platform Suutra's truly-so is apparently
all-inclusive. Despite this difference, Aristotle
and Hui-neng agree on one crucial issue: the major
cause of falsehood is our mistaken interpretations
of what appears. The world is not fundamentally
illusory: it is our own delusions that prevent us
from seeing the way things are.

But what of Hui-neng's idealistic strain? After
all, the Platform Suutra implies that we come to
know the truth when we see into our own minds.
Certainly, this seems to be a direct violation of
the Aristotelian notion of correspondence. But does
it have to be? Let us consider Thomas version of
Aristotelian correspondence (Summa Theologica, Part
I, Q. 21, Art. 2):

Truth consists in the equation of mind and thing....
Now the mind. that is the cause of the thing, is
related to it as its rule and measure: where as the
converse is the case with the mind, that receives
its knowledge from things. When therefore things are
the measure and rule of mind, truth consists in the
equation of the mind to the thing.... But when the
mind is the rule or measure of things, truth
consists in the equation of the thing to the mind:
just as the work of the artist is said to to true,
when it is in accordance with his art.

Thomas explicitly states here that the
correspondence between the mind and what-is can
occur in either of two ways: either the what-is can
be the standard to which the mind conforms or vice
versa. We will have the opportunity to discuss the
second alternative at a later point. For now, let us
focus on the first, the one we have been discussing
thus far: the mind is the receptor of percepts and
adjusts itself to what the senses report. In light
of our concern about Hui-neng's idealism, we should
take note of the fact that Thomas sees this
correspondence as an internal relationship within
consciousness, that is.

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the correspondence is really between thoughts and
sense experiences, not thoughts and things. This
leads Thomas to the striking statement: "Truth
resides only in the intellect" (S. T. part I, Q. 16,
Art. 1) . Later (in Art. 3) . Thomas quotes
Aristotle's De Anima (431(b)) for support: "The soul
is in a way all existing things; for existing things
are either sensible or thinkable...." There is a
potential equivocation here: when Aristotle and
Thomas consider the definition of truth, they speak
of the correspondence between mind and things; but
when they consider the practical test for truth, the
correspondence seems to be between two mental
constituents: interpretation and phenomena. Here,
though, Aristotle's three truths resolve the
difficulty. Because of the metaphysical stipulation
that most things are true, what-is is generally
what-appears. Thus, we need worry about the
discrepancy between phenomena and things only in
those rare cases wherein a false thing appears. Here
previous experience and habit play an important
role: we learn not to trust dreams and sketches, for
example, on face value. In the case of Hui-neng, as
we have seen, the theory does not admit the
possibility of false things; everything is
essentially tathataa. Therefore, in practice, things
and phenomena coalesce. In this restricted sense,
then, Hui-neng's theory, as a theory about the
acquisition of truth, is not necessarily any more
idealistic than Aristotle's or Thomas'.

Still, philosophically speaking, Hui-neng's view
of truth is not as sophisticated as that of
Aristotle and Thomas. Most importantly, Hui-neng
does not develop any explicit idea of the truth of
persons. This is an important omission in the
following respect: if things are intrinsically true,
how is it that delusions arise? Obviously, this must
be the result of some deficiency in the person, but
the Platform Suutra does not develop this idea in
any detail. This is not to say that Hui-neng did not
recognize the importance of the person in his
training methods; the interpersonal encounter
between master and disciple was as much a part of
Ch'an or Zen training then as it is now. The point,
however, is that the written account in the Platform
Suutra is more mechanistic than personalistic. It is
understandable that the following famous koan would
be attributed to Hui-neng: "Without any
consideration of good or evil, right now. what is
your original face before your parents were born?"
It is consistent with Hui-neng's position to
emphasize such a fundamental prepersonal. amoral
reality which (upon enlightenment) comes to function
as the mind of the person. Still, an emphasis on the
truth of the person, rather than on the ontology of
the truly-so, would seem to be a more useful account
for Ch'an practice. Lin-chi apparently agrees.

