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© 2021 William Cobb

Buddhist Philosophy
and
The Game of Go

William Cobb

Slate & Shell
www.slateandshell.com
2021

Second Enlarged Edition of Reflections on the Game of Go

Buy the full book at gobooks.com

Copyright Page

© 2021 William Cobb

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited.

Slate & Shell
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Richmond, VA 23238
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This is the second edition of a book, the first edition of which was titled Reflections on the Game of Go and was published in 2005. It included a number of essays that had been published in the journal of the American Go Association and various other sources, including Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine, The Journal of Eastern Philosophy, which is published by the Department of Philosophy at Kyoto University in Japan, and the British Go Journal. Some were written for use in my classes as a member of the Philosophy Department at the College of William and Mary. A number of additional essays have been added to this edition that appeared in the journal of the American Go Association after Reflections on the Game of Go, which has been out of print for several years, was published. Many of the essays have been slightly edited for this publication.

ISBN of the printed version: 979–8503890051

Conversion to SmartGo Books by John Mifsud

Table of Contents

Buddhist Philosophy and The Game of Go

Copyright Page

Foreword

A Brief Overview of Buddhist Philosophy

The Game of Go: An Unexpected Path to Enlightenment

The chapters in gray are included only in the full book.

Go and Buddhist Philosophy

Emptiness

Go Proverbs as Koan

The Overcoming of Self in Go

Wu-Wei (non-action) and Go Intuition

The Martial Game

Hand Conversation

The Karma of Go Stones

Dogen on Go

The Art of Go

What Is a Go Stone?

Good Timing

The Dialectic of Go

Attachment and Detachment in Go

Partners vs. Opponents

What Is Shape?

“I”, “Me”, and “Bad” Moves

Taking Refuge in the Dharma

Go is Good for You

Two Ways to Lose

Schrodinger’s Go Stone

Go as Meditation

One Move at a Time

Comes the Revolution

Playing with Demons

Language Games

Go Metaphors

Playing in a Noisy Room

What You Know Can Hurt You

Dealing with Losing

Avoiding Alzheimer’s

My Favorite Opponents

The Burden of Winning

Just To Be Doing It

The Sporting Game

Thinking Too Much

Philosophical Reflections on Go #1

Philosophical Reflections on Go #2

Philosophical Reflections on Go #3

Philosophical Reflections on Go #4

Philosophical Reflections on Go #5

Philosophical Reflections on Go #6

Philosophical Reflections on Go #7

Philosophical Reflections on Go #8

Philosophical Reflections on Go #9

Philosophical Reflections on Go #10

Philosophical Reflections on Go #11

Philosophical Reflections on Go #12

Philosophical Reflections on Go #13

Philosophical Reflections on Go #14

Philosophical Reflections on Go #15

Philosophical Reflections on Go #16

Philosophical Reflections on Go #17

Philosophical Reflections on Go #18

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About SmartGo Books

Foreword

My interests in the game of go and in Buddhist philosophy developed quite independently of each other, although both were prompted by a visit to Japan in 1974. As a philosophy professor at the College of William and Mary, I was already aware of Buddhism, but not of the game of go. I began reading contemporary Japanese literature and eventually came across Kawabata’s novel, Meijin (translated as The Master of Go). I thought the game sounded interesting and eventually found someone who could teach me how to play. After a few years I also discovered the American Go Association and slowly became more involved in the world of go. A major highpoint of that involvement was being invited to spend two months in Tokyo as a guest of the Nihon Ki-in (the Japanese Go Association) in 1996 to learn how to teach go to beginners, especially children. That program resulted in my being certified as an International Go Instructor by the Nihon Ki-in. Since then I have taught the game to hundreds of people, from kids in elementary and middle schools, to students in my courses on Go and Eastern Philosophy at the College of William and Mary, to people in retirement homes.

In the 1980s, I also began to be seriously interested in Eastern thought, especially the philosophy of the Kyoto school in Japan, a fascinating expression of Buddhist thought by philosophers who are solidly trained in Western philosophy. Then, in 1994, I suddenly noticed the parallels between these two interests and discovered that these parallels were well known to many go players and had been for a long time. I began writing about them and even developed a course I taught at the College of William and Mary on Eastern philosophy and the game of go. This was a very popular course, and I taught two sections of thirty students each every semester for several years. I retired from the college in 1999.

My column The Empty Board started in the American Go Journal in 1994 and still continues as this book is published. The idea for it was really the inspiration of the editor of the journal at the time, Roy Laird. When Chris Garlock replaced Roy as the editor in 1998, he suggested some changes in the column, primarily opening up to a broader range of topics and making the writing style more focused and disciplined (that is, less academic).

