Good morning. Welcome. I want to talk this morning about Zen Buddhist practice of time and temporality. And there's probably not enough time to talk about everything I want to talk about. Well, I'll talk about it more in practicing with impermanence tomorrow evening. So there are various teachings about time in Zen and Buddhism. Of course, all teachings in Buddhism have implications for our practice, how we actually express our Buddha nature. So I want to talk about that and about how to use time, and then presencing, how to be present.

[01:02]

and some teachings from Buddhism about time. And we will have time also for some discussion. So I'll start with Dogen's teaching about being time. Dogen was the 13th century Japanese monk who founded the branch of Zen that we do, Soto Zen, and brought it back from China. and one of his better-known essays is about Bujji being time. So just a couple of the main points. He helps to show how time is not, as we usually think of it conventionally, some external absolute objective container.

[02:05]

So, it's not that we don't honor the time of, you know, the hour and clocks and so forth. There are many different aspects of time. But time is not primarily some actual objective external existence or container. This is congruent also with modern physics and modern physics view of time. Doggett says time is instead actually our being, our existence, our awareness and activity. We are time, each of us and together. So he says that we, again, we don't ignore conventional time. And so I have a watch here to see when it's time to Yeah, when it's time to kind of stop babbling to yourself and have some discussion together.

[03:13]

But time is primarily how you're sitting right now. Your body-mind right now. We make time. Unlike our conventional view of time, time moves in various directions. Of course, it moves from yesterday to today to tomorrow, but it also moves from today to yesterday, and from tomorrow to today, and from yesterday to tomorrow, and from tomorrow to tomorrow, and it moves in various different ways. The point of saying this is not some theoretical or abstract philosophy about time. So in a period of zazen, of meditation, as we just have done, and it's very auspicious for us to have a couple of people who just sat zazen for the first time, which is always wonderful, but as we sit, we might notice that

[04:18]

Time moves in different ways. So for those of you who've been sitting for a while, you know that some periods of Zazen go by very quickly. Some periods of Zazen seem to go on forever, and we're wondering when's the bell going to ring. Time has a different quality, even though it may be the same time according to some clock. How do we express ourselves? in time is how time works. Our presence right now is time. Our awareness and activity is time. And we honor the various temporal conditions. So how do we respond appropriately to this time?

[05:23]

Part of that is our own awareness of time, our own making of time. So I want to talk about using time and the richness of time and re-inhabiting time and being present. Dogen points out, though, that we might have some idea about this. This is not about having some perfect practice of time. Again, time has various different textures and moves in different ways. So Doggett says that even a partially expressed being time may feel like we're not really fully expressing our our presence, our existence in this time, we may feel that.

[06:24]

But Dogen says even a partially, a partial being time is completely a partial being time. So it's not about, you know, achieving some perfect expression of time, or some perfect being of time. This is one of the biggest problems in practice. been talking about this recently, that we have, and I feel it more and more, that we have ideas about enlightenment or practice or morality. We have ideas about how things should be. It's not that there's any problem with having ideas, but if you think that's real, that can become a big problem. You might feel like, oh, I'm not being timeless. I can't do this, or whatever. Or you might feel like everybody should be doing being time in some certain way, and then we can make judgments about others as well as about ourselves. How do we fully express the richness of this time? How do we fully meet and respond to the complexities of this time?

[07:29]

So I've talked about the Chinese Huayen Buddhist idea of the ten times. So for those who haven't heard that, there is a past and present and future of this present. There is a past and present and future of the past. There is a past and present and future of the future. And all of those nine together is the tenth. So the past of this present included waking up this morning and included some idea you had about coming here, about doing Zen practice sometime a while back. The future of that past, maybe right now, or the period of Zazen we just had, or tea and cookies later,

[08:35]

The future of now, of this present is, anyway, there's a past and present and future to that. Time moves in a complexity of ways. And there's actually, if we see time in too rigid a way, that's an instruction to our fully being present. Which is the point of talking about this. How do we be present in time? How do we express ourselves in time without trying to run away from time? So we sometimes, in some spiritual practices, there's this idea of eternity. But that's a kind of way of avoiding time. Dogen isn't talking about eternity, he's talking about being here now. Being here now that includes acknowledging our past and future. and the past of the past, and the future of the past, and the complexity of this experience now, that's already passed, as soon as I say it.

