Thus while Dōgen's first answer to Ejō ("call it cutting the cat") sounds evasive, in fact it is crucial to understanding Dōgen's fundamental response to the Nan-ch'üan story. Ejō's questions indicate he is looking to place a moral value judgment on this action. Dōgen, however, guides Ejō toward seeing the act "as it really is," prior to the introduction of placing it in a moral context. This is none other than Dōgen's application of his doctrine of genjōkōan to the situation, of "recognizing the presence of things as they really are." Prior to the rise of self and other and any conceptualization or contextualization of what the act is -- a crime, a messy affair, an act spurring others to enlightenment, and so forth -- is the simple experiencing of the cutting of the cat.

　　 Fundamental to our experience-of-the-cutting-of-the-cat is its impermanence. Indeed, for Dōgen impermanence expresses our direct-

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experience-of-things-as-they-really-are. Dōgen points out that we do not "experience" a permanent, changing, objective reality. Rather, our experience is a ceaseless process, an ever-changing ebb and flow of space-time events. (This fact holds whether or not there is indeed any essence or enduring substance behind or beyond our experience, a point of metaphysics on which Dōgen suspends judgment.)

　　 Dōgen, therefore, seeks to aid Ejō in seeing the cat-killing action as it really is. But he is not thereby trying to evade Ejō's concern about the morality of the act. Dōgen acknowledges that the act would be a crime, thus affirming the Buddhist precept "do not kill." But he seeks to point out that attachment to this moral precept (or any other, for that matter) is unwarranted. If we cannot provide an ontology of permanency and immutability behind the flux of our experiencing, then we cannot regard even moral principles or precepts as absolute and immutable. Dōgen's question/answer exchange seeks to point out that moral judgments have no static ultimate ontological status, that they are temporary configurations arising and falling with all the various circumstances (jisetsu) coalescing in any given situation. Thus good, evil, and neither good nor evil are understood in the Mādhyamika sense of asvabhāva (Skt: "no own-self nature").

　　 Ejō's subsequent question "Then how can we escape this crime?" reintroduces the theme of moral causation introduced at the beginning of section 1.6. As now applied to the Nan-ch'üan story, Ejō's question now means: given that cause and effect are immovable, how can one escape the bad karmic effects of killing the cat? Dōgen replies: "The action of the Buddha and the crime are separate, but they both occur at once in one action."

　　 Dōgen's answer is none other than the application of the point Dōgen made that led to his recital of the Nan-ch'üan story in the first place: cause and effect emerge clearly at the same time. The act "as it really is" is only one act, the killing of a cat. Addressed in its moral contexts, however, this realization/actualization of the Nan-ch'üan story is both "a Buddha act" and "a crime," which are separate. That is to say, there is not a cause (the cat-killing Buddha act) and subsequent effect (a crime) linked together in a linear, sequential spatiotemporal relationship. Rather, the Buddha act and the crime are discrete events, discontinuous from each other, which arise at the same time.

　　 So how, then, does one actually "escape" the bad karmic effects of killing the cat? Dōgen's answer is that he does not, and cannot, escape it. Rather, he experiences the karmic effects of the act in the very moment of his "immediately presencing" (as the "Shoakumakusa" puts it) the killing of the cat. Furthermore, the karmic debt incurred in this act is immediately paid without remainder. As the "Shoakumakusa" chapter expresses it: "This presence exhaustively presences all places, worlds,

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times and phenomena [dharmas] as its domain, the domain which takes for itself nonproduction." [19]

　　 Because the karmic debt is paid without remainder, in the very completion of the act no subsequent effect can result from it. Thus there is no subsequent production of evil from the killing of the cat that continues on to give rise to a new cause-effect relationship. Thus the act of killing the cat can be an act of bringing others to enlightenment when performed from the standpoint of enlightenment.

　　 But even though Dōgen affirms the cat-killing act as an act of a Buddha, there are clear indications he is ambivalent about it. The concluding exchange between Dōgen and Ejoo on this matter is as follows: