I was pondering the similarity of Cartesian doubt to the practice of Zen Buddhism, which was within minutes serendipitously re-iterated by this online excerpt:
"Although the Great Doubt, as the trigger of the Great Death, goes back to the Chinese Chan tradition, it is so fundamental to the dynamics of Japanese koan Zen that it is now widely associated with Hakuin. It is vividly presented in a passage from the Sermons of Takusui, a disciple of Hakuin:
“The method to be practiced is as follows: you are to doubt regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead men would also hear sounds … You must doubt deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be. Pay no attention to the various illusory thoughts that may occur to you. Only doubt more and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything in advance, without intending to be enlightened and without even intending not to intend to be enlightened; become like a child within your own breast … but however you go on doubting, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. Doubt deeply in a state of singlemindedness, looking neither ahead nor behind, neither right nor left, becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. When this method is practiced more and more deeply, you will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Doubt, “What is the subject that hears?” and doubts still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Doubt but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of doubt, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment, as it you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived.”
Zen philosopher Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) quotes Takusui’s text in the context of a comparison between Descartes’s “methodical doubt” and the Zen concept of Great Doubt, and explains, in modern philosophical language: “The Great Doubt comes to light from the ground of our existence only when we press our doubts (What am I? why do I exist?) to their limits as conscious acts of the doubting self. The Great Doubt represents not only the apex of the doubting self but also the point of its “passing away” and ceasing to be “self.” It is like the bean whose seed and shell break apart as it ripens: the shell is the tiny ego, and the seed the infinity of the Great Doubt that encompasses the whole world. It is the moment at which self is at the same time the nothingness of self, the moment that is the “locus” of nothingness of where conversion beyond the Great Doubt takes place. For the Great Doubt always emerges as the opening up of the locus of nothingness as the field of conversion from the Great Doubt itself. This is why it is ‘Great’.”---
https://buddhism-thewayofemptiness.blog....eat-doubt/
Jun 23, 2026 07:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 23, 2026 08:09 PM by Magical Realist.)