[09:48]

How do we meet the fullness of our reality, of our life, as it moves around in time, and as we take on? responding to situations in time. So the great master, Zhao Zhou, lived in the 9th century. Joshu in Japanese may be the greatest master of all time, if you can say that about anybody. Many, many of the old teaching stories or koans are about him. He's the one who talked about responded to the question about dogs having good in nature. Anyway, one time he said to one of his students, I use the 24 hours. You are used by the 24 hours. Actually, he probably said 12 watches. In the old, in East Asia, they didn't have 24, they had 12.

[10:52]

And they changed, actually. You know, we have, what is it, 60 minutes in an hour? In the old way of conceiving of time, there were, I think, six periods, six watches between dawn and sunrise, and six between, we start at sunset, and then six between sunset and dawn. So, of course, since during the year, the time of dawn and sunset, sunrise and sunset changes, the actual length of an hour would change a little bit every day. So there are also ways of seeing time. But anyway, Zhaozhou said, I use the 24 hours. You are used by the 24 hours. What does that mean? We may have all kinds of ideas in our modern world of being caught up in all of the to-do lists and all of the agendas and all of the schedules and being at certain places at a certain time, and we can feel trapped by that.

[11:59]

and not have time to just enjoy our time. So in some ways this practice of zazen, 30 minutes or 35 minutes or 40 minutes or even 15 or 20 minutes or 10 minutes at home, is a time to not be caught by, not be used by time. It's your time. It's your time. Time to be present. in this body and mind, as it is, not according to our ideas of who we are and what the world is. How do we not waste time? How do we use our time? How do we enjoy our time? Enjoy our inhale and exhale. Enjoy our response to the causes and conditions of time, the difficulties of time, the situation we're in at some particular time. How do we see this time differently? So that's another point of it.

[13:01]

What does it mean to not waste time? So the Han, the wooden block out in the entryway that we use to signal the beginning of periods of meditation says life and death is the great matter. Don't waste time. What would it be to waste time? This isn't a matter of kind of efficiency exercises or productivity indexes or something like that. How do we be present in our time? How do we find our way to enjoy time? So, it looks like I have time to tell the story about Yun Yan sweeping the ground. Yun Yan was the teacher of, the founder of Soto Zen Chan and Dong Shan. Anyway, he and his brother were both monks, and one day Yun Yan was sweeping the temple. So this is part of our practice, not just the sitting meditation, but then when we get up to take care of the space, as we will do after the talk, we'll have a temple cleaning period that you're welcome to stay and join.

[14:17]

Anyway, Yun Yan was sweeping the temple grounds. And his brother Dawu came and saw him and said, too busy. And Yun-Yan said, you should know. There's one who's not busy. So we had this store front Zendo in North Chicago, and we're all out in the world, in the city. We all, more or less, have busy schedules and busy lives and jobs, hopefully, and family, maybe, and various things that we have to do. Part of this sitting practice is just to remember the one who's not listening. So some periods in zaza your mind might be very busy thinking about all the things you have to do later today or next week or whatever.

[15:22]

Or thinking about something that happened yesterday. But how do we just remind ourselves of the one who is not busy, is just sitting and inhaling and exhaling and waiting for the breath. And there may be many thoughts coming through our minds. So part of what we learn in zaza is that that our thinking mind, our feeling mind keeps going when we stop, and then we don't really have control over our thoughts the way we might think we do. That here we are and thoughts keep rolling along, or sometimes there's spaces between them, and that's nice too. How do we just settle into remembering? So we may forget the one who's not busy for you know, a long time, for days or hours or weeks, but this story reminds us, oh yeah, there's one who's not busy.