At the end of 2002, Chris and I started the AGA’s E-Journal, which eventually replaced the quarterly print journal altogether. The E-Journal format necessitated a further reduction in the length of the The Empty Board columns as they were being published as parts of an email magazine.

During this time, I also published a general overview of the theme of the connections between go and Buddhist philosophy in the British Go Journal and a more academically oriented and much longer piece on this topic in an English language scholarly journal published by Kyoto University in Japan, The Eastern Buddhist (XXX, 2, 1997). This article was also published in abridged form in the magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in 1999 (VII, 3, Spring 1999).

All of these writings are reproduced here, with only slight editing, even though there are some places where I would now say things a bit differently. I have also appended introductory notes to many of the articles.

A Brief Overview of Buddhist Philosophy

This essay was written for my courses on go and Buddhist philosophy at the College of William and Mary.

The practical aim of Buddhism is to find a way to overcome the suffering that usually characterizes human life. Its basic claim is that we ourselves are the cause of the absence from our lives of the calm, peaceful enjoyment of life that everyone, at some level, dreams of achieving. Moreover, we also have within ourselves the power to solve this problem. The solution comes from grasping a certain understanding of how things are and acting in accordance with that understanding until we actually experience things in accordance with that understanding, which is the condition called being enlightened.

Buddhist philosophy involves a view of the human self and the human situation that is quite different from that which most Westerners take for granted. This is what makes it difficult for Westerners to understand Buddhism, and why a concrete manifestation of this way of seeing things, such as playing the game of go, can be helpful. The most fundamental concept in Buddhist philosophy is the metaphor of emptiness. This term is connected with three other main ideas: impermanence, interconnectedness, and the doctrine of no-self. The essence of Buddhist philosophy is contained in these four closely interrelated concepts.

When Westerners speak of emptiness we refer to the absence of something. An empty glass is one that does not contain any liquid or other such filler. (Normally, it would of course contain air although it is “empty”.) When Buddhists say everything is empty they are referring to the absence of a certain way of being. The claim is that things do not exist in a way that is permanent, independent, self-sufficient, or unchanging. That way of being, traditionally called inherent or self-contained being, does not occur, indeed, cannot even be made sense of as a possibility. Thus, the sort of being that Westerners tend to assume lies at the foundation of things, including the self, Buddhists claim does not occur at all. There is nothing like the common Christian notion of God or the soul in basic Buddhist philosophy, nor any notion of absolute principles of any sort, moral or otherwise.

For Buddhists, everything is temporary, dependent on other things, and changing. This basic metaphysical assumption has profound implications for understanding human life and the human situation, as well as for understanding the nature of the world or of reality in general.

The notion of impermanence helps to illuminate this. The idea that everything is impermanent, that everything has a beginning and a termination, applies to one’s self also. Buddhism claims that the assumption that one’s self is a permanently enduring entity leads to the notion that one’s self has eternal, self-contained significance—and that notion is the source of the attitudes and behavior that cause suffering. If everything is impermanent then the nature, value, and meaning of everything is dependent on context and subject to change. This includes one’s own life, the lives of others, and everything else.

The question of whether your reading this essay is a good thing or a mistake can never be permanently or finally answered, not because you can never get all the relevant information, but because there is no object involved that has the kind of being that could be definitively judged as good or bad and no fixed criteria for making such a judgment and no unchanging judge to make the judgment. There is no “viewpoint of eternity” from which such questions could be answered or even take on some sort of intelligibility.

Because of the context of impermanence, everything can be and become both good and bad (or is neither good nor bad in any ultimate sense). Questions about ultimate good and bad cease to arise since the context necessary for making sense of them does not exist. It is crucial to see that notions of good and bad are always context dependent, that is, based on assumptions and conditions that are changing and impermanent, and that there is no ultimate or absolute context. This is clearly different from the most common Western way of thinking. It also contrasts with some Eastern ways of thinking, such as Vedantism in Hindu thought. On the other hand, it is similar to the thought of such Western thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. (Once you know that Sartre had significant interaction with a Japanese philosopher from Kyoto University, the title of his major work Being and Nothingness takes on a different resonance.)

It is important to see that the notion of impermanence does not lead to some sort of chaotic meaninglessness. The positive side of this view can be brought out by thinking about the concept of interconnectedness or interdependent and codependent being. While there is no permanent being, there is impermanent being. Many things exist, have existed, and will exist. It is just that they do not exist as independent, self-sufficient, self-contained beings.

Things are what they are by virtue of their connections with other things. This is especially obvious with regard to things like social institutions, the nature and significance of which is context dependent and constantly changing. It applies even to physical things as such and especially to our selves. Each of us is who we are by virtue of our relationships and involvements with the world and with others. These connections with others, and with social institutions, etc., make up our being. It is through such involvements that we define who we are and create an existence for ourselves We have no being over and above these changing interconnections.

