Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
the sea darkening,
a wild duck’s call
faintly white
– Bashō1
Substance (Latin: substantia, Greek: hypostasis, hypokeimenon, ousia) is without a doubt the fundamental concept of occidental thought. According to Aristotle, it denotes what is constant across change. It is constitutive of the unity and selfhood of all beings. The Latin verb substare (literally: to stand underneath), from which substantia is derived, also means ‘to withstand’. Stare (to stand) can also mean ‘to stand up to, to maintain oneself, to resist’. Thus, the activity of existing and persisting is part of substance. Substance is what remains the same, the identical, that which delimits itself from the other by remaining in itself and thus prevailing. Hypostasis can mean ‘foundation’ or ‘essence’, but it can also mean ‘withstanding’ and ‘steadfastness’. The substance stands firmly by itself. The striving towards itself, towards self-possession, is inscribed in it. Tellingly, in normal usage ousia means ‘wealth, possessions, property, estate’. And the Greek word stasis not only means ‘to stand’ but also ‘revolt, tumult, quandary, discord, quarrel, enmity’ and ‘party’. The semantic antecedents of the concept of substance do not at all suggest peacefulness or friendliness, and the concept’s meaning is prefigured accordingly. A substance rests on separation and distinction, the delimitation of the one from the other, the holding out of the selfhood of one thing from that of another. ‘Substance’ is thus conceived with a view not to openness but to closedness.
The central Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) is in many respects a counter-concept to substance. Substance is full, so to speak. It is filled with itself, with what is its own. Śūnyatā, by contrast, represents a movement of ex-propriation. It empties out all being that remains within itself, that insists on itself or closes itself up in itself. Śūnyatā spills such beings into an openness, into an open, stretched-out distance. Within the field of emptiness, nothing condenses into a massive presence. Nothing rests exclusively on itself. The un-bounding, ex-propriating movement sublates the monadological for-itself into a mutual relationship. Emptiness, however, is not a principle of creation; it is not a primary ‘cause’ from which all beings, all forms, ‘emerge’. It has no inherent ‘substantial power’ that could create an ‘effect’. And it is not elevated to a higher order of being by any ‘ontological’ rupture. It does not mark a ‘transcendence’ that precedes the forms as they appear. Form and emptiness are situated on the same level of being. There is no gradient of being that separates emptiness from the ‘immanence’ of the things as they appear. As has often been pointed out, the Far Eastern model of being does not involve ‘transcendence’ or the ‘wholly other’.
Yü-Chien’s Eight Views of the Xiao-Xiang, inspired by Zen Buddhism, could be interpreted as views of emptiness. They consist of fleeting strokes of the brush that only hint at things, of traces that do not determine anything. The presented forms seem to be cloaked by a peculiar absence. Everything seems inclined to sink back into absence before even truly having appeared. The forms seem to withdraw into the endless expanse of the white background. A certain reserve means that the articulations are kept in a peculiar state of hovering. In their detachment, things float between presence and absence, between being and non-being. They do not express anything final. Nothing imposes itself; nothing delimits itself or closes itself off. Figures blend into each other, follow each other’s contours closely, reflect each other, as if emptiness were a medium of friendliness. The river sits in its place, and the mountain begins to flow. Earth and sky snuggle up to one another. What is peculiar about this landscape is that the emptiness not only allows the specific shapes of the things to disappear but also allows them to glow in their graceful presence. Imposing presences lack grace.
cuckoo:
filtering through the vast bamboo grove
the moon’s light
– Bashō2
In ‘The Sutra of Mountains and Water’, Dōgen articulates a particular landscape of emptiness in which ‘the Blue Mountains are walking’:
Never insult them by saying that the Blue Mountains cannot walk or that the East Mountain cannot move on water. It is because of the grossness of the viewpoint of the vulgar that they doubt the phrase ‘the Blue Mountains are walking’. It is due to the poorness of their scant experience that they are astonished at the words ‘flowing mountains’.3
The expression ‘flowing mountains’ is not meant as a ‘metaphor’. Dōgen would say that the mountains ‘actually’ flow. Talk of a ‘flowing mountain’ would be metaphorical only at the level of ‘substance’, where the mountain is separate from the water. In the field of emptiness, though, where mountain and water play into each other, that is, at the level of indifference, the mountain ‘actually’ flows. The mountain does not flow like a river; rather the mountain is the river. The idea of the difference between mountain and river that we take from the model of substance is sublated here. If we were using metaphor, the river’s properties would be merely ‘transferred’ to the mountains, and the mountains would not ‘properly’ flow. The mountains would look only as if they were moving. Metaphorical speech is thus ‘improper’. Dōgen’s, by contrast, is neither ‘proper’ nor ‘improper’. It departs from the level of substantial being that makes the separation of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ speech meaningful.