[16:25]

Maybe it's also good to remember the one who is busy and to think about, oh, okay, what is important for me to be busy with when I'm busy? Maybe the one who's not busy allows us to as I was talking about last week, to see what is the most important thing. What is it that we might be busy with if we feel busy? Or maybe it's not important to be busy at all, we should just enjoy our life. Anyway... When Yun-Yan said there's one who's not busy, Dao said, you mean there are two moons? held up his broom and said, which moon is this? So it's not that busy and not busy are separate, two separate things. Our time, the richness of our time, is moving in many directions. Again, this is not about trying to use time efficiently, it's about really, how do we enjoy our time?

[17:32]

How do we be present in this day, this hour, this week, this lifetime. So once my Teacher, Rev. Anderson, who was here a few months ago to dedicate this temple, was asked, what is wasting time? And he said, not remembering one who's not busy. Even in the middle of, somebody asked me this recently, is it possible to be mindful when you're very busy? Well, yeah, even in the middle of some task or some work or some activity or some week where there's lots to do, right in the middle of that can you take a breath?

[18:35]

Can you hit the pause button? Can you enjoy that in the middle of busyness there's one that's not busy? How do we see the texture of time as it moves around between from future to past, from past to present, and so forth. So, I want to say a little bit also just about being present. Mindfulness practices are about being present, about feeling. The texture of your breathing, about feeling. What it feels like to lift your arm. In walking meditation, as we lift our foot with each inhale and place it down, with each exhale, very slowly, to be aware of our walking.

[19:44]

And during our longer sittings, when we have meals in the meditation hall, to appreciate the space, the time of lifting your spoon from the bowl to your mouth, of chewing, of being present with your eating. All of these practices, which are, and when we do temple cleaning also, to be aware of, as you're brushing off the cushions, or as you're preparing the tea. This doesn't mean doing it slowly in some precious way. It's just as you do it, to be present in it. But I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of this idea of being present, or be here now, as Ram Dass called it. It doesn't mean kind of avoiding the past or future. We may have some tendency to want to escape from some of the past that we might regret, or some of the future that we are afraid of, what's going to happen, and all the possible scenarios we might worry ourselves about.

[21:06]

To be present is to be in the unknown. this present moment is so rich we can't really know what it is. We can sort of remind ourselves of presence, express ourselves in this situation as well as we can, or as well as we wish to, or as mischievously as we wish to, or whatever. what it is that we want to give to this present, but so much is going on in this present that we can't possibly really understand or know. As I'm sitting up here babbling and some of you are sitting still and some of you are moving a little bit and you're all more or less upright and the complexity of what is happening in this room

[22:10]

right now is totally inconceivable. It includes everything that's ever happened and ever will happen to each one of us. How could we possibly know this present? And yet we talk about being present, not in some narrow way, but in a way that re-inhabits time, that honors time, that honors this being time and the fullness of time. So in this time of this Dharma talk, and I'm covering a lot of material, and I think we will have time for questions and discussion, this is, in some ways, we could say, quote-unquote, advanced Zen teaching. But it's also just how we are right now. how we see the fullness of our life.

[23:15]

So what happened in the past, you know, history or herstory or whatever, you know, things that happened in the past, well, history isn't really what happened in the past, history is our stories about it now. So I've participated in quote, unquote, historical events a few times. And the stories written up about them later certainly don't have anything to do, or maybe have a little bit to do, with my experience and others' experience of that event. But the richness, this is about finding the richness of time, of this present, and of the past, and the future, and the future of the past. How do we re-inhabit all of that? How do we see this breath in the richness of all time? Not escaping time into some eternity or some idea of timelessness, but to really fully engage the complexity of our time right now.

[24:28]

So one practical implication of this is, of course, how we may change the past. You all know how to change the past? I think there's some conventional idea that the past is set. And of course, you know, the future's not yet set, we know that, but we think what's happened in the past is, you know, stuck and fixed. But actually, in reality, If you take some story about your past, maybe something you regret that happened in the past. We all can feel that way about our personal history. You can see the story that you're telling yourself about what happened then and how you regret it. what you might have said, what you might have done, some choice you made, some other choice you didn't make.

[25:36]

So we have stories about that. The past is stories about something in the past. Actually, we can get caught up in stories about the future too. We can have all kinds of apocalyptic visions of how terrible things are on the planet and so forth. But right now, in your present experience, in your being time, you have the choice to see things in different ways. So I'm talking about seeing time in different ways, not getting rid of the conventional time. So the stories you have about the past, which include regret or tragedy or loss or sorrow, that story is still there, but you can also see it a different way. Some difficulty you had in the past, which you feel uncomfortable about, you can see as Something that you overcame, or something that you might overcome, or something that you might transform.

[26:48]

Because part of the point of time is that it's moving around. Time is transformation. We're not stuck in some single story about the past, or the future, or about the present. We can choose to express our being time. in a way that sees, that, as I said, re-inhabits, that expresses the fullness of time right now. How do we enjoy our time? How do we see our life now, not as trapped in some particular circumstances that are unchangeable, but seeing the fullness of our life and our work and our activity and our relationships in some wider, extended time frame, beyond life and death behavior.

[27:51]

So who you are right now has to do with things that happened before you were born. Of course, just genetically, the genetic material of your great-grandparents or your great-great-grandparents you don't even know anything about. Who you are right now has to do with things in the future. It could be in terms of if you have children, but even if not, what What you do has some effect in the world. Everything we do has some effect. Time is about cause and effect. So this is the second noble truth. The first is that there is sadness and suffering in the world. Second is that there's a cause of this. And the cause of the suffering is our grasping after things. But we can let go a little bit. We can change how we see our life and our world.

[28:53]

So all of this has to do with how we express our presence right now, today, this week, this month. How we try and bring our deepest and best intentions to the situation we are in. How we give ourselves to our time of past, present, and future. Sometimes this includes thinking about the future. So Nancy is going to take care of her job today as work leader in terms of taking care of preparing for that. So it's not that we ignore, it's not that we ignore conventional time, clock time.

[29:57]

But we can also see the richness of time and express ourselves in it. So I think it's time for me to stop talking. And I have this tendency to sometimes talk about a lot of different stuff during the times of my dharma talks. So I'm going to ask time for questions, comments, responses, any questions you have about any aspect of anything I talked about or didn't talk about. Please feel free. Yes, Ken. Hi, Tony. You mentioned the transformation of the past, transformation of the future. Now, there is a kind of education, which you talk in scenarios called For example, in terms of dealing with the past, they talk about competing with the past.

[31:07]

I had a bad relationship with my partner, but maybe I didn't understand. If I find out about it, then I realize that things were really different. I can become completely emotional in that situation, that kind of thing. Answering to the future, they talk about the future that we are going to have is the future that we sort of posit and decide to become. And that hit me. That's their approach to this kind of thing. Is there any specific techniques in Buddhist practice in terms of transformation, in terms of dealing with taxes, like extending compassion towards ancestors or lesser than? Yeah, thank you. I don't know that particular system, but I do have some comments. Yeah, extending compassion to the past. Extending compassion to the future is very important in terms of changing the future. Extending compassion to the present. being kind to yourself right now, changing your leg position when you have to during a period of Zazen, if it's really painful, for example.

[32:11]

I wouldn't talk about it as completing, though. I think there's a common idea about getting closure on some situation in the past. Part of this being time is that it's not like you finish something ever, or completely know it ever. Yeah, there are ways of dealing with, and there are Buddhist practices and practices and monasteries for dealing with difficult situations that have happened and processing that and getting some, bringing compassion to that. But to talk about completing it means that you're denying the future life of it, too. Because even if you take care of something that happened in the past, like the good example you gave of some problem with a parent and seeing it in a different way and feeling more fulfilled about it, still, because there is transformation, because we're alive, because we live in the process of change of time and being time,