This is the point of the no-self doctrine—not that there is no self in any sense, but that a common way of thinking about our selves is mistaken. It is the view of the self as an enduring, self-sufficient, independent entity that is being denied. Buddhism affirms that the self is as ephemeral as everything else, and as context dependent. There is no core self that possesses an inherent nature, and this applies to everything, so it is a rejection of the traditional Western notion of substance.

Life is full of suffering because people want to acquire and to hold on to things in the belief that things can give our lives enduring meaning and value. This is a result of thinking that things can be inherently valuable, that the self is a potential owner or creator of such things, and that the purpose of life is such ownership or creation. Struggling to get such things and being afraid of losing them is a major source of suffering.

However, when you realize that things do not have inherent value and that there is no enduring owner and that insofar as you have a life it is composed of interconnections with the lives of others, your basic motivation is changed dramatically. No longer can I think of benefiting myself by having and holding things for myself apart from you. Instead, I see that my life can only be made better by making everyone else’s life better because we all share a common life. Again, this applies to everything, all sentient beings, indeed, all beings period—there is a basis for an environmental ethic here. Buddhists express this point by saying that wisdom leads to compassion.

Thus Buddhism argues that the greedy grasping and fearful clinging, and the anxiety and frustration that these produce—these practices that are so much a part of our lives, are the result of a mistaken understanding of the nature of the self and of life. The person who realizes the ephemeral character of all things and how we all create each other’s lives can only respond compassionately to those who still suffer in the struggle of common life, trying to show them the way to avoid such suffering, and share with those who have also realized how things are the peaceful enjoyment of our moment of existence wherever the contingencies of our interconnections may take us.

This way of living is achieved by a combination of practical and intellectual activities. Understanding how things are is important, but practice is even more so because it not only helps you to implement your understanding in your life, it also helps you to grasp the meaning of the ideas in terms of which understanding is articulated.

Perhaps the best known such practice is that of sitting meditation, on which the Zen tradition places a special emphasis. While meditation can be devoted to reflection on the basic ideas of Buddhist philosophy, it is more usually focused on practicing a type of behavior, namely, just being there in the passing moment, really being there. A very simple activity is chosen, that is, sitting, and you try not to do anything else, especially not to become absorbed in the timeless realm of mental speculation or in abstraction from the present by thinking about the past or the future. Everything is focused on the passing moment and its contents in the most intent way possible, trying to overcome the idea that there is any separation or distinction between yourself and the contents of the passing moment. The aim is to develop the ability to adopt such an attitude of immersion in the present in every aspect of your life. A similar major practice is that of chanting in public services. The aim here is to experience in a concrete way being a part of a whole that is composed of interconnections with others.

In a similar way, you practice being compassionate by taking the traditional basic five vows: not to kill, not to take what is not given to you, not to speak in a way that causes suffering, not to engage in improper sexual activity, and not to use intoxicating substances in a way that interferes with your practice. You may add additional vows, such as not begrudging others praise they are due and not giving in to anger, and on special occasions (full moon days are a popular time for this) you may add additional practices, such as not participating in raucous music or dancing, not wearing extravagant clothes, and not running. All such practices are intended to help you acquire a manner of living that accurately reflects the way things are. These are not rules to be treated like absolute prohibitions or requirements: they are simply guidelines that are likely to be helpful to most people.

In this context, the game of go is seen as a particularly rich practice because it offers a practical encounter with both the metaphysical and the ethical dimensions of Buddhist philosophy. The game is based directly on the principles of emptiness and impermanence, and to play it well the players must acquire the virtues of patience, generosity, and fearlessness. Go is a game of peaceful sharing, not of war-like destruction, and it is well said that your opponent in the game is yourself, that is, your greed and fear, not the person who is your playing partner. Understanding what this means and how the game can be seen and played in this way is the aim of this book.

The Game of Go:
An Unexpected Path to Enlightenment

This article was published in The Eastern Buddhist, an English language journal published by the University of Kyoto in Japan, New Series, XXX, 2, 1997, 199–213. An abridged version also appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. This article is an overview of the issues I deal with in “The Empty Board” articles that have been published in the American Go Association’s “Journal” since 1994 and make up the rest of this book.

