Shin-jin-datsu-raku as Virtue-Ethical Self-Formation: Re-evaluating Dōgen's Ontological Ethics — Epoche C2
The phrase, and what is at stake in reading it Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253) reports that what he brought back from his teacher Rujing at Mount Tiantong was a four-character phrase, shin-jin-datsu-raku , 'body and mind dropped off', and it is that phrase — not any account of how the dropping off felt — that he reaches for throughout the Shōbōgenzō , his collected Japanese-language essays, whenever he has to say what sitting accomplishes. A familiar gloss treats the phrase as the name of a meditative episode in which the division between subject and object lapses. On that gloss Dōgen's ethics must be sought elsewhere — in the monastic rule, in the bodhisattva precepts, in the vow — because the phrase itself belongs to a phenomenology of awakening rather than to any theory of conduct or character. This essay argues that the gloss misplaces the phrase. Shin-jin-datsu-raku names a formative process, and that process has the shape which virtue-ethical theories give to the formation of an agent; Dōgen's ontology and his ethics are therefore not two departments needing to be joined, but one doctrine stated twice. Two preliminaries make the case harder before they make it easier, and both belong at the front rather than in a footnote. The first is philological. The phrase Dōgen ascribes to Rujing does not stand in that graphic form in Rujing's recorded sayings; what stands there is a homophone, written with characters meaning that the dust of the mind falls away rather than that body and mind drop off. Both are read shinjin datsuraku . Whether Dōgen misheard, deliberately re-read, or drew on a source now lost, the consequence for interpretation is the same and it is considerable: what survives is not a transcript of an experience but a doctrinal formula whose written form Dōgen either chose or endorsed, and which he then puts to work in argument. Carl Bielefeldt's study of Dōgen's meditation writings establishes the general version of this point, showing that the Fukan zazengi , Dōgen's manual of sitting, is a reworking of an existing Chinese Chan manual, and that his pronouncements about zazen are positions taken up within a literary tradition rather than reports from the cushion (Bielefeldt 1988). If that is right, the phenomenological reading is not merely one option among several; it treats a polemical term as though it were introspective data. The second preliminary is that 'virtue ethics' is not one thing, and a comparison that does not say which thing it means establishes nothing. The argument here therefore fixes its test in advance, taking it from the Nicomachean Ethics , and only afterwards asks whether shin-jin-datsu-raku passes. Four conditions, taken from the text rather than from the label Aristotle's account supplies four commitments which together distinguish a theory of virtue from a theory of right action, and each is worth stating in the form he actually gives it, because the comparison stands or falls on the details. The bearer of value is an activity of the formed agent, assessed over a whole life. The human good is activity of soul in accordance with virtue — and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete — and further, in a complete life ( NE I.7, 1098a16–18). Two things follow at once: eudaimonia is an activity rather than a feeling or a resting condition, and the unit of assessment is a life rather than an episode. The state is acquired by performing the acts that express it. We become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre, and just by doing just acts ( NE II.1, 1103a31–b2). Nature gives the capacity; habituation completes it. Performing the act is not sufficient. The agent must act knowingly; must choose the act, and choose it for its own sake; and must act from a firm and unchangeable state ( NE II.4, 1105a28–33). It is the third condition that separates someone who has the virtue from someone who merely does what the virtuous person does, and it is what makes this a theory of formation rather than a classification of acts. The formed agent is the criterion. Things are good and pleasant to each person according to that person's state, and the excellent person is right about them, seeing the truth in each case, being as it were a standard and measure ( NE III.4, 1113a29–33). Normative authority is thus located in a perception that only formation makes possible, not in a rule the unformed could apply. These four are not a definition of virtue ethics; they are the commitments of the ancestral case, which is what a comparison needs. One further consideration comes from the modern reconstruction and will matter below. Alasdair MacIntyre makes the primary site of the virtues a practice : a socially established, cooperative form of activity possessing its own standards of excellence and its own internal goods, goods which cannot be obtained in any other way, with a virtue defined as an acquired quality whose exercise enables one to achieve them (MacIntyre 2007, ch. 14). MacIntyre also insists that virtues are unintelligible apart from the tradition that carries them — a reason for care in what follows, not a bar to it. Testing the phrase against the four conditions Take the conditions in order. On the first, Dōgen is not merely compliant but stricter than Aristotle. The Bendōwa (1231) states that to suppose practice and realisation to be two is the view of outsiders; in the buddha-dharma they are one — the doctrine usually cited as shushō-ittō . Realisation is therefore not an episode which practice produces and which then obtains; sitting is the activity in which realisation consists. That is energeia in the strict sense, an actuality that is complete at every moment of its exercise, and it rules out from the start the reading on which shin-jin-datsu-raku is a state one enters and thereafter possesses. On the second condition, the relevant evidence is not in the philosophical fascicles at all but in the regulatory ones. The Shōb