By: Armin Baer
I’m writing with some reflections on Bob Zeglovitch’s talk on September 15, a recording of which can be found on the Dharma Talks page of this website. Bob quoted David Hinton (China Root, Taoism, Ch’an and Original Zen) on the philosophical Taoist meaning of Tao: “…a generative cosmological process, an ontological pathway by which things come into existence, evolve through their lives, and then go out of existence, only to be transformed and reemerge in a new form.”
Hearing this again brought back many things I had read in my learning about Taoism years ago and also how much Taoism may have influenced and been a source for the development of Zen in China. One thing I had been told was that early translators of the Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese had to borrow terms from Taoism to introduce the new concepts. At first I had assumed that the term “dharma” would use the character for Tao, since both describe an unbounded, universal truth of the nature of things. But later I learned that the word “dharma” is translated using a different Chinese character meaning “law.” And the Chinese Buddhists then also used the term “Tao” in its original Taoist meaning, and included it as part of Buddhist concepts, even if it didn’t have a counterpart in the Indian texts.
So in the version of the Fukanzazengi that we are reading, I am struck by the term in the first paragraph, “dharma-vehicle” used as a synonym for Tao/Way. So what does it mean to say that the Tao/Way is the vehicle for carrying, or perhaps expressing, the Dharma/Law? In philosophical Taoism, the Tao is not only the cosmological source, it is beyond our knowing and describing, and it is endlessly dynamic, like a river that in which we are ever swept along. One either flows with it and live/dies/re-emerges in harmony with that movement, or one resists the constant movement and suffers. Hinton writes that Zen followers were often called “those who flow along with Tao.” Perhaps as we embrace the Buddha’s instruction on the nature of karma, ignorance and liberation from suffering, we are enabled to stop resisting and begin to live in harmony with the dynamic flow of the Way.
One other reaction I had to Bob’s talk had to do with the contrast that he played with between the Christian idea of original sin and the Dogen’s portrayal of the Way/Tao in Fukanzazengi as “perfect and all-pervading” and “the whole body is far beyond the world’s dust. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, I can understand what he was pointing to.
My thoughts were drawn to a different pair of Christian theological concepts that I think are very apt in this discussion of the Tao: immanence and transcendence. In Christian monotheism, God the Creator is the sole and boundless source of all that is, and the concept of immanence includes the idea that the Creator’s divine love expresses itself in the existence of everything and everything that is created is not separate from that divine love. That existence by its very nature might then be called perfect and all-pervading. Transcendence describes, in part, the impulse of the divine nature that exists in everything that is created to become one with the Creator through the act of existing and at the cessation of existence (return to the divine Source?) I’m using words here that are probably not theologically accurate in terms of Christian texts, but I believe they roughly express the basic concepts. If we take the anthropomorphized aspects of the divine out of the Christian concepts, there is some overlap with the Tao as creative source of existence and the cycles of return and transformation. Ever since I first learned about philosophical Taoism, I’ve been intrigued by the resonances between these ideas. Of course, there are many and fundamental differences, but how wonderfully rich this all is!