Paper short abstract:

The purpose of my presentation is to investigate the "empty flower" imagery in Dōgen's Kūge (空華) chapter of Shōbōgenzō (正法限蔵) as expression of the enlightenment of the entire world. According to this, Dōgen's depiction of nature is located between natural and supernatural.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will focus on some of the most important, although densest passages from Dōgen’s Kūge (空華) chapter of Shōbōgenzō (正法限蔵), with the aim of investigating Dōgen’s approach to nature. I claim that, for Dōgen, nature must be read and taught like a Sūtra. The reason why Dōgen’s philosophy draws considerable inspiration from natural images is so that it can illustrate the qualities of the Buddha-nature and transmit its teaching. Nevertheless, Dōgen’s imagery also has something super-natural, not only natural, built into it, in the sense that each image has within it the enlightenment of the entire world. It is from these terms that Dōgen develops an entire cosmology based on an (empty) flower.

In the Kūge (空華) chapter, Dōgen develops his vision of the Buddha-nature from the likeness of a flower set in the foreground of some kind of space, a space which seems to be completely empty and yet is, at the same, an expression of the entire world. My aim is to analyze the image of how this flower opens up and falls apart and, in this process of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be, contains within it every single detail of the world. This expression of the world through the flower is similar to how the Buddhist masters are able to see their own body-minds (shinjin, 身心) as a reflection of the whole universe. After displaying the complex imagery of the “empty flower” (空華), I will highlight three aspects of Dōgen’s discourse based on the conceptual terms of “merging,” “non-duality” and “relationality.” By playing with how the real and the unreal, the true and the delusional, the empty (or faint) and the colorful all merge together, Dōgen tries to expand our imagination without escalating this imagery into a fantastic world. Finally, I will focus on how the various translations of the title of Dōgen’s chapter (into Japanese, German, Italian and English) bring out various meanings as a way to demonstrate, once again, the relational unity of the flower and the world. Dōgen plays with the polyvalence of words as if he were composing a symphony, and by doing this, is able to explore the multiplicity of meanings as they appear in every single character of his text and from every possible composition.