[33:16]

more can happen. So to complete something in the past, that language has this feeling of trying to get rid of the past and getting rid of our regrets. The same thing with the future, looking towards the future. Yes, definitely having envisioning something you're going to do in the future and envisioning it in a positive way may be very helpful, but the richness of it is that it may go beyond your vision of it. And so we never stop paying attention to this being time. It's not like you take care of it and then it's done. It's like the idea that some people have of enlightenment, oh, I'll get enlightened. It's not something to get. So the point about this is that being time is alive. It's moving. So yes, the positive, compassionate approach to the past and the future and the present is important, but then never to kind of shut the door on the aliveness of it.

[34:19]

Yes, hi. I only heard maybe once in your talk about living in that moment with intention, and I find that not necessarily in terms of intention towards transforming to the future, but intention about a particular moment. Yeah, so that's very important. I talked about it, I think it was last Sunday or Monday, thinking about what is the most important thing, maybe Monday night. Yeah, our intention is very important. We have this practice of vow, which is related to the idea of being time. So we will chant the four bodhisattva vows at the end of this to basically to free all beings, to enter all Dharma gates, to cut through all delusion, to realize Buddha.

[35:29]

These are inconceivable vows, but how that's actually implemented practically in being time is that we take on things. Like, I'm going to show up and sit zazen Sunday morning and come to a Dharma talk Sunday morning. And you've all done that. You have some intention to show up here. that brought you here, but also many other things in your life you are working at. And so yeah, intention is extremely important in terms of practicing in the richness of being time. And then this background kind of inconceivable vow gives us a context for that. So yeah, thank you. Yes, who gets this? As you were speaking, I was thinking about acronymity, and things that seemed so exciting in the past, maybe, don't seem so exciting. Yeah, right. Things that seem so awful don't really seem so awful.

[36:32]

Yes, yes. You know, like that quote, nothingness isn't seen, nor is it otherwise. It's not always so. I mean, if there's something about you know, deep equanimity in what you're talking about with time, too. It's kind of a humble feeling that we don't want to know. Yeah. Yeah, this is about change. How we see the past, how we see the activities we enjoyed in the past or didn't enjoy in the past can change. You know, like with Ken, you're talking about this sort of idea of, like, I was thinking that, you know, in some of my experience, actually, you know, fully being curious and fully embracing, not embracing, you know, fully experiencing, that there's a lot of blocks to actually really experiencing what's happening, you know. Basically made up of grief, hate, and delusion, right? But there's something about this, there's something in that process of that endless experiencing and going with that, that

[37:39]

I want to say complete something that really changes something. Yeah. So I said to take care of something in the past, to take care of something in the future. But then there are deeper, there may in the future or in the future of some past be more ways of seeing that. So yeah. So there are many levels of what we call practice. For those who are new, if you have just practical questions about meditation too, feel free.

[38:43]

how we express our presence. Titus? I was just remembering, there's, I've been sort of realizing the importance of sort of particularizing. I think this ties into something we got to be saying, but sort of making granular our experience. So I think we have a tendency to sort of think of the past as this big lump thing, or events in the past as a big lump thing, or pain in our body as a big lump pain, or the future as a, you know, maybe scary wall or something. But then I'm just finding in practice, how practice provides a way to maybe exist in the present in this very particular sort of way. So you're sort of squaring off or approaching events, experiences, sensations, memories, thoughts, ideas, or something in a more granular kind of way. And that seems helpful.

[39:48]

or some way that practice is helping me to deal with my experience. Granular. It's a grand word. Yeah, and following up on that, you know, part of our practice is, well, in some sense we can say to live simply, to not be caught up in desires and so forth, but also it's about honoring the complexity of reality. So, as you say, not to see the past as just some lump, but to see the particularities of our experience now. This is one of the things that Satsang does. As we sit, and if we're paying attention, we can see these different textures of our body and our awareness. And there's this idea in Chantai or Tendai teaching, that in each moment of thought there are three thousand worlds.

[40:54]

I think this is very useful. And some of those worlds are in the past, and some of them are in the present, and some of them are in the future, or the past or the future, or more than one of those, anyway. To see that the complexity of reality is beyond our idea about it. This doesn't mean, you know, so I talk about this a lot, it's not that you should not use your intelligence, but to see the limitation of our human intelligence. To see that our actual raw, tender, rich experience is 3,000 worlds each thought, each moment. Very complex. And to honor that complexity means to have a wider latitude, a wider capacity for engaging our present and our future and our past right now. To see the richness of our experience includes seeing how our story of the past is particularly limited, and that's fine.

[42:03]

Our story of this present is particularly limited. Even if I try and have a wide panoramic view of it, there's just so much that words are so limited and so forth. To honor those limitations is very important. So I've had some Zen students sometimes want to understand everything, figure everything out, and they have these very well-developed analytical minds. And there's nothing wrong with that, but if you think that that's it, you're going to have a problem. So practice and enlightenment is not about having some understanding of it. You may have some good understanding of it, that's OK. But to realize the complexity of reality, I think, is very helpful, practically. It gives us a sense of humility. And so someone's talking about that in a way. And it also enriches our experience.

[43:03]

So, I recently read about a man, actually I just read the book and I don't know the name of the man or the book, but it's the story of when he was 12 years old or so, he disobeyed his parents and went climbing in a building that was under construction and fell off the roof. And the experience of his foot on the tarp, it would then end up underneath and fall into the ground, which took a second and a half, or two seconds. In reality, in his memory, it was an extremely long period of time, and he never ever forgot that. When he went to, as an adult, became a psychiatrist that studies the brain to find out what that was about, or at least partly about that. And he's written this book about the physiological response that our brain has to this panic or emergency situation.

[44:12]

So it's all about memory, according to his analysis. You said there were 3,000 worlds in there. He was remembering all of them. It was memory that was distorting his perception of that time. So I'm sort of thinking about that. physiological or something. I wonder if we're sort of exploring different dimensions of heart rate and SOSN that can plug into some of those abilities that we don't know we have. We're not in touch with. Yes, thank you. Yeah, they're doing amazing, scientists, neuroscientists are doing amazing research on the brain now to find out, you know, what parts of the brain are activated in these kinds of times of intensity and other times that, you know, part of our practice of sitting, having longer sitting, sitting for a day or three or whatever, is that it gives us a, again, a wide, and just a period, any period of size, and also gives us a wider texture of seeing

[45:41]

the richness of our time and different kinds of intensity. So yeah, developing a capacity for seeing our life, our present time, and responding to that in wider ways. So I had a similar experience. I've had actually several near-death experiences. I was 19. Anyway, I was killed in Arizona, or at least I was sure I was going to die. A car I was in, sitting in the backseat, spun out very, very quickly and rolled over and over and over into the desert, onto the desert. I won't go into all the details, but I still remember very vividly kind of watching the whole thing as I was rolling around and around from the space up here, and knowing I was going to die, there was no question about it. And it was very calm and peaceful, and there wasn't time for lights and tunnels and stuff like that, but it was just, there I was, and this was the end, and okay.

[46:46]

And then some It felt like hours later, but it was probably a minute or something, I don't know. We were upside down, the car was upside down, totaled 100 yards off the road on the desert and crawled out. Anyway, yeah, we had, there are times that are more intense and maybe there are times that are less intense and those may be important too, but yeah. the capacity we have to be aware and be present and enrich our life and enrich our experience and our relationships, we don't really see in our usual mode of time. So this idea of being time gives us a wider sense and can develop our capacity. Again, the example I like to use is of dolphins who have these much bigger brains than us and we don't know what their doing with them except that they obviously aren't burdened by opposable thumbs, don't have to build buildings or write anything or type at computers, so what are they doing with their minds?

[47:51]

We can't understand. So yeah, this, so again, it's a practical, this isn't just a theoretical discussion of the physics of time, it's how do we enjoy and see more fully our time of being. Thank you.

[48:10]

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