Abstract

In this chapter, I will I try to demonstrate that reading Dōgen through the lens of contemporary logic can help dispel obscurities and solve interpretative dilemmas. I hope to argue in favor of this hermeneutic technique performatively by showing its advantages when faced with one of the most difficult sides of Dōgen’s writings, his ideas on time. In detail, I will argue that, instead of there being one paradox in Dōgen’s writings, there are two distinct paradoxical issues, the first concerning the ontological imbrication of distinct times, and the second, the fact that Dōgen at times seems to emphasize the ontological priority of temporal instants and, at other times, the ontological priority of time as a continuous flow. I then look back to Nāgārjuna to clarify the philosophical foundations of Dōgen’s ideas on time, specially concerning the nature of co-dependently arisen entities and their occupation of space, and use this to reformulate the paradoxes. Then, following recent works pertaining to the formal mereology of time and its occupiers, I makes use of the distinction between extensive and intensive occupation to solve these same paradoxes.