Eric Nyberg

This paper argues that Dōgen’s philosophy should be understood through the inseparable unity of Buddha-nature, expression (dōtoku), and practice-realisation (shushō), not as distinct doctrines but as co-constitutive dimensions of reality’s continuous self-manifestation. Through close reading of key Shōbōgenzō fascicles, particularly ‘Busshō’, ‘Uji’, and ‘Genjōkōan’, I demonstrate how post-Meiji analytical approaches (kenkyū) have fragmented Dōgen’s essentially holistic thought by imposing Western metaphysical categories. Recovering the traditional sankyū (participatory investigation) method reveals how Dōgen’s texts function performatively, requiring embodied engagement rather than propositional analysis. This triadic reading shows Buddha-nature as dynamic field rather than metaphysical substrate, expression as reality’s direct self-articulation rather than representation, and practice-realisation as world-confirmed actualisation rather than goal-seeking. The implications extend beyond Buddhist studies: Dōgen offers an ecological ontology where value is intrinsic to relational networks, a non-representational semantics, and an ethics of care grounded in recognising our co-constitution with the natural world.

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that the genealogy of our moral faculties undermines their claim to normative authority. Realists respond that our evolved attitudes might nonetheless track stance-independent moral truths. Both sides, however, share a dubious presupposition: that normative authority must consist in a relation between our evaluative attitudes and some domain of facts independent of the processes that produced them. I argue that evolutionary genealogy is vindicatory rather than corrosive, not because our attitudes happen to line up with stance-independent truths, but because selection is itself the process that constitutes the only kind of normative authority there could be for creatures like us. Selection produces subjects, beings for whom things matter, and for obligately social agents whose characteristic goods require stable cooperation, the norms that sustain cooperative life have constitutive authority. I then develop a continuation-tracking standard that specifies the content of these norms, and argue that the stance-dependence of this account, far from being a liability, gives it an empirical specificity that stance-independent rivals cannot match. The scope of the argument is architecturally entailed: a vindicatory genealogy that established only that selection constitutes normativity, without specifying the standard thereby constituted, would leave the central claim underdetermined. The continuation-tracking standard is not supplementary to the metaethical argument; it is what that argument delivers. The upshot is that debunkers and realists have been arguing over whether genealogy can be reconciled with stance-independent moral truth, when the genealogy was doing the vindicatory work all along.

This paper argues that Dōgen's philosophy should be understood through the inseparable unity of Buddha-nature, expression (dōtoku), and practice-realisation (shushō), not as distinct doctrines but as co-constitutive dimensions of reality's continuous self-manifestation. Through close reading of key Shōbōgenzō fascicles, particularly “Busshō,” “Uji,” and “Genjōkōan,” I demonstrate how post-Meiji analytical approaches (kenkyū) have fragmented Dōgen's essentially holistic thought by imposing Western metaphysical categories. Recovering the traditional sankyū (participatory investigation) method reveals how Dōgen's texts function performatively, requiring embodied engagement rather than propositional analysis. This triadic reading shows Buddha-nature as dynamic field rather than metaphysical substrate, expression as reality's direct self-articulation rather than representation, and practice-realisation as world-confirmed actualisation rather than goal-seeking. The implications extend beyond Buddhist studies: Dōgen offers an ecological ontology where value is intrinsic to relational networks, a non-representational semantics, and an ethics of care grounded in recognising our co-constitution with the natural world.

abstract: Numerous authors have compared Process thought as articulated by Alfred North Whitehead and Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, owing to the fact that each of these systems is rooted in the notion that relational action, rather than substance, is meta-physically fundamental and that human life is to be understood as fundamentally experiential. However, despite the fact that the foundational philosophical tenets of Mahayana Buddhism are built on axioms established and rooted in early Buddhism, relatively little has been written comparing Process thought with the philosophy of early Buddhism. In this essay, I first offer a brief comparison and discussion of the foundational metaphysical principles of these systems. The purpose of this essay is to extend the dialogue between Process thought and early Buddhism, highlighting both areas of convergence and points of departure. The first task is to establish how key terms in each system may be understood in terms of the other and to point out ways in which these systems converge around questions of ontology, agency, and the nature of the self. I will then discuss the epistemologies that underwrite these meta-physical commitments. Finally, I will conclude with a brief comparison of the role of aesthetics in human experience and the soteriological project within these two schools of thought.