This Because That

The Way is originally perfect and all pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust. … And yet, if there is a hair's breadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion.¹⁴

The Japanese founder of my Zen lineage, the thirteenth-century monk known as Dōgen Zenji, exhorts us to a Way that recognizes two things: in the first place, the all-pervading and absolutely immaculate nature of our world of practice—there is nothing to be extracted from or separated out from this world where all things co-arise, mutually interdependent within the beginningless, endless web of cause and effect, of impulse and repulse. And at the same time, precisely alongside this originally perfect Way, Dōgen calls for our wholehearted engagement with this world—our full-throttled activity and response to a world from which, in the end, we are not separate.

Who speaks? This dust, in its immaculacy, speaks. My first glimmering understanding of this co-arising interdependence came from the same source as my first understanding of French poststructuralism. One afternoon in the late 1980s, my professor Barbara Johnson told the class a terrible joke:

A man came home one night to the tell-tale blinking light on his answering machine. "You have nine messages," the metallic-voiced recording told him when he pressed play. The man was surprised; he'd only just relocated to this city to be closer to family. He barely knew a soul; indeed the house he was renting often seemed depressingly empty and far too big for just one person. The messages were all from the same unfamiliar caller. A deep male voice: "This is the Viper, I come to your house tonight," said the first message. His voice sounded alien, creepy, dark. Beep. "This is the Viper. I come in three hours." Beep. "This is the Viper. I come in two hours." Beep. As each message played, the Viper's visit grew closer and closer, and the man grew more and more frightened. "This is the Viper. I come now." Beep. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. The man leaped up in terror—just as the door swung open. A short, balding gentleman stood on the doorstep. "Good evening. I am the Viper. I come to vash your vindows. Vhere should I start?"

This joke is neither particularly funny nor scary, nor even scary-funny. But it does neatly illustrate a world shared by twentieth-century poststructuralism and thirteenth-century Zen Buddhism alike. This is our world. A world that we today call "global"—as if there were a choice, a choice to inhabit a planet that was not a globe. As if we could reject the world in its spherical, all-pervading, mutual co-arising. As if there might be an option to reject the globe and to become, again, flatlanders.

As Barbara Johnson first and Dōgen Zenji second taught me: all things are known by their relationship to all other things. Letters and words are marks that help us define a thing as such but that are known only by dint of their relationship, their definition through other letters and words, which are themselves known only by dint of still more letters, more words, more vindow-vashing.

This game of cross-reference gets even more interesting when we think about interlinguistic translation. In "The Task of the Translator" Walter Benjamin famously describes how translations are possible precisely insofar as all of the equivalencies we draw are only a matter of fitting together fragments of a vessel: the fragments come together around the empty hollow that defines the whole. The hole that makes the whole.¹⁵

The older I get, the more I find myself trusting both hole and whole—trusting the deep ways that our mind lays claim to marks, identifies and knows things. Each word, each thought, each thing comes...