At the level of emptiness, the mountain does not rest in itself like a substance. Rather, it flows into the river. A flowing landscape unfolds:
mountains ride the clouds and walk through the sky. The crowns of the waters are mountains, whose walking, upward or downward, is always ‘on water’. Because the mountains’ toes can walk over all kinds of water, making the waters dance, the walking is free in all directions.4
The un-bounded emptiness suspends any rigid opposition: ‘Water is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither moving nor still, neither cold nor warm, neither existent nor nonexistent, neither delusion nor realization.’5 The unbounding also applies to seeing. The aim is a seeing that takes place prior to the separation of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. The things that are seen do not have a ‘subject’ imposed upon them. A thing must be seen in the way it sees itself. A certain primacy of the object is meant to protect the object against being appropriated by the ‘subject’. Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen. This is an exercise in a way of seeing that is object-like, a seeing that is becoming object, a seeing that is letting-be, a friendly seeing. We need to look at the water the way that water looks at water.6 Beholding most perfectly would mean the beholder becoming water-like. Perfect beholding sees water in its being-thus.
Emptiness is a friendly in-difference in which the seer is at the same time seen:
The donkey looks into the well and the well into the donkey.
The bird looks at the flower and vice versa. All this is ‘concentration in awakening’.
The one nature is present in all beings and they all appear in the one nature.7
The bird is also the flower; the flower is also the bird. Emptiness is the open that allows for mutual permeation. It creates friendliness. One individual being reflects the whole in itself, and the whole dwells in this one being. Nothing withdraws into an isolated for-itself.
Everything flows. Things merge into each other and mix together. Water is everywhere:
To say that there are places not reached by water is the teaching of śrāvakas of the Small Vehicle, or the wrong teaching of non-Buddhists. Water reaches into flames, it reaches into the mind and its images, into wit, and into discrimination, and it reaches into realization of the buddha-nature.8
The distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’ is suspended. According to Dōgen, water is the body and spirit of the sage. For the sages who dwell in remote mountains, the mountains are their body and spirit: ‘We should remember the fact that mountains are like sages and sages are like mountains.’9 Zen Buddhist practice lets the monks living in the mountains become mountain-like; they take on the look of the mountain.
The transformation of a mountain into a river would be ‘magic’. But magic is the transformation of one substance into another; it does not go beyond the sphere of substance. Dōgen’s ‘flowing mountains’, by contrast, are not the result of a magical transformation of their essence. Rather, they represent an everyday view of an emptiness characterized by the mutual permeation of things:
There is neither magic, mystery, nor wonder in the real truth. Whoever thinks there is, is on the wrong track. Of course there are all kinds of clever things in Zen, such as making Mount Fuji come out of a kettle, squeezing water out of glowing tongs, putting oneself into a wooden post or changing mountains round. That is nothing magical or wonderful: it is just everyday triviality.10
Spring and winter, wind and rain, dwell in a plum tree. The tree is also the ‘heads of patch-robed monks’. But it also withdraws entirely into its fragrance. The field of emptiness is free of any compulsion of identity:
‘The old plum tree’ . . . is very unconstrained; it suddenly flowers, and naturally bears fruit. Sometimes it makes the spring, and sometimes it makes the winter. Sometimes it makes a raging wind, and sometimes it makes a hard rain. Sometimes it is heads of patch-robed monks, and sometimes it is eyes of eternal buddhas. Sometimes it has become grass and trees, and sometimes it has become purity and fragrance.11
