Good evening, everyone. So a couple of days ago on Juneteenth, I did a three and a half hour seminar on Dogen's being time and his whole approach to time and teaching of temporality, along with Joanna Macy's deep time. Tonight, I'm just going to give a few high points of that. A few of you were there a couple of days ago, so you can add things in the discussion. But just to dive in, starting with Dogen's essay, Being Time, Shobokenzo Uji, just summarizing some of what he says, that time is not some external, intractable, objective or independent container that we are caught in. We often think of that, think that way of time, that it exists sort of out there independent of us and we have to find our way through it or meet up with deadlines or make progress in it or whatever.

[01:11]

But for Dogen, we are time. When we fully express ourselves right now. That's time. Time is not separate from our activity, our experience. And he says, we cannot fully avoid expressing our deepest truth presently in this being of time. Dogen also offers the consolation that even a partial half-hearted expression or exertion of our being time is completely a partial being time. So Dokin is very challenging, but he also offers various places in his writing, steep, profound consolation and support and comfort. So we are always being time. And he urges us to exhaustively study how is time, but we can't escape from being time.

[02:12]

He talks about, the distinctive function of time as passage or flowing. There's passage from today to tomorrow, passage from today to yesterday, passage from yesterday to today, passage from today to today, and passage from tomorrow to tomorrow. This happens because passage itself is the distinctive function of time. So time's passing or flowing is not linear, it's multi-directional, time passes in many different ways. And he also, Stogen also says that it's not merely flowing, that we should not ignore conventional views of time. We shouldn't ignore clock time, that's also part of the time we have to deal with, but fundamentally time is deeper than that. Time has to do with our experience. A very simple example, we sit zazen for a period of 30 minutes or 40 minutes sometimes, and the dawan hits the bell at 30 minutes.

[03:23]

But some periods of zazen, you may have noticed, seem to go by very fast. in some periods as us, and even though it's the same time and clock time, just seemed to go on and on and never end, and the dawn must have fallen asleep. So time is not something objective and external and real in that sense. Time is our being, our being of time. So Again, I'm just going to hit some of the highlights of what I talked about Saturday, and those of you who were there can bring up other parts of it. But we tend to think that we are caught in time. Actually, we are being time. Our being is time. one story that I'll mention. So I talked about some of the background sources for Dogen's perspective on time, from the East Asian Buddhist tradition, and from our Soto lineage.

[04:30]

I mentioned one story that I'll just mention briefly, Yunyan Dancheng, who was, well, 781 to 841, he was the teacher of Dongshan, or Tosan, the great founder of Chinese Soto Zen, who wrote the Julumare Samadhi that we sometimes chant. So Yunyan is very important in our lineage, but he's famous as a Zen failure. He spent many years just not getting it. But anyway, there's one story that I mentioned the other day. Yunyan was sweeping the grounds of the temple. He was doing Soji, he was doing temple cleaning. And his brother Dawu was also a monk. One came by and looked at him and said, too busy. And Yun Yan said, you should know there's one who's not busy. Now there's more to the story and it gets into the integration of duality and non-duality, but just this, you should know there is one who's not busy.

[05:36]

even when, you know, Wansong, the commentator of the Book of Serenity, where that story, one of the places that story appears, said, as you eat, boil tea, sew and sweep, or go on the internet or whatever else, you should recognize the one not busy. Then you will realize the union of mundane reality and awakened reality. In the Soto tradition, this is called Simultaneous inclusion, naturally not wasting any time. So one time, my teacher Tenshin Ramp-Anderson, maybe it was in a show song ceremony, was asked, what does it mean to waste time? So we chanted the harmony of difference and sameness. And in our translation, we say, do not pass your days and nights in vain. Another translation just says, do not waste time. those who study the mystery, I humbly urge you to not waste time.

[06:42]

So somebody asked Red, what does it mean to waste time? And he just said, forgetting the one who's not busy is wasting time. So this is about the integration in terms of time, this is about the integration of our sense of something deep and ultimate, our sense of the universal, and how that integrates into our everyday activity. This is the, this is, kind of a fundamental aspect of Soto Zen practice. We experience something deep, or we experience something, some sense of the ultimate through our Zazen practice. Of course, not every period, and maybe, you know, maybe it's something that we experience gradually over time, so to speak, but we have the sense of something It goes beyond, but then our practices in our zazen, but also when we get up from our zazen, how do we express that?

[07:44]

So Dogen's practice is about, Dogen emphasizes expression. How do we creatively express the ultimate? How do we creatively express the one who's not busy, right in the middle of our busy life? That's the point. It's not about reaching some higher state of mind or reaching some great understanding or whatever, or having some super experience. It's about, you know, Suzuki Roshi said, walking through Golden Gate Park, we lived in San Francisco, walking through Golden Gate Park in the fog, gradually my robes get wet. So our practice, sometimes we have some sudden experience that happens, and it's possible to have some good understanding, but that's not the point. The point is this sense of the ultimate, this sense of what goes beyond. How do we express it right in the middle of our busyness? How do we remember the one who's not busy? So Saturday also talked about some of the background of East Asian,

[08:50]

Buddhism and how that informed Dogen's understanding of many things. I mentioned some things about Huayen Buddhism, the Buddhism that came out of the Flower Ornament Sutra that some of us chant once a month in the evenings, the first Friday evening of each month. A very wonderful psychedelic sutra, but the Huayan school in China was a little more systematic. One of the things it says, well, it also talks about how there are Buddhas and Bodhisattvas present in every atom, at the tip of every blade of grass, innumerable Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are everywhere. That's kind of the vision of this magnificent sutra. But one of the things it says about time is that there are ten times. Do you know that there are ten times? So there's the past, present, and future of the past. There's the past, present, and future of the future.

[09:54]

And there's the past, present, and future of the present. And then there's all nine of those together is the 10th time. So, you know, that's another, another aspect of the multidimensionality of time moving in all these different directions as Dogen says. I also talked about a story from the Lotus Sutra, and I'll just mention a couple of parts of it. This is the central story in the Lotus Sutra is the, Well, to make a longer story short, that myriad wonderful old aged bodhisattvas spring forth from the ground. And the Buddha says that these bodhisattvas springing forth from the open space under the ground will keep alive the practice in the future evil age. So they're here now, of course. But this leads to the central revelation in the Lotus Sutra where the Shakyamuni Buddha says that actually it seems like he was born and left the palace and struggled for many years and was awakened under the Bodhi tree and then taught for 40, 45 years and passed away into nirvana.

[11:14]

But in the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha reveals that actually He has this inconceivably long lifespan. He's been practicing as a Bodhisattva for many, many, many, many, many, many ages. And they have all these magnificent metaphors for how long it is. Like all the grains of sand in the Ganges, if you drop one grain of sand in each galaxy, to put it that way, in this direction, He's been alive that long, that many ages. And then you take all the other directions too. So anyway, he's been around for a very, very long time. This is an important story for Dogen in terms of his sense of time that he talks about the story a lot. He says, it's not, merely that Buddha is present always in the world, but that his vigorous, inspiring practice continues throughout the wholehearted practice, through the wholehearted practice of his successors, through all the children of Buddha.

[12:29]

And all of us in this Sangha and other Sanghas are defined as children of Buddha. We have become, we are children of Buddha. We don't necessarily realize it, but that's what happens in taking refuge in Buddha Dharmasangha. We become children of Buddha. So, but Dogen says about this, that this inconceivable lifespan is not some abstract timeframe belonging to some esoteric realm of exotic Buddhas. But it's a way of expressing for Dogen his view of time as the actuality, the reality of non-dual awakening and active practice in the concrete present context. It's not something abstract. This space and time, he connects space and time, but the space is not outer space or empty space, it's the space

[13:35]

you know, of our seats. It's the space between our ears. It's the space of our body. It's the space of the room you're in. It's the space of this Zoom room. So space is the nature of what we might, what we tentatively call things, you know, maybe I'll come back to that. But so he says that, the Buddha's lifespan, this inconceivable lifespan is alive because, I mean, maybe it's literally that he's around here and the Buddha's and Bodhisattva's around here, but also Dogen says that the Buddha's lifespan, lifespan right now is our practice, our wholehearted practice. So here, all of us are keeping alive Buddha. in this difficult time and place. So that's a little bit about Dogen's sense of time. I also want to talk, and I want to, I was going to talk more about, I wanted to talk more about Joanna Macy's deep time.

[14:42]

because it really kind of helps to explicate and unfold Dogen's being time. So deep time comes from deep ecology. Joanna Macy was a teacher of mine who I've worked with for a long time. a Buddhist scholar, but she is also a practitioner. She's she practiced in the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka and also in Tibetan tradition, but she also has a keen sense of Zen. And one of the things that she talks about is re-inhabiting time. So this is one of the most important things I want to say that, you know, we have a, we have a sense in Zen practice and in Buddhist practice of being present. Some of you may remember Ram Dass' old book, Be Here Now. So there's some impulse tendency to want to be here now, but this is, can be very dangerous because being here now is not an escape from time.

