Winter 2004 — Uji
Venue: Rowardennan
From the retreatChronicle
Talks and digests
A digest is a shorter way into the talk: the speaker's main ideas in their own voice, nothing added.
What the series says (short overview) — About these overviews
The small numbers, like 1.6, lead to the part of the full text that a sentence of the overview draws on. Click one to go there; the Back button brings you here again.
Across these five talks, Mike presents Uji as his modern interpretation of a difficult Dogen chapter, using “time-present” for an existential account of being here at this time. He begins from the claim that time is the present and the present time,1.6 while maintaining that neither clock time nor the felt speed of time is an absolute. The series therefore does not replace ordinary temporal language with a better theory: it adds a view in which every person and thing has its own time-present and the one real moment and place is here and now.1.91.10 This present is neither a private mental state nor a promised pure condition, because disappointment, anger, sleepiness, thought, and the effort to become buddha also belong to it.
That claim carries a deliberate tension: causes, memory, plans, and scientific processes remain workable, yet Mike repeats that there is process and there is not,2.6 and refuses to treat reality as a continuous process. What matters is not winning that tension as an explanation but noticing how mental images, a constructed self, and expectations of future attainment can pull us away from the condition we already inhabit. For this reason he treats zazen as a changing balance rather than a fixed achievement; posture and whole activity can help us return to reality, but neither enforce a perfect state nor make thinking valueless. His reading insists on action: time-present is experienced in doing rather than only in thinking, and a person lost in thought remains visibly in the shared room. The connection of person, world, and time is accordingly practical rather than merely metaphysical: in action, the Universe makes itself real and ordinary activities can bring people back to reality.
Language helps us communicate and inquire, but descriptions restrict their objects and are not the things themselves, so no formula — including Mike’s own — finally possesses what it names. He accordingly calls his account an interpretation, not a scientific claim or final explanation, and lets the ordinary statements that a day was fast and that it lasted twenty-four hours stand together. Accounts of a past or future are still spoken from the present, but that does not cancel past events, causation, a shared constructed world, or ordinary work within it. In its final movement, the series asks readers to notice how they are, make what they do real through sincere activity, and return to the present, which no one can escape.5.115.12
Talks in this series
Uji 1: Time Is the Present
Mike reads time-present as the real here and now that relativises clock time and shows itself in action
Mike introduces Uji through his own modern interpretation of a difficult but important chapter about time. At its centre, he reads Dogen’s opening statement: Time-present means that time is the present, and that the present is time. This does not simply discard ordinary twenty-four-hour time, because the chapter also studies that time while calling it relative. Mike says neither a subjective feeling of time nor an objective clock supplies an absolute account.
Uji 2: An Alternative to Linear Time
Mike keeps the present as the only real time, grants ordinary process, and leaves the contradiction open
Mike continues his reading of Uji by setting Dogen’s time-present against the ordinary picture of time as a linear journey. His central claim is that the present is the only real existing time. This is an alternative view, not a dismissal of the ordinary language in which people speak of past, future, causes, and plans.
Uji 3: The Changing State of Zazen
Mike reads time-present as zazen’s actual condition, with irritation and sleepiness, not a pure goal
Mike reads Dogen’s time-present as the actual condition of zazen, not a pure or future state to attain. The state of buddha includes the changing state we actually inhabit, including disappointment, irritation, sleepiness, and thought. He says the ideal person we try to become is an image in the mind, whereas recognising the state we are in is already the point at issue.
Uji 4: Contradictory Explanations
Mike: reality is not contradictory, but our explanations must contradict each other to try to grasp it
Mike approaches Dogen’s time-present as something that must be returned to, not mastered by taking the text apart once. Spring is made real at every time-present, he says, and the same distinction separates what is here now from the names we give to processes and persons. His reading keeps the claim that time is neither static nor a continuous process, even though that makes ordinary explanation difficult.
Uji 5: Words and Reality
Mike closing this Uji sesshin: a description restricts its object; ordinary action can return us to reality
Mike closes his reading of Uji with Master Kisho’s poem about will and words, and with Dogen’s own variation on it. He says will and words may be present or absent without a process of arrival or departure, so speech or silence can happen naturally instead of following a prior inner plan. The donkey, horse, and Spring images let him explain this as an ordinary time-present situation, not as a mystical event.