Dōgen the Bootmaker and the Perils of Living in the Material World

 Dōgen the Bootmaker and the Perils of Living in the Material World

AS my favorite Beatle once sang,

 

I'm living in the material world
Living in the material world

Can't say what I'm doing here
But I hope to see much clearer
After living in the material world

 

George finally asks for salvation from the material world.  I sure hope he got what he wanted.  It’s no small matter dealing with one’s success and failure.  We all want a “better” life, including better things and better choices, and some even want honest values and know there is a deeper inner conflict that we don’t ever quite resolve.  Before what George called the “Big Ending” we might even ask ourselves what it means to live better with fewer, not less and if better is somehow better.

 

I take up this as a spiritual quandary because I like nice things.  Dare I say better things?  

 

I am likely more vain than the next guy but where would my heroes be without their vanities, their pursuit of their own version of a life well-lived, a better world?  What of Arjuna and Achilles?  Charlie Watts and David Beckman?  What of their inimitable style, grace, and care for the things they made and did, how they appear and what they apparently value by their discriminating tastes?  Can we please add George here too?  Add yourself, you should.

 

How do things of the world, things humans create offer their lessons in value?  I too “hope to see much clearer.”

 

There’s something of a revival positing the value of craft, artisanal and bespoke work that invites less consumption, an admonition to the proverbial fewer, better as a lifestyle proposition.  With the respect and curiosity that has emerged for those making such consumer goods is also the matter of cost.  What’s that worth it?  What would you pay for those boots, that loop wheel sweatshirt, your passion?

 

What Henry Ford did with the Model T was to make mass production a means to affordability.  When Ferrari builds a car nowadays they aren’t thinking much about the price and likely not much about their costs either.  They have a clientele waiting in line to pay close to any price.  In fact the more out of reach, somehow the better.  Go figure.  We’ll not be figuring that into our query.

 

In 2022 dollars a Ford Model T would cost about 25K---and in real dollars a contemporary Ford Maverick even less, so there’s something to be said about greater access for the money.  That Maverick costs about 22K.  The Ferrari starts at 200K and good luck finding that car.  Let’s call it 10x the cost to be conservative.  It might not be fair to compare today’s Ferrari with a loop wheel sweatshirt or a pair of handmade boots but let’s think of the value proposition this way for just a moment.  What would you pay for that and why?

A hoodie from one of the big brands is about $30 while The Real McCoy’s will run ya’ $220, so not quite 10x the cost but you get the idea.  Jeans are closer to that 10x mark: ordinary Gap can be had for as low as $30 while Japanese selvedge might touch $300 or more.  There’s no doubt that the TRMC hoodie is made of far better fabric, superior construction, and even design.  These features can be quantified.  But as a luxury item made by a small company for the fewer, better crowd the disparity in price can’t be ignored.

 

A privileged middle-class guy might be able to save up for a $300 pair of brilliantly constructed jeans and get three times the use, to say nothing of the fit.  It’s still hard for many to imagine 10x the cost, especially in a culture that usually places price on a par with value.  So we need to talk about that kind of difference, make the argument and persuade, ignore our objectors, and live the lives we prefer and hopefully can afford.

 

Many of the fewers and betters in vintage workwear deal in the Amecaji, made in Japan or with reference to Japanese makers.  In the brand lists of retailers specializing in these goods we see an international marketplace, makers from across the globe, but it’s not unfair to say that the reference, even the benchmark is Japanese.  For all the brilliance of Kreosote boots made by the singular hands of J.D. Gabbard or Role Club’s Brian the Bootmaker, they are more frequently compared to Tokyo’s Brass Shoe Co’s Clinch or John Lofgren’s Made in Japan offerings.  

 

In America of yore small shops and one-person makers were less a feature of the love of artisan craft than they were of local economy and, yes, thrift.  Mass production created access to affordable goods and we now weigh those costs with respect to values that are not only material but emotional, psychological, cultural, and indeed global.  I would rather not pay $300 for a sweatshirt but I also rationalize its use, durability, and quality.

As George Carlin put it, “that’s the whole meaning of life, trying to find a place for your stuff.”  Not just closet space but in your head and heart.  There’s invariably conflict in all that of this stuff.

 

Another example, this one personal.  I’ve spent most of my life admiring mechanical watches.  I’ve saved, flipped, waited, and finally landed my grail.  But I found after a few years of staring at it on my shelf that the emotional burden was more than I really wanted.  I sold it, satisfied that I scratched that itch, unregretful of the effort and time spent in pursuit but also having learned that having stuff is much more than the object itself and that value is truly not the same as the price.  I didn't sell to recoup the money.  I sold because my spirit felt more discomfort than joy.  I think that discomfort is not different from the joy that I feel now.

 

There’s always some discomfort when we think about what we need and what we might want.  Well, I hope so.  The binary itself is a contemplation on privilege but the alternative, to reduce living to mere needs is not much life at all.  Living in zero sum games and poverty consciousness as moral superiority is the stuff of a soul’s dark nights.   How we draw such boundaries of cost and worth and live with ourselves may not be the only stuff of life but it matters enough to invite us to ask why we feel the way we do: about costs and values, what constitutes better and how we take stock of hearts and minds and things.