About one and a half centuries after Hui-neng,
Lin-chi founded the southern Ch'an line of
transmission named after him. In the Lin-chi Records
the treatment of truth is headed in the direction we
have already anticipated. Rather than the truly-so,
Lin-chi emphasizes the "true person" (chen-jen(t));
rather than Hui-neng's no-thinking, Lin-chi speaks
of "no position" (wu-wei(u) ) . Putting these
together, we find in the third chapter Lin-chi's
famous reference

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to the "true person of no position." This term
played a central role in Lin-chi's training
techniques, and he often demanded of his disciples
that they make manifest this true nature of the
personality. In a sense, Lin-chi sees a fundamental
connection between Hui-neng's "original nature" and
"original face;" that is, Lin-chi makes it explicit
that the truly-so is manifested in the activity of
the true person. The truth is based as much in the
person as it is in the tathataa. The roots of
Lin-chi's idea may be in chapter 6 of the
Chuang-tzu: "There must first be a true person
before there can be true knowledge." The "true
person" is one of Chuang-tzu's common designations
for the sage who acts spontaneously, responsively,
and without contrivance. In this respect, we can
understand Hui-neng's "no-thinking" as a state of
responsive awareness in which one is not
self-consciously putting one's experience into
static con-ceptual frameworks. In any case, Lin-chi
expressly states that the true person represents the
spontaneous functioning at the basis of all human
activity (3; ch. 3) and the mode in which intention
and act are inseparable (yao-hsing-chi-hsing;
yao-tso-chi-tso(h), 11d, ch. 10).

In short, Lin-chi recognizes that for
correspondence to take place, there must be not only
the world and the mind, but also the activity of
corresponding itself; this activity is the
functioning of the true person. "Moreover, make
yourself master of your situation; wherever you
stand is truth" (13a; ch. 12). What is Lin-chi's
position on idealism? Although he does say that
there is no dharma external to the person, he points
out (27; ch. 18) that this should not be taken to
mean that the dharma is accessible through inactive,
introspective contemplation. The dharma is not
located in any single place; it is not something
toward which one takes a stand. The true person has
no status or position; wherever that person stands
is truth. I take this to be a response to the
idealistic reading of Hui-neng. Lin-chi wants it to
be clear that the ideal is not to transcend the
external world and withdraw into the mind; rather,
the ideal is to find the truly-so, to discover the
true person, in one's spontaneous and responsive
activity within the world.

This discussion of the activity of the true
person returns us to a fore-mentioned, but as yet
unanalyzed, point in Thomas' view of truth. We noted
above that Thomas discussed two ways in which the
correspondence between mind and things can occur:
either the mind can conform to things or things can
conform to the mind. it is this latter possibility
that concerns us now. Thomas' example of the artwork
is a fruitful one. Here we have the case that the
mind becomes the rule for the term of the thing and.
if the artwork fulfills the intent of the mind, we
can say there is a correspondence between the
intellect and what-is. Hence, Thomas maintains that
it is appropriate to speak of truth in artistic
creativity. (incidentally, this medieval view of
truth in art has had its impact even on contemporary
theories of aesthetics; see, for example, Albert
Hofstadter's discussion of the "truth of things" in
his Truth and Art.) The question that now faces us
is this: Lin-chi has maintained that

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the truth of things can be manifested in the
activity of the true person, but would he also say
that the truth of things can be created by some
activity of the true person? No, to make truth even
partially dependent for its existence on the person
would be to deny that all things in themselves are
tathataa. Here we have an important divergence
between the Ch'an Buddhists and part of the Western
tradition. We will return to this point later.

A second point of divergence is that Aristotle
and Thomas hold that the truth of persons is of
concern to ethics as well as to metaphysics and
epistemology. That is, truth insofar as it applies
to persons is a virtue. In the Nicomachean Ethics
(1127(a)), for example, Aristotle says that truth is
the mean between boastfulness and false modesty.
Thomas adds to the list of vices opposing truth two
more: lying and dissimulation or hypocrisy (S. T.
Part II-II, Q. 110-113). The Ch'an tradition does
not discuss truth as a virtue. There are various
reasons for this: Ch'an Buddhism wanted to
distinguish itself from the Confucianist emphasis on
virtues and the Hiinayaanist orientation toward the
precepts, for example. The true person for Lin-chi
(and for Chuang-tzu, in fact) acts naturally and is
not consciously trying to live up to some ideal.
Hence, explicit reference to ethics is avoided. In
fairness, however, it should be noted that there is
some common ground beneath the divergence just
noted. One could easily argue that for the classical
philosopher, to display virtue (virtus) is really
just actualizing one's inherent potential to be a
man (vir). Taking this tack, it is much more
difficult to distinguish sharply the Zen project of
manifesting one's original face (Buddha-nature, true
personhood) from this classical sense of virtue.
Thus, the distinction between the two traditions may
not be as hard and fast as the prima facie evidence
would indicate.