Introduction

There are a number of traditional practices in Japan that have been used as aids in the search for enlightenment. These include such things as the art of flower arranging, archery, sword fighting, the tea ceremony, karate, etc. All are seen as involving one or more of the attitudes that are characteristic of a Buddhist so that by engaging in them one can experience elements of the Buddhist perspective in a concrete form that is more readily accessible than koan study or meditation practice. In addition to serving as paths to enlightenment, these practices can illuminate the nature of the Buddhist perspective for those seeking simply to understand Buddhism, and there are a number of well-known works that use a description of these practices and the experience of engaging in them as a way of explicating Buddhism. Some examples are Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), Gustie L. Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Horst Hamnitzsch, Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony (New York: Avon Books, 1982); Thomas Hoover, Zen Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), etc.

However, there is a major traditional practice in Japan that has been associated with Buddhism for centuries and is traditionally referred to as a “way” or “do” that has been neglected by those seeking to explicate Buddhism, although it is an unusually effective vehicle for illuminating the Buddhist perspective. This is the game Westerners call “go”, known in Japan as igo or kido, “the way of go”.

From a Buddhist point of view, the game effectively manifests the way Buddhists conceive of the world process and straightforwardly inculcates the attitudes of mind and heart that Buddhists praise. In fact, the game provides a useful way of depicting and experiencing the fundamental aspects of life as Buddhists understand it. My intent here is to show how this is so.

Dogen on Go

That there is a special connection between playing go and the authentication of enlightenment is suggested by a striking passage in the famous thirteenth century Zen master Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo. In the essay “Spring and Autumn” (Shunju), written in 1244, Dogen uses a reference to go to help his audience understand a famous koan. (I am relying here on the translation by Katherine Thanas and Dazuake Tanahashi in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, edited by Dazuaki Tanahashi (New York: North Point Press, 1985, pp. 108–113.) In response to a monk’s question as to how to avoid being either cold or hot, the ninth century Chinese Zen master Kongshan tells the monk to go where there is no cold or heat. Dogen refers to several traditional explanations of this response that interpret it as making a philosophical point about the unity that must be prior to all distinctions. That is, a unifying concept of temperature must be prior to the distinction between cold and hot. The traditional explanations take Dongshan to be pointing toward the denial of the ultimacy of all distinctions. However, Dogen insists that such interpretations are inadequate: “If the Buddha-dharma had been transmitted merely through the philosophical investigation of unity and distinction, how could it have reached this day?”

Dogen says that we should instead heed the words of Hongzhi, a twelfth century Chinese Zen master, who said: “It is like when you and I are playing go. If you do not respond to my move, I’ll swallow you up. Only when you penetrate this will you understand the meaning of Dongshan’s words.”

Dogen then goes on to clarify this surprising reference to playing the game of go. He comments, “Suppose there is a go game; who are the two players? If you answer that you and I are playing go, it will be as if you have a handicap of eight stones, and if you have a handicap of eight stones, it will no longer be a game. What is my meaning? When you respond to my question, ‘Who are the two players?’, answer this way: ‘You play go by yourself; the opponents become one.’ Steadying your mind and turning your body in this way, you should examine Hongzhi’s words, ‘If you do not respond to my move.’ This means ‘you’ are not yet ‘you’. You should also not neglect the words, ‘I’ll swallow you up.’ Mud within mud; a jewel within a jewel. Illuminate other, illuminate the self.”

Dogen offers this as an adequate explanation of Dongshan’s remark, along with an additional explanation in terms of his own notion of “dropping off body and mind” (Shinjin datsuraku). His use of the reference to playing go suggests that he assumes his audience at the Eiheiji Temple is thoroughly familiar with the experience of playing the game and that he himself is also. It also suggests that he sees playing the game as at least comparable to the experience of “dropping off body and mind.” However, since I cannot assume that the readers of this article are very familiar with go, I will say something about the game and how it can be connected with basic Buddhist ideas before unpacking this passage from Dogen’s Shobogenzo.

The Game of Go

The game of go originated in China at least 4000 years ago and in the ancient Chinese tradition was seen as one of the four activities a person had to master in order to be considered truly civilized, the other three being poetry, music, and painting. It was brought to Japan around the seventh century of the common era, probably by Buddhist monks returning from training in monasteries in China. The game is much older than Buddhism, but it was quickly recognized by Buddhists as a useful tool for Buddhist practice. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the strongest players in Japan were generally Buddhist monks. (The oldest extant game record in Japan is traditionally ascribed to Nichiren, the 13th century founder of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism.) The game was popular as a means of instilling the virtues of overcoming fear, greed, and anger among the Samurai, whose instructors in go were Buddhist monks. Its capacity for making its players better people is part of the reason go is still widely popular in Japan, Korea, and China, where millions of people play regularly and there are substantial groups of professional players who make their living at go, usually by teaching the game. The increasing popularity of go in Europe and America, where there are thousands of enthusiastic amateur players and a few professionals, is also connected with its tendency to foster humane attitudes and friendly relationships among players. Even among players who are unfamiliar with the history of the game and unacquainted with Buddhism, the unusual power of the game to transform the characters of its players in profound ways is experienced and recognized. Go is much more than a mere form of entertainment.

