Nietzsche, Dogen and Gratitude
Jackson Pollock, "Number 9," 1949, © 2022 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In the Epilogue to “The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem”, Nietzsche wrote that, “Die ganze schöne, die ganze grosse Kunst gehört hierher: beider Wesen ist Dankbarkeit,” which is often (loosely) translated as, “The essence of all beautiful art, great art, is gratitude.” It’s possible, and at least somewhat accurate, to say that this is just Nietzsche being Nietzsche. He’s making a provocatively absolute statement in the context of a philosophy that claims to disallow absolutes. You might almost think he was a Tang Dynasty Zen Master for talking this way but, nonetheless, Nietzsche has a point.
Ordinarily, gratitude is introduced and explained in the realm of the relative. I remember my mom putting a plate of food down in front of me and saying, “You should eat everything on your plate because there are places in the world where people don’t have enough to eat,” or words to that effect. To put it a bit more precisely (sorry Mom!), she was saying, “You should be grateful for the rather ordinary and hastily prepared meal in front of you because it could be a lot worse, and that gratitude should naturally compel you to eat all of it.”
This approach to gratitude also shows up in the Buddhist realm and in the realms of coaching and secular mindfulness in a form that is commonly known as gratitude practice. There are countless exercises put forward in this regard that include chanting, journalling, prompted expression, list-making and recitation, etc. but they all have a similar flavor in that they require the practitioner to put themselves in a state of attention then express gratitude for one or more facts, persons or conditions that should properly inspire it. To give an example that is at least somewhat analogous to the distinctly secular one above, the Oryoki liturgy that is chanted as part of the formal and ceremonial act of serving and eating meals in Zen monasteries says, in part, “Innumerable labors brought us this food. We should know how it comes to us.” Clearly the intention here is that this acknowledgement will, first of all, instill a sense of appreciation for the innumerable labors and, second, be internalized and remembered thereby contributing to a lasting sense of well-being.
As anyone who has eaten Oryoki-style will tell you, this rhetorical gambit generally works as intended. In fact, the whole ceremony is finely crafted to fill participants with a potent mix of food, gratitude and diligence, and there’s ample evidence more generally for the beneficial nature of gratitude. Various studies cite improvements in mental and cardiovascular health as well as welcome life improvements like smoother, more enjoyable relationships that accrue from gratitude practice and related practices that focus on overall well-being.
However, there is a problem with this approach. Let’s say that my mom has effectively used the “eat everything on your plate” strategy on me and that I’m swanning around, filled with gratitude for my pork chop, Mac-n-Cheese and frozen green beans. Let’s also say that sometime later I walk by a restaurant and notice somebody, presumably in a window seat, eating a really substantial and delicious-looking meal - way more substantial and delicious than anything I could afford. I might think, “Damn! They have so much more food and it looks so much more delicious than mine.” Less hypothetically, I recall an experience of eating Oryoki breakfast, normally my favorite, in the middle of a seven-day sesshin and, after all the chanting and bowing, digging in to discover that the food had the texture and flavor of water-soaked cardboard. Of course, everyone else seemed to be enjoying it tremendously and I’m pretty sure that it was objectively delicious but I was completely incapable, for reasons that still escape me, of appreciating it as such. Needless to say, my gratitude was somewhat dampened. To be grateful for gifts, capacities or interests, if the gratitude is dependent upon gain and loss, pleasure and displeasure in this way, has the transience and undependability of all conditioned things. As the actual Tang Dynasty Zen Master Nánquán once said, “This is what can be picked up and blown around by the power of the wind. Easily dissipated.”
In the end, it should be clear that this cannot be the kind of gratitude Nietzsche was talking about. In fact, it’s hard to see how one would construct even a good piece of art or, for that matter, engage in any act of complex creation, e.g. writing a sophisticated computer program, building a bridge or writing an essay about gratitude, based on it. One might think, “I’m so lucky to be able to make this thing. I’ll make it a good one.” It’s easy to have that thought but it’s hard to translate into actual work. The thought itself is so straightforward and insubstantial and the act of creating something new, even in a medium that feels familiar, inevitably brings one up against the limits of understanding and control. The dark realm of not-knowing looms. A similar set of objections apply to the person receiving a work of art or, as described above, an Oryoki meal. Fortunately for all of us, there’s an alternative.
As a Mahayana Buddhist school, Zen recognizes that humans are constrained to engage with the world in a way that is inherently delusory and deeply conditioned - prone to the construction of categories, objects and entities that, in actuality, completely lack an independent self-nature or essence. This mode of engagement or being - the mode of self-construction and emotionally driven rumination on which we spend so much time and energy - is usually called “ the relative” in English. The other main mode, experienced as a kind of spacious, receptive attention that naturally and easily trades places with focused attention, touching lightly but intimately on thoughts and perceptions as they arise and pass away, is usually referred to as “the absolute”. These terms align with a long-running debate about truth value in Western philosophy and perhaps also refer to the corresponding conversation in Buddhist philosophy about what is usually called the Two Truths Doctrine.
