Dōgen’s “Leaving Home Life” (Shukke 出家) : a study of aesthetic experience and growth in John Dewey and Dōgen

• Main Author: Bender, Jacob
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy; Leaving Home; Aesthetic Experience
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/145782
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study argues that Dōgen’s “Leaving Home Life” (Shukke 出家) fascicle is not simply about leaving home/lay life to become a practicing monk. At first glance, the fascicle might not appear philosophically significant. To help bring the themes of that work into greater focus, I juxtapose Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō and John Dewey’s later works on aesthetic experience and education. Both the teachings of Dōgen and the later Deweyan works on aesthetic experience are similar in the sense that both describe nature as a radically plural and interdependent world without recourse to an underlying substance ontology or reality antecedent to and outside of experience. Both Dōgen and Dewey also claim that the experience of nature as a precarious, interdependent flux is continually ignored because we neglect the cultivation of certain habits and human potentials. The cultivation practices of Dōgen’s Zen Buddhism are also comparable to Dewey’s experiential melioration or, as Scott Stroud describes it, an orientational meliorism: “the way one approaches and experiences the world can be usefully modified to yield better experience . . . [through] cultivating habits of attention to or absorption in the present situation.”1 Dōgen’s “Leaving Home Life” fascicle could be interpreted in a literal sense: only by literally “leaving home life” and becoming a monk can someone become enlightened.2 However, both the view that a person does not need to practice meditation and the view that a person needs to become a Buddhist monk are mistaken because both are guilty of maintaining the same dualistic understanding of practice and enlightenment.