The discussion of truth as virtue does raise
another important point, however. In Aristotle and
Thomas, truth-telling is primarily posed in terms of
presenting oneself to others. That is, the true
person (one possessing the virtue, truth) does not
mislead others. In Lin-chi, however, the emphasis is
on self-awareness, that is, one who is a true
person does not lie to oneself. Of course, these two
orientations are not mutually exclusive and, in
fact, they are ultimately interdependent.
Nevertheless, the difference in emphasis is striking
As we shall see, the Ch'an and Zen emphasis
approaches more the existentialist sense of
authenticity than truth-telling in the ordinary
sense.

For a more holistic account of the Zen position,
we will turn now to the writings of Dogen, a
thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master. Dogen is
probably the most systematic and philosophically
inclined of all Zen or Ch'an writers. Thus, although
he does not explicitly say much about "truth," he
does address himself to many of the same issues that
have concerned us here. Even though Dogen is
traditionally associated with the Soto rather than
the Rinzai (Lin-chi) branon of Zen. Dogen did not so
identify himself. For the purposes

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of this article, he can be seen as a legitimate heir
of Hui-neng and Lin-chi, at least regarding their
view of truth.

Even though Dogen makes scattered references to
tathataa, he has his own term for the truth of
things, namely, genjokoan(l), "things' being present
as they are." Hence, like most of his Ch'an
predecessors, Dogen, in effect, denies that there is
illusion; there are only the delusions we inflict on
ourselves. From this standpoint, even a dream as
dream is tathataa; if someone should take it to be
other than it is (as sense experience, for example),
the interpretation, not the thing, is the locus of
falsehood. Thus, if we analyze Dogen's view of
interpretation, we will reach the heart of his view
on truth and falsehood.

In referring to enlightenment, it is significant
that Dogen generally prefers to use the term
"authentication" (sho(j)) rather than "realization"
(satori(k)). While the word "realization" often has
the connotation of being a single incidence of
recognition, the term "authentication" may convey
the nuance of a continual verification of the
genuineness of one's interpretation. Dogen does not
reject the importance of sudden insight (he himself
had such a peak experience while in China), but it
is the process of continual authentication that best
characterizes the unique character of enlightenment.
But how does the enlightened person test his or her
interpretation? Like Thomas, Dogen would maintain
that there is no extraexperiential touchstone, no
thing-in-itself that can serve as the standard for
evaluation. As Thomas says, "truth resides only in
the intellect," that is, consciousness must reflect
on itself (either intuitively or conceptually) so as
to maintain the correspondence between its
interpretative structures and its sense experiences.
Dogen's major work, The Treasury of the Correct
Dharma-eye (Shobogenzo(l) ) , is filled with
exhortatives that urge his disciples to examine
their own experiences and to authenticate their
understanding of what is. Still, Dogen differs from
Thomas in maintaining that a special mode of
reflexive consciousness is needed for this
authenticating process. In his fascicle, "A Talk
about Undertaking the Way" (Bendowa(m) ), Dogen
writes (p.729):

The Buddhas and Tathaagatas have the wondrous
art wu-wei(n): they directly transmit to each other
the wondrous dharma and authenticate perfect
enlightenment. Being passed on directly from Buddha
to Buddha, this (transmission) is without
distortion, i.e., jijuyuu sammai(o) itself is the
touchstone.

