The Self Studying Itself and Shut Your Mouth Too

Above is the crab apple tree in the Yugeji front yard, blooming so fully and briefly just now. With the air filled with aroma, memories come of sitting under the apple trees in my parents’ front yard as a boy with my dog Tippy and of the apple tree that I’d pass walking to the zendo and back when I trained with Katagiri Roshi.

Are such sweet memories the self? Is there anything that is the self that is constant in time and place and body that sensed those apple trees?

Gereon Kopf Beyond Personal Identity: Dogen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self (only $149.99! at Amazon.com and I can’t find in any local libraries, I assume because of the high demand) has this (take a deep breath, friends, this dude’s been trained to think):

“Dogen uses the term ‘jiko’ [usually translated “self”] … to denote a temporary awareness event in the noetic polarity within the existenial ambiguity of the self and other and self and myriad dharmas, which Tamaki renders … into contemporary Japanese as ‘environment’ (Jap.: kankyo). …The term ‘jiko’ implies the self-reflexive nature inherent in self-awareness as the self studying itself in the sense that ‘I am aware of myself as I.'”

Phew! Are you still with me? What I get out of this is that “to study the self” implies both the self as environment (“the radiance of all worlds in the ten directions”>”) and the sense of subjectivity itself (“the nose inadvertently in the hand of the self ). I’ve sometimes felt lonely in the Zen world for emphasizing this aspect of “to study the self” so it’s neat to see this presented, albiet in a difficult way, in a scholarly work.

Then on the way to work this morning I listened to an old Katagiri talk called “Don’t Stick Your Nose Into Zen Buddhism.” I’ll come back to this material in future posts because there’s a lot of fun stuff here … but for now just this quote from Roshi to conclude,

“According to my technical term,  just shut your mouth and take care of your life.”