 

Christian, particularly Protestant worlds, have made much of the difference between things of the flesh and matters of spirit.  In fact, very early Christians argued about this at length not only because they heard they should give unto Caeser but because ephemeral things, material life and embodiment were considered lesser values, problematics with respect to an eternal spirit, the destiny of an immortal soul.  Transient materiality and conditional embodiment were not to be confused with the true reality of eternity.  To say that we have inherited a suspicion of material life is merely to repeat the obvious structural narrative of our cultural religious history.

 

Not to overstate the matter or gainsay the reductive, Japan has had its own contentions of body and matter with spirit and higher values.  Early Buddhism’s ascetical ethos and dissociation from ephemera is doctrinal---the world’s anitya (Sanskrit, impermanence) is one of its three principal characteristics.  To extricate one’s self from self as enduring reality is to say that no reality, no truth, nothing withstands the vicissitudes of time.

The sooner we appreciate (one must not say “grasp” here) the facts of mujō (Japanese for the Sanskrit thus impermanence, mutability) the more likely we are to receive the deeper possibilities of a moral life.  The most renown of Zen philosophers, the 13^th century Dōgen Zenji makes the case for radical temporality as a vision that invites living in temporal experience.  The contrast is noteworthy: we arrive at a rather different set of values from the Christian binary that requires spirit to be understood as separate from matter.  Heaven may be gratitude itself, as Blake put it, but in Christian terms it not to be confused with things.

 

In the Christian ethos, our embodied life is distinct from its spiritual destiny, it’s finality in eternity.  Zenji posits no finalities, no eternity, and so reminds us that we must reassign human possibilities to the everyday and evanescent.  In the absence of ultimacy there is only the ordinary.  The truth of the ordinary is not to be despised or discredited but somehow taken to heart.  The question is how since the alterntive is nihilism, a straightforward rejection of life because it is limited and conditional and nothing more.  When this is all we gots, we better have a closer look at what we want and how we value life.  Zenji’s genius was not to retreat into soporific disinterest with the world but to consider what life means when “…there is no gap between practice and enlightenment…and daily life.”

In Zenji’s nondualism, the experience of material reality is nothing more (or less than) another version of the experience of impermanence---what else could it be?  When we say we experience the world or things in the world we are in fact talking about our experiences of them.  What else could things be?  Not to reduce all to the subjective or the solipsism of one’s own opinion, things as somehow existing “out there” can either cause us more suffering or provide us with awakening to what is possible.  Likewise the experience of spirit or self or even impermanence itself must be equally empty of permanence.  The result is not the negation of the world, the too-often attributed nihilism assigned to Buddhism, but rather a newfound appreciation for precisely what is on offer, namely, a transience that properly understood becomes the basis for the wisdom to “awaken” to our existence.  If mere humanity is somehow not enough for you, you’re not going to like Dogen.

Simply put, just because everything is evanescent it is no less valuable as such.  Enlightenment is not a state or a goal, not a heaven or an eternal permanence but rather some kind of entangling vantage point that is more like a moving, indeterminate, imperfect perspective.  (It might be more than that but it's not less.)  Such an awakening would allows us to make peace with the first principal that all that transitory is invariably unsatisfying but that too is not a problem to fix but only another condition to embrace.  (I mean to restate the elements of the Buddha’s first three so-called Noble Truths.)

 

Zen tradition will also take nearly as much influence from Confucian understandings of the secular as sacred and the Shintõ tradition’s preoccupation with ritual purity as a means of negotiating with a changeable world.  We can no more expect eternity than we can perfection, well, unless we prefer our own delusions for such consolations over the truths of a mortal human existence.  To be merely human is not a problem to solve nor a situation from which eternity, God, Buddhas or Bodhisattava will somehow rescue us.  This is It. 

I am more than hesitant to reduce or attempt to summarize the ethos of a civilization.  I don’t want to suggest that somehow these historical differences and structures define our cultural dissemblance with respect to values and things. But once we return to the relationship between our Protestant Ethos and the spirit of capitalism, how the Christian west has been informed by its own views of material transience and spiritual perfection, there still appears something worthy of further contemplation.  

Dogen’s effort to see the everyday, the impermanent, and the imperfect as a problematic that must be addressed by a re-cognition and re-appreciation of these terms of existence is an exercise in re-valuation.  In other words, the contemplation of value is not only valuable but the means to living with the facts of an enlightened gratitude for life in the just-as-ephemeral-as-everything-else-here-and-now.

If Dogen were making boots or sweatshirts, he would be compelled to remind us that while nothing will us be ultimately fulfilling, there is nothing other to do than acknowledge, honor, and value that there is nothing more that needs to obtain.  Those boots subject to all of our scrutiny for perfection will not only be found out to be imperfect but can be the source of our awakening because they are yet another example of the relationship between value and its costs.

As your boots age and patina, as we notice their flaws and wonder about whether they were worth the price, we take up the true stuff of life.  It’s not just the boots, it’s what we notice and question that we’ve purchased.  So much the better if what we uncover is the experience of our desires, our preferences and tastes, our contentions and conflicts with living in a world in which we must ask ourselves what it’s worth and how we create value.