SUMMARY
The contemporary Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has identified three questionable trends in our current approach to ‘fullness’ (his term for what constitutes the goal of spiritual practice): excarnation (fullness is seen as a disembodied religious experience ‘in the mind’), therapeutization (self-actualization replaces self-transcendence), and a tendency towards re-affirmation of ordinary life, rather than aspiring to fullness, which is considered damaging to our humanity. In an earlier article I suggested that such trends could be counterbalanced by a more inclusive Zen spirituality. This follow-up article shows that the thought of Dōgen (1200-1253), founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school, within its Japanese Buddhist context, reveals a very different perspective on fullness: it is conceived as the ritual embodiment of buddhahood, expressed through the meditation practice of zazen. Dōgen’s thought challenges the trends of excarnation and therapeutization, and offers a new Zen perspective on the re-affirmation of ordinary life. It also forces us to rethink our Western dichotomies between meditation and ritual, inner experience and outer form, and spiritual practice and fullness.
In an earlier publication I questioned certain trends in the reception of the Sino-Japanese Chan/Zen tradition in the West in the light of Charles Taylor’s work A Secular Age, his account of the secularization process of Western culture over the past five centuries. Taylor describes how the clash between believers and non-believers has exploded into a wide range of various positions, that all occur within our contemporary secular context. He defines secularity not as the absence of belief in God, but as a context in which a belief in God or transcendence is no longer ubiquitous and unchallenged.
      At the end of this earlier publication, I suggested that a more inclusive form of Zen spirituality could help to counteract three problematic trends that Taylor identifies in the modern Western relationship to spirituality. The current article follows up on this suggestion by studying the thought of Dōgen (1200-1253), the founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school.

1.           Fullness within the Immanent Frame

In our secular age, Taylor notes, the spiritual search takes place within the context of what he calls an ‘immanent frame’: a worldview that distinguishes a self-sufficient immanent natural order from the transcendent. Within this immanent frame there are numerous positions being taken with regard to the answer to the question: what is it that constitutes the goal of spiritual practice, the fulfillment of religious longing, the ultimate value of human life? In order to avoid religious bias, Taylor uses the term ‘fullness’, which he tentatively describes as follows:
We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring. Perhaps this sense of fullness is something we just catch glimpses of from afar off; we have the powerful intuition of what fullness would be, were we to be in that condition, e.g. of peace or wholeness; or able to act on that level, of integrity or generosity or abandonment or self-forgetfulness. But sometimes there will be moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment, where we feel ourselves there.
According to Taylor, there is no escaping some version of fullness: even the unreligious person, who shuns Christian ideas of fullness, has his own version of what real fullness consists in. The religious person, however, usually considers such a fullness as beyond, or independent from, ordinary human flourishing. Fullness implies some kind of self-transcendence. This is however not per se an ontological transcendence (such as relating to a personal God, or becoming one with the divine). It can also refer to an epistemological transcendence, in which the world appears in a radical new light (such as Spinoza’s perspective sub specie aeternitatis, where the world is seen through God’s eyes).
As Taylor describes, sometimes, as we can read for example in the mystics, such a sense of fullness comes in an experience which unsettles and breaks through our ordinary sense of being in the world, with its familiar objects, activities and points of reference, where something terrifyingly other seems to shine through. In other cases, such fullness is experienced as a state of ultimate balance and harmony, where our highest aspirations and our life energies are somehow lined up, producing an experience of ‘flow’. Taylor admits the inadequacy of ‘fullness’ as a shorthand term for the condition we aspire to, especially with regard to Buddhism, where the highest aspiration is conceived as realizing ‘emptiness’ (sunyata). As Taylor puts it, in Buddhism, real fullness only comes through emptiness.
The various debates on the question what, if anything, constitutes fullness in our secular age take place, Taylor argues, amidst ‘cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other’.

