Contrary to occidental philosophy, which is to grasp and solidify the principles of essential being (ontos on), Buddhism seeks to understand the existence of human beings and the significance of suffering in human life. In the East Asian languages human beings are described as “inter-beings” in that they 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 integrated this conception with the embodied cognition of both the thinking and the acting self. In the phenomenological point of view, Heidegger, in his early work, emphasizes that being is bound to a fundamental substantiality, which borde...