Go is a board strategy game, as is chess, though the game differs profoundly from chess. It is played with circular black and white pieces called “stones” on an approximately square grid that is usually 19 by 19 lines. The field of play consists of the intersections of the lines, and the stones, placed on the intersections, are not moved during play, although they can be captured and removed from the board. Play begins with an empty board, and the players alternate placing stones on the board, with the player who has the black stones going first. As play proceeds, patterns of black and white stones evolve on the grid.

Winning and losing is determined by the number of open intersections you are able to surround with stones that are safe from capture. However, the point of playing is clearly understood as not that of winning games (when playing in accordance with the rules you lose about half your games), but of exploring the possibilities to be found in particular arrangements of stones. Thus one seeks to create interesting games, and that requires becoming a stronger player, that is, acquiring a greater understanding of the game. In other words, it is not misleading to say that rather than striving for victory, the players engage in a search for enlightenment—which involves moral qualities as well as intellectual understanding because greed and fear are the greatest barriers to becoming better at the game.

This aiming at understanding rather than focusing on winning is facilitated by a handicapping system that assures that players of unequal skill will have an equal chance of winning or losing. This system, which Dogen refers to, consists in having the weaker player place an appropriate number of stones on the board before the stronger player places a stone. The effect is of the weaker player having made several plays before the stronger player makes a first play, thus giving the weaker player an advantage to offset the superior understanding of the other player. To facilitate the awarding of handicap stones, each player is given a rank, based on past performance, which changes as the player becomes stronger. Thus, a player whose level is, for example, three steps below that of the other would place three handicap stones before the stronger player plays. Traditionally, the maximum handicap is nine stones, but if the difference between two players is more than about four stones it is difficult for them to have a properly balanced game. Their understandings of what is happening in the game will diverge too widely for appropriate responsiveness in the play. Higher handicap games are usually thought of as teaching games, in which the stronger player is helping the weaker one to understand the possibilities of the game better.

The game begins with an empty board. That is, there are no playing pieces on the board to start with, in contrast to most board games. This situation makes the range of possibilities that the board offers much greater because the game is not restricted by the impact of an initial disposition of playing pieces. In fact, because of the size of the standard board, with 361 intersections, and the fact that all the pieces have the same initial status, namely, being able to occupy a point on the board, the number of possible games is astronomical, vastly greater than the number of possible games of chess. This is part of the reason it is only recently that computers have been able to play go at a high level.

This starting position in the game illustrates an important point about the Buddhist notion of emptiness. In Buddhism, as in ordinary language, emptiness does not refer to an absolute lack of anything. Emptiness refers to the absence of something that one for some reason expects to find, as we say a glass, normally used to hold liquids, is empty even though it is full of air, or we say a room is empty when there are no people in it even though it is full of furniture. The earlier use of “void” to refer to this Buddhist notion is misleading.

The emptiness that Buddhist philosophy affirms is very similar to that of the empty board at the start of a go game. The Buddhist point is that potentiality precedes actuality. This has many implications for understanding the human situation, and the game of go effectively incorporates many aspects of this. The game does have some limits, of course, since it is a particular form of being, but they are extremely minimal. The size of the board can vary. Using a 19 by 19 line grid is simply customary and convenient—big enough to be interesting, small enough to be manageable. The game can be played on virtually any size board, and smaller boards of 9 by 9 or 13 by 13 lines are often used by beginners. In ancient China 17 by 17 lines was a popular size. The rules of play can be reduced to the single principle that a stone (or a group of stones that are connected to each other along the lines) remains on the board as long as it is connected to at least two empty intersections. Thus go lacks as much of the usual structures of games as it can and still be a game, yet the effect of this is not to create something of little interest but to greatly enrich the range of possibilities.

The player of go discovers that the absence of an absolute fixed structure or of ultimate limits on reality is not the disaster one might expect. On the contrary, it makes things much more interesting. The fact that the openness of go means that there probably is no perfect game does not in the slightest undermine the enjoyment of playing. Even the best AI programs, which can defeat any human player, are not able to win more than about 50% of the time with either color when playing against themselves or each other. For the go player, discovering how fascinating and enjoyable it is to dwell in such an open-ended world can be a revelation. You learn to revel in the creative possibilities that result from the relative absence of defined powers and fixed structures rather than being frustrated or distressed by the fact that this means there are no final answers regarding what constitutes good play.