2. Three Problematic Discourses on Fullness

Taylor identifies three problematic trends, resulting in certain discourses on fullness, that have arisen out of such ‘cross pressures within the immanent frame’.
The first trend is a shift towards ‘spiritualization’ at the cost of embodiment. Fullness is no longer located ‘out there’ in the objective world, but in a subjective, inner experience. This constitutes an ‘excarnation’ of fullness: it is disembodied and reduced to ‘religious experience’. The second tendency is to further reduce fullness to self-actualization, rather than self-transcendence. What was formerly spiritual transformation, realizing a fullness beyond the level of ordinary human flourishing, is now seen as therapeutic healing. Fullness is located in optimal human functioning, a shift from a religious to a therapeutic discourse. The third tendency is to even deny the existence and/or attainability of such a sense of fullness. Many exclusive humanists consider it dangerous to strive after a fullness beyond human flourishing, since it sets up unrealistic standards that threaten to damage our humanity. They plead for a reaffirmation of ordinary life, not in the religious sense of the word where ordinary life is sacralized, but in a strictly secular sense.
These three problematic trends have influenced the reception of Zen Buddhism in the West. In Buddhist soteriology, the sense of fullness has been conceptualized as bodhi, a term that literally means ‘awakening’, but has been traditionally translated by Western interpreters as ‘enlightenment’. From within the first discourse on fullness, it was only natural to conceive of enlightenment as a disembodied religious experience. But under the influence of the human potential movement, the enlightenment experience has increasingly been interpreted in the psychological terms of the second discourse on fullness. Enlightenment came to be understood in terms of optimal psychological functioning, as a state of psychological health. And Western adherents of the third discourse on fullness, the re-affirmation of ordinary life, have found plenty of support in the anti-enlightenment rhetoric that can be found in many Zen texts, where the Zen practitioner is encouraged to stop looking for enlightenment, and to stop attempting to transcend ordinary life: ‘ordinary mind is the way’ is a popular Zen motto.
A study of the thought of Dōgen could not only lead to a less one-sided form of Zen spirituality in the West, but could also help to counterbalance the three problematic discourses on fullness that Taylor mentions. Many initial Western interpretations of Zen tended to leave the Sōtō Zen school out of the picture, due to various reasons. Since the 1970s, however, Dōgen’s writings have become more well known in the West. Dōgen is a complex thinker, not to be approached as one would approach a Western philosopher, looking only for his ‘philosophical positions’, but as a soteriological thinker who uses various perspectives on fullness and our access to it.
Let us now turn to the three Western discourses on fullness and contrast them with Dōgen’s thought.

3.           Fullness as Excarnated Religious Experience

The first, religious, discourse on fullness accepts its validity as a religious domain, but translates it into experiential terms, in order to protect it from attacks from science.

3.1.        From Disenchantment to Excarnation

The process of disenchantment, that has led man from being an embodied, embedded participant in an enchanted cosmos to being an isolated, individual spectator of a universe built up out of dead matter, has led to a process of ‘excarnation’: fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing has been increasingly conceived as a religious experience that takes place ‘in the mind’, rather than as an embodied participation in a cosmos that is itself permeated with such fullness. As Taylor puts it:
We have moved from an era in which religious life was more ‘embodied’, where the presence of the sacred could be enacted in ritual, or seen, felt, touched, walked towards (in pilgrimage); into one which is more ‘in the mind’, where the link with God passes more through our endorsing contested interpretations.
The excarnated view on fullness was related to the desacralization and disenchantment of the world, that the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment brought about. Protestant thinkers rejected the existence of sacred objects, relics and places, and downplayed religious practices such as ritual, procession, ceremony, church services, that used to serve as the collective embodiment of the religious life. The genuine spirit of the religious life was to be found in the experience of the sensible individual, much more so than much what went on in churches and synagogues. Spirituality became the search for a specific experience, religious experience.
The concept of religious experience, that seems so ubiquitous today, is in reality not more than two centuries old. William Proudfoot describes the historical genesis of the term. Due to the increasing secularization during the Enlightenment, any metaphysical justification of religious belief became suspect. The German protestant theologian Schleiermacher (1768-1834) therefore introduced the concept of religious experience, in an effort to rescue religion from oblivion. As Proudfoot notes, ‘the turn to religious experience was motivated in large measure by an interest in freeing religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs and ecclesiastical institutions and grounding it in human experience’. By stressing that religion was a matter of experience, ‘Schleiermacher sought to free religious belief and practice from the requirement that they be justified by reference to nonreligious thought or action and to preclude the possibility of conflict between religious doctrine and any new knowledge that might emerge in the course of secular inquiry’.