[15:58]

It's not about getting rid of the past and future. So I'm flipping through my notes, excuse me. But this re-inhabiting time is a healthier, sane fashion for experience time, for experiencing time, for being time. It's not about being in a narrow present where we get rid of the past and get rid of the future. And of course, at times, in some being times when we want to do that, we might want to get rid of all of the uncomfortable things in the past, all of our mistakes, all of the difficulties of the past, all the things that we regret. So there's some impulse to try and escape from the past. And also with the future, all of our fears, all of our anxieties are about what might happen in the future, what will happen in some nearby future. We're not, well, as I was saying the other day, it's possible that we might be afraid of something in the present.

[17:06]

Like if you find yourself someplace and a grizzly bear is charging you, you might be afraid of what's happening right now. But most of the time in being time, our sense of the future, our sense of fear, our sense of anxiety is about something that we think might happen in the future. So there's this natural impulse to be present here now in a way that's really restrictive to try and escape from time. So what Joanna talks about is really re-inhabiting time, seeing, feeling that this presence of the present being of time is not timelessness, but timefulness. that this present time includes all past times. It includes all future times. There are lots of ways to demonstrate that. So everything that has happened to us in our past is part of what's happening in your Zoom box right now.

[18:14]

You know, people that you knew when you were a child, your parents, your pet animals when you were a child, past friends and lovers and roommates and whatever. All of those are part of what is happening right now on your seat. So, and going beyond that, I want to talk about the ancestors too, as Joanna talks about that. How many of you know something about any of your great-grandparents? A number of people raised their hands. Some people didn't. But whether or not you know anything about your great-grandparents or their parents, the way we think these days, you would probably agree that something about them is part of who you are and what you are here now.

[19:18]

So we have lineages of ancestors. our Zen ancestors, our spiritual lineage and cultural lineages. So all kinds of different ancestors. So in this sense of this narrow sense of being here now denies that past. And I think some of, you know, mindfulness orientations, not necessarily all, are about just being present and getting rid of the past, getting rid of the future. but deep time is about seeing that this present includes all pasts and all futures. So part of what Joanna talks about is caring for future beings. She started thinking about deep time as a response to her work in nuclear guardianship and her concern about nuclear waste, because nuclear waste will be dangerous for 10,000 years and in some cases for 100,000 years.

[20:24]

And so she thought, well, how, you know, Joanna wondered, well, how do we take care of that? How will beings in the future realize that this is dangerous place? Cause there's nuclear waste buried here. And so she, her idea was that there would be like, um, monastic communities or semi-monastic communities of spiritual seekers at different nuclear waste sites to remind people in the distant future that this is a dangerous place. Don't dig around in here. So anyway, the the sense of taking care of future beings. So time is moving in all these directions, right? Time moves from today to yesterday, from yesterday to tomorrow and so forth. So part of what we, part of our practice in the present, in this rich present that includes the past and the future is to take care of future beings. And actually, I think we all have some sense of that.

[21:29]

If we're concerned about climate damage, for example, that has to do with our concern. Well, it's already happening. The fires in California, huge thunderstorms in the Chicago area. the sea rising and endangering cities on the East coast, the big storms aggravated by climate damage in the Southeast. All of this is happening already, but it's going to, it is going to be much worse. So how do we take care of these beings in the future? How do we take care of all the beings in the future who are actually here now also? She points out that all, the DNA of all the humans present here now today in this world is going to be, uh, the DNA of all the beings in the future. So, um, well, I said Saturday, unless of course there are extraterrestrial invaders who interbreed with us, but putting that aside, um, uh, we, we are,

[22:35]

connected with future beings. And Joanna's concern is that we do what we can to take care of future beings. So I want to talk about changing the past. And this is one of the main things I want to talk about. So history is a kind of provisional story we tell in the present about the past. I've experienced being involved in a couple of quote unquote, historical events that are written up in history books later. And what's written does not match my experience of what was happening or my memory of what my experience of what was happening and those of other people involved. So, We can change the past. This is really important. Of course, we can change the future. We can help to mitigate the worst of climate damage now by supporting non-fossil fuels, by supporting renewable energy and doing that in our personal life.

[23:50]

And also in terms of supporting changes in the systems of the economic systems, the cultural systems of our society. So we can change the future that way, but we can also change the past. And there are lots of examples of that now. So this seminar was two days ago on what's now a national holiday, Juneteenth, which was the day in 1865 when finally all slaves in Texas realized that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two years ago and the Civil War had been over for more than a couple of months and that they were free. So the Juneteenth celebrates the day when finally everybody, all African-Americans, all people in this country knew they weren't slaves anymore. Now we could say, of course, that we now have mass incarceration and there was Jim Crow and police murders of unarmed black people and so forth.

