“微分” された真実｜Reality differentiated (3/3)

諸仏しよぶつ諸祖しよその受持し単伝するは古鏡なり。同見同面なり、同像同鋳なり、同参同証す。胡来胡現十万八千、漢来漢現一念万年なり。｜正法眼蔵「古鏡」

仏祖らはいわば一枚の鏡を伝えてきた。同じ姿を映し、同じ形に鋳られ、同じ法を証す。胡が来れば胡を現わし、漢が来れば漢を現わす。十万八千里を越え、万年を一瞬にする。

『正法眼蔵』は迷／悟、修／証といったストラクチャーに代え、鏡・水・竹・蔦… など、テクスチャーに関する表象をいたるところに嵌め込んだ。テクスチャーは「このことを説く」ということをしない。なぜ説かないのか。あるいは、こう問おう。仏法をテクスチャーで考えることは、それが織り込まれた社会に何をもたらすだろうか。

社会にもしテクスチャーがあるとすれば、それは人々のふるまいによって織りなされるだろう。行動の様式は思考の形式に制御される。その思考の形式を制御するのは伝統であり、なかでも宗教であるということは既知の事実と言っていいだろう（いや究極の制御装置は脳であるという見解は、また別枠の話である）。

すると、宗教と社会とはストラクチャーではなく、テクスチャーにおいて結合しうる。人々は教義や聖諦を知って行動するのではなく、テクスチャーを感じて行動するのである。

だからこそ宗教は文化的創造性をもちうる。禅宗が叢林を越えて書・茶・華などの文化要素を創出し、クルアーンに必ずしも記されてはいないであろう美意識がモスクの壁面を装飾する。そのような現象は、経典に定義されたストラクチャーだけからは決して生じないだろう。

ただし数学と異なって、宗教に微分の公式は存在しない。ストラクチャーからひとつひとつテクスチャーを読み取らなければならない。『正法眼蔵』はそれを実践した稀有の例なのではないか。

 

What all buddhas and ancestors have maintained and transmitted, person to person, is an old mirror. This is one seeing, one face; one image, one casting [of the bronze mirror]; one practice and one realization. When an alien comes, an alien appears across a hundred and eight thousand miles. When a native comes, a native appears at any moment in myriad years.
|”Old Mirror” in Shōbōgenzō, quoted from Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation with minor modification.

In his Shōbōgenzō, Dogen replaces categories such as delusion/realization and practice/enlightenment, which are considered to be structural to traditional Buddhism, with symbolic elements like a mirror, water, ivy, and bamboo inserted in the lines and passages to be woven into a unique texture of Buddhism. His focus on texture rather than structure seems to place his standpoint away from stating what the absolute “Truths” of Buddhism are, toward revealing how things could be rearranged in the True Buddhist Eye.

Then, what the action of texture-focused Buddhism on the society could be? Now I would extend the notion of texture to the society; a society’s texture is defined as the entirety of people’s behaviours––”behaviour” in its broad sense, including bodily performances, languages, businesses, art works, architecture, music, literature, science and more as far as they refer to tangible activities of people rather than abstract systems or institutions. This will lead us to recognize that a religion and a society could meet in texture, not in structure. People do not behave by knowing credo or dharma of their religion but by touching the texture of what they believe.

This explains the reason why religion can affect cultural creativity. We know the cases in Zen Buddhism which exerts its influence across number of cultural areas such as ways of writing (calligraphy), arranging flowers, designing gardens, meeting other people (tea ceremony), as well as the cases in Islam where we find so many places (mosques) of prayers graced with amazingly beautiful walls and floors whose design are not precisely written down in the sacred text. Crossover phenomena like these could only be produced by the religion’s texture traveling across its structures.

But texture is not always easy to see, easy to feel, in huge structures; you need to “differentiate” it at every point, along every curve, over every surface of structured volumes. I think Dogen was one of the unparalleled human beings who had an eye to realize it.