3.2.        Dōgen – Fullness as Embodiment

In order to investigate Dōgen’s thought, it is important to note two contextual factors. Firstly, Japanese Zen Buddhism must be viewed within the larger context of Mahāyāna Buddhism, that operates from a worldview that differs radically from our currently prevalent Newtonian preconceptions of time and space. Secondly, Japanese notions of body and mind differ radically from Western Cartesian mind-body dualism.
(1) Mahāyāna Buddhism knows the trikaya doctrine of the three bodies of the Buddha. According to this theory, the Buddha manifests himself in three bodies, modes or dimensions. Firstly, in his historical manifestation as Shākyamuni, the Buddha has a nirmanakaya, a created body which manifests in time and space. Secondly, as an archetypical manifestation, the Buddha can manifest himself as a sublime celestial form in splendid paradises, where he teaches surrounded by Bodhisattvas, using a sambhogakaya or body of mutual enjoyment. Thirdly, as the very principle of enlightenment, the Buddha manifests himself as a dharmakaya, the reality body or truth body, also interpreted as ultimate reality.
According to the Mahāyāna Buddhist worldview, reality (the dharmakaya) should not be seen as a collection of lifeless objects, but as a vital agent of awareness and healing. Reality itself is continually co-active in bringing all beings to universal liberation. The sacred is immanent in space and time. Such a worldview has great soteriological consequences for spiritual practice. Rather than aiming at achieving higher states of personal consciousness, or therapeutic calm, the point of spiritual practice becomes to embody, or appreciate, or participate, achieve a liberating intimacy with, reality itself.
In early Buddhist soteriology, the way to liberation was conceived as a path (marga) from bondage (samsāra) to liberation (nirvāna). The aim of spiritual practice is for the individual practitioner to dispel ignorance, greed and aversion. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, however, liberation is realized through the ultimate insight (prajñāpāramitā; literally: the wisdom beyond all wisdom) that nirvāna is not a goal to be attained. As the famous Mahāyāna philosopher Nāgārjuna (ca. 150 A.D.) expressed it: there is not the slightest difference between samsāra and nirvāna.
Karl Potter has made a useful distinction between ‘path philosophies’, that consider liberation to be the result of continued spiritual practice, and ‘leap philosophies’, that stress liberation as an immediate realization. Early Buddhist and some Mahāyāna Buddhist schools can be characterized as path philosophies, whereas the branches of Mahāyāna that consider themselves as esoteric Buddhism can be characterized as leap philosophies. They view all path-like approaches to liberation as indicative of exoteric Buddhism: preliminary teachings that ultimately have to be superseded by prajñāpāramitā. The point is not so much to attain enlightenment, but to realize it.
Especially in the esoteric Vajrayāna tradition, and its tantric practices, such a worldview has led to the development of practices of transcendent faith and ritual enactment of buddhahood, dependent not on lifetimes of arduous practice, but rather on immediate, unmediated, and intuitional realization of the fundamental ground of awakening. The replacement of spiritual cultivation by a leap is expressed in the Zen tradition by ‘sudden enlightenment’, and in more devotional Buddhist traditions by a ‘leap of faith’.
In the context of medieval Japanese Buddhism, this ‘leap paradigm’ was represented by the immensely influential Tendai Buddhist discourse of ‘original enlightenment’ (hongaku), the assertion that all beings are Buddhas inherently. Since Dōgen grew up in the Tendai school, this hongaku discourse also functioned as the intellectual matrix out of which his thought emerged (even though he was also critical of it).
According to Dōgen, all of existence is grounded, or embedded, in the ultimate reality of the dharmakaya. The dharmakaya should not be interpreted ontologically as a transcendent cosmic Being that contains or projects the world, but should be seen as the fundamental activity of the world itself. In this sense, all of existence is itself buddhahood, and therefore lacks any value beyond itself. What is ultimately valuable (fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing) is built into existence itself, whether this is recognized and appreciated or not.
Fullness is constituted by what Dōgen calls ‘the rightly transmitted teachings of the Buddha’ (shōden no buppō), which doesn’t refer to either a body of creeds, the content of certain experiences, any Absolute, or a return to the letter of the teachings of the historical Shākyamuni Buddha: it is the symbolic expression (dōtoku) or activity (gyōji) of Buddha’s spirit (not only the historical Shākyamuni Buddha but also the cosmic dharmakaya). In different historical and cultural circumstances this spirit needs to be continually re-expressed and re-enacted. This involves a thorough demythologization and a subsequent remythologization. In his work, Dōgen demythologizes many traditional doctrines and oppositions that had come to define classical Chinese Zen, not in order to arrive at ‘true Zen’, but to make room for a subsequent remythologization.
For Dōgen, the rightly transmitted teaching of the Buddha consists in ‘the samādhi of self-fulfilling activity’ (jijuyū-zammai), which is concerned with the self-enjoyment of the dharmakaya. The notion of samādhi usually refers to a concentrated state of awareness, but Dōgen uses it to refer to a state of mind that at once negates and subsumes self and other; a total freedom of self-realization without any dualism or antitheses. This does not mean that oppositions or dualities are obliterated or transcended, but that they are realized. Such a freedom realizes itself in duality, not apart from it.
‘For playing joyfully in such a samādhi’, Dōgen writes, ‘the upright sitting position in meditation is the right gate’. He refers here to the sitting practice of zazen. For Dōgen, zazen is not so much a psychological training aiming at particular states or experiences, but the ritual expression, embodiment and enactment of buddhahood. In his Fukanzazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen), Dōgen stresses that the zazen that he speaks of is not meditation practice, and admonishes the practitioner to not try to become a Buddha. Zazen is not about attaining a mental state of liberation, but about an ongoing transformation that is as much physiological as it is psychological, in which one ‘realizes’ one’s own buddhahood, in the sense of fully participating in it. It is not a state but an activity.
Zazen is a communal ritual and ceremonial performance that expresses ultimate reality (the dharmakaya). Dōgen stresses that all practitioners should practice zazen together: ‘standing out has no benefit; being different from others is not our conduct’. In such a way, he radically demythologizes standard Zen views on meditation, and remythologizes it as a liberating expression and activity of Buddha nature. Zazen does not lead to enlightenment, zazen itself is enlightenment. Dōgen uses the term practice-realization (shusho) in order to indicate how the two notions are mutually interwoven. For Dōgen, practice-realization is seen not as a psychological state, but as a liberating activity, liberating intimacy. The enactment of the sacred in ritual takes prime importance.
Since zazen is seen as a ritual enactment of the enlightenment of the Buddha, it should not be practiced in order to gain therapeutic or religious benefits. Rather, for Dōgen, zazen is the prototype of ultimate meaninglessness. According to the twentieth-century Sōtō teacher Kōdō Sawaki (1880-1965), the practice of zazen requires leaving behind a means-end rationality: ‘Zazen is an activity that comes to nothing. There is nothing more admirable than this activity that comes to nothing. To do something with a goal is really worthless. (…) Because it takes you out of the world of loss and gain, it should be practiced’.
Zen philosopher Dale Wright comments, however, that some sense of purpose remains in spite of such disclaimers:
If you lack the purpose of Zen, you will also lack everything else about Zen, including zazen. This is so because the purpose of casting off all purposes in an exalted state of no mind still stands there behind the scenes as the purpose that structures the entire practice, enabling it to make sense and be worth doing from beginning to end.
(2) The excarnated discourse on fullness, in which the connection with the sacred takes place ‘in the mind’, explains why Zen enlightenment has been interpreted as a state of mind, a state beyond thought, beyond subject and object, a pure, disembodied experience. However, Cartesian dualism differs in several respects from Japanese notions of body and mind. Firstly, although mind and body may be conceptually distinguishable from some perspectives, they are not seen as ontologically distinct. Secondly, Japanese thought, and Eastern philosophies generally, treat mind-body unity as an achievement, attained by a disciplined practice, rather than as an essential relation. This undercuts the Western dichotomy between theory and praxis. In Japanese thought, the notion of shinjin-ichinyō (oneness of body and mind) has been developed in order to overcome a dualistic approach to body and mind. Such a unity between body and mind is also expressed in Dōgen’s work: ‘Because the body necessarily fills the mind and the mind necessarily fills the body, we call this the permeation of body and mind’.
The ninth-century Japanese Buddhist thinker Kūkai (774-835), founder of Shingon (mantra) Buddhism, stressed the role of the body. The crucial point for Kūkai is not only that enlightenment is not a final redemptive state to be achieved over many lifetimes, but also that it is not some other-worldly truth to be grasped via a mystical experience. The central idea in Kūkai’s philosophy is to ‘become a Buddha in this very body’ (sokushin jōbutsu). Realizing fullness is therefore not about attaining a mystical experience, it is about increasing the body’s ability to process, to ‘digest’ our ordinary experience, to incorporate the world. In this way, it reverses the way we understand the world in ordinary experience.
Dōgen inherited from Kūkai the tradition of giving precedence to the body over the mind. He maintained that in spiritual practice, the body plays the most important role:
The human body, in Dōgen’s view, was not a hindrance to the realization of enlightenment, but the very vehicle through which enlightenment was realized (…) Dōgen claimed that we search with the body, practice with the body, attain enlightenment with the body, and understand with the body.
Dōgen’s notion of reality as inherently liberating, and his radically immanent embodied discourse on fullness reveals a rather different perspective on Zen and Zen practice than has been common in the West: not so much a universal spirituality that leads up to a transcendent mystical religious experience ‘beyond the mind’, but an immanent affirmation and even sacralization of ‘this very mind’ and ‘this very body’. Such a perspective could perhaps help to bring about a ‘re-incarnation’ of fullness.

4.           Fullness as Therapeutic Self-Actualization

Apart from the problematic religious discourse on fullness as excarnation, Taylor identifies a second problematic trend. This second, psychological discourse on fullness can be seen as a further implication of the psychologization of religion. The transcendent quality of mystical religious experience is relativized, and the notion of a fullness beyond human flourishing is brought closer to human flourishing itself. In a trend which is related to the first one just discussed, the process of spiritual transformation itself is increasingly therapeutized and psychologized.

4.1.        The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Traditionally, a radical conversion experience was deemed necessary in order to be able to embark on a path towards fullness. Such an experience, that involved a radical reorientation of perspective and a break with the past, was labeled as metanoia. Within the immanent frame, however, there seems to be no room anymore for such radical breaks. Access to fullness no longer takes place through a religious conversion experience, where the old form of life is radically replaced by a new direction, but is seen as the optimum point in a continuum of psychological health, the result of steady spiritual practice. Spiritual transformation is interpreted not as realizing a fullness beyond the level of ordinary human flourishing, but as a therapeutic healing within ordinary human flourishing. The religious goal of transcending our humanity moves towards the more secular goal of realizing our humanity – but only at the psychological level.
Carrette and King describe this development as part of a general process of the psychologization of human experience. The discourse of mysticism increasingly gives way to a discourse of ‘altered states of consciousness’ and ‘peak experiences’. Whereas the first discourse on fullness reduces it to a religious experience ‘in the mind’, its therapeutization constitutes a further reduction of the content of that experience, that threatens to erodes its religious character altogether. Transpersonal psychologists conceive of religious practice as a means towards self-actualization, rather than an attempt at self-transcendence. Peter Sloterdijk has spoken of ‘the Americanization of the religious’, in which God is transformed into a transcendent sponsor of immanent successes in the world.
As another example of such a therapeutization, Taylor describes the polemic between religion and secular humanism, whose aspiration to rehabilitate the body and desire often is connected with an accusation against faith, and its notions of guilt and sin. As a result, Taylor notes, many issues which used to be considered moral are transferred into a therapeutic register. What was formerly sin is often now seen as sickness. The spiritual search for religious fullness is moved to a therapeutic search for health. Taylor notes that one of the factors associated with this triumph of the therapeutic is ‘to reject the idea that our normal, middle-range existence is imperfect. We’re perfectly all right as we are, as “natural” beings’. At most we need some healing which, however, doesn’t involve any radical conversion, a growth in wisdom, a new higher way of seeing the world.

4.2. Dōgen – Casting Off Body and Mind

Although Dōgen’s discourse of fullness as universal buddhahood points to a radical ontological immanence, he does also speak about the realization of fullness in terms of a radically transformed new relationship to the world, indicating the possibility of an epistemological transcendence. It is possible to transcend our ordinary ways of experiencing the world. But such a transformation is not a matter of self-actualization but self-transcendence, expressed as self-forgetting:
To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget one’s self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others.
Dōgen speaks about the realization of fullness as ‘casting off body and mind’ (shinjin totsuraku). According to the Japanese philosopher Nagatomo, this phrase should not be interpreted as any kind of ‘Zen enlightenment’ experience, in the sense of a Unio Mystica, an emancipation from delusion or an epistemic state of ‘seeing things as they are’, but as a switching of perspectives: body and mind are suddenly no longer dualistically experienced as two separate entities, but body-mind is experienced as a nondual unity. What is cast off, is the dualistic everyday perspective on body and mind. Although from the everyday perspective, body and mind are experienced as two separate things, a higher perspective is possible where body-mind is experienced as a continually changing configuration of dharmas, that doesn’t contain any ‘I’. Such a higher perspective is called ‘samadhic awareness’ by Dōgen:
The ‘oneness of the body-mind’ cannot be understood from the perspective of our everyday existence. Epistemologically, this means that the function of external perception as it is directed towards the natural world, is incapable of experiencing, much less understanding, the oneness of the body-mind, and hence is useless in articulating the meaning of the oneness of the body-mind. (…) There must necessarily be an epistemological apparatus that operates in samadhic awareness quite distinct and different from the order that is operative in the everyday perceptual consciousness.
Such an epistemic shift from a relative, provisional dualism that operates in our everyday existence, to the nondualism that operates in samadhic awareness, is not the result of some psychological breakthrough, but connected with a transformation of the body. ‘Casting off body and mind’ can be seen as the realization of what Dōgen calls a ‘true human body’ (shinjitsu nintai): the body that has been transformed through self-cultivation. The true body is a practical, experiential consequence of ‘casting off body and mind’. For Dōgen, this notion of ‘true human body’ has cosmic connotations. The Japanese philosopher Arifuku notes that for Dōgen, body and mind are not only interwoven with each other, they are also united with the world as a whole, and quotes the following passage:
The whole earth is the true body of the Buddha, the whole earth is the gateway to liberation, the whole earth is the eye of Vairocana Buddha, and the whole earth is the dharmakaya of the Buddhist self.
The individual psycho-physical constitution is extended to a cosmic dimension. Dōgen uses phrases as ‘the body-mind of Dharma’, ‘the body-mind of the Buddhas and ancestors’. Therefore, understanding is only possible when we participate in this totality. Then, what Dōgen calls ‘the true human body’ functions freely and authentically in harmony with the entire universe.
Everything which comes forth from the study of the way is the true human body. The entire world of the ten directions is nothing but the true human body. The coming and going of birth and death is the true human body.
The realization of such a true human body can occur in zazen, which is described by Dōgen as first and foremost a somatic practice.

5. The Reaffirmation of Ordinary Life

5.1. The Danger of Attempting to Transcend our Humanity

The two discourses of excarnation and therapeutization of fullness are primarily used by believers in transcendence, and can be seen as attempts to hold on to a meaningful notion of a fullness independent of human flourishing amidst the various cross pressures within today’s immanent frame. But, as Taylor notes, some exclusive humanists draw the final consequence of the processes of disenchantment and desacralization, and deny the existence and/or attainability of such a sense of fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing. They even consider it dangerous or harmful to strive after such fullness, and charge that
religion actuated by pride or fear sets impossibly high goals for humans, of asceticism, or mortification, or renunciation of ordinary human ends. It invites us to ‘transcend humanity’, and this cannot but end up mutilating us; it leads us to despise and neglect the ordinary fulfillment and happiness which is within our reach.
An example of this would be, according to such critics, the Christian ascetic denial of human desires and neediness, in order to pursue a transcendent fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing, either in this life or the next. The exclusive humanist therefore argues for a reaffirmation of ordinary life, for a this-worldly art of living that involves a care of the self.
Taylor points out, however, that such a trend towards a re-affirmation of ordinary life started within Christianity itself: it began in the Reformation and continues to our time. Taylor contrasts this attitude with premodern ones such as the medieval warrior ethic of honor and glory, the monastic ethic of self-denial and asceticism, and the Platonic philosophy which saw work and family as profane.
In early Reformation theologies, everyday activities such as dish-washing were seen as sacred. During the Enlightenment, this affirmation was pushed further into the secular realm, relating it to the pursuit of happiness. Human happiness, and the proper means to it, became a dominant theme in the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment. In today’s exclusive humanism, fullness has almost been made synonymous with happiness. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ are listed as the inalienable rights of man in the United States Declaration of Independence.

5.2.        Mindfulness as a Resacralization of Ordinary Life

Not only the first two discourses on fullness have found a place for Buddhism. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, also for those who use the third discourse on fullness, Buddhism has had considerable appeal. In an attempt to reaffirm ordinary life, without falling prey to either a crude materialism or some kind of religiosity, many secular humanists have embraced Buddhism as providing a non-religious access to fullness, without any need for notions of transcendence. The various ways in which Buddhism has adapted to the needs and expectations of the West, also include an answer to this need for a resacralization of ordinary life, in the form of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness (being aware of the present moment). Originally a meditation technique developed by monks that ostensibly renounced ordinary life, in order to aim for a fullness beyond ordinary flourishing, mindfulness has found its way into current Western society as a means towards greater affirmation and appreciation of ordinary life.
In contemporary Buddhism, it is commonplace to find exhortations to perform the tasks of life with mindfulness and care. In this way, one can realize fullness in the most mundane things and activities. The Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh recommends mindful housework, walking, eating, and dish washing (‘taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands’): the Buddhist practitioner is advised to bring calm, alert, and non-evaluative attention to the flow of present moments, letting go of thoughts, memories, and anxieties about the past and future. Such meditative awareness to any activity brings greater awareness, skill and appreciation to every aspect of life. It is a way to learn to cherish and reaffirm ordinary life.
The popularity of Buddhist mindfulness is one of various modern attempts to resacralize the everyday world, without a return to premodern modes of sacralization, such as the veneration of relics, common to both Christianity and Buddhism.