[24:55]

But how we tell the story of the past changes the past and changes the meaning of the past. And this is happening all the time. So, um, you know, thanks to the brave young woman who, uh, videotaped with her cell phone, uh, the murder of George Floyd, there has been a, uh, a movement to respond to the history of slavery and oppression of black people in this country. And that's changing, uh, the present, but it's also changes the past because when we know about, what things that happened in the past when we know our history, that changes the present and that changes the future. And that changes the meaning of the past. So this is really at work now here in our country in terms of the whole situation of how our country was built on slavery and racism and our economy.

[25:56]

Right now, there are bills in many states, in many state legislatures, to outlaw the teaching in history classes of slavery or of race, that there are laws that they're trying to pass to prevent any teacher from mentioning anything about race. And there's one of the states, I don't know if it's Texas or Arizona, where they actually have proposed that the way police now have body cams so that we can see what happens in some of these events where Black people are killed, now they want to put on body cams on teachers to check that they don't say anything about race or about slavery. So right now in the present, we are having this contest about how to change the past or not, or in what way we wanna change the past. The past is not set. We can say that June 19th, 1865, certain things happened.

[26:59]

It was announced in Galveston, Texas that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. But there's many things like this where events right now, events that we recall of the past change our present and change the future and change the meaning of the past. So this is not just about social things. This is very much in terms of our personal situations too. So some of us may have traumatic experiences from our childhood, for example, or just things that we did in the past that we now regret or mistakes we made that we feel bad about that may haunt us in various ways. This is, you know, not uncommon. And one of the things that happens in Zen practice is we're sitting and, you know, being aware of what's going on in our, body and thoughts and these things arise, but we can change the past.

[28:07]

We can change those things. The meaning of those things can be changed. If we forgive ourselves for our mistakes, if we forgive others for being involved in those, if we forgive the people who may have hurt us, if we, accept what happened in a different way, it changes the meaning of that past. And that happens in our own personal lives. And it's not set. It's fluid. It's how, how we see experiences in our childhood or experiences that we've been through or mistakes we've made or so forth. It's kind of helpful to make mistakes. We need to see, how the world is changing. So one of the things, let me get back to my notes. I was going to read a passage from Dogen.

[29:09]

The past of the present may also be the past of the future. The present of the future will be intimately connected to the futures of our present, yet it is not necessarily predetermined or limited by our present future. We can reclaim the past and the present, and thus we can actually change our past as well as our present for the sake of the future. So history is the changing process, as I may have said, of defining the past for the present and the stories we tell about the past in the present change the meaning of past events. So just a couple of other things I want to say about all of this, and then I want to hear your comments and responses. So another part of this is to appreciate the ancestors. So we do this, Sometimes we chant the names of the ancestors in the Zen lineage from Shakyamuni Buddha to Dogen or just as a Giroshi or whatever.

[30:14]

And so we have spiritual lineages. So Jukai or taking the precepts is about connecting with a spiritual lineage. and being confirmed in it and recognizing our Buddha nature. But of course, as I was saying, we also have personal genetic lineages and ancestors that way, cultural lineages, but we also have ancestors in the future. So time is moving in all these different directions. There was another quote that I missed that I wanted to say. I'm not going to get everything in that I got in the three and a half hours Saturday. Oh, just one quote from Hongzhe from Cultivating the Empty Field. He was a century before Dogen in China. He said, this is the time and place to leap beyond the 10,000 emotional entanglements of innumerable eons. Time or one contemplation of the 10,000 years finally goes beyond all the transitory and you emerge with spontaneity.

[31:23]

So this sense of contemplation of the 10,000 years, when we have a wider sense of time, then it's not that we ignore clock time. It's not that we ignore the problems of the present. of 2021 or whatever, it's not that we ignore the problems of our life, you know, in June, is this June still? Yeah. But how do we see this in this broader timeframe? Both are happening at the same time. This, this timefulness of being present here now and seeing that when we re-inhabit time, when we don't try and deny time, All of time is here now. So Dogen talks about when he's celebrating the Buddha's awake enlightenment day, he says that all Buddhas are enlightened today. All Buddhas in the past and the present and the future. This time is happening in all these directions at once here now.