We are not dealing with ‘poetic’ language here, unless ‘poetic’ refers to a state of being in which the brace of identity is loosened, that is, to that state of particular in-difference in which speech flows. This flowing speech responds to the flowing landscape of emptiness. In the field of emptiness, the things break out of their isolating cells of identity and enter into an all-encompassing unity, the free and unconstrained sphere of mutual permeation. Like the all-pervasive white of snow, the field of emptiness immerses the things in an in-difference. For it is hard to distinguish between the white of blossom and the white of the snow lying on it: ‘Snow lies on the panicles of the reeds along the shore; it is difficult to decide where they begin and it ends.’12 The field of emptiness is in a certain sense un-limited. Inside and outside permeate each other: ‘In the eyes is snow, in the ears is snow too – just at that moment they are dwelling in uniformity [i.e. in emptiness].’13
The ‘uniformity’ of emptiness kills the colours that persist in themselves.14 But this death at the same time enlivens them. They gain in breadth and depth, or in silence. ‘Uniformity’ thus has nothing in common with indiscriminate, colourless or monotonous unity. One could say that whiteness, that is, emptiness, is the deep layer or the invisible breathing space of colours or forms. Emptiness immerses them in a kind of absence. But this absence also raises them to a special kind of presence. A massive presence that was only ‘present’ would not breathe. The mutual permeation of things in the field of emptiness does not bring about a shapeless and formless confusion. It retains the shapes. Emptiness is form. ‘The Master once said: “True emptiness does not destroy being, and true emptiness does not differ from form.”’15 Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself. It loosens the rigidity of substance. The beings flow into each other without merging into a substance-like ‘unity’. In the Shōbōgenzō it says:
A person getting realization is like the moon being reflected in water [literally: living or dwelling in water; B-Ch. H.]: the moon does not get wet, and the water is not broken. Though the light [of the moon] is wide and great, it is reflected in a foot or an inch of water. The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass and are reflected in a single drop of water. Realization does not break the individual, just as the moon does not pierce the water. The individual does not hinder the state of realization, just as a dewdrop does not hinder the sky and moon.16
Emptiness thus does not mean the negation of the individual. Enlightened vision sees every being shining in its uniqueness. And nothing rules. The moon is friendly towards the water. The beings dwell in each other without imposing themselves on each other, without hindering each other.
The bindweed flower
Its only calyx breathes
Mountain lake colour . . .
– Buson
The emptiness or the nothing of Zen Buddhism is therefore not a simple negation of beings, not a formula for nihilism or scepticism. Rather, it represents an utmost affirmation of being. What is negated is only the substance-like delimitation that produces tension. Openness, the friendliness of emptiness, reveals that particular beings are ‘in’ the world and, further, that the world is in their foundation, that in their deep layers they breathe the other things and offer them space in which to dwell. In just one thing, then, the whole world dwells.
The fortieth koan of Mumonkan runs as follows:
When Isan was with Hyakujo he was the tenzo.17 Hyakujo wanted to choose a master for Mount Daii, so he called the head monk and the rest of them, and told them that an exceptional person should go there. Then he took a waterbottle, stood it on the floor, and asked a question. ‘Don’t call this a water-bottle, but tell me what it is.’ The head monk said, ‘It can’t be called a stump.’ Hyakujo asked Isan his opinion. Isan pushed the water bottle over with his foot. Hyakujo laughed, and said, ‘The head monk has lost.’ Isan was ordered to start the temple.18
With his answer – that one cannot call a water bottle a ‘stump’ – the head monk betrayed the fact that he was still attached to thinking in terms of substance: he understood the water bottle in terms of its substance-like identity, which distinguishes it from a stump. The tenzo Isan, by contrast, pushes the water bottle over with his foot, and with this unique gesture, he empties out the water bottle; that is, he pushes it into the field of emptiness.