5.4.        Dōgen on Fullness and Ordinary Life

Western Zen seems, therefore, to fit perfectly within this trend towards a reaffirmation of ordinary life. Many Western Zen practitioners have been relieved to find a form of spirituality that advocates simply being natural. Zen has become famous in the West for its radical view that in order to realize awakening, there is nothing special that one could or should do. A famous Zen dictum tells the practitioner just to eat when he’s hungry, and to sleep when he’s tired, following his natural inclinations, without running around looking for enlightenment.
But Dōgen is critical of such rhetoric that he calls ‘Zen naturalism’. For him, Zen practice is ‘the practice of buddhahood’ (butsugyo): an active recognition of one’s own buddhahood, and an engagement with it. Practicing buddhahood is for Dōgen not just doing whatever one pleases, but refers to very specific activities modeled on the practice of Shākyamuni Buddha. Such activities include sitting in zazen, but also extend to one’s daily activities. As Dōgen scholar Dan Leighton explains:
The point is to enact the meaning of the teachings in actualized practice, and the whole praxis, including meditation, may thus be viewed as ritual, ceremonial expressions of the teaching, rather than as a means to discover and attain some understanding of it. Therefore, the strong emphasis in much of this approach to Zen training is the mindful and dedicated expression of meditative awareness in everyday activities.
The presentation of Zen meditation to the West as a method for attaining enlightenment has reactivated the very same tension between ‘spiritual practice’ and ‘ordinary life’ that Taylor has described as such a persistent issue in the Western Christian tradition over the past five centuries, and that both Christian and humanist pleas for a reaffirmation of ordinary life have attempted to overcome. The current Western fascination with mindfulness in everyday life, a spiritual exercise that can also be practiced in ordinary life, can be seen as an attempt from within Western Buddhism to reunite those two dimensions.
But ironically, it is precisely when meditation is no longer instrumentally conceived as a means to religious experience, but as ‘the expression or function of Buddhas’, that an emphasis on meditative awareness in everyday life, and therefore a true re-affirmation of ordinary life, is made possible.
Dōgen attempts to rethink the dualistic opposition itself between ordinary life on the one hand, and a transcendent fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other hand. In his view, nonduality is not about overcoming duality, but about fully realizing it. This implies the continual uncovering and manifesting the fullness that is already there. Not in the sense of ‘seeing into one’s true nature’ (Buddha nature as buried within us), but in the sense of ‘all of existence is Buddha nature’ (the fundamental interrelatedness of all of existence). ‘The endeavor to negotiate the Way, as I teach now, consists in discerning all things in view of enlightenment, and putting such a unitive awareness into practice in the midst of the revaluated world’.
Dōgen’s expression of self-forgetting, as quoted earlier, is at the same time a radical affirmation of ordinary life, as the necessary (and only) habitat in which we live and are enlightened:
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.
All traces of enlightenment are wiped out when the dichotomy between ‘ordinary life’ and ‘fullness’ has disappeared. Then ordinary life becomes itself the location of sacrality, and Zen comes to be understood not as a way to a pure enlightenment experience but as, in the words of modern Japanese Zen teacher Taizan Maezumi (1931-1995), a way to ‘appreciate your life’.

