May 1987 — Gudo Wafu Nishijima

Nishijima says that Master Dogen's Shobogenzo has a very special logic, in which one subject is explained in a first phase on the basis of idealism, in the next on the basis of materialism, and in a third on the basis of reality, so that in it we can find three kinds of philosophies and one reality. He suggests that this logic can help to find a new religion that synthesizes idealism and materialism, that is religion and science, whose contradiction, he says, the world today suffers from. To synthesize the mental and the physical side, Dogen used human action, on which his Buddhist philosophy is based and which Nishijima describes as the synthesis of human mind and human body and as a fact at the moment of the present and at this place.