What does Dogen mean by this jijuyuu sammai?
"Sammai" is the Japanese equivalent to the Sanskrit
"samaadhi," a high-level meditative state. "Jijuyuu"
is a difficult term to translate; basically it is
the sense of spiritual well-being derived from Zen
practice and utilized in one's personal affairs.
Hence, it is a saintly serenity and joy that one
brings to one's daily life. To understand the
relevance of this to authentication, we must be
clear about Dogen's view of Zen practice, especially
zazen(p), "seated meditation."

In two fascicles, "The Principles of Zazen"
(Zazengi(q)) and "Admonitions

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about Zazen" (Zazenshin(r) ) . Dogen utilizes a
distinction among three terms: thinking (shiryo(s)),
not-thinking (fushiryo(t) ) and without-thinking
(hishiryo(u)). For our purposes here, the crucial
point to notice is that both thinking (any sort of
conceptual categorization, whether explicit or
implicit) and not-thinking (the denial or the lack
of all such conceptualizations) are inappropriate
characterizations of the zazen state. Rather, the
true mode of zazen is without-thinking, a responsive
state of awareness which is neither thinking nor
not-thinking, but which underlies the two. In fact,
Dogen implies that without-thinking takes the form
of either thinking or not-thinking. The importance
of this point is that, by Dogen's principle of the
oneness of practice and enlightenment
(shushoichinyo(v)), without-thinking must somehow be
authentication itself. Thus, if we can understand
without-thinking, we will also understand Dogen's
view of enlightened interpretation.

There are two ways in which the self-reflexive
test of corresponding within consciousness can take
place. For our example, we can refer to Dogen's
discussion of the interpretation of time in his
fascicle "Being-time" (Uji(w) ) . First, an
interpretation may be evaluated reflectively. This
is, in effect, a test for consistency in the
concepts that constitute one's interpretation of
time. Dogen considers the characterization of time
as "flying away" (p. 191). In such a case, Dogen
urges us to "investigate" (kaie suru(x) or gaku
suru(y)) the matter. If time flies away, Dogen
points out, then there is a separation between
oneself and time, between things and time. That is,
time itself is being considered a temporal thing.
Since this is nonsensical, the interpretation cannot
be definitive, Here we have the authenticating
response (without-thinking) assuming the form of
thinking. The self-reflexive evaluation may also be
nonreflective and nonconceptual, however. Thus,
Dogen refers to the fact that people often interpret
temporal experiences as something they have, rather
than as what people are. To someone who has the
wrong interpretation here, Dogen merely calls on him
or her to "Look! Look!" (p. 191). It is significatn,
by the way, that Lin-chi uses the same exhortation
in urging his disciples to see the true person
within themselves. Here, I argue. the
without-thinking authentication takes the form of
not-thinking, that is, the test takes the form of a
prereflective, nonconceptual "just looking."

From our account of the Ch'an and Zen tradition,
we can sec the rationale behind this twofold process
of authentication. Since things are present to us as
they really are, falsehood resides in our
interpretive processes. Dogen is correct in seeing
two ways in which these may lead us astray. First,
we may develop inconsistent interpretations which
obviously cannot describe reality without
equivocation and ambiguity. Second, we may lose
contact with what we directly experience, that is,
we may develop a nest of interconnected concepts
that are consistent among themselves, but simply do
not correspond to things (or, what is the same in
the Zen view, to things as directly experienced).
The dual testing process, therefore, attacks
falsehood from both sides.

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A few clarifications are needed. First of all,
we are not always aware of our interpretations; in
fact, they need not even be verbalized to play a
constitutive role in our actions, feelings, and
lines of thinking. Expressing this
phenomenologically, any positing attitude of an act
of consciousness involves interpretation. How then
are we to become aware of such tacit orientations?
"Jijuyuu sammai itself is the touchstone," that is,
in the meditative state of zazen one is in direct
contact with things as they are. Therefore, any
implicit assumption that is not a direct reflection
of this immediate experience will become manifest
through Zen practice. This does not mean that every
such interpretation is false; rather, they merely
require further authentication. Consider, for
example, a stick's appearing bent when it is
half-submerged in water. The Zen stipulation is that
the raw appearance is itself truly-so; the bent
stick's appearance is not itself false. Yet, insofar
as we do not expect the stick to be bent when we
take it out of the water, there must be a tacit
assumption here that requires authentication. In
this case, the authentication process takes the form
of thinking, not just looking. We might, for
instance, recall previous experiences wherein being
straight in the air is succeeded by being bent in
the water and vice versa. Therefore, by induction
one expects the same situation to prevail here. In
other words, in this example thinking relates the
present, direct experience to previous direct
experiences such that we see the consistency in the
interpretation. It is significant that (unlike most
of the Western tradition) the Zen view does not
require a scientific explanation of why straight
things appear bent when partially submerged, of what
causes the "same" really straight stick to appear
bent. In the Zen framework, interpretation must meet
the requirements of accurate description not
adequate explanation. In this case, the
interpretation accurately describes what is now
directly experienced in light of what will be
directly experienced (using what has been directly
experienced as the basis for the expectation). Thus,
even though the interpretation is not a simple
reflection of the present experience, it is still a
reflection of a set of direct experiences. Hence,
the interpretation is authenticated.

A further clarification concerns the term
"correspondence." As noted earlier, for their
definition of the meaning of truth, Aristotle and
Thomas speak of the correspondence between mind and
things, but for the test of truth, the
correspondence takes place within the intellect
(which is capable of both discursive and intuitive
insights, incidentally). Since the Zen tradition
rejects the notion of false things, the distinction
between the two correspondences tends to collapse.
In this sense, the Zen view is that correspondence
takes place between experiential components.
Accordingly, when there is correspondence, there is
a unified consciousness without dualism. When
interpretations are authenticated, there is no gap
between the understanding and the experience. In Zen
terminology, one knows directly just as one knows
that the water is cold when one drinks it. This lack
of opposition, this oneness of mind, is the basis of
the jijuyuu in jijuyuu sammai.

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A third clarification concerns the
interrelationships among thinking, not-thinking, and
without-thinking. We might, for example, ask the
following question: how do we know when we should
authenticate through thinking and when we should do
so through not-thinking? It is important to bear in
mind that this question again overlooks the
centrality of zazen (or jijuyuu sammai): we do not
decide; without-thinking spontaneously takes on the
form of the appropriate response. As Dogen puts it,
the jijuyuu sammai itself is the touchstone. In
other words. to authenticate one need only be
authentic to oneself and to be authentic to oneself,
one lets oneself show itself without thinking about
it. But how does one authenticate whether one is
being authentic? In the beginning, at least, one
cannot do this for oneself. A Zen master is
necessary for guidance. Through the encounter with
the master, any traces of inauthenticity are made
manifest to the disciple until the disciple learns
the serenity of jijuyuu sammai. From that point
onward, the presence of the serenity is itself the
authentication of the authenticity. In this respect,
zazen is the alpha and omega of Zen practice. This
leads Dogen to advocate shikantaza(z) , the
performance of zazen alone.

There is one corollary to Dogen's position that
deserves our attention here, namely, the notion that
truth (in its acquisition) is context-dependent.
Thus, in his fascicle "Things' Being Present as They
Are" (Genjokoan, p. 9), Dogen follows the Yogaacaara
view that the fish is correct in his belief that the
ocean is an emerald-like palace and the deva in
heaven is correct in his belief that the ocean is a
glittering string of lights, and the person far out
at sea is correct in his belief that the ocean is a
great circle. The fish, the person, and the deva are
each authenticating what is actually experienced,
given their respective contexts. This, of course,
violates the spirit of the views of both Aristotle
and Thomas. To see the implications of the
difference, let us refer back to Thomas' discussion
of truth in art. Thomas maintained that artworks are
true insofar as they adequately take on the form of
the artists' intentions. From Dogen's standpoint, we
can develop a different theory of truth in art. That
is, Dogen would presumably say that the situation
(the presence of tathataa) takes form through the
artist. Consider, for example, the creation of
Michelangelo's "David." According to historical
accounts. Michelangelo claimed that he had "seen"
the image of David in the slab of marble discarded
by another artist. That is, the marble presented
itself to Michelangelo as "David" and Michelangelo
became the vehicle for the thing's self-expression.
In the Ch'an and Zen terminology we have developed
the image of David in the marble was a true thing
and Michelangelo, acting as a true person, let the
thing show itself through him. This is why, as we
have already seen in the earlier quotation, Dogen
associates jijuyuu sammai with wu-wei. The artist,
the Zen master, the Taoist sage are only insofar as
they are responsive to situations in which things
present themselves as they are; there is no
self-conscious, calculative "doing."