              Discussion

The discourses on fullness discussed in this article have greatly contributed to the popularity of Zen in the West. The view on fullness as an excarnated experience ‘in the mind’ led to a fascination with the Zen enlightenment experience. The therapeutization of fullness led to an instrumentalization of Zen meditation practice, a way to self-actualization ‘beyond good and evil’. And the call for a reaffirmation of ordinary life led to a preference for Zen naturalism, and an idealization of Zen ‘ordinary mind’.
Meditation, as a spiritual practice aimed at an inner spiritual transformation, came to be seen as a way to make contact with fullness, conceived as either some kind of religious experience or as a process of self-actualization, that allows the individual to transcend the prevailing social norms and attitudes. As Robert Sharf points out, such a view of meditation makes it appear to be the very antithesis of ritual, which is often seen as precisely instilling those very same prevailing social norms and attitudes by means of outward scripted and stylized activity. Such an opposition, Sharf notes, is however more Western than Asian: a precise Asian Buddhist analogue to our distinction between ritual and meditation cannot easily be found. The Western dichotomy between meditation and ritual corresponds with other Cartesian dichotomies, such as inner/outer, subjective/objective, and mind/body.
In their presentation of Zen to the West, Japanese (Rinzai) Zen scholars therefore stressed the antiritual character of Zen. The Zen school (the name literally means ‘the meditation school’) was, more than any other form of Buddhism, all about meditation rather than ritual, and therefore perfectly relevant to the modern age.
Just as Dōgen’s emphasis on embodiment of buddhahood can serve to counterbalance the tendency of excarnation, his view on zazen as the ritual enactment of buddhahood can counteract the tendency to separate meditation from ritual. As Taylor notes, we need to enlarge our palette of points of contact with fullness. Too often we conceive of this in a limited way in terms of individual, subjective experience only. In collective ritual, however, another kind of experience can occur, that can open the participants of the ritual to fullness. Such forms of access to fullness have however been marginalized in modern Western approaches to religion.
 In Dōgen’s incarnated spirituality, ritual and practice are tightly interwoven, which can help to overcome the Western dichotomy between authentic inner individual experiences, and constricting outer communal ‘churchy’ rituals and ceremonies. This can not only correct some Western misinterpretations of Zen, but also question the validity of Western discourses on fullness that have arisen within our immanent frame. If those discourses have contingently arisen due to various historical circumstances, the contemporary encounter with Dōgen and Sōtō Zen constitutes another historical influence, that could facilitate the development of a new discourse on fullness that includes embodiment, self-transcendence and re-affirmation of ordinary life.
      But is Dōgen Zen actually capable of offering a new access to fullness for modern Westerners? As Taylor notes, ‘there is a condition of lived experience, where what we might call a construal of the moral/spiritual is lived not as such, but as immediate reality, like stones, rivers and mountains’. It is perhaps precisely indicative of the process of secularization that such direct experiences of fullness, such forms of ‘naïve’ immediate certainty have become very difficult in our age. Although some would argue that Dōgen’s perspective on fullness as the embodiment of universal buddhahood could help to re-establish such a condition of immediate certainty, various objections could be raised. Isn’t Dōgen’s universal buddhahood simply another version of a premodern, outdated Western cosmos? And how could it be possible for us moderns to return to a pre-modern direct apprehension of an enchanted universe? To speak with Nietzsche: God is dead, and he remains dead.
However, Dōgen’s notion of universal buddhahood is not simply a return to a premodern naïve framework, leaving behind our modern reflective framework. For Dōgen, the way we construct our experience in thinking and language is not excluded from universal buddhahood – the latter is not a metaphysical notion of some supreme Being, but rather describes an ongoing activity that is intrinsic to the temporality of all phenomena. Although it could be described as a form of ‘immanent transcendence’, it also differs from Western notions of immanence, for example the notion of an immanent order in nature that can be understood and explained on its own terms, regardless of the existence of a transcendent, supernatural creator beyond it. Dōgen’s view of nature differs substantially from our modern Western understanding of nature. As Ōkōchi notes, the Japanese notion of shizen (nature) does not refer to anything objective or objectified that takes place in front of or outside of human beings, but is rather an expression of the spontaneous way of being of all things. It was originally used in an adjectival or adverbial form - comparable to the Western notions of ‘naturally’ or ‘by nature’.
Rather than present a new version of ‘the Zen experience’ as a new attempt at radical transcendence, or a new conception of religious experience, Dōgen’s immanent transcendence, his radical phenomenalism, can serve to overcome the implicit dichotomies in Western modes of thought between inner and outer, mind and body, meditation and ritual, individual and society, spiritual and secular, and ‘religious life’ and ‘ordinary life’. Dōgen’s enactment ritual approach to zazen may serve as a helpful antidote to Western approaches to fullness, and may also illuminate certain materialist and consumerist orientations to spirituality (fullness as a religious experience or a condition of self-actualization to be attained). The very distinction itself between spiritual practice and fullness is radically problematized by Dōgen. In this way, the development of a Dōgen Zen in the West, which is in full swing since the 1970s, could perhaps lead not so much to some kind of resolution, but to a renewed exposure to the various cross pressures within the immanent frame.

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