Sculpting Words in Ice: How Buddhist and Christian Stylistiques En-Act Mundane Failure and Ultimate Hope

Both Buddhist and Christian teaching-texts often deconstruct the “merely” mundane so that the learner can advance towards beatitude. A precious few of these texts teach by miming such a deconstruction via subtle literary techniques: the textual surfaces or conventions act-out the role of naï ve appearance, and the subtexts that subvert them act-out how confident trust (in the Buddha’s Teachings, for the Buddhists; in Christ’s Divine Prom- ises, for the Christians) can find fulfillment. In the great poem “The Altar” (by George Herbert, 1593-1633), the holistic appearance of the altar bears hidden signals of its own real brokenness, and these signals point to the sub-text that is the Christian’s hope. In the great Shobo-genzo of Dogen Zenji (1200-1253), formal techniques scramble conventional holisms and fixed identities in order to act-out the “true nature” of reality-reality, for Dogen, is at once “continuous flux” (and “absolute density”).