I want to talk this evening about time. Maybe about Zazen time. Any time is Zazen time. But we've been doing Zazen during this last bit of time. And Ajazen, or this meditation practice, allows us a kind of flexible sense of time, a kind of range of time. In some sense, it connects us with a very wide stretch of time. we can trace this time of just sitting upright back to the Buddha and all the ancestors who have kept alive this practice going back 2,500 years ago and actually much longer than that.

[01:15]

And we talk about them. We just chanted a chant from Chateau who lived in the 700s in China. And I'm going to talk about Dogen, who lived in the 1200s in Japan. And we have Suzuki Roshi, who brought this practice to, in our lineage, to California in the 1960s. We're connected through Zazen with a wide range of time. we sit upright, aware of our breathing, aware of our posture. And this is something that is possible for us here this evening because of many beings over wide stretches of time. And as we sit, we can

[02:19]

It's possible to have a sense of that range of time. We can have a sense of just being this body-mind here, and each breath, and we get up and, oh, when is this? Well, here we are. So there's the wide sense of time that's part of this practice. And there's also this moment, this next breath, this sense of presence, this sense of immediacy. In all Buddhist philosophy, there were 62 moments in each snap of the finger. So they really got it down to very short durations of time. But actually, in each period of zazen, we honor the clock time.

[03:29]

But really, it's our time. And in our tradition, we don't tell you you have to be doing a certain thing at each minute in those 40 minutes. There are things like guided meditation where you're supposed to be doing something. Here, we're just sitting. And what is that? And what is going on in this time? And some periods of zazen that the dawan is watching, hopefully, the clock time. And it might be 35 minutes or whatever it's scheduled for. And if we start sitting before the first bells, it could be longer. But some zazen periods, as you know, may go by very quickly, and some may seem to go on and on and on. And when is he going to ring the bell? Time is elastic.

[04:31]

Time moves in many directions. What is this time? So part of what our tradition provides us is just this question about our time. How do we use our time? The Han outside says, life and death is the great matter, don't waste time. How do we enjoy our time? How do we appreciate? How do we settle into this time of sitting upright in a way that allows us to deeply appreciate this presence and this flowing and passing and immediacy and this depth, this deep time.

[05:34]

So I want to just look a little bit at some of Dogen, who founded this tradition in Japan, One of his most famous essays is called Being Time, Uji in Japanese. So I want to just look at a few passages in that as he passes through time, talking about time. And part of what he asks us is to look at time, to see what is our time. How do we appreciate our time? And he sees time in a way that's very complementary with modern physics. Time is not just some external container.

[06:41]

And I think Einstein says the same thing. It's not just some objective external clock time. Time is a function of our experience. It's our time. It's our being of time. It's our experience of time. So he says, you should not come to understand that time is only flying past. You should not only learn that flying past is the virtue inherent in time. You fail to experience the passage of being time and hear the utterance of its truth because you learn only that time is something that goes past. Well, of course, time is passing. But what is that? The essential point is every entire being in the entire world is each time in an independent time, even while it makes a continuous series. So there's this continuity and then there's this moment, this breath.

[07:48]

And of course, each breath depends on each previous breath. And each breath makes possible every other breath into the future. In as much as they are all being time, they are my being time. Time is not something external or objective. It's personal. It's our time. He says, being time has the virtue of passage. It passes from today to tomorrow. It passes from today to yesterday, passes from yesterday to today, passes from today to today, passes from tomorrow to tomorrow. This because passing is a virtue of time. Past time and present time do not overlap or pile up in a row. Each thing is time. So he says a lot of things in this essay, and I'm just gonna touch on a few of them and talk some more about time.

[08:55]

He says there's nothing remaining left over. any dharma, any phenomena left over is as such a leftover dharma. Even the being-time of a partial exhaustive penetration is an exhaustive penetration of a partial being-time. So we may think that we're not fully using our time. We might think that we're only partly inhabiting our time. But even so, we are fully inhabiting a partial being time, he says. So it's not about getting some grade in how well are you being time. We have no choice but always to just, that we are being time. This is the time we are being, but can we pay attention to it? Can we notice it? Can we enjoy it?

[09:58]

Can we engage it? How do we experience our being of time. Even a form of understanding that appears to be blundering is being. On a still broader plane, the times before and after one immediately manifests the blunder are both, along with it, dwelling positions of being time. The sharp, vital quick of dharmas dwelling in their dharma positions is itself being time. And this sharp vital quick is a translation of a word that literally is like a fish flopping around after it gets pulled out of the water. It's that flopping around of our experience of being alive. What is it like, this being of time?

[10:58]

He says, you must not, by your own maneuvering it, make it into nothingness, and you must not force it into being. Our being of time is being time. So part of this is how do we inhabit our time? And this is not about, again, it's not about judging sometimes as more fully time than other times. And yet, so this is slippery. And Dogen, in the way he talks about the reality of our experience is slippery. And it's not because he's trying to be confusing, it's because when we actually settle into occupying our dharma position, as he puts it, occupying, inhabiting our life, we can't get a hold of it.

[12:02]

Part of the nature of reality, the nature of time itself, the nature of our life itself is that There's not some thing there that we can define it with. The emptiness teaching is that, not that there's nothing, but that whatever we say about it isn't it. Whatever we think about it isn't it. And yet here we are. And we can say, yes, here I am. we can choose to take on this time, this life of our being. So, there's being right here, and then there's seeing the range of time, and time, as Dogen says, moves in various directions.

[13:04]

It moves from past to present. It moves from present to past. It moves from future to future. And I've been talking about the samadhi of all being and samadhi of all time. Actually, as we sit here, being time, being presence, all beings are here. All of the people we've ever known, all of the beings in the whole world in some real way are here. All the beings in the future are present right now in this world. The genetic material on the planet now is what will be the beings in the future. one way to describe it. And we all have ways of seeing past and future and present right now.

[14:18]

So as we sit, thoughts come up, feelings come up. We imagine different times. So I want to talk about One of Dogen's influences was Chianti in Chinese, or Tendai Buddhism. So I want to read a few things from Brooke Siporan, who's been here a couple of times, as she talks about time in terms of Chianti, Chinese Buddhism. I had experience of this last week in a certain way. I was in San Francisco at the San Francisco Zen Center. I was supposed to go to Tassajara last weekend to teach some classes to the students there and there was a fire. The scientists say that there are more fires in California now because of climate damage.

[15:18]

Anyway, the roads were closed. It looks like Tassajara is safe, but they had to close down the guest season. Anyway, so I had a kind of extra time at City Center in San Francisco and got some extra work done and got to sit in the Zendo there in the morning and that was really interesting. So I lived there in the early 80s and after I was at Tassajara for a few years in the late 80s and sitting a couple of periods in the morning in that zendo, it was really strange because I hadn't done that in a long time. And so just being there, and I went out and saw some old friends in San Francisco too, but there were lots of ghosts. And I don't know what ghost—ghost means different things in different contexts, but for me there were lots of ghosts. Just sitting in the Zendo and, you know, I had memories of other periods and other assemblages.

[16:27]

You know, you can do that here too, I guess. you can remember other times when you were sitting here and other groups of people. I don't know, maybe it's been, maybe it's happened that the exact same people who are here tonight were sitting in the exact same seats on some evening here. It's possible. But anyway, but there, there were many different situations that, you know, kind of hazily came to mind. Many, many old friends, many old sangha members. So it was just, it was interesting. from a long time ago. Of course, they weren't really there as ghosts. They were just my memory last week, and now I'm talking about them this week, so I don't know.

[17:28]

Did that really happen last week? Well, that's my memory right now. Anyway, time is like that, and our minds are like that. And how do we be in time with all of the thoughts of past experience that we have now, and with all the thoughts of future experience? So we create the future in some ways, by the ways we project it now. And our society seems to be good at imagining really terrible futures. Hollywood and television are good at really terrible visions of all the terrible things that'll happen in the future and zombies everywhere. But maybe it'll be beautiful in the future. We can imagine that too.

[18:30]

Anyway, so those are just some random thoughts to bring into Brooks of Porin's reflections based on Chianti Buddhist philosophy, which also influenced Dogen. So I want to read some of this because it's It's really interesting. He says, well he's talking about the Lotus Sutra. So some of you were here in the spring when we talked about stories from the Lotus Sutra and there's one colorful story about, that really brings past and different times together about, as the Buddha is preaching the Lotus Sutra, a stupa of an ancient, ancient Buddha from some previous Big Bang appears, and inside the stupa is an ancient Buddha named Abundant Treasures, who has vowed to always appear whenever the Lotus Sutra is expounded. And so he does, and he says, well done to the Buddha Shakyamuni, And the Buddha explains to his assembly that the stupa is floating in mid-air, and we talked about it in the spring, that various embodiments of Shakyamuni can appear and ask this Buddha to open the stupa and then that happens.

[19:51]

Anyway, the Buddha Shakyamuni sits with ancient abundant treasures Buddha. But Brooks Porn says about this, the reappearance of the long extinct past as part of the present assembly illustrates the retroactive power of the present. the way the Lotus Sutra idea of recontextualization itself recontextualizes and transforms the past. So this idea of recontextualizing, how we see something in the past, the way I was seeing the San Francisco Zen Center, Zendo, in the past, last week, and how I'm talking about it now, recontextualizes it. The way we can see anything in our past, we recontextualize it in the present. It's not actually what it was in the past, it's how we're talking about it now. So this idea of recontextualizing is really interesting. That past, seemingly dead and gone, of no further relevance now becomes a confirmation and contribution to this present moment of the Lotus Sutra practice.

[20:59]

But its full implication remains hidden until all the present forms of one's activity are also seen at a single glance as forms of oneself. Just as all other moments are seen as internal to this present moment, with its retroactive power, of recontextualization. So, too, do all other people reveal themselves to be internal to oneself, to be forms of oneself, part of one's transformations as a bodhisattva, the many forms one is taking to liberate living beings and progress towards Buddhahood. So from the point of view of this Chantay teaching, all past times are part of how we recontextualize the present, but also For each of you, all the other people in this room are ways in which you are seeing yourself, for all of us. So this recontextualizing is, so you can meet yourself as all the other people in this room.

[22:09]

So this is an interesting way of thinking and seeing. Just as the idea, quote, you are and have always been an inadvertent bodhisattva, which is something he talks about. He's talking about bodhisattva practice and how when we start doing bodhisattva practice, we can start to realize that actually this is something that we didn't realize we have always been doing. It changes the way you see all the past and future that surround this present moment. So too does it change the perception of all the things and people in the present. All the other selves that surround this experience of being the self that you are. Just as the Buddha of the past is made whole and alive, this ancient Buddha, by the recontextualization, so too is the Buddha of the present made whole and alive by all other beings are his alternate bodies. So it talks about the alternate bodies of Shakyamuni. But actually, for a Buddha, all the other bodhisattvas are her alternate bodies.

[23:18]

When the two Buddhas sit side by side, then, so this happens when they sit side by side in the stupa, then we have a dramatization of that funny line in chapter two of the sutra, only a Buddha together with another Buddha realize the ultimate reality of all things. Here they are, a Buddha together with a Buddha. This means the past with the present. So we all have a past that we imagine. We have events that we can track in the past. You all know a day that you celebrate as your birthday, or a year that you graduated from high school, or that other things happened. We all have certain data about the past. And yet, what is that past? So we can combine the past with the present. The Lotus Sutra says, you will be a Buddha. You are a future Buddha. This means the you of now relates to the you of the future.

[24:26]

The you of the future is a Buddha. A Buddha looks back at his own past and sees the you of right now. He realizes that even then he was a Buddha. The past looking at the future, and the future looking at the past, that is a Buddha together with a Buddha. The Lotus Sutra is a story of prospective retrospection. Another really interesting phrase. We can see our future, we can see our past now, or in the future, or in the past, and see our life not as a series of blunders, We can see it that way too, and maybe Buddha, you know, Dogen said his life was one continuous mistake. Maybe Buddhas make mistakes too, trying to find skillful means. And yet, where you gaze upon a Buddha who you will become, which enacts the gaze backward of the Buddha to you, the prior self, the Buddha becoming, the same relation applies among all beings within the present moment, brought together here as the transformation bodies of Shakyamuni.

[25:44]

So this kind of relationship of times, including different present times, including different present beings, including different past and future beings, this retroactive recontextualization, this prospective retrospection, how do we see different times as informing each other? showing this possibility that you know something's happening here, but you don't know what it is, and it may be more wonderful than you can possibly imagine. And there's a Buddha in the future looking back at you now, saying, Wow, there's me back then, sitting zazen, listening to some strange talk about Buddhas and time and what, and here we are all becoming.

[26:53]

We don't know what. We can't know what on some level. Later on, Brooks of Porran says, a moment of time is a recontextualization of all of the past. Each moment is a way of celebrating everything in the past, and I would say everything in the future, too, and vice versa. Each moment of time is the bringing forth not only a new set of changing events, but also a new set of eternal principles. omnipresent conditions, rules, requirements, regularities, coherences, laws, universals. Each moment is effectively the creation of a new space-time that determines the new, the character of everything in the universe and all the past and future.

[27:59]

That's a really wild way of seeing being-time. But I just wanted to put it out there. that we don't, we can't, you know, this is certainly contrary to our linear sense of time. But to fully inhabit our being time, our taking on of the opportunity of this time now, how do we appreciate the possibilities of our relationship to some possible future being, some possible past being, some possibility of awakening in the past and future, and that this is all in process. So maybe it's not just being time, it's becoming time. Or so the phrase Buddha

[29:05]

beyond Buddha. This ongoing awakening of Buddha going beyond Buddha is part of this too. Well, okay, that was a lot to lay on you. Anybody have any comments or questions or responses, please feel free. We have a little bit of time. So this is not about some idea or philosophy to understand. This is about how do we appreciate the multi-directional flowing and interconnectedness of times.

[30:12]

argument that a chemistry anthropologist named Benjamin Minoworth made about language and how it shapes perceptions. And people have been arguing about this for so long. He claimed that the Hopi have very different verb tenses than the ones that we have in English. And that in English and in most other European languages, we use verbs to place actions in discrete times, right? So I did this, I am doing this, I will do this. And he said that the Hopi verb tenses function very differently, and that when you describe an action, it's an action that is either increasing or decreasing, either sort of ebbing or flowing. and that therefore their perceptions of time aren't the perceptions that we have of these discrete units, but rather of a flow of things that grow and blossom and decay.

[31:58]

And so every now and then I always try to figure out, you know, what will be different? Can I live in some different verb tenses for a while? Can I imagine a different verb system? The way you describe that... sounds more like various nature, not nature imagery, like the moon waxing and waning, going from full to new moon, or vegetative flowers, seeds sprouting and growing and blossoming and petals falling. So that's sort of different from just past, present, future, that's more nuanced. Our language doesn't exactly do that, but we can sort of think that way.

[33:03]

Yes, Chris. I served someone a couple of weeks ago after a Sunday service. I was walking with my dad. I was like an adolescent. On Sundays, I was like this. That's pretty bad. And so I like to think of these feelings like feeling sad or feeling lonely or where you're happy is really a way of a connection to like every human that's ever been alive.

[34:49]

Yes. Because everybody's felt all of these things. Yes. Yeah, I think we're connected through the first noble truth, which I've been talking about as just facing sadness, or loss, or pain, or sometimes it's translated suffering. But it's a noble truth when we actually face it, when we're willing to just stop and sit and be present with it. And yeah, that's where we're connected. We're all, we've all had some loss. We've all, we're all damaged in some ways. We've all experienced some pain. Even if it's just the pain of being born and getting smacked on the bottom and having him crying.

[35:57]

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