Abstract

Contrary to occidental philosophy oriented to grasp the principles of essential being, Buddhism recognizes the entity of what suffering is in our life. Human beings as Inter-Beings are enveloped by the topos of life and death. From breath to breath, our life is bound to the moments of emerging and vanishing, being and non-being in an essential unity. Dōgen’s philosophical thinking actualized this conception accompanying the embodied cognition of the thinking and acting self. In view of a phenomenology Heidegger emphasized the Being bound to fundamental substantiality, which borders at the Ab-grund, falling into nothingness. With Dōgen, the contrast of life and death is enveloped in our breathing. It achieves the unity of body and cognition which can be called ‘corpus’. Contrary to that, the essential reflection for Heidegger is to grasp the fundament of Being in the world, which represents the spectacle of a Thinking-Being-Unity. The goal of this comparison is to grasp fundamentally what is the essentiality of being, life and recognition bound to embodied cognition in this globalized world.