Lewis Hyde on Dogen and Self-Forgetting

In a meditation on the idea of forgetting, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment… will never know what happiness is.” In this essay, Nietzsche advocated for developing the “powerful instinct” for knowing when to employ history and when to engage only the energy of the present moment. In his book, ‘A Primer for Forgetting’, writer Lewis Hyde weighs up the use of memory and asks, when is forgetting the best strategy? One of the figures Hyde refers to in the book is the medieval Zen master, Eihei Dogen, who emphasized the significance of forgetting and transcending one’s limited sense of self in spiritual practice. In the excerpt here, Hyde is specifically referring to a line from Dogen’s Genjokoan in which he expresses how attention directed inwards towards intimacy with oneself can be a transcendental experience.

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“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,” writes Dogen Zenji, thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master. And “to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things.” “To study” could be translated as “to become intimate with.” Translating the second line has its own complications. Some say that forgetting the self is “to become one with the ten thousand things”; some say it’s “to be enlightened.”

In the Chinese version of Dogen’s original text, the character for “forget” is made of two elements: the lower half indicates “heart/mind,” while the upper half means “to become invisible, perish, lose.” The oldest rendering of this upper part, found on oracle bones dating back three or four thousand years, is a bit of a pictogram: it inserts a vertical line beside the sign for “person” so as to indicate a person hidden behind something and thus invisible.

When something is forgotten, the heart/mind no longer sees it. You could therefore translate Dogen’s “self-forgetting” this way: “When we study the self … it disappears.”

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The forgetting that belongs to meditation practice (“study the self to forget the self”) entails much more radical nonaction. Meditation typically consists in keeping the attention focused on something simple, like the breath. That turns out to be quite difficult; I can rarely get to ten breaths before my attention wanders. Feelings like a monkey, thoughts like a wild horse: body and mind keep disturbing the concentration. Previously dormant itches flare up and call for immediate scratching; thoughts tumble through the mind. The practice then amounts to returning to the breath rather than scratching or following the thought. Dogen called it shikantaza, “just sitting,” breathing naturally in an upright posture, and doing nothing with those restless horses and leaping monkeys.

All thoughts and feelings are the seeds of possible actions; when we let them blossom into actual actions (physical or mental), they bear the fruit of individual self. I scratch an itch and now I am a Person-Who-Scratches. I daydream about fixing a leaky faucet or building a walnut bookcase and I am the Handyman. I fret about some stupid remark and I am the Dummy. Following a train of thought or acting on an impulse is the elemental form of self-making. Not acting but instead returning to the breath is the elemental form of self-forgetting.

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