Philosopher, Religious Thinker or Contemplative Practitioner? Making Sense of Dōgen Beyond Zen Modernism

Van der Braak reflects on the different approaches to understanding Dōgen’s work. For his own, he uses the philosophical hermeneutics of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). According to van der Braak, for Gadamer, understanding is possible through a merging of horizons, one’s own with that which one aims to understand. Regarding Dōgen, a central claim of Gadamer’s approach to understanding is that it is impossible to understand Dōgen “as he really is” or to understand what he wrote “as he really meant it”—Dōgen’s authorial intention is necessarily inaccessible. Since we do not have Dōgen before us, the only access we do have, even using his texts and studying the practices handed down in the Sōtō Zen tradition, is by way of imaginatively reconstructing him. Making sense of Dōgen is always imagining Dōgen. Such imaginings are created even before we encounter one of his texts. They are formed according to our subconscious pre-understandings (Vorverstehen): understanding him as a philosopher, as a religious thinker, as a prophet, or as a miracle worker. This pre-understanding, then, continues to color our imagination, even if we read Dōgen with an open mind.