In his famous lecture ‘The Thing’, Heidegger also approaches a vessel in a very unconventional way:
How does the jug’s void [Leere, i.e. emptiness; D. S.] hold? It holds by taking what is poured in. It holds by keeping and retaining what it took in. . . . The twofold holding of the void rests on the outpouring. . . . To pour from the jug is to give. . . . The nature of the holding void is gathered in the giving. . . . We call the gathering of the twofold holding into the outpouring, which, as a being together, first constitutes the full presence of giving: the poured gift. The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out. Even the empty jug retains its nature by virtue of the poured gift, even though the empty jug does not admit of a giving out. But this nonadmission belongs to the jug and to it alone. A scythe, by contrast, or a hammer is incapable of a nonadmission of this giving.19
Thus far, Heidegger has not moved beyond the weak position of the head monk. That monk would also have said: the jug is not a scythe. The ‘presence’ of the jug, namely the poured gift, is what distinguishes it from scythe and hammer. Heidegger has not yet left behind the model of substance. But he then goes one step further – without, however, pushing over the jug, without pushing it into the field of emptiness:
The spring stays on in the water of the gift. In the spring the rock dwells, and in the rock dwells the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky. In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth’s nourishment and the sky’s sun are betrothed to one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.20
The thing is thus not a something with specific properties. Rather, the relations mediated by ‘dwelling’ are what makes the jug a jug. Alongside earth and sky, the gods and mortals also dwell in the gift of outpouring:
The gift of the pouring out is drink for mortals. It quenches their thirst. It refreshes their leisure. It enlivens their conviviality. But the jug’s gift is at times also given for consecration. If the pouring is for consecration, then it does not still a thirst. It stills and elevates the celebration of the feast. . . . The outpouring is the libation poured out for the immortal gods. The gift of the outpouring as libation is the authentic gift. . . . The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, ‘gush’, really designates: gift and sacrifice. . . . In the gift of the outpouring that is drink, mortals stay in their own way. In the gift of the outpouring that is a libation, the divinities stay in their own way, they who receive back the gift of giving as the gift of the donation. In the gift of the outpouring, mortals and divinities each dwell in their different ways.21
By letting earth and sky, the divinities and the mortals, dwell in itself, that is, by ‘gathering’ them, the jug is. Heidegger calls the ‘gathering’ of the ‘four’ the ‘world’, or the ‘fourfold’. The jug is the world. The ‘essence’ of the jug is the relation between earth and sky, between the divinities and the mortals. Although Heidegger thinks the thing from the perspective of these relations between the ‘four’, he still holds on to the model of ‘essence’. The thing is still tied to the figure of substance. In Heidegger’s thing there is an inwardness that isolates it, like a monad. On this view, a thing cannot communicate with other things. Each thing, alone with itself, gathers earth and sky, divinities and mortals. There is no sense of neighbourhood. There is no proximity between things. The things do not dwell or live inside each other. Every thing stands isolated, by itself. Like a monad, Heidegger’s thing has no windows. The emptiness of Zen Buddhism, by contrast, creates a neighbourly nearness between things. The things talk to each other, reflect each other. The plum-tree blossom dwells in the pond. The moon and mountain play with each other.
the bell fades away,
the blossoms’ fragrance ringing:
early evening
– Bashō22
Heidegger also tries to think the world in terms of relations. Earth and sky, the divinities and the mortals, are not fixed, substance-like entities. They permeate each other, reflect each other: ‘None of the four insists on its own separate particularity. Rather, each is expropriated, within their mutual appropriation, into its own being. This expropriative appropriating is the mirror-play of the fourfold.’23 Particularly interesting is the expression ‘expropriated . . . into its own being’ [zu einem Eigenen enteignet]. The expropriation, it follows, does not annul what is proper to a being. It negates only what is beginning to insist on itself, proper-ty [Eigen-tum] that persists in itself. Each of the four finds itself only through the others. It owes what is proper to it to its relations with the others. The relations are older, so to speak, than the ‘proper’. The ‘appropriation’ binds the four into the ‘simplicity [Einfalt] of their essential being toward one another’.24 Internally, however, this simplicity remains a manifold, or rather a fourfold. Each of the four frees itself into its proper own; the simplicity does not involve the properly own being repressed in favour of unity.
The ‘world’ is not a substance-like something but a relation. In this world relation, the one reflects everything else in itself: ‘Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each therewith reflects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four.’25 The world as ‘mirror-play’ happens beyond explanatory relations.26 There are no preceding ‘grounds’ on which it can be explained. Heidegger therefore draws on a tautological formulation:
The world presences by worlding. That means: the world’s worlding cannot be explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed through anything else. This impossibility does not lie in the inability of our human thinking to explain and fathom in this way. Rather, the inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world’s worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world’s worlding. . . . The united four are already strangled in their essential nature when we think of them only as separate realities, which are to be grounded in and explained by one another.27
None of the four is a separate reality. The world is not a unity that consists of isolated ‘substances’. In a certain sense, Heidegger, too, empties out the world. The centre of the ‘mirror-playing ring’ of the ‘fourfold’ is empty.28 However, Heidegger does not remain inside this relationality. One could also put it like this: Heidegger does not hold on to relationality, that is, to the absence of substance-like inwardness, until the end. The figure of the ‘ring’, despite its empty centre, already suggests a certain inwardness. Its closedness, after all, fills the emptiness of the centre with an inwardness. Heidegger’s thinking does not remain wholly in relationality or horizontality. This becomes apparent when we look at the figure of God. Beyond the relationality of the world, Heidegger looks up. There, in the region of the divinities, is an icon-like window: the divinities are not identical with ‘God’; they are arranged around the one ‘God’, who exceeds the ‘relation’ of the world. Because of this existence outside of the world, God is able to withdraw into Himself, or develop an inwardness. Inwardness, which the ‘relation’ lacks, is thus reconstituted in the ‘He’: ‘The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown.’29 This inwardness makes it possible to invoke God. As long as it still points to God, the world is not empty. The world of Zen Buddhism, which rests on emptiness, is emptied of both anthropos and theos. This world does not point to anything. The impression one gets from Heidegger is that the ‘ring’ of the world circles around a hidden theological axis. This unique circular movement leads to the emergence of a further inwardness at the ‘empty’ centre.
