Okay, so this is a class in a writing by Dogen Zenji. The writing is called Being Time. So, does everybody know who Dogen is, or should I do a little bit of introduction on Dogen for some people, for anyone like that? Okay, so Dogen, Eihei Dogen, was a Japanese monk who lived in the 13th century, 1200 to 1253, and he found himself dissatisfied with the state of Japanese Buddhism, which had already been there for several centuries, and went to China, and there was greatly awakened and returned and brought back the tradition which is now known as Soto Zen, that he inherited from his teacher in China. He came back from China in 1227, and he founded a temple called Eiheiji in northern Japan.

[01:06]

And he wrote quite a lot, unusual, very unusual for a Zen master. He had quite a lot of writings, And actually, they were pretty much unknown until this century, except by a few Soto Zen monks and scholars. And in this century, there's been a great deal of interest in his writings. Very poetic, very powerful, very incisive. A lot of them are commentaries on koans, old Zen stories. So there are a number of good translations now of parts of this writing, anyway. And his writing on time, called Being Time, has been one of the most studied of his writings. So that's what we're going to talk about in this class, that particular writing. But we will refer to other aspects of Dogon, I'm sure, as we go along. What I want to do in this class is actually study the text very closely and go through it line by line and discuss it with you.

[02:20]

But tonight, I want to do a little more presentation, and we'll get to the text by the end of the class, I think. But I want to present some background, which I think will help in looking at the whole question of time. So my sense of this text is that it's about how to re-inhabit time. how to reclaim time, how to see time in a new way, how to examine and clarify what our assumptions about time are, what we think time is, how we use our time or how we don't use our time, how we think we're separate from time. So, literally this text is called Being Time. It's about how we can be time. It's not about... It's about not being separate from time.

[03:26]

So, there are a lot of different aspects of this. So what I wanted to do in... in this class is go through what is, is to talk about some of the background understandings of what time is. Starting off with understandings in Buddhism. So what I wanted to do tonight particularly is to just throw out some of the ideas about time in Buddhism and maybe also in our own culture and have those as kind of backgrounds to be aware of as we're going through the text of being time. Before I get into that, I wanted to talk about the text itself. So there are a number of good translations. We're actually very lucky. There are three or four very good translations of this text. One of them is, the one that I'm going to use as a base text, only because it's the most available of the books, is Tom Quirrey's translation in Shobo Genzo Zen Essays. So I have copies of that, which I'm going to pass out in a second.

[04:35]

If you have a copy of the text, of any version of the text, please wait and don't take it the first time. Because one of the ways to study Dokkaebi that really works is to look at different translations. So in addition to that, when there's a translation in Munun and Dudrok, Kurt, can you hold that up? So this is out of print now, or else I might have used that as a base text. But Kastanahashi's translation of being time in Munun and Dudrok is also very good. Another one is, in the translation that Norman Waddell did in the Eastern Buddhist translation. So all of these, I think, are on reserve in the reading room, or will be. So for people who live here, you can look at them in the library. And as the course goes along, maybe I'll make copies of some of these other texts if people want them, some of the other versions. Another, the fourth version, besides the Norman Waddell version, the Curie version, and Kastan-Hashi's version, is in this book, in the back of this book by Stephen Hine, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time, in Heidegger and Dogen, which is quite philosophical and interesting and difficult book.

[05:48]

I haven't been able to get through it myself, but in 10 seconds, in time. But he has a very good translation in the back a few times. So there are a number of resources for looking at this text. In terms of commentaries, there's a wonderful book. These are all, except for Moon in a Dew Drop, which is unfortunately out of print now, these are all in the bookstore also. But there's a very good book called Impermanence is Buddha Nature. which is scholarly but quite readable by Joan Stambaugh, and it's about Dogen's understanding of temporality, time, and Buddha nature. So basically what I'd like you to do for this class is just read the text through. So I'm offering other readings for those of you interested in doing that. But basically, that's all optional. Yeah? Could we make, I don't know how long these things are, but could we make copies and maybe just make a notebook, even if we don't have all these books?

[06:49]

Definitely. Like just make a notebook of things that people can look at? Right, so we will have all of these available in the class in the reading room, at least one copy of each. I think another good resource is Joanna Macy's book, World as Lover, World as Self. So when I talk in a few minutes about the different ideas of time in Buddhism, I'm going to refer to her notion of deep time. And there's a chapter in here called To Re-inhabit Time, which is, I think, quite relevant to our looking at what is the meaning of time in Zen and in Buddhism and in Dogon. in our own lives, so then it's just about your own life. What does it mean to live and be in time? So I've actually been very interested in the koan that Joanna poses in her book about what she calls deep time. So another resource is an article I wrote for the Kyoto Journal called Being Time Through Deep Time about Dogen's teaching of time and nuclear waste.

[07:55]

So there'll be some copies of these in the... in the reading room, too. And I have a few extra copies. So those of you who are planning to take the course who don't live here, I'd like to make these available to you, to those people first. So let me just go over the people I don't know. Robin Carlson? Right here. OK, good. I think I know everybody else. OK. So anyway, there's some extra copies of this, which people who are going to be taking the class can take afterwards. Let me pass out now copies I have of Cleary's translation of Being Time. So if you already have a copy of this, those of you who were in the Lotus Sutra class have copies of this. If you have a copy of the book or if you have another copy of one of the other translations, please don't take this the first time around, just to make sure that everybody has at least one text. Adrienne, do you want to get a copy? Yeah.

[08:57]

Oh, yeah. This one? I know that. Would that be okay? Sure. Yes, that's a recent translation. I haven't looked closely at his translation of Being Time. Generally, from what the translations in that book that I've looked at, they're very literal. And he had said that all the material is there. English is not always so intelligible. So you have to kind of read between the lines. So, in a way, that's useful. If translation is poor in a certain kind of way, it's very helpful. Yeah, he doesn't even call it being kind of false in existence. Well, there's a lot of translations of that. Whose translation was that? Nishijima. Yeah, Nishijima and Shodokasu. Yeah, why don't you take one of these two? Okay, I have some extras now. Who wants a copy of this who doesn't have it? I'll pass it around. Now people who have another version and want to have a copy of that version, you can take it.

[10:03]

So one of the things about Dogen, so I wanted to talk about translation and about how to study Dogen in general before we move to the next part. So there are these different translations which I've mentioned, and I think one of the best ways to study Dogen is to If you can't read the original, and almost nobody can, even native Japanese people can't read Dogen in the original because he's writing in, I guess it's kind of like reading Chaucer's English would be for us, or maybe even harder. And he also plays with language a lot, so I'm gonna talk about that in terms of being time, which can be translated in different ways. But one of the best ways to study Dogen is to look at two or three decent translations And there are a number of fairly good translations, as I've said, of this text. Look at them together, and you can actually get a better idea of the original by looking at two translations together often than you can get from any one translation.