[32:27]

So, So in the same way we can look at the future beings, Joanne emphasizes, you know, actually meeting future beings and imagining future beings in specific times and specific places in Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Joliet or wherever you are and particular or Florida even and particular future beings 50 years from now, or 500 years from now and how, how are they looking at us? How do they encourage us? How can we be supported by them? They're looking back at us, looking back or however you want to see time and encouraging us to take care of our time for, for the future and for the past. So I could keep babbling. There's a whole lot more to say. Um, but I'll leave it at that for now.

[33:32]

And maybe in discussion more can come up. So any of you who were there Saturday and want to bring up something that I said, then you're welcome to, or just anyone who has any questions or comments or responses to any of this. And I, you know, I maybe I was a little too busy and trying to, trying to, you know, get everything in from the other day during this time, but it's okay. Cause we are being time. So comments, questions, responses, please feel free. Jen, hi. Good to see you. Oh, thanks. That's great. It's really nice to be here to see people. Come again. In some future present time. Right, yes. I have a document that's about 11 pages long, and it's in nine point type, and it is a list of the people, some of them are not named because nobody knows their names, of people who were lynched in the United States between the time of the end of the Civil War and about 1945.

[34:55]

I would kind of carry this around with me when I went to meetings and expect people to be impressed because I cared so much about this, you know, and I would walk up to people like Stan Willis or other people and, you know, tell them about this document or show it to them. And they would go, huh, you know, and I could never understand why they didn't feel more connected to it until, I guess it was, I hate to connect it to the death of George Floyd, but- Please. I think it was Mike Brown, when that young man was shot and his body was left in- St. Louis. In St. Louis, yeah, on the street for four or five hours, while his relatives uh, fretted and the police would not let them.

[36:01]

But anyway, um, uh, that past moved into the present and I, I did not realize that The lynching had continued so completely up to the present day and yes, and until I until you realize How many people have been killed by the police? It's very very interesting and and I I was It I I finally understood why people would just brush off and the fact that I had this enormous list of victims of lynching from the past. And I finally understood that that didn't end. Well, this is still happening in the present, as you say, that the police murders and more than the police murders or murders by other people, white people, black people, and the whole,

[37:09]

white supremacy terrorist party controlling the Senate who's trying to suppress, you know, do voter suppression so that the voter, the voting ability and the voting rights will be worse than they were before Martin Luther King helped to pass the voting rights bill. Anyway. Yeah. So this is continuing and through mass incarceration and so forth. So that, that in some ways has never stopped. It's taken different forms. But Clara, what's learning about that history? So just in the last few years, people have learned about the massacre in Tulsa in 1921, where a whole very affluent, well-to-do, middle-class Black, large Black neighborhood was burnt to the ground completely. 300 or more people killed. They're just discovering the mass graves. It was just covered up. Even people in Tulsa didn't know about it until the last few years.

[38:12]

Some people knew. Anyway, that's an example. So history is really interesting, because again, the stories we tell now about the past, we change the history. And when we understand more about the history, that changes the present and how we see the present. And then, you know, people can argue about, well, we shouldn't let that be in the history books. Cause you know, that's going to take, that's going to take away our power or whatever. Um, so, uh, the past is not gone. The past is fully present. Our present includes all the different paths, you know, time is moving around in all these directions. There's different paths and how do they, how do they express the present? And then the futures, how are the different futures, you know, there's not in Buddhist thinking, there's not predestination, the future is not set. So, you know, for example, with climate damage, we don't know

[39:13]

You know, there are mass extinctions, but we don't know if people are going to go extinct as possible. But I kind of doubt it. Somebody, some, some of us will continue. How do we make the best of it? How do we, so the future is not set. The past is not set either. Even though we think the past is gone, the past changes. These are all examples of the past changing. And that's all part of our present. So other comments or questions or responses about that or anything else about being on time? Yes, Debra. No, I'm sorry, Mr. Talk Saturday, but I'm not sure what you're saying is what I'm understanding or have a sense of it. As you talk about this different levels of time or expressions of time, is the does the human in a sense have a knowing that isn't able to be expressed? And I know you didn't use that word as you spoke, but I'm just kind of bringing this big word up.

[40:16]

Is it all relevant to what you're speaking about? That's my question. Well, I'm not sure I got what the question is. Can you say it again, please? Okay. Well, part of it has comes, I've studied a lot about trauma, for example. Let's just use that example. Yeah, there's a very relevant. Yeah. So this Menachem talks about this, he talks that he feels that trauma is in the DNA. It's in the white DNA, it's in the black DNA, it's in the Asian DNA. And I'm just using that as one example. It's just an expression of a concept. But I feel that there is sort of a knowing that can go on. And you can have, for example, the Jewish people can have thousands of years of trauma or African Americans. And I know this is more of a specific example, but is there a kind of knowing? Sometimes I, because it's, I can't explain it. Like that's come up for me a few times on a couple subjects. And as I hear you speak this evening, it came up about time because there's sometimes I feel what you're saying is a knowing, you know, not so much a cognitive understanding.

[41:24]

Maybe you wouldn't use that word, but I'm just asking. Yeah, no, that's very interesting. You know, there's this sense in which, you know, the example you gave that, you know, race is traumatic for everyone, at least in this country, we're all traumatized by all the different aspects of race and, you know, white people, black people, brown people, Asian people, it affects all of us. And it's not a matter of finding blame, it's a matter of how is it impacting our present. So there's different kinds of knowing. This is a very important part of Zen teaching. Dōgen talks about this a lot. When we're out in the middle of an ocean, for example, and we don't see any of the shoreline, we think the ocean is circular. He says in Ginjo Koan. But then when we get closer to the shore, we see the distinctions of the shoreline.

[42:30]

Or for another example, human beings have one sense of water, fish have another. Hungry ghosts have yet another. Dragons have a different idea, a different sense of time. So, of water, excuse me. So, well, and time. So there's different kinds of knowing. And I think that's part of what your question is getting at. There's a knowing that is in our body. It's not just some linear rational thinking. And not to get rid of that, get things out, we can know things rationally, but also we know things, especially when you're talking about trauma, PTSD, for example, there's a knowledge of that in our body, different parts of our body and different tensions in our body. So yeah, how do we know the past and the present? Yeah. And I don't know if I responded to your question. Yes.

[43:32]

Thank you. No, you kind of touched it. I have to expand my thoughts. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Howard. Thank you for your talk. Hopefully my internet doesn't drop out on me. It's a little low volume, but that's okay. Go ahead. We'll be uprooting at like two different times if that happens. I was, was, you know, you mentioned the Lotus Sutra and I was thinking a lot as you're You know, when you're bringing up the topics that you're bringing up about the bodhisattvas springing up from the earth. And almost sort of like, I had never thought about it like this before, but the sense of like, you don't know when the bodhisattva is going to spring up out of the earth. There's a lot of them. And they, and bodhisattvas are there to, to help you cultivate, help remind you, right. To practice. Um, uh, And in a way I'm kind of thinking of as like, um, you know, in the Lotus Sutra, there's all this stuff about like, oh, you know, this person didn't even know that they were a Bodhisattva, didn't even know that they were already going to be with us.

[44:36]

Um, and that, and it, that in a way was, is like the prerequisite for becoming one in the first place, but one had to be, one had to notice that the Bodhisattva was springing up in the first place. Um, so I guess, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's something here about, um, all these opportunities for awakening that we are or are not sort of willing to be open to. So, you know, I'm thinking about resistances to, you know, learning about Tulsa or learning about, you know, all the terrible things that have happened in American history. You know, the places and situations in which we are or are not willing to hear it. are willing or not willing to perceive or relate to it as a teaching in some way about suffering, our place in the suffering, how we are shaped by it, um, how we internalize it and bring it back out into the world in some way.

[45:37]

Um, so yeah, that's a bit of a rambling thought, but, um, I hadn't thought about the Bodhi Vatsapas springing up from the earth in that way, but, um, I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, you know, that's there's a lot in what you said that these awakening beings spring out of the earth at different times. We may or may not recognize them. We may not be open enough. So one of the things that practice does is to kind of tenderize us, you know, sitting Zazen a lot, you kind of get kind of a little bit softened up and you can recognize some of this stuff more. I want to add to what you were saying, though. It's not just that there is this history of terrible things, because there's also lineages of courageous people who tried to, you know, save all sorts of beings, who tried to help in different situations. Whether or not they'd ever heard of bodhisattvas, you know, there were people who,

[46:42]

you know, tried to, they were abolitionists, people who tried to work towards freeing the slaves. That was, that's the whole thing I mentioned Saturday that I wanted to mention again about the Civil War. This is about changing history and I talked about this Saturday and I forgot to say it now that the history of the Civil War It's really changed. It can really change. It can change in different directions. When I was a kid, I've always liked studying history, but I particularly studied the Civil War. And back then, most of the books, at least the ones I encountered about the Civil War were these stories about the noble generals and the different military battles and how they were lost or won, and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and then the noble generals on both sides, right? Robert E. Lee and, you know, C.S. Grant. Now we know that the Civil War, in some reality, was about freeing slaves or ending slavery.

[47:51]

And now we know that, or I've heard that Robert E. Lee was actually a really brutal slave owner. So how we see that history changes. And that's like seeing, changing the history of what we know about, you know, American history, about our own personal history. We see it in different ways, but there's also the history of, you know, people who were working to help, working as bodhisattvas, whether they knew it or not. So many examples, you know, that until 101, before 101 years ago, women were just not allowed to vote in this country. Women were prohibited from voting. Women were not worthy of voting in this country 101 years ago. It was just understood that women were just not, qualified. And then suddenly, not suddenly, but after, you know, all the suffragettes and, uh, and all the women's suffrage movement for decades, um, they forced Congress to change it so that women were allowed to vote hooray.

[49:04]

And now we have a woman vice president. So, you know, these things change and they change not just because of the brutality or whatever of the past, and there is that, but how do we see the whole thing? How do we see also the people who helped to make things better? So there's lineages of that too. Just to add that, to not make this all gloomy, that wonderful things happen suddenly after lots of work. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, and it would have been thought like impossible, like, you know, five years before or whatever. But, you know, because conservative politicians and judges finally realized that they had family members who were gay, they realized, oh, yeah. Anyway, lots of things change. And it's this kind of interesting ferment of how do we see, how do we change the past?

[50:09]

And how does the past change the future? So history is really important and knowing history, but history changes. So I gave some examples, but anyway, other comments. Yes, Jerry. Hi. Hi. I was thinking about the phrase that Joanna Macy uses about re-inhabiting time. And I like that. When I think about time as being more whole, so the past and the present and the future are going on all the time, I don't know exactly how to explain it except to, it gives me a sense of coming home and a better sense of being in my own body. Yes. And less, less someplace else. Yeah, and that's a really nice way to think about it of sort of re-inhabiting time is in effect, re-inhabiting yourself or, you know, coming home again.

[51:19]

Well, we are time, we are being time. Time is not something external. Jerry sent me an interesting article about how people have felt trapped by time. And there were even people who, in the 1890s, it was really interesting, who were trying to bomb big public clocks to destroy them, because then if there weren't any clocks, then we'd be free of time. And, you know, that impulse is, Maybe understandable to feel we can all feel, you know, the pressures of deadlines and of having to be certain places at a certain time. And, you know, my cats don't worry about, you know, what time it is. They know when they're hungry and they come and ask for food. we get caught by our sense of clock time. We have to observe that. We have to, you know, respect conventional views of reality.

[52:21]

When the light turns red, we stop. But in a deeper sense, time is this fluid thing moving in all directions. So yeah, re-inhabiting time. And that means re-inhabiting our body too. So yes, Jerry, thank you. Can I say something? Go ahead. There's a really good book called Longitude by Sobel, I think the name is. And it's about when people were sailing around on ships more and more and more, they couldn't tell, they could tell east and west from where the sun was, but they couldn't tell where they were north and south. And so it's a whole story of inventing a clock that's stable enough on a ship that as the ship rolls around, it doesn't lose time. And what they learned was that in order to know where you were in time, you had to know where you were in space. Yes. It's a really interesting, it's a really nice read, but yeah, that's the point of the story.

[53:23]

Say the name of the book again, please. It's called Longitude. and it's by Sobel, S-O-B-E-L. She also wrote a book about Galileo, but this one is really good. Cool, thank you. And it's actually, the person who actually ended up inventing this clock is like a poor farmer mechanic, and he sends it into the Royal Historical Scientific Society, and Isaac Newton thinks that he's not educated enough to make this clock, so he tries, he knocks it over and tries to break it, and there's a little sort of, intrigue in the story. I've heard about that, that story. Yeah, that's interesting. But yeah, but it's about figuring out how to tell, tell where you are in North and South when you're in the middle of nowhere, basically around the middle of this emotion. Interesting. Yeah, we resist time in some ways. But being time is to be as fully inhabiting time. Other? Yeah, Ed?

[54:24]

Yeah, thanks. And I was just going to mention, there's this famous story about Seamus Heaney when he was a student. And there was an incident that the teacher, he was more or less punished in a way. He had to write the words, I must tell the truth. And I think all of us might have had experiences like this on the chalkboard repeatedly. And instead, he wrote the phrase repeatedly, I am the truth. And in that sense, he You know, and it seems, it's almost, it's like evoking Jesus in a way, but it served to, it served notice upon the instructor that objectifying time as a truth separate from his being is problematic in the minimum. And so I just wanted to mention that story. Thank you. That's very relevant.

[55:25]

So it's not just, so I am the truth. Also I am time or time is me, or, you know, we can turn it around that way. But yeah, that's what Dogen is talking about. That time is being and being is time and is our being of time. And this also goes back to what Debra was talking about. What do you mean? What truth, Kimo Sabe? What are you talking about, about truth? Are there many? So there are some koans about this. In fact, one commentary on the one who's not busy talks about different aspects of reality. But is there one reality? Are there many realities? Are some realities more real than other realities? This is, this is not just theoretical, you know, because in our country now with this huge division over, you know, facts and, and, uh, you know, false facts and so forth. Yes, Ed. And then like, and like you're saying all truth necessarily resides in time.

[56:31]

So to suggest the truth, independent of time is false. always, one might say. But then again, in time, we change the truth because we change the past and we change the future and we change the present. So I like, there's a quote from William Blake, the great British poet, who said, anything that can be imagined is an image of the truth. So, you know, is fake news the truth? Well, For some people it is, I don't know. So we also have precepts to look at as a way of assessing the truth. What is real we can look at in terms of how does it benefit beings? How does it include all beings? How does it not kill? How does it, you know, not take what is not given? So we can look at the different truths in those terms, but, but, but reality is not, well, I don't know.

[57:37]

This is a question. Is there one reality that includes all the other realities? So I don't know, but in time it moves around. in our being. Yes, Ko? Well, I've been wondering about ultimate and relative reality. And I was wondering if you could also consider there being an ultimate past and a relative past. And the relative past can be changed by our stories and the meaning we make of it. But there's something ultimate that I think of as persistent and beyond reinterpreting. Interesting. Yeah. our practice is exactly about this relationship in Soto Zen, fivefold relationship between the ultimate or universal and the particular or phenomenal. And I hadn't thought about that in the way you're just talking about it in terms of times, like there is some ultimate universal time.

[58:42]

Well, all time is the universal time. I don't know. I have to think about that more. That's interesting. Thank you. So in terms of honoring clock time, we're running a little bit late, but if anybody else has something you want to throw into the time pot here, we can talk about one more thing. Yes, Wade, hi. Well, just a short question, I guess, to wrap us up. I was interested in the word being in the title, being time, because that word means a lot of different things in English as a noun, as a verb, as a state of being, no pun intended. So is the Japanese similarly multivalence? What is Dogen talking about specifically when you say being time? Is that something being time the way that someone is being chased? Or is it a being that is time? Yes, I would say all of the above.

[59:43]

Sometimes it's translated as existence time. But I would say being as a verb, being time, or time being, I think it's helpful to see it all those ways. The Japanese, uji is the name of the essay, which literally means, u means yes or existence, being in that sense. Ji is just a common character for time. So it's, it's not that being is time, it's the being of time or time in its beingness. So I think, you know, I think it's actually useful to translate it in that way as being time, or sometimes there's a wonderful book by, oh, what's her name? I forget, A Tale for the Time Being. She came and spoke at Ancient Dragon a few years ago. It's really, fascinating book about Japanese Zen.

[60:45]

Isn't it Madeline L'Engle? What's that? Is it Madeline L'Engle? No, it's Ruth Oseki. Oh yeah, I remember her. Yeah, A Tale for the Time Being. I highly recommend that book. It's too complicated to say what it's about, but partly it's about Japanese Zen and about World War II and about, the North, the American Northwest, and many other things. Anyway, but I think part of what's so rich and what's so fun about translating Chinese and Japanese texts is that Chinese characters have an array of meanings and overtones. And, you know, it's not, the point isn't what did Dogen mean by that? Because I think he had this sense of, Stephen Hine calls it creative ambiguity. So to use a Chinese character like Wu, Wu is the opposite of Mu.

[61:48]

Mu means no, or not, or Mu, like in the Mu koan is, does a dog have Buddha nature? Mu. But in the original koan, Jiaozhuo was also asked by another monk, does a dog have Buddha nature? And he said, ooh, yes, it has. So, ooh in Uji can be translated, it has. It has time. But anyway, it's, so, you know, one of the things about Dogen is he's tremendously playful. And one of the things about, and it's like the Zen koans are playful. So it's not about, you know, going back to what Deborah was saying, it's not about knowing what is the right meaning of it. I mean, we can, you know, we can have different interpretations, but it's about playing with the meaning. So thank you for that, Wade. And, um, Maybe on that note, we'll close with the four bodhisattva vows. And then afterwards, if anybody wants to, then I'll have announcements. And if anyone wants to hang out after that, just for a little bit, we can do that, so.

[62:52]

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