Specter Vision Radio.

Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.com. Today we're talking about Genjekon, which is an essay by Dogen-Z, Ehay Dogen, 13th century Japanese Zen philosopher,

arguably the most important philosopher in the Zen tradition.

Now, as a threshold matter, I already find myself tripping over my words, which doesn't

auger well for the rest of this conversation, I suppose.

But even talking about Dogen as a philosopher introduces kind of an interesting challenge.

And this is something I've been thinking about this week.

So I've had a couple of people saying nice things about the show, which is very much appreciated.

And one thing that people sometimes say to me is like, oh, yeah, well, it's really interesting

that you guys are really getting into a lot of stuff about religion.

That always wrong foots me because I never think that we're talking about religion.

I always think that we're talking about just, you know, ideas, philosophical ideas,

or maybe metaphysical ideas, if I want to be more precise.

But that to me is not synonymous with religion.

But for many, perhaps even most listeners, if they hear us talking about,

for example, our show on Philip K. Dick, we kept talking about the programmer, or I use the word

the artificer. But you could just as usually use the word God, right? Those are all kind of

synonyms. But calling it God places this squarely in the realm of

something we call religion. Whereas if I talk about the patterner or the programmer or whatever,

that feels like either a way of framing it so it isn't quite so religious or else it's a fig leaf

that I'm using to avoid using

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