[11:07]

Having said that, though, what I'd recommend is to read through whatever translation you have just once, just to read it through. And don't try and understand it all the first time. We're going to be going over it, you know, paragraph by paragraph. Hopefully we'll get through the whole thing. It's not that long, really. But to go through it once first and get a sense of the whole and then start again, and then after you've been through it once to look at another translation to kind of get a sense of a slightly different slant on what he's saying, I think is probably the most helpful way to work with Tolkien. So are there any questions about Dogen or translation or the text? So all of these materials, that's a good idea, Sonya, will be available. Okay, so I wanted to talk, oh, one other thing. I find it's very helpful to have some kind of way of participating and expressing yourself with a text.

[12:13]

So in the last two classes I did on Heart Sutra and on the Lotus Sutra, we copied out parts of the sutra, which is a very traditional way of working with sutras, to copy a sutra, to calligraphy a part of a sutra, a phrase of a sutra, is actually very traditional. And a lot, most of the sutras, most of the Mahayana Buddhist sutras, talk about doing that as a very fine practice and a very beneficial practice. There's not that tradition, especially in Dogan. One tradition there is, though, which I'd like to suggest, offer to you as a way of finding your own relationship to this text, is to write short poems commenting on the different essays in Dogan. So those of us who, those of the priests who work with Reb Anderson here, each week we write out a four-line poem about different, a new chapter or a new essay in Shobo Genzo, in Dogen's work, Shobo Genzo.

[13:14]

So what I thought we might do as a class is, again, this is optional, but for each of you, as you're going through the text, think about writing a poem about it. So it's traditional to do a four-line poem. If you wanna do a five-line poem or a seven-line poem, that's okay. Or if you wanna do a few four-line poems, but it can be your response to something, your kind of understanding of the whole text, or some comment you have, it could be just on a particular part. You can think of the text as a whole, or you can find one story, or one image, or one sentence. in the text that really strikes you, and then work with it yourself in terms of putting it into a four-line poem. So maybe at the last class, anybody who would like to will read some poems on being time. So that's a way to kind of have some personal expression or relationship to the text. So what I wanted to talk about tonight first is

[14:21]

What is time? How do we see time? And to go over some ideas about time. So time also means history. What does history mean? How do we see what history is? So I want to start with some traditional Buddhist ideas about time and ideas that were part of what Dogen's context was about time. So in this text he talks about people not questioning time, how people see time in an ordinary way in terms of the 24 hours and they don't really question their own assumptions about time. So I think it's important to, in the course of working with this text, to look at what do we think time is? How do we treat time? How do we take care of our relationship with time? Or do we think time is something we have to conquer, or use very well, or time is money, or what is time? What do we do with it? So this text is about how to be time.

[15:26]

One of the main feelings about time, I think, in Dogen's time, was the Japanese aesthetical approach to impermanence. So a lot of, most of Japanese culture, in a sense, a response to a feeling, a sensitivity to the poignancy of impermanence. So there are volumes of Japanese poetry about the falling cherry blossoms and how beautiful the cherry blossoms are and they fall away. So Dogen himself was stimulated to, the story goes, to enter the spiritual path. at his mother's funeral when he was seven. His father died when he was two or three and his mother died when he was seven. And he saw the incense coming up during the funeral and had this deep sense of reality of impermanence. So this is a Buddhist idea that was very much part of the culture that Dogen was in.

[16:33]

This sense of the beauty of things and their fading. So I think to the Japanese sensibility and Japanese aesthetics, the most beautiful thing is something that's just started to fade. So, you know, something in its prime is, you know, is kind of too flashy. When it starts to fade, then there's this kind of poignancy. So there's this very sense, very deep and subtle relationship to time, which was very much part of Dogen's culture. So that's kind of one view of time that we can kind of be aware of as we're reading this. Another particular Buddhist teaching about time and also about progression of time was the theory of, it's called Mapo, the final age of the Dharma. So this is a theory about history in Buddhism.

[17:35]

I think we had, in our culture, we had this idea that history is kind of progress, you know, that we're getting better, we're developing more, better, you know, technological devices and people are living longer and we're conquering diseases. But anyway, in our culture, maybe this is falling apart some, but there's a sense that we think should be progressing anyway, you know, that we should be getting better, that humankind is developing and becoming more and more civilized. You know, this is, does that sound familiar to anyone? this idea of progress. Well, in Dogen's time, there was this very strong idea of kind of the opposite, of the generation of things. And it's very much part of East Asian culture, that in the old days, the ancient emperors were really the great ones, the wise ones. The ancient stages really knew what they were doing. And now things have fallen apart. We have that sense of things too, I think, sometimes. But it was very strong in Dogen's time. And particularly in Japanese Buddhism at that time, there's this theory of Buddhist history that first there's the true age of the Dharma, which means that there is enlightenment, practice, and teaching.

[18:53]

So this was the way that teaching was in Shakyamuni Buddha's time. Then there's the, what's the name of it, the tentative age, I think it's called, I forget now the name of it, but the second age of the Dharma is when there's teaching and practice, but there's no enlightenment anymore. And then the third age, which people in Dogen's time thought had already come, and you know how long ago that was, 13th century, so where are we at? But anyway, the final age of the Dharma was when there's no more enlightenment, there's no more practice even, there's just the teaching left. And this is considered this great degenerate age. And in Dogen's time, in the 13th century Japan, there was a great revival of Buddhism. So Dogen founded the Soto Zen movement in Japan, but there was also the Rinzai Zen. a branch that was brought to Japan at that time, and Pure Land Buddhism developed as a separate movement, and Nichiren Buddhism. There were whole numbers of new religions, new approaches to Buddhist practice that developed, and a lot of it was a reaction to this idea that this is the kind of final degenerate age of spiritual teaching.

[20:09]

Dogen himself sometimes uses this idea to kind of exhort his monks to practice harder because you've got to practice harder because it's the final act. But he also very clearly in some of his writings totally refutes this and says it's possible for anybody, anytime, anywhere to be fully awakened. But this is one view of time and history that was prevalent in his time anyway. So that's part of the mix. But I think if we think of that, we should look at our own, also look at our own idea of progress. So, you know, we have this idea that human beings are the crown of creation, you know, that we're the dinosaurs and so forth. Finally, there are these intelligent animals walking around, that's us. Anyway, that's an interesting idea that the culmination of evolution is human beings and we're kind of the best thing that's ever happened.

[21:13]

If you take that idea literally though, there are intestinal parasites that developed after human beings who can only live in the intestines of human beings, so maybe they're the crown of creation anyway. I think we have this assumption of very deeply ingrained in us of progress, and not just in terms of our culture or history, but also in terms of our own lives that we want to develop and become better beings and learn more things and get more money or get more wisdom or whatever it is, that we have this sense of personal development. I think that's very much part of our new age culture, too. We want to develop our awareness. So this is a kind of approach to time, too. So Dogen asks us to question all of our attitudes towards time.

[22:15]

So what does it mean that we are developing? Now, to counter the Buddhist notion of things degenerating, There's another way of approaching time and history and Buddhism that has to do with the future Buddha, Maitreya. So I think we should throw that story in too to kind of balance the degenerate age story. So Maitreya was predicted by Shakyamuni Buddha to be the next Buddha in the future. And there's different stories about how long that's gonna be. Some say like 500,000 years. Sometimes it's 5,000 years. It's their different story. So it's already been 2,500 years since the historical Buddha. So this is the age of Shakyamuni Buddha who lived 2,500 years ago in India. And the next Buddha on earth will be Maitreya. And Maitreya is said to be now living in the meditation heavens contemplating how to save all beings and become a Buddha. So this is a very powerful idea at times in Asia through the history of Asian Buddhism.

[23:22]

One way this was understood is that people have to become ready. When we make the world ready, then Maitreya will appear. So there have been a lot of revolutionary and radical movements in Asia, particularly in China, that looked to Maitreya and said, well, if we can get it together, then we'll be ready for Maitreya. So this is kind of counter to the idea of the Dharma degenerating. This is like, there's this possibility for another Buddha. And so, you know, that kind of lines up in some ways with our Western notions of a messiah. I don't know. There's this sense of Maitreya having some analogy to that idea that there will be some great age in the future when Buddha can appear again. Then another idea in Buddhism we just talked about in the Lotus Sutra classes, the inconceivable lifespan of the Buddha.

[24:28]

So in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha is talking to his disciples and says to them, well, actually, you think that I passed away into Parinirvana after living 80 years and so forth, Or you think that I left the palace and got enlightened and that I will pass away at some time. But actually, I've been living for how many years? Billions and billions of years. Yeah, incalculable. Kalpas. Kalpas. Yeah, that's kalpas. The Ayudas came later. Yeah, right. So for a long time, Buddha's already been here. And we just think that he was born and was deluded. sat under a tree and got enlightened and taught, but actually there's always been Buddha, there always is Buddha. So that's another kind of totally different view of time that cuts through our ideas of progress. So yeah, Kalpas is another idea in Buddhism of time. This is a good one.

[25:30]

There's four Kalpas. Calpa is like a long time. I think of Calpa as being like one cycle of a big bang. In modern physics, we have this idea of the universe started at one time, there was a big bang, and now what's happening, it's getting bigger or something, and it's expanding, and at some point, it's gonna collapse again, and that'll be the end of it. So in old Buddhist cosmology, there's this idea that there have been many cycles of that. So each long cycle is divided into is called a kalpa, or one way of talking about it, there are four kalpas. There's the kalpa of arising, when things are kind of developing. There's the kalpa of abiding, when things are kind of hanging on. And then there's the kalpa of decaying. And then there's the empty kalpa, when there ain't nothing. So one of the standard Zen koans often talk about, what is Buddha in the empty kalpa, in the empty eon?

[26:40]

Or what is your original face in the empty eon? So this is a question that monks ask teachers and vice versa, traditionally in China and Japan. Can you give us a description of the kalpa? Right, yeah, so one of the ways. There are many different descriptions of kalpas, but one view of a kalpa is that, okay, there's this bird, and she has in her claw a piece of silk, and she flies over the top of Mount Everest once every hundred years. And the silk rubbing against the top of Mount Everest, the time it takes for that silk to wear down Mount Everest when the bird flies over Mount Everest with the silk every hundred years, that's one kalpa. How does the silk wear down the mountain? Well, you know, if you... If you brush, you know, if I... It's going back and forth? Yeah. Or just the bird... Once every 100 years. Well, you know, imagine... If it's only going to flower once, it's not going to wear down the mountain.

[27:45]

No, no, every 100 years. Once, then again, 100 years later, it comes again. And the silk, you know, it's like things... That's how long it is. So that's one kelpa. Anyway, this is an image of what a kelpa is. So I wanted to throw these different ideas of time into this before we start reading Being-Time, to have a sense of the different possible ways of looking at time, and to have that in mind as we read through Dogen. One more important traditional one is from the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Huayen Buddhist teaching, the Flower Ornament teaching. And this is that there are 10 times. I think this is actually getting closer to some of the stuff that Dogen talks about in Being Time. So in Buddhism, there are 10 times. There is the past, the present, and the future of the past.

[28:47]

There is the past, the present, and the future of the present. there is the past, the present, and the future of the future. So the past of the future, one past of the future could be now, right? And one future of the past could be now. And this might be the present of the present, except that it's already past. So it must be the past of the present, except by the time I get to the end of the sentence, it'll be the future of the present, which is now. Anyway, there are nine of those times. So to see time in this multi-dimensional way, rather than to see it as, you know, now it's five after eight according to that clock there. So five after eight was the future of the past when we started this class, right? Anyway, there are those nine different times, and then the 10th is all of those together. So those 10 times are in flower ornament Buddhism. And which was a very, which, that kind of philosophy that comes from that sutra was very important in the Soto Zen tradition that Dogen brought back to Japan.

[29:51]

So it's kind of a philosophical background to the tradition that Dogen brought to Japan and that Suzuki Roshi brought to America that we do here. So to see time in this kind of multidimensional way is part of what this is about. Okay, so before we actually get to the text, I wanted to bring in two more contemporary, more present day ideas of time in Buddhism. So, there's this idea of being in the present, or being present. and most Zen teachers talk about this, being present. I was just listening to a tape of one of the talks Rev gave during the last session, and he was talking about being thoroughly present in each moment, all through the day, and usually looking at what your mind is bringing up in each, you know, he was going, he was really into it, really being present.

[30:54]

And you've probably heard of Be Here Now. So I think a lot of, contemporary American Buddhism and American spirituality, we have this idea of being present, and Thich Nhat Hanh talks about present moment, wonderful moment, and to be in the present is kind of an ideal that we, that is held up as what our practice is about. So I want us to keep looking at, in being time, what does that mean to be present, to be in the present? So looking at the 10 times, we can see being in the present would mean all of those things. So actually the past is just an idea we have in the present, right? And the future is something that happens in the present. And how we see the past in the present changes the past. So I don't know, I've had a lot of experiences of this recently.

[31:54]

Can anybody else? It definitely changes the future. So how you, so your story about something in the past, right now, your present story about something in the past, changes that past, and the present, and the future. And your story about, and our story about the future changes the future. And all of that is just happening in the present, which is actually, you know, also an illusion, because it's gone before, you know, that we have this kind of little, there's a, There's another story about time in one of the Jefferson Airplane songs about how you can't kind of really be there in the present because there's this gap in our senses and so forth. Do you remember that song, Dana? Anyway, there's a... Anyway, there's... The present is also an illusion. We know that the past is an illusion, right? If we're present, if we're just right here in the present, You know, the past is just some story we make up about something that happened, right? And the future is, you know, we can spend a lot of time worrying about the future. And we can spend a lot of time regretting the past and not be here and not be present.

[32:58]

What's present? So, what I feel about this text being time is that we have to look at all of these views of time and really bring that in to what Dogen is saying. And partly I'm coming to this myself from Joanna Macy's idea of deep time and re-inhabiting time and reclaiming time. So this is the last idea about time that I wanted to fill out before we actually get to Dogen. Do people know who Joanna Macy is? She's a Buddhist scholar and teacher and activist, and this is one book that she wrote, wrote as Lover, World as Self, and I had the good fortune to study with her in a class in San Francisco a while back and work with her. One of the things that brought her to this question of time was the whole issue of nuclear waste. So she's also very interested in the well-being of the planet and so forth. Nuclear waste really kind of blows apart our idea of time because it's going to be poisonous for 25,000 years or 250,000 years depending on the...

[34:05]

So right now people are kind of trying to put it under, bury it under the desert so we don't have to think about it in metal dramas which will dissolve in a few thousand years, if at best. Anyway, this is a big problem that she's tackled actually and looked at and is talking about. I've been working on the group that she started. And there's some things about that in this article, Being Time Through Deep Time. So her idea of deep time is to see beings of the past and beings of the future and to actually acknowledge them. So she talks about the 80s when basically the administration is in Washington kind of found this new frontier to exploit, which was the future, and we could exploit all the resources and so forth, and we wouldn't have to worry about it. Of course, there wouldn't be anything left for the future generations, but they're not going to be around anyway. Or do we actually believe there's going to be a future?

[35:13]

So she talks about the fact of nuclear bombs and how that's actually changed our consciousness in a very deep, subtle, unconscious level, that we actually have this idea that there won't be a future. So she talks about becoming friends with the beings of the future. How do we think about the people who are going to want to come and be students at Green Gulch in 100 years? Or in 500 years? Or in 5,000 years? Who's going to live in this valley? And do we actually really take seriously the possibility that there will be people 1,000 years from now or 5,000 years from now? in the Bay Area or wherever, and how do we see time in that broader way? This seems to kind of be the opposite of being here now, in a sense. Well, how do we put that together? So that's the koan that she has offered to American Buddhists. How do we re-inhabit time?

[36:14]

How do we not use being here now as a way of escaping? from time escaping from the past escape from the future i want to know about the past i mean i we know that we we have regressed and we know that we made mistakes in the terrible things happen in work who were abused and wounded victimized know that so i want to just be here now forget about that or i don't want to be in the few you know i don't worry about what's gonna happen next year because you know the world is in terrible shape anyway let's not think about that let's just be here now so there's that way of being here now which is kind of a denial of How do we include deep time in being present? Okay, so that's kind of introduction. Those are different ways of looking at time that are around and that are available and that are part of Buddhism and part of our culture. Anybody else have any other ways of looking at time that they want to throw in while we're doing this?

[37:17]

about intervening in terms of we are our ancestors, the whole stream of ancestors and the whole stream of our future generations are in us here in the present. Right, good. Yes, yes. So I think that's what Joanna's talking about too, that we everything that we, so, I think we're used to thinking about this in terms of space, you know? That we're kind of, we have this sense of interbeing, we have, we're more used to thinking in terms of interconnectedness in terms of space. We know that we're connected to the people in Bosnia, because we can see them on TV. We know that we're connected to the people in the rainforest in South America, and that our lungs depend on the oxygen from those trees, and we know we're connected to the people who come here Sunday and help support Green Gulch, and we know that we're connected to the people who buy our produce, and we know that we're connected to... I think we have a sense in space, in the present, of how we're connected to all beings.

[38:27]

But what I think is harder is to see that in time. So another way of talking about deep time is how are we connected to the beings of the future? How do the beings of the future really connect with who we are now? and the beings of the past. So one of the things that we do here at Green Gulch every morning in service is to chant the names of about 90 ancestors going back to Shakyamuni Buddha 2,500 years ago. So I think it's a very powerful, actually, way of connecting to something that's deep time. Every morning we recite the names of people going back 2,500 years. So the sense of ancestors, one level of it is if we plug into some spiritual tradition, we've got this lineage, right? But we all also have going back that far, you know, biological ancestors, right? So we have lineage going back, looks like most of us goes back into Europe, but anyway, all the whole world actually, you know, we can see is connected. So we have this biological,

[39:29]

lineage, we have the spiritual lineage, and we also have this karmic lineage according to Buddhism, so that's another aspect of time is that there's this idea of rebirth in Buddhism. So we can get into that too, but is this, you know, we can think of it metaphorically or literally or however you want to think about that, but that there's this kind of karma that we have, this kind of psychological tradition or lineage that we have that goes back, psychological, this kind of pattern that we have that goes back through many past lives. And it's not that literally, you know, that there was somebody else who was bombed in some other life before, but there's some kind of tendency or pattern of responses that kind of gets passed along in the world. So, anyway, we don't have to get into a whole discussion of rebirth in Buddhism, but that's part of connecting, being connected to ancestors and being connected in deep time. So yeah, I think that's really relevant.

[40:32]

And now to read Dogen is to read a spiritual ancestor of the practice that we do here, and to see what he said about time. But we're reading Dogen's Being Time in the 20th century, so we can't really read the Being Time that he wrote, because he, you know, it's, we can look at, I have the Japanese characters and Chinese characters that he wrote, we can look at that, but, Just like if any of you have traveled to other cultures, who've been to other countries and know how different it is to be in another culture, think about what it's like to be in another century. What were the people like who lived in this valley 100 years ago? And yet we're connected to them. It sounds familiar. I don't remember that literally, but it makes sense.

[41:36]

He talks about becoming the ancestors. So there's this thing we chant before a lecture sometimes that Buddhas and ancestors of old were the same as we. We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. So, we are the ancestors of somebody else, you know, in the future. But also, we make the ancestors real. I mean, we make Dogen real by studying his teaching and making it relevant to our lives. So, you know, I was saying, talking about this text as kind of philosophy, and Stuart said, well, it's not really philosophy. And that's right, it's about, practically speaking, how do we live our lives, and what do we, how do we use our time? So in that sense, we have to be, Our own ancestor, yeah, I think so. But I don't remember specifically where it is. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. If you find it. Other comments before we get to the text?

[42:41]

Okay. Well, maybe we'll start with the title. I wrote it up on the board. The first two Chinese characters up there is literally the title of this essay, Uji, being time. And actually, those two characters together is just a very common Chinese or Japanese word that means sometimes. And sometimes it's like out of the store. So I put this up there in the title of another writing. I'll get to it in a second, another line that Dogen reinterprets. give you a sense of how Dogen plays with language, because a lot of what happens in being time is that he's playing with language and turning language inside out. So I think it helps to have some sense of that. So the first character there on the left, so I've written it left to right, means to have, or there is, or it could just mean to be, being.

[43:51]

The second character is Time, or if we say eight o'clock, that's the character for o'clock. Just a common term for time. So this kind of common compound, which usually just means sometimes, he plays with in this text and talks about it as being time, or to be time. And he does that by taking a different meaning of the first character. So I wrote the second line on the board, Maybe I should get up. This is from another writing by Dogen called Buddha Nature. Another chapter in his teaching, Shobogenzo. So if you can't see this, you can just turn around. This is a very famous saying from the Buddhist Sutra. And the usual way it's read is that all beings, all sentient beings, completely have Buddha nature.

[44:54]

So this is from the Maha Parinirvana Sutra, and it's a very kind of basic, it's actually something that Buddha is supposed to have said when he was enlightened, when he was awakened. He said, now I see all beings have Buddha nature, except that because of their confusion and conditioning and delusions, they don't realize it. So Dogen kind of plays with this statement, the usual way it's read, he plays with the reading of it. So these two characters together mean completely or all, these two mean sentient beings, Usually, this is read, completely have. So this is the same character as the u and uji. And then the last two characters are buddha-nature. Dogen reads it as, completely are buddha-nature, or wholly, whole being. So all such being, whole being, buddha-nature. And it makes this a verb. So it's the same character that he's playing with there. But he does that because it's not that you have buddha-nature.

[45:56]

It's like Buddha nature's not something over there. It's not that, you know, here's Stuart and Buddha nature's over there and you, or maybe Buddha nature's in here and you haven't, you know? It's like just, we are that. So he kind of takes, he uses most language, even Chinese and Japanese, much less English, is based on subject and object and we have something that has something else in their objects. So Dogen, continually in his language, is taking apart that subject-object division and just putting it all together. So that's what he does in this sentence, and that's what he does in being time, too. It's not that there is time, it's to be time, or existence time, or it's been translated in various ways. But to read this text, I think it helps to have a sense of the two meanings of that, of this title. There's one meaning, it's just, there is time, or at a certain time, or some time.

[47:01]

In parts of this text, he kind of reads it that way, but also he plays with it so that sometimes it's being time, or to exist as time, or to be time. So does everybody have some version or other of the text? So the one that we're starting with clearly says, an ancient Buddhist said, at a time of being standing on the summit of the highest peak, at a time of being walking on the bottom of the deepest ocean, at a time of being three-headed and eight-armed, at a time of being 16 feet and 8 feet, at a time of being a staff and whisk, at the time of being pillar and lamp, at a time of being the average man, at a time of being earth and sky. So this is a quote.

[48:05]

So Norman Waddell and Kastanahashi both say, for the time being, stand on top of the highest peak. For the time being, proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. So those are different ways of reading these first two characters, time being time. Stephen Hein's translation says, some time is standing so high up on the mountaintop. So I think Thierry's notes are helpful here, but I don't know if he says, the person who's quoted here is Yao Shan, the one who Dogen's calling an ancient Buddha. is, we call, we say, Yaksan Igen Zaiyosho. Let me chant his name in the morning. He's right after, the generation after Sekito Kise, who wrote The Merging of Difference and Unity, Sando Kai. And he's two generations before Tozan Yokai, or Dongshan, who was the founder of Chinese Soto school.

[49:08]

And he's the guy, so I'm gonna tell another story about him that some of you have heard anyway. There's this story that a monk came and saw Yaoshan sitting during Zazen and said, what are you thinking of, sitting so intently? And he said, I'm thinking about that which doesn't think. So this is the same guy. And the monk said, how do you think about that which doesn't think? And he said, non-thinking, or another way to translate it is beyond thinking. So some of you have heard that story? What are you doing sitting there? What do you do with your mind when you're sitting during Zazen? And one translation is, I think of not thinking. But literally, it's, I think of what doesn't think. And how do you do that, the monk asks, and he says, non-thinking, or beyond thinking, or I would translate it, to unthink. So, in a sense, this being time is also a commentary on that non-thinking, that beyond thinking. So, the same guy, Yak Sun, also said, at a time of being standing on the summit of the highest peak, at a time of being walking on the bottom of the deepest ocean.

[50:22]

So there's a time, all of you have seen, have known it. Well, how many of you here have been on a mountain top at some time? Okay, almost everyone. So, there was some time of being where you stood on the summit of the high peak. And we think of that time of being as some other time, not right now, right? And yet you can remember it now, you can have some image of it now or some feeling or sensation of it. Anyway, that's a time of being. Another time of being, walking on the bottom of the deepest ocean. So probably none of us have done that literally, but maybe some of us feel like we've been there. Okay. at some time of being. three-headed and eight-armed. So that three-headed and eight-armed is, so through this text, there are a lot of allusions to just kind of Buddhist stories and to Asian cosmology.

[51:29]

And so part of what we need to do going through this is just to explain the references. So three-headed and eight-armed refers to Asuras or Titans, which are kind of sometimes translated as angry gods. So one of the six realms of being, there's hell, hungry beings, animals, humans, heavenly beings, and then there's these angry dogs. And they're kind of, if we think of it psychologically, it's the state of kind of being very powerful and ambitious and wanting more. This is a time of being too. So that's one time of being. And another time of being, 16 feet and 8 feet. So a Buddha is said to be 16 feet tall, or eight feet tall when she's sitting. This is just kind of a classical image of a Buddha. So there's a time of being, of being some angry god, and there's a time of being of being this beautiful Buddha body.

[52:30]

Another time of being staff and a whisk. So these are emblems, these are things that are emblems that are of Zen teachers staffs risks time of being a pillar in a lab So pillar and so these are kind of have symbols in a sense They're just phenomenal Phenomenal phenomenal experiences. There's a lab pillar but also They have some kind of resonance lamp is the light by which we see and so forth. So part of what Dogen does is very poetic. He kind of mixes this together. The time of being, clearly says the average man literally is Chang or Li, which Wada says is kind of like Tom, Dick and Harry in Chinese.

[53:35]

They're common names. So he gives two names. At a time of being, the Earth and the sky, the whole world. So what do people think about this? I actually want men to encourage you from the beginning to ask questions or if things come up. Do we have those query notes on here? Yeah. The footnotes for Clear Your Earth should be in there. Is it the 110 notes? Yeah. They're on the bottom of page 109. and then they continued in 110. So some of you have a two-sided copies of the theory text, some of you have one-sided. So, you know, this opening section here basically is just putting out different times of being, different aspects of our experience. The top of the mountains, the bottom of the ocean. Tom, Dick, and Harry, or the whole earth and sky.

[54:37]

I suppose we could make more of the different images, but I don't know. Any questions, comments? Well, he covers it all. Yeah. And he says each one of these is a time of being. Each one of these is the time being, or each one of these is a certain time. That's interesting. He says sometimes standing high up on the mountaintop, sometimes walking deep down to the bottom of the sea. Sometimes this man or that fellow, sometimes the great earth or the empty sky. So, these, literally, uji, it could be read sometimes, or it could be, or the way Dogen is working, clearly, he starts to work with it in the next passages, being time. So let's keep going. So-called time of being means time is already being. All being is time. So here he kind of turns the characters around, the Chinese characters.

[55:48]

This so-called sometimes, this so-called time being means that time So, Waddell's translation, time, just as it is, is being, and being is all time. So he kind of takes these two characters apart, which together means sometimes, and says that time is being, being is time. Time, just as it is, is being. So I think it's kind of hard to get what he's saying when we first see that. I mean, what does that mean? Time is being. Time is already being. All being is time. Is time? I mean, because I don't understand this and I'm going through a scenario of some of the things that I've learned and stuff.

[56:52]

I'm wondering if he's... would time exist without human beings? I mean, if existence, or not human beings, but any sentient being or anything, anything that exists, so if there was no existence, would there be time? Well, good, good question. So, I can say something about that based on having read further along, but I'm not sure if I should. But he's saying existence is time, and time is existence, so this seems to be saying there is no time except existence. So that's actually, that's the right question, I think. Is there some time outside of existence? So we all, so one of the views of time that we all have, which I didn't even mention because, you know, it's so obvious is as the, you know, on my wrist or up on the pillar over there is that there's eight o'clock and nine o'clock and so forth. Does that exist separately from existence? I mean, is there, like, is there some,

[57:53]

You know, is there some container of time that we exist in that's separate from, you know, from our lives and from Earth and from being? So we actually act like there is, you know? We want to save time, or we want to make time, we want to use time, you know? The way we think of time is that there is some time separate from being. But it's a wholly independent... that there's some absolute, yeah, real time outside of, aside from our being. I find it interesting that, like, other cultures or indigenous peoples put things like deep time into a category like dream time or great mystery. Uh-huh. They don't try and fathom it, I don't think, because I think they see, I mean, they understand it's not understandable. Yeah, what I want to do in this class is actually all of us together study what is this time.

[59:03]

So Janet was bringing up before, she was talking at dinner about Australian Aborigine. Well, I guess dream time is the common term. Their sense of time. Their sense of time. I have some stuff I can read. And the existence of time is, as is said here, like the plants are time, and we're time, and everyone was created. We created The humans created many a time. We created that concept. Where, I mean, so-called civilized human beings created the concept of many a time. Right, clock time. Other cultures have other ways of being in time or part of time. Biological time. Biological time. Yes, I really think that part of what this... So I want to be... used this Being Time essay, because I think it's very deep, to study what is time for us.

[60:05]

So I actually think it's quite relevant for any of you to bring in, as we're going through this, anything you know about other views of time. from aborigines or native peoples. I think it's very relevant. Part of the culture that Dogen was in, actually, and part of where he's coming from, very much so, is that there was this kind of shamanic native indigenous tradition in Japan that was very much part of their religious context for Japanese Buddhism in his time that had to do with mountain aesthetics and that was shamanic in the same way that Native American tradition is or that Australian Aboriginal tradition is. It was also civilized in the sense that it had been... You know, it had been integrated into a kind of high culture in the sense that China and Japan had this high culture, but Taoism and a lot of Japanese Buddhism before Dogen really had this kind of relationship to the earth and to spiritual practice and kind of this magical way of looking at the world that was not linear in the way that science is used to looking at it.

[61:13]

So, time is already being. Another thing, you were talking, Patrick, about the way modern time works. There's another book called Time Wars by Jeremy Rifkin. If any of you can find that, that's also very relevant to this. He talks about the history of time in Europe. I think it wasn't until like the 1700s that people had the idea that the ideas of minutes and seconds were actually kind of common understanding. You know, before that, people farmed. With the industrial revolution, there was this idea of efficiency. So this is another idea of time, right? That we want to use our time efficiently. And this was something that was developed by manufacturers in the 18th and 19th century. And it wasn't until then, actually, that Common people had the thought of minutes and seconds.

[62:19]

There was maybe the sense of hours. Basically, they got up when the sun came up or before the sun came up and took care of whatever they had to take care of, their livestock or their agriculture, and were in tune with the natural rhythms. So part of this is, what is our view of time now? I think part of what Joanna Macy's talking about, what is our view of time now, and how does that relate to natural rhythms? So many of you know about the time signals we do in the morning in the zendo. There's five hits on the drum and one hit on the bell to signal five o'clock at the beginning of zazen, and there's six hits and two hits, and that's based on clock time. But actually at Eheiji, the monastery that Dogen set up, The way that worked, they had a system that goes back to, I don't know, I guess early China. Maybe it goes back to India, but they divided. Yeah, they divided the night time into like five, four or five, I forget now, watches, you know, is the way it's translated usually.

[63:27]

And then each of those is divided into, I think it was four actually, not three, now we do three, like thirds of an hour for the second hit. But anyway, those signals in Eheji and also at Shogoji, the monastery I was at in Kyushu still, are based on this old system. They're not based on the clock. And it has to do with the time of sunset and sunrise. So instead of hitting, so the same signal that we do in the morning for 6.30, we hit the bell six times and the drum six times and the bell twice to indicate that it's the second, third of the hour. They hit that based on this other system of divisions of time, and it depends on the sunset time and sunrise time, so they don't do it till sunrise. And the way they know when it's sunrise, when it's time to do it, is, there are a few ways, but one is like, you hold your hand up, and if you can see the lines, then it's something, it's light enough. if you can see the lines in your hand, or if you can see ants walking on the ground, or they look at a temple building and plus they can see the designs on it, then it's light enough to start hitting that signal that we do after a second period.

[64:37]

So, Dogen himself was very much working with a time frame that had to do with natural rhythms. And I think for us to even begin to be able to study being time, we have to recognize the ways in which Our own experience of time has been really altered since the 13th century. Not too much in Daylight Savings. Right, in Standard Time, which I still can't figure out. So did they just, did we arbitrarily divide the hour into threes, and that's an analog that they divided the watch into threes? I think that's it, yeah. I mean, this is, I don't know when in, you know, in the history of Soto Zen in Japan, when they went to clock time. I mean, now most places use, you know, clock time, not this old system. But originally it came from the system where they divided the time from sun, set to sunrise in certain periods of time. And at Heiju, they have actually this kind of machine, which is, I could call it that, which is actually this powdered chip incense.

[65:44]

And they figure out the time, they light, it's like a groove in this flat table, and they fill it with chip incense and they light it. And you can see how it travels on this path the burnt chipped incense and that's how they measured the time. I mean, that traditionally was how they did it. So they used incense to measure time. So anyway, this is getting back to the different ways of seeing time. Let's do a little more with the text tonight. Well, I'm sorry, any other comments or questions? Stuart? 10 unit days, 10 units, 10 units of 10, 10, 10. Well, actually, it's interesting. That would really throw everybody off. It would. But actually, in Dougan's time, they had 12 hours of the day. So actually, literally, here somewhere, in Cleary's, in the middle of this paragraph, it talks about 24 hours.

[66:49]

But literally, it says 12 hours, because the time was divided into 12 hours during the day. And they corresponded to the zodiac. So they talk about, so Dogen has a set of poems about the different times of the day, and it's all about what's happening in the monastery at that time, and it's the time of the rooster, and the time of the pig, and the time of the dog, and the Chinese zodiac animals. So this is another way in which time is connected to the stars, in the sense of astrology, and to nature. Okay, so-called time of being, or being time, means time is already being. Time just as it is, is being. All being is time. The 16-foot-tall golden body is time. So this is one of the things he's talking about here. Because it is time, it has the adornments and radiance of time. You should study it in the 24 hours of the present. I think that's very important.

[67:51]

The 16-foot-tall golden body is time. Because it is time, it has the adornments and radiance of time. So the 16-foot-tall golden body is the body of Buddha. Because the body of Buddha is time, it has the qualities of being a body of Buddha. It has the adornments and the radiance and the enlightenment of Buddha. And you should study it in the hours of the present. Three-headed, eight-armed is time. So being this angry, ambitious god is time. Because it is time, it must be one suchness in the 24 hours of the present. So what else? Because it is time, it can be in no way different from the 12 hours of your day. The length and brevity of the 24 hours, though not as yet measured, is called 24 hours.

[68:53]

Because the direction and course of their going and coming are obvious, people don't doubt them. Yet though they don't doubt them, this is not to say that they know them. This is what we've been talking about. We have this common view of the 24 hours. The direction and course of their going and coming are obvious. So 24 hours is pretty clear. So even in Dogen's time, they had linear time, right? They had this kind of, in his day it was 12 hours, but they had these 12 hours. They had this one hour following another. They had this view of time, what we would call clock time. I mean, there was that way of looking at time, even then. And the direction and course of their going and coming are obvious, so people don't doubt them. Yet, though they don't doubt them, this is not to say that they know them. Because such a being's doubting of things which they don't know is not fixed, the future course of their doubting does not necessarily accord with their doubts of the present.

[69:58]

It's just that doubting is for the moment time. So he's saying we don't doubt enough. Just to give it to you another way, Waddell says, even though you don't come to have doubts about them, that is not to say you know them. Since the sentient being's doubting of the many and various things unknown to him are naturally vague and indefinite, the course his doubtings take will probably not bring them to coincide with his present doubt. So, the course of our doubting, so we may have doubts about this time, we may have doubts about how we're using our time, we may have doubts about what this time is. Is this time being, what is that? And he seems to be saying that we don't know, that our doubting is not fixed, that our doubting is not settled, our doubting is vague and indefinite.

[71:03]

Even our doubting of time is not clear. So it won't, so we don't, even this doubting does not, he says, does not necessarily accord, the future course of their doubting does not necessarily accord with their doubts of the present. So even our doubts about time are not sustained over time. The doubts we have in the future will not be the present doubting because we don't, we can't doubt. So this is about questioning. How can we question our time? How can we actually, put ourselves into time enough to really strongly enough question what is the time that we're having. He's saying we're not really questioning our time. We're not really looking at our time. But then he flips that completely over. He says, it's just the doubting is for the moment time. So all of those doubts, even if they're not fixed, are time. Just like the top of the mountain and the bottom of the ocean are time. So I think this next paragraph is important.

[72:09]

Self is arrayed as the whole world. You should perceive that each point, each thing of this whole world is an individual time. Each thing of this whole world is an individual time. The mutual non-interference of things is like the mutual non-interference of times. For this reason, there is arousal of minds at the same time. There is arousal of times in the same mind. Cultivating practice and achieving enlightenment are also like this. Arraying self, self sees this. Such is the principle of self being time. So this is pretty dense stuff. Yeah, it sounds like we could spend the rest of the six weeks here on that paragraph. Yeah, probably so. So yeah, I don't know if we're going to actually get through this whole text, although one thing I promise is that we will talk about the story at the end, because it's a wonderful story. So the last, maybe, quarter of this text is another story about Yaksan, about Yausha.

[73:15]

Who's the guy who's quoted in the beginning? But anyway, it's a great story, but we'll get to that. Okay, self is arrayed as the whole world. You should perceive that each point, each thing of this whole world is an individual time. The way Waddell says it, we set the self out in array and make that the whole world. You must see all the various things of the whole world as so many times. These things do not get in each other's way any more than various times get in the way of each other. So this is kind of a technical thing here, this mutual non-interference of things. I was talking about the 10 times of the flower ornament Buddhism. This is a reference to that. So in Huayan, or flower ornament Buddhism, they talk about the mutual non-interference of things. So there's this whole, and the five ranks in Soto Zen is also about this, the relationship of the absolute and the relative, and in terms of time, we can talk about it in terms of the eternal and the momentary.

[74:26]

or the transitory. So partly what Dogen's doing here is taking this concept which was familiar to most East Asian Buddhists about how things relate to each other and don't interfere with each other. So this, we need to go do some kind of technical background on this, but there's a system of interrelationships of It's called, in Huayen Buddhism and Flower Arrangement Buddhism, the fourfold Dharmadhatu. There are four aspects. There's the absolute universal relating... How does it go? Like the universal in particular? Yes, the universal relating in the particular. So to see the universal in a grain of sand is the universal in the particular. Then there's the particular in the universal. So to see each phenomenal thing in the context of the absolute, in the context of sameness, in the context of universal, in the context of how we're actually all the same.

[75:32]

I mean, tentatively, Sonia and I look different, but actually, we're all the same. So to see the particulars in the context of the universal, that's the second one. Then to see the particular and universal as not interfering with each other. So whatever the particular phenomena is, totally is part of, is one with the universal, the absolute. And the fourth one is this thing he's talking about here, which is that all things, all the phenomenal things, actually come up together and kind of hang out together and don't bother each other really, and we're all part of this dharma realm. So this is a technical reference that Dogen's giving here. And usually it's understood, as I was saying before, in space, in terms of different beings, different objects. He's saying that time is like that, too. So this is very dense, what he's saying here. I was, as you were talking, I was given this image. I don't know if it carries through totally, or it's too simplistic, but I was thinking of this in a personal sense, like a human in your own environment, sort of like

[76:44]

After dinner, you're digesting, which doesn't interfere with seeing or hearing, or your hair growing, or your heart beating, or something. I mean, each of those have their own rhythm, and their own times. But somehow the whole thing, with all those various functions happening, don't interfere with each other. Right. No, I think that's actually a really good example. Thank you. So to see how things don't interfere with each other. Each event just is there by itself, right? So there's washing dishes, there's getting ready for class or whatever, there's talking to somebody else who's washing dishes, there's going out and there's all these different activities. We can see those as times also. So I think we're more accustomed to being in this realm in terms of things, or in terms of space, but to see that each of those activities is time.

[77:50]

Whether it's standing on the mountaintop, or standing on the bottom of the ocean, whether it's being the whole earth and sky, or being Tom, Dick, or Harry. Whether washing dishes, or whatever. All the different activities that are going on come up together, and each of them is time. So, you know, I don't know if I'm conveying this, but my feeling about this, about what Dogen is talking about is a way of seeing our lives in a much more dynamic way. you know, that we're used to seeing things as kind of static, or, you know, this is the thing we're doing, this is our time right now, but actually it's very dynamic, there's a lot going on, and it's all happening, and it doesn't, and all the different times that are happening in this time don't interfere with each other, there's all 10 of those times right here. So I think the way you said it was, yeah, your hair's growing, you know, you're washing the dishes, you're breathing, heart's beating, right?

[78:54]

Yeah, that brings up for me that the idea that we're each an individual ecosystem. So I'm just this small ecosystem in a bigger ecosystem. And this whole thing is functioning in one way and it's part of like all little mini planets around the Bay Area. Like this is a little ecosystem here too. And yet they're all part of one. Yeah. Yeah, they're all interrelated. I saw that bunker sticker yesterday. The earth doesn't belong to us, we belong to the earth. It's like that idea. And I think there's a way of seeing time that way too. Where he says, he refers to the arousal of minds at the same time. Everything is mind. He's saying we create time. by our sentient nature in some way.

[79:57]

And so, is he saying here that we're not just creating one mind, we're creating all these minds? The way you're saying it is almost it, but I feel like there's some dualism there. When you say, we're creating time. I don't think that's exactly... I think he's saying something more than that. It's not that we're creating time. Creation is we and time. It's maybe more like it. I mean, we are time, or our creating is just time. Awareness, our awareness of time. So if you say we're creating, it's just like saying beings have Buddha nature, this kind of separation there. So part of what he's doing is cutting through all the separations we make with time. But not only just human beings, but he's saying all existence. So even though a tree hasn't created time, time of being a pillar or a lantern.

[80:59]

Right. Maybe he had minds that we don't know about. Well, yeah, it's not just mind. I mean, I think that's, I think it includes mind. So in this particular case, he's talking about, there is arousal of minds at the same time. So in this room, there are, whatever, 20 minds bringing up something or many things in each moment and whole systems, as you were saying, of sensation and awareness and heartbeats and so forth. Each of us is a different ecosystem. So there is arousal of different minds at the same time. There is also arousal of times in the same mind. So each one of us, as our mind functions, there are you know, all ten, or maybe more than ten, but let's say ten times coming up. That ten is kind of an abbreviation. There's infinite times, each appearing in each moment.

[82:01]

So to be in the present moment, well, that includes a lot. By the way, he's talking about... But you could never not be in the present moment. Right. Well, no, that's an important point. He goes into that. And actually, that you can never not be in the present moment is one of the points he makes. And yet, there's an edge to it. So let's keep going. That's a real central point, I think. Yeah? I'm not sure that this will help or hinder if it's the right place. But as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, why is Dolben thinking And I wonder if there was something in that historical time that this was an antidote to, or what did this come out of?

[83:08]

Okay, good question. This goes back to part of the historical background and story of Dogen that I didn't really go into. The question that sent him to China, that he wasn't satisfied with the answers of any of the Japanese teachers he talked to. There's this teaching about Buddha nature, which we referred to. And the understanding in Japanese Buddhism of his time was that there's this original enlightenment. Basically, we're all enlightened from the very beginning. This is a basic teaching of Buddhism. We all have Buddha nature, or if you want to be non-dualistic, we all are Buddha nature. Doug's question was, well then why do we have to practice? Why do people make all this effort and sit for seven days or whatever? Why do we, what does it matter? We could just do anything, right? We could just go and watch television. You're all missing the 49ers playing the LA Raiders tonight because you're in this class.

[84:13]

I don't know, that might mean anything to anyone. You know, there's other things you could be doing, but why are we trying to cultivate our practice and achieve enlightenment and all this stuff? So, Dogen's question was, if we are already awake from the beginning, why do we bother to practice? Why do we need to practice? That was why he went to China, that question. Nobody could answer that for him. So, part of what he says, very strongly, in a way that really, to me, cuts through a lot in this essay, and we'll get to it, is that all time is being time. And he said it from the very beginning too, top of the mountain or the bottom of the ocean, it's all being time. But then what is the, where is the edge in this that sent him to China and that led him to write down all of this for us? So yeah, this is kind of a fundamental question, good. So this is something that hopefully we will get to in the course of, actually the story in the end is a lot about that, I think.

[85:15]

So this is his poem. Yeah, this is one. And actually, the people who write about Dogen pointed out that he doesn't use this phrase, being time, anyplace else in his writing. But a lot of his other writings have to do with this. He talks about being in your Dharma position. He talks about the same things he talks about here in different ways in one of his other writings. But he didn't actually use this term, being time, anywhere else. but it is kind of central. It brings up all the central issues in his teaching. So speaking of being time, it's nine o'clock. I'm so tired.

[85:53]

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