In the Buddhist sense, emptiness refers to the fact that nothing is self-determining and thus nothing is eternal. What is lacking from reality as a whole and thus from everything that exists is a particular kind of being, namely, the kind of inherent being that is self-grounded or absolutely independent. Everything is what it is by virtue of its relationships to everything else, and since nothing serves as the ultimate ground of this vast complex (such a ground would lack emptiness), it is subject to constant change. This brings in the principles of impermanence and interconnectedness. These two principles are also fundamental to the game of go. The most obvious manifestation of interconnectedness in go is in the way groups of stones develop during play, while the shifting significance of these groups and the stones that compose them is a clear example of impermanence.

Play in the game is directed by the intention of one player to surround more empty intersections than the other player. The technique for doing this is to create lines of connected stones that encircle parts of the board by placing stones adjacent to each other so that they form solidly connected shapes surrounding empty points. Since stones can be captured and removed from the board, this process becomes very complex, and the significance of particular stones is constantly changing as a game develops. Considered in itself, a stone has almost no significance. It can occupy an intersection on the board and if captured it will result in the reduction of its owner’s score by one point. A stone’s real significance lies in its potentiality for interaction with other stones. By virtue of its relations with other stones, it can surround territory or disrupt the ability of the stones of the other color to do so and even capture stones of the other color. In this process the role that a stone plays, its meaning in the game, is entirely a function of its connections with other stones. The stones have virtually no inherent being. Thus, players experience what it means to say that things are what they are by virtue of interconnectedness. Moreover, the significance of any stone or group of stones is subject to the possibility of radial change. A stone or group of stones that is important at one point can become dispensable as a result of later developments. Stones can even be used as sacrificial offerings for the sake of later gain and may or may not be accepted as such. The significance of the vulnerability of the stones to the tides of fortune accustoms the players to the reality of impermanence, and again this is found not be a dreadful situation, but one that greatly enriches the experience of playing.

These points are relatively easy to understand, but they represent only the first step. There is a more significant level of analysis of the significance of go as a path to enlightenment, namely, the way it can illuminate two basic questions: how you can avoid falling into a nihilistic relativism while affirming a principle of emptiness as ultimate and why wisdom in the form of a recognition of the fact of emptiness generates a response of compassion. These two issues are among the most challenging in trying to explicate Buddhist philosophy. They appear in the famous advice of Zen masters not to make judgments of good and bad. Since this sounds like a bit of advice that is supposed to be good rather than bad, it is not clear how to understand it. Moreover, it seems that compassion is being seen as a good thing as well. Go is very helpful in illuminating these puzzles.

As a means of getting at these issues, something must be said about the fourth principle mentioned earlier, the doctrine of no-self. It is ironic that the martial arts are often advertised in the West as a means of self-defense. In the East, especially among Buddhists, these arts are valued precisely for their ability to help one to overcome self, that is, to eliminate the delusion of having or being a self as an independent reality. The recognition that in an important sense there is no “self” is a key step on the path to enlightenment, but non-Buddhists are often confused about what this means. One way to explicate this is to note the implications of the notion of interconnectedness for understanding the individual person. Since everything is what it is by virtue of its relations to other things, this means that I as an individual am constituted by my relations to other people, institutions, places, actions, etc. There is no self-grounded or self-grounding inner core of the individual. Your life is entirely a dependent process.

This has profound implications for what makes sense as a life project for an individual. Since my life is a function of relationships with others, the only way I can make my life better (not worrying for the moment about what counts as better) is by making everyone else’s life better. That is to say, the only motive I could have for trying to make the lives of others worse is the notion that I could thereby make my life better in some way, but interconnectedness makes this impossible. As will become clear, this is connected with the fact that it cannot be good to win in go because it is not bad to lose.

This view of the nature of human being is essential to the game of go. One of the most striking consequences of playing the game is the way it leads to the diminution of self-centered behavior even in those who are merely playing the game because they like it as a game. That is, the game induces the overcoming of self even in those who are not trying to do this. A clear indication of this is the congenial interpersonal atmosphere you invariably find at go clubs and tournaments. Players generally are genuinely supportive of each other, rejoicing in others’ successes, going out of their way to help weaker players become stronger, and generally acting like friends rather than opponents. Everyone is immediately struck by this at their first tournament. Of course, this can be true of groups who play other games, but in the case of go, the character of the game directly promotes this kind of behavior.

The motivation behind the Buddhist denial of the existence of an inherent self, besides the perceived lack of empirical evidence for such and the theoretical problems it involves, is the connection between the idea of such a self and the experience of suffering. The notion that your being is ultimately independent of others implies that your life can be improved by doing things that enhance your own being regardless of the impact on others. This may involve enhancing the being of others at the same time, but the point is that that is not necessarily the case. This belief leads to what Buddhists call “attachment”, that is, to the idea that there is something, material wealth, power, status, whatever (even enlightenment), that will make my life better if I can get hold of it for myself. However, this only generates suffering. Either you are desperate because you do not have whatever it is, or you are desperate because you are afraid of losing it. The only solution is to abandon the idea of an independent self and to embrace the reality of your interdependent being.