Heidegger was probably familiar with the Zen Buddhist figure of emptiness. In his fictional conversation with ‘a Japanese’, Heidegger has his interlocutor point out that Noh stages are ‘empty’.30 Heidegger then projects his thinking on to this figure of emptiness, ascribing to it an inwardness that is certainly alien to the emptiness of Zen Buddhist teaching. Heidegger uses emptiness to characterize the fundamental figure of his thought, ‘being’. ‘Being’ denotes the ‘open’ that renders all beings manifest without, however, manifesting itself. Being is not itself one of these beings, but every being owes its meaningful contours to it. Being lets beings be what each of them is. Being thereby enables every relation to beings. In this context, Heidegger uses the ‘jug’ as a metaphor for the open of being. According to this metaphor, the ‘emptiness’, or the ‘inner recess’,31 of the jug is more than a result of the shape. For it is not the case that the shape of the jug creates emptiness, a space that is not occupied by anything. Rather, the emptiness is what allows the shape of the jug to emerge in the first place. The emptiness is, so to speak, older than the clay around it. Rather than the emptiness owing its existence to the shaped clay, the shaped clay emerges from the emptiness:
Yet it must be recognized that the inner recess is not just a haphazard emptiness which arises purely on account of the surrounding walls and which happens not to be full of ‘things’. It is just the opposite: the inner recess itself is what determines, shapes, and bears the walling action of the walls and of their surfaces. The walls and surfaces are merely what is radiated out by that original open realm which allows its openness to come into play by summoning up, round about itself and toward itself, such-and-such walls (the particular form of the vessel). That is how the essential occurrence of the open realm radiates back from and in the embracing walls.32
The ‘walls’ are what is ‘radiated out’ by emptiness. The open of the ‘inner recess’ is ‘summoning up’ the walls ‘toward itself’. This ‘toward itself’ is evidence of the inwardness of this emptiness. Emptiness, the open, is the soul, so to speak, of the jug. The shape, or form, would be the radiation emanating from this soul-like inwardness.
For Heidegger, then, emptiness is anything but the absence of something. Rather, it is a dynamic process that, without revealing itself to be ‘something’, bears, forms, at-tunes [bestimmt] and sur-rounds every thing, and thereby en-frames all things making them part of a tonal unity. Emptiness manifests as a ground-providing mood that at-tunes all that is present. The ground-mood binds, gathers, the manifold presences into a comprehensive tonality, into the inwardness of a voice. Through this com-prehension, emptiness charts out a place. The place is held and gathered in the gathering and internalizing force of emptiness:
Often enough it appears to be a lack. Emptiness is held then to be a failure to fill up a cavity or gap.
Yet presumably emptiness is closely allied to the special character of place, and therefore not a lacking, but a bringing-forth. Again, language can give us a hint. In the verb ‘to empty’ [leeren] speaks the word ‘collecting’ [Lesen], taken in the original sense of the gathering which rules a place. To empty a glass means: To gather the glass, as that which can contain something, into its having become free. . . .
Emptiness is not nothing. It is also not a lack. In sculptural embodiment, emptiness plays in the manner of a seekingprojecting instituting of places.33
Emptiness empties; that is, it gathers what is presencing into a gathered togetherness of the place. It is what holds together, what ‘determines, shapes, and bears’, in a way that precedes, however, what it bears and shapes. It is itself invisible, but it shines through all that is visible, allows what is presencing first to shine forth in its meaningfulness. The gathering, at-tuning emptiness gives the place an inwardness, a voice. It animates the place. Heidegger conceives of the place from the perspective of this gathering force:
Originally the word ‘site’ [Ort] denotes the tip of a spear. Everything comes together in the tip. The site gathers unto itself, to the most supreme and inmost extreme. Its gathering penetrates and pervades everything. The site, the gathering, takes in and preserves all it has taken in, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature.34
The ‘tip of the spear’ that makes everything come together in itself illustrates the fundamental movement of inwardness that also determines Heidegger’s notion of emptiness. The emptiness of Zen Buddhism, by contrast, does not have a ‘tip’. It does not rule in the way of a gathering centre that ‘takes in’ everything or ‘summon[s] up, round about itself and toward itself’. It is emptied of such inwardness and gravity toward-the-self. Precisely the absence of a ruling ‘tip’ makes it friendly. Zen Buddhist teaching is emptier than Heidegger’s emptiness. One could also say: the emptiness of Zen Buddhism is without soul and without voice. It is more scattered than ‘gathered’. Or: a unique gathering, namely a gathering without inwardness, a mood without voice, is inherent in it.