In Chinese, however, the picture is quite different. In place of the two, somewhat arid, philosophical terms above, Chinese authors bring to bear a rich set of metaphorical pairings such as “zhǔ” (主) and “kè” (客) meaning “host” and “guest” or “lǐ” (理) and “shì” (事), which, taken together as a compound, mean “minister” or “councilor”. The use of metaphor is key because it operates as a vehicle for the transport of experiential recognition. These terms capture, in poetic language, something specific about the relationship between the modes to which they refer.
In his celebrated poem, “Wǔwèi Piānzhèng” (五位偏正) commonly referred to as the “Five Ranks”, Dòngshān takes two ordinary words: “piān” (偏), which has a variety of meanings including “crooked", “slanted”, “leaning”, “partial” or “one-sided”, and “zhèng” (正), which has meanings that neatly complement “piān”, e.g. “straight”, “upright”, “primary” or “positive”, and turns them into technical terms of reference for the two modes. What is eerily accurate about this choice is that it aligns so well with embodied experience. Arguably, the whole request and trajectory of Zen practice is to recognize the distorting and obscuring effects of piān, to study them intimately and, in the process, allow zhèng to appear and, both suddenly and gradually, take its place in the awareness of the practitioner - a place that it always held even when they were unaware of it. This process and practice is described in countless sources including the Five Ranks, the Koan literature, Dōgen’s Shobogenzo and Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind. For example, in the prologue to the latter, Suzuki Roshi writes, "For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our ‘original mind' includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.” Dōgen, in the Genjo Koan, puts it even more succinctly in what may be his most frequently quoted passage, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”
The ancients have always been resistant to the impulse to spell things out too lavishly in order to avoid misleading people but they have nonetheless provided more hints and intimations about the nature and moment-to-moment experience of zhèng. In his Fukanzazengi, Dōgen says, “The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma-gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment.” This statement has baffled many a Zen student. Who, after hearing this, has not, at least once, had something like the thought, “My knees/back/neck… are killing me and my mind is running wild like a puppy in a dog park! How is this ‘the Dharma Gate’ of anything, least of all ‘repose and bliss’?” But Dōgen means this literally and, again, it turns out to be experientially accurate.
We are all too familiar with the emotional constructs and narratives that underlie our own experience of piān, but, once zhèng begins to swim into view, the emotional undercurrents it presents become clear as well. The characters Dōgen used to write what is translated above as “repose and bliss” are 安樂. The first, “an” in Japanese, means “calm” or “peaceful” and, if one looks at its components - a roof over a woman's head - clearly refers something like “domestic tranquility”. Note that Dòngshān also points this way in his Five Ranks when, in the last stanza, he says, “Everyone wants to be extraordinary but, in the end, you come home and sit by the fire.” The second character has a number of readings and, as far as i can tell, is not well-attested in Japanese but its variant, 楽, is sometimes pronounced, “gaku” or “raku” and has meanings that include “music” and “comfort” or “ease”. However, looking at the corresponding word, “lè”, in Chinese, the picture is substantially frothier and, in addition to “music”, includes meanings like “laugh”, “laughter”, “glad”, “cheerful” and even “fun”. If we presume that Dogen, who had just returned from China, was aware of this and intended at least some of these meanings when he chose to write 樂, then we can see that he is pointing at two radically different classes of positive experience and making a portmanteau of them in order to encompass the range available to the practitioner.
In short, this experiential mode, zhèng, is not simply a state of mind and not just apparent in one form. Nor is it a window into some notional absolute truth. It is a process and a practice, and its manifestation depends on the precise nature of the engagement. When the body and mind are at rest it may be experienced as a kind of spacious calm and unconditioned appreciation. When the attention is task-focused, especially with a task that is physically energetic, the feeling can be very different - glad and, perhaps, musical. When something surprising happens, it manifests as delight. When interacting with other beings it comes closest to love. And, in all of its forms, it urges a deep gratitude simply for the experience of the moment and fact of being alive.
Which brings us back to Nietzsche.
Given the forgoing, the reader should not be surprised by the suggestion that at least one of the possible outcomes of an encounter with a work of art, in addition to boredom, distraction, distaste and intellectual intrigue is exactly this - the experience of zhèng. I can remember, with a clarity that only comes from intensity of feeling, my meeting with Jackson Pollock’s Number 9 at the Wadsworth Atheneum’s 1984 exhibition of the Tremaine Collection, years before my first real period on Zazen. Standing in front of the painting I found myself led by Pollock’s gestures - that is, by his embodied expression - through an array of interior spaces as though the painting were a map or, more accurately, both the map and the territory itself. In the process, my preoccupation and self-concern fell away and were replaced with an awareness of both his body as it had moved decades earlier and the full content of the present moment to the extent I was capable of taking it in - the feel of the air in the gallery, the texture of the soundscape, the sense of discovery and delight. It was a transformative moment and, thinking back on it now, I’m still ineradicably grateful.
This is what our ancestors have been saying to us all along. To paraphrase, one might say that the essence of all authentic practice, of truly selfless practice, is gratitude.