This is manifested in go in several ways. In the Japanese tradition you always begin a game by expressing your appreciation to the other player for the other’s willingness to play as well as your expectation that your understanding will be enhanced by playing with them. It is obvious that you cannot play games other than solitaire unless there are willing partners, but in the case of go the character of the game as an interactive process that is valued for the quality of the interaction emphasizes this. A popular metaphor for go in Japanese is “hand conversation” (shudan), a conversation being an interactive process valued for the quality of the process rather than any outcomes for the individual participants. (This is why classroom lectures, for example, are not conversations.)

The most effective way go undermines players’ attachment to self is the handicapping system that is an integral part of the game. If you win more than about fifty percent of your games, you are automatically promoted to the next level of the ranking system, which changes the handicap in your games. This means that you expect to lose about half your games so on that basis alone you are encouraged to not become attached to winning. In fact, many players often say that it is better to lose than to win because when you lose it is usually obvious that you overlooked some sort of possibility and you can learn from that, while if you win it is usually because the other player made an obvious mistake. Go players say that you do not win games, you lose games, but this is not an expression of despair. Since you are more interested in learning to play well than in winning games, losing is actually better, in a sense. It would, of course, be ridiculous to suggest that you should try to lose; it is useful to lose only if you are trying to win. This may imply that the inherently good thing is to become stronger, but that is misleading also. Getting stronger cannot be treated as good in an unqualified sense. You may be neglecting other responsibilities in order to focus on go, for example. In the Buddhist view, judgments of good and bad are always made within a context, and there is no ultimate context to provide a final ground for such judgments. Nor is there an independent agent to be the subject of such judgments. Moreover, it is often a matter of years of play between advances in your level of play and the level of most players ceases to increase after a time. Thus, the character of the game encourages players to abandon attachment to getting stronger, as well as to winning, and to focus instead of enjoying the game at the level they are able to play.

The character of the process of play in the game also tends to undermine attachment. The judgment that a particular play is good or bad is always highly provisional. The impact of a play is a function of how the other player responds as well as of your understanding of the potentialities of the situation that is developing on the board. There are many proverbs in go suggesting ways to play, but they are like most proverbs in that contradictory ones can be applied to almost every situation. Since the emptiness of go prevents you from forcing a win, the players learn to greatly restrict the making of judgments of good and bad. In counseling a weaker player you may note that a particular play is “usual nowadays” rather than “good” or that a line of play is “difficult” rather than “bad”. Such counsel is also usually explicitly hypothetical as well: “If you want to capture those stones, you should play there.” The player tries to balance the various aspects of the game, seeking security for the stones you take to be crucial to your position while being open to changing your view of which stones are crucial, for example, and trying to surround enough empty intersections for territory to win while trying not to surround so many that your walls are too thin and can be breached. This character of the game naturally leads the players to focus on an interest in discovering the potentialities in the developing shapes on the board, and that interest may be greatest in a case where the outcome is damaging to your own chance of winning. This, of course, is not a source of distress for go players. It is not unusual for players to be very enthusiastic about a game which they have just lost. The delight is often shared equally when two players feel they have created a particularly elegant game. When the game is a close one, most players do not know who has won until the score can be carefully counted in a way that clarifies the board situation.

Here you begin to see how a lack of ultimate standards of good and bad may not lead to nihilism and despair. There is a context that provides the structure necessary for things to be more or less interesting, but that context is clearly created by an agreement by the participants to play this game, rather than to do something else. The important point is that the context involves the rejection of an ultimate standard of good and bad to a remarkable extent and that this rejection is a sort of affirmation of nihilism. That is, it is a recognition that the absence of such standards can lead to an attractive situation rather than one of despair or boredom. This is just the point that Buddhism tries to make.

There seems to be a major difference in the way you choose to enter the world of go and the way you enter the world of ordinary life, but the parallelism between the two worlds is surprisingly close. In both cases, from a Buddhist perspective, the values involved are more like what is usually thought of as aesthetic rather than ethical. There is no basis for ultimate pronouncements about good and bad, yet there are widely shared views of what is appropriate, even though the participants realize that these views are subject to change.