P463

In fact, Dogen considers language in its most
profound usage, what Dogen calls "expression"
(dotoku(aa)), to be a creative activity like the one
just described. That is, language does not here
refer to a preexistent reality, but rather, things
express themselves through the transparent medium of
without-thinking. In this way, the entire world of
phenomena-including the mountains, rivers and
rocks-express reality. Dogen, therefore, says that
such things are themselves suutras (see, for
example, Dogen's fascicle, "The Mountain and Water
Suutra," Sansuikyo(bb)).

This concludes our discussion of truth and Zen
Buddhism. Our major conclusions are the following.
First of all, although the correspondence theory may
give an adequate definition of truth, it needs to be
supplemented if we want to know how it is possible
for such a truth to be acquired in practice. We have
investigated here the threefold metaphysical account
of truth first stated by Aristotle and developed by
Thomas, but also paralleled in the Ch'an and Zen
traditions. In general, we have found the threef old
distinction to be illuminating of the metaphysical
assumptions behind correspondence as a practical
theory. Second, despite many startling similarities,
we must conclude that the Western view and the Zen
view of truth are fundamentally different,
especially with respect to what the theory of truth
should try to accomplish. Ultimately, Aristotle and
Thomas desire a theory of truth that will be the
cornerstone for explanatory interpretation. Thomas
adds to this the application of the theory to events
wherein things conform to mind, that is, to events
wherein man is in creative transformation of his
world. Both explanation and the governance of the
natural world, we may note, are constitutive of an
idea of science. Beyond these goals, Thomas (and, to
a lesser extent, Aristotle) is also interested in
establishing truth as a moral ideal of interpersonal
relations, a virtue toward which we should strive if
we are to achieve our basic humanity. The Zen view
of truth, on the other hand, has a distinctively
different orientation. Rather than explanatory
interpretation, Zen is interested in descriptive
interpretation. Rather than governing the
trans-formation of nature, the Zen Buddhist tries to
be the agent of nature. Rather than setting a moral
standard to live up to, the Zen Buddhist achieves
his humanity by letting go of external standards of
value and by becoming more spontaneous. In the final
analysis, therefore. the Western philosophers
stipulate a tension between man and world: as Thomas
put it, the mind must conform to things and things
to the mind. Harmony is achieved through mutual
adaptation. Zen philosophy, on the other hand,
stipulates an essential unity: the tension between
man and world is the result of egocentric delusion.
If we destroy that delusion, man's activity--his
thinking and his doing--becomes just an expression
of nature itself.

A final lesson of our comparison is this: the
Zen Buddhists do not think differently than the
Western philosophers. When it comes to defining
truth and articulating the metaphysical assumptions
behind the practieal application of

P464

this theory, the difference between the traditions
is slight. The Zen and Aristotelian/Thomistic
traditions diverge only when they consider what the
purpose of thinking is and what the basic
relationship between man and world is.
Aristotle/Thomas and Hui-neng/Lin-chi/Dogen are not
sets of writers who think differently; they are
groups of philosophers who disagree about what we
should think about.

REFERENCES

Quotations from Aristotle are taken from Richard
McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New
York: Random House, 1969).

Quotations from Thomas are taken from The Summa
Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans., Fathers
of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols.
(Benziger Brothers, 1947) .

Quotations from Lin-chi are translated from the
Chinese original as given in Sasaki, Record of
Lin-chi (Kyoto: Institute for Zen Studies, 1975).
Two references are given for quotations: the
first number is correlated to the Yanagida
Rinzairoku edition as given in Schloegl, The Zen
Teaching of Rinzai (Boulder, Colorado: Shambala,
1976), while the second number refers to the
chapters as found in Sasaki.

Quotations from Dogen are translated from Okubo,
ed., Dogenzenji zenshu, vol 1. (Tokyo: Chikume
Shobo, 1969).