in the plum’s fragrance,
suddenly the sun –
mountain path
– Bashō35
1 Bashō, Bashō’s Haiku, p. 47.
2 Ibid., p. 123.
3 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō / The True Dharma-Eye Treasury, vol. I, p. 218.
4 Ibid., p. 221.
5 Ibid.
6 See ibid., pp. 221f.
7 The Ox and His Herdsman, p. 60. Transl. note: the German edition is inspired by Heidegger and translates the last sentence as ‘Das eine Wesen west an in allem Anwesenden und alles Anwesende scheint in das eine Wesen’ (‘The one being presences in all that is presencing and all presencing shines into the one being’). See Der Ochs und sein Hirte, Eine altchinesische Zen-Geschichte erläutert von Meister Daizohkutsu R. Ohtsu, mit japanischen Bildern aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, Pfullingen: Neske, 1981 [1958], p. 94.
8 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō / The True Dharma-Eye Treasury, vol. I, p. 223.
9 Ibid., p. 225 (transl. amended). Transl. note: the English edition has ‘We should remember the fact that mountains like sages and the fact that [mountains] like saints.’ I have brought the passage in line with the German version.
10 The Ox and His Herdsman, p. 92.
11 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō / The True Dharma-Eye Treasury, vol. III, p. 230.
12 The Blue Cliff Record, p. 82. Transl. note: the English edition corresponds closely to Han’s introduction of the quotation: ‘When snow covers the white flowers, it’s hard to distinguish the outlines.’ I have given a translation of the German version.
13 Ibid., p. 214.
14 Transl. note: the German version gives Einfarbigkeit (‘monochromaticity’) where the English has ‘uniformity’.
15 Master Yunmen, ‘Gate of the Clouds’, p. 160.
16 Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō / The True Dharma-Eye Treasury, vol. I, p. 43.
17 Transl. note: as a footnote in the Mumonkan explains, a tenzo is ‘[o]ne of the six classes of monks in office’ (p. 262).
18 Ekai, Mumonkan, pp. 262f.
19 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: HarperCollins, 1975, pp. 161–84; here: pp. 169f. {170}
beyng.com: References to Poetry, Language, Thought pages have been updated with {links} to the corresponding page in the 2001 edition.
20 Ibid., p. 170 {171}. Transl. note: in the German, the last sentence is ‘Im Wesen des Kruges weilen Erde und Himmel.’ A more literal translation would be ‘Earth and sky rest in the essence of the jug.’ Note that Heidegger also uses the term Wesen as a nominalized verb. Thus, the sentence could be translated ‘Earth and sky dwell in the essencing of the jug.’ The notion of ‘essence’/‘essencing’, rather than ‘jugness’, is needed for the argument that follows.
21 Ibid., pp. 170f.
22 Bashō, Bashō’s Haiku, p. 32. Ibid., p. 177.
23 Ibid., p. 177. {178}
24 Ibid. Transl. note: in the existing English translation, Heidegger’s Einfalt is variably rendered as ‘onefold’, ‘simplicity’ or ‘simpleness’. It should be kept in mind that the German term is always Einfalt, setting up an opposition to Geviert, or ‘fourfold’.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., pp. 177f.
28 Ibid., p. 178.
29 Heidegger, ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’, p. 220.
30 Martin Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue on Language (between a Japanese and an Inquirer)’, in On the Way to Language, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 1–54; here: p. 18.
31 Transl. note: more literally, ‘the hollow centre’ [hohle Mitte].
32 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, p. 268.
33 Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 116–19; here: pp. 118f. (transl. amended).
34 Martin Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’, in On the Way to Language, pp. 159–98; here: pp. 159f.
35 Bashō, Bashō’s Haiku, p. 143 (transl. mod.).