In go, there is an initial agreement about what counts as playing the game, which involves some basic rules and definitions so that you can identify extreme possibilities that could not be reasonably proposed as appropriate. In life, Buddhists speak to this issue by saying that compassion is the natural accompaniment of wisdom. This claim is not as easy to grasp as might at first seem to be the case because the wisdom referred to is precisely the understanding that everything (including this claim) is empty. There are no absolutes. Even this claim itself is recognized as contingent and open to interpretation without any way of providing a final answer about its meaning. This would seem to leave Buddhism open to the possibility of having no basis for objecting to behaviour that seems clearly outrageous—torturing babies as a way to deal with boredom, for example. How can Buddhists support their appeal to compassion as the only appropriate response to the human situation?

The game of go can again provide a useful model for understanding this matter. When two people confront each other across a go board, they could do virtually anything—throw the stones at each other, carve their initials in the board, etc. Why play go? The broader question is why do anything at all. This question seems to be about ends, and thus is usually assumed to require some sort of standard of good and bad if it is to be answered. However, there is another way of looking at it. This involves considering the kind of beings who are facing each other here. If you assume the reality of emptiness and interconnectedness, any behavior that is inconsistent with this condition will clearly be inappropriate because it is based on delusion, a false view of reality. Thus, what is appropriate is going to be cooperative in some sense. Of course, this could be a matter of throwing the stones at each other, but what would be the result? Most likely, a process that is nasty, brutish, and short, hence not very interesting. Carving initials would fail to take advantage of the rich range of possibilities the board offers. This does not mean that throwing the stones or carving initials is wrong or bad, just that it seems unlikely that people who understand the possibilities would choose to do so. It would be like an artist just pouring paint down the drain—not a crime, but a waste, nevertheless.

The point is that while it is true that, because of the nature of reality, nothing very significant (in ultimate terms) is ever at stake, it still is the case that some things seem more appropriate than others, and a good guideline for finding the more appropriate things is to say that they are the cooperative acts that increase the opportunities for cooperation, that is, the compassionate acts. Thus, one plays go for the same reasons people climb mountains, because it is there and it seems such a waste not to play it. It is the same for life in general. The game of non-attachment is a useful model for a life of non-attachment.

Conclusion

So, what are we to make of Dogen’s suggestion that we can understand how to go where there is neither cold nor heat by thinking about playing a game of go? Dogen speaks of the authentication or the experience of enlightenment as “dropping off body and mind”, which means losing one’s sense of being a separate being, ultimately distinct from the world and from others. He and Hongzhi are suggesting that playing go involves this experience of non-separateness. From the description above it should be clear how this is possible.

When Dogen says “the opponents are one” he is not referring to the kind of mutuality commonly found in interactive experiences. That is, he is not talking about the kind of sharing that routinely occurs in activities that require the involvement of another person, from war to sex. When we do something together in the usual way, there is a sense in which, by creating a shared product or experience, we overcome our distinctness and create a common bond, a single thing that is “us”. However, in most joint experiences our separateness is nevertheless maintained, often by having different or incompatible goals, such as victory, which cannot be shared by the opponents in a battle, or my pleasure, which is not yours. Hongzhi and Dogen are suggesting that go is different; here the separateness of the players is completely overcome—”You play go by yourself. Mud within mud; a jewel within a jewel.”

The possibility of achieving such non-separateness in playing go is facilitated by the handicapping system. When go is played in the proper spirit, there is no goal external to the activity of playing, and the players have no ulterior motives. The sole aim is to play, and both players give themselves up completely to the patterns and possibilities in the stones. The stones play themselves; the players merely facilitate this process and allow it to occur. (Dogen’s implication that this is not possible in a high handicap game of eight stones probably reflects the fact that a separation like that between teacher and student seems unavoidable in cases where there is that much difference between the playing strengths.) Dogen seems to take for granted that it is common in playing go to experience a total involvement in a dynamic process in which distinctions between yourself and the other player and between yourself and the process of play are recognized as distortions of the fundamental unity of the phenomenon. This sort of activity, in which the reality of non-separateness is actualized, will be experienced as fundamentally positive and liberating—just like the experience of authenticating enlightenment.

For Dogen, the point is not that you lose yourself in this kind of activity, but rather that you lose the delusion that your self is essentially a separate and distinct being in the world. Thus, in playing go you find your “true” self, “dropping off body and mind”. You lose the false “you” and actualize the real “you” that is not separable from the other player or from the play. It is this actualization of the overcoming of distinctions that Dogen suggests Dongshan was pointing toward.

Dogen would say that playing go is often not like this for many players because they maintain attachments to things that require them to be separated from the other player and from the process, things like winning or improving their ratings. In order for “my” winning or “my” rating to be important, I must be a separate and independent individual. However, it is possible to lose these delusions and for a moment at least to experience the dropping off of body and mind that is the actualization of enlightenment. So, if you’re curious about what nirvana is like, learn how to play go. Then take the advice of Dogen and just play, not trying to do anything else. Let the game “swallow you up”.