Lacan's Discussion on Joyce and Dōgen's “Dropping off Body and Mind”

<p>Lacanian psychoanalysis is similar to Zen Buddhism in that both emphasize the human activity of language fundamentally and endeavor to gain access to the Real, that is, the dimension of the Thing-in-itself or Being itself. In Lacan's course of thinking, the kind of life the subject who succeeded in acquiring access to the Real would experience was examined. Lacan sub-sequently studied James Joyce, who wrote Finnegans Wake, which is filled with skillful play on words. When discussing Joyce, Lacan thought that the Symbolic, that is, the dimension of language activity, the Imaginary, namely, the dimension of images and the Real were tied together as the Borromean knot. Subsequently, Lacan considered that the aim of psychoanalysis was the identification of the subject itself with the fourth element, by which the three dimensions were able to be tied together as the Borromean knot. In this article, Dōgen's “dropping off body and mind (shinjindatsuraku)” is examined by referring to Lacan's discussion. It is surprising how boldly Dōgen interpreted the words in Buddhist texts in his own right or deconstructed-and-reconstructed them at will in The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō). One may ask what allowed Dōgen to do that. In this article, a few observations on the relationship between Dōgen's cosmology of language and his “dropping off body and mind” are made as well.</p>