Firewood, Ash, and the Moment That Never Turns Into Anything Else
One of the most disorienting moves Dōgen makes in the Genjōkōan comes wrapped in an image so ordinary we almost miss how radical it is. Firewood becomes ash. Simple enough. And yet Dōgen immediately pulls the rug out from under our usual way of understanding that sentence.
Firewood, he tells us, does not become firewood again after it is ash. Fair. But then he goes further: we should not suppose that ash is “after” and firewood is “before.” Firewood abides fully as firewood. Ash abides fully as ash. Each condition includes before and after without being reducible to a point on a timeline.
This is where readers often stumble—not because the words are obscure, but because the implication is so counterintuitive. We are deeply invested in linear stories: this turns into that, birth leads to death, past explains present. Dōgen isn’t denying change. He’s denying that change means one thing sliding forward into another.
To probe this, we posed five questions in the accompanying video, each aimed at a different pressure point in the text.
First, what does it mean to say that firewood “fully includes before and after” while being independent of them? This challenges the assumption that things are incomplete until their future arrives. For Dōgen, firewood is not a draft version of ash. It is complete expression, right there.
Second, when Dōgen says firewood “abides in its condition,” he’s pointing to identity without permanence. A thing is fully itself without needing to persist as itself. This is a precision move: identity is not continuity.
The third and fourth questions turn toward birth and death. Dōgen explicitly denies that birth turns into death or that death turns into birth. This is not nihilism, and it’s not a crude rejection of rebirth doctrines. It’s a refusal to treat existence as a conveyor belt. Birth is a complete condition. Death is a complete condition. They are not episodes in a single storyline.
His seasonal metaphor makes this vivid. Winter does not become spring. Spring does not end winter. Each season fully occupies its own reality. We only call one the beginning or end of another because we are narrating from outside the moment.
The final question asks what it means for birth and death to be “complete this moment.” This is where Dōgen’s teaching cuts closest to practice. Completion does not mean finality. It means nothing is missing. Nothing needs to arrive later to justify what is here now.
This passage from Genjōkōan is not a poetic aside; it’s a direct challenge to how we read our lives. If moments do not turn into other moments, then clarity is not found by projecting forward or reconstructing backward. It is found by meeting what is fully, without asking it to become something else.
That’s an uncomfortable proposition. It leaves no place to hide. And that, perhaps, is exactly why Dōgen begins with firewood and ash—things so ordinary that, once seen clearly, there’s no way to argue your way around them.
