Winter 2004 — Uji

A difficult chapter about time

Uji is one of the three or four particularly important chapters of Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, and the important ones tend to be quite hard to understand. But the principle he’s talking about here is rather important: the principle of time in Buddhism. “U” means is, exists, even yes; “ji” simply means ordinary time. We can say existence-time, being-time, is-time, or even right-here-and-now. What “uji” points to is something about being here at this time.

What he is trying to do is to describe what reality is like. He bases his view on zazen, but he only has words, and even his words are not enough; to understand the chapter, we can refer to our own zazen and our own action. All of his philosophy is trying to point us to the place before we started thinking about it. But it’s impossible; he tried the whole of his life, and he said that it was impossible. He creates bizarre images and switches around his language: instead of saying I’m sitting in the zafu, he’ll say the zafu is sitting under me.

In a way, pulling the chapter apart makes it more difficult. I couldn’t understand the Shobogenzo the first time I read it, or the second or the third, and Nishijima Roshi said the same thing. Coming back to it again and again we can slowly get something. And this is only my interpretation; the original may create clearer images for you.

Question: Why is it expressed so strongly? What was it over against?

It was against traditional Buddhism. Master Dogen wanted to strip away all the misinterpretations and establish something very simple, realistic. He wanted to say Buddhism is about reality, not about burning incense.

Question: Which team did he support?

Fukui Rovers.

Time is the present

A buddha of old said,

Time-present is standing on the mountain heights Time-present is sinking to the depths of the ocean Time-present is an angry demon Time-present is a buddha …

I’ve chosen the phrase time-present, because it’s the nearest thing for me to what I feel Master Dogen is trying to say. We can read the poem as snapshots of a monk’s life: sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes elated. But Master Dogen has a much more strict interpretation than “sometimes”.

Time-present means that time is the present, and that the present is time.

He says that time is actually the present. The present is the only real existing time, so everything that exists must be in the present; there is no other place that it can be.

He often says “illuminated by the light of the present”. When we’re lost in our thoughts, our images are hazy; the real world in front of us is clear. To be awake, to be buddha, means to see what’s around us, now, at this place. It’s a poetic image, but not only that: when we’re not caught up in the images in our brain, the present is brightest.

In his first statement, we could say, he’s almost denying that time has any kind of process: throw away your watch, time is only now. But then he says we must also study time as 24-hour time, and that 24 hours is relative. And he says that although we never doubt our ability to clearly trace the passage of time, we cannot be sure that we know clearly what time is. Of course I know what time is: it’s sixteen minutes and 15 seconds before 12 o’clock! But he’s suggesting that this objective statement is not complete: our actual experience, an hour that passes just like that or time that drags, doesn’t fit completely with the objective fact. He doesn’t reject our subjective feeling in favour of objective absolute time; he doesn’t reject either of those.

He’s trying to break up our belief that time goes on and we’re in it: everything, everywhere has its time-present. I have my time-present; that plant on the window sill has its time-present. He denies that the objective view is true, and he denies that the subjective view is true. He doesn’t deny that the hands going round are a valid way of looking at reality, but he denies that this objective time is absolute. Our views of time conflict, and Master Dogen always resolves conflicting views in the present. He says in the end there’s only one moment that’s real and only one place that’s real, and that’s here and now. But our brains can’t work without process, so we have to spread things out into a process.

The past is here, now

We’re all taught that time is a process, so we think that we experience time as a process; actually we don’t. Master Dogen describes our normal view as a journey: we cross a river or a mountain pass, and we feel they are still back there. But he says that when we are crossing the mountain pass, we are present there, and so time is present there. Where is the past? Can you point to it? The only place I can find the past is here, now. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a past; it doesn’t deny that past events affect the present, and it doesn’t negate cause and effect.

Question: But the future doesn’t exist yet.

Think of an event in the future: where is it? He says the future is an idea, and the idea exists now. The past that we have exists now too: my memory, the scar on my hand from when I fell over as a child. Besides that, there is nothing else. But he doesn’t mean that I didn’t have breakfast.

Our real experience isn’t like the frames of a film, with a gap between this moment and the next: the present is always here, but at the same time it’s moving on. So it’s a contradiction. He’s suggesting that the present contains the past, and that the past contained the present. He paints a landscape of peaks of time that we look out over; he doesn’t mean that when I went to the cinema last week, that event is still hanging around here somewhere.

We can’t understand that the present is contained in the future precisely because we have this very strong linear view: the future hasn’t come yet. He’s saying ditch the linear view and everything is now: in the future it will be a now, in the past was a now, and all nows are at the same place. But what we experience in the moment is infinity: we experience it, but we don’t grasp it. He wants to break the linear view, not to deny it, not to say it’s wrong, but to introduce something else that’s missing.

I don’t think Master Dogen is suggesting parallel Universes with pasts in. All of the past that exists exists now. We can’t conceive it.

Question: Is it impossible to conceive, or is it just difficult?

I don’t know, I haven’t stopped trying yet.

Our actual experience is that the future never arrives, and the past never leaves.

There is process and there isn’t

Once you take away process, science collapses: without a process view you can’t separate causes from their effects. And science is a valid way of looking at reality; it has created our civilisation, and we need it. But Master Dogen wants to suggest another view, outside of science and also outside of religion: the middle view. It’s not based on a process view, nor on a spiritual or eternal view; it’s based on real experience in the present.

Language is process too. Process is real, but it’s not real. It’s real because we all agree that it explains the way reality works. It’s not real because only this moment is real: there’s no next moment yet, and the last moment has gone already. So we can say there is process and there isn’t process. That contradiction is at the heart of the problem of describing reality.

… The whole Universe is progressing from one moment to the next, not static but also not continuous process.

He doesn’t deny process, but the times don’t pile up, neither do they extend out in a continuous line. In Einstein’s space-time continuum we still have process; in Master Dogen’s existence-time there’s no continuum: there’s just this, just this.

His example is Spring. We call a process Spring, but actual Spring is just now: Spring is made real at every time-present. We need to come back to this again and again: the difference between what is real here and now and what we call Spring, or a process, or a person. There is nothing real and unchanging that passes from moment to moment called time; it’s a parallel with what he says about a permanent unchanging self. Our concept of time has something real about it, but it doesