Eihei Dogen's Ethics of Oneness

Buddhist ethics has been categorized as consequentialist, phenomenological, and virtue-theoretical. Alternatively, Buddhism is sometimes categorized as entailing moral anti-realism. Such categorizations have been applied to the ethical writings of medieval Zen master Eihei Dōgen. By attending to his masterwork Shōbōgenzō (“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”), I argue that, even if some of the foregoing categorizations of Dōgen’s ethics have their place in his oeuvre, Dōgen’s ethics is nevertheless an ethics of oneness. I demonstrate that the ethical imperatives countenanced in his writings are entailed by his account of oneness. Specifically, certain ethical imperatives follow logically from his metaphysical commitment to Buddha-nature monism, according to which all existents are Buddha. I show that these imperatives can be grounded in Dōgen’s theory of the mutual awakening of all existents to their being Buddha-nature and in the practical realization of this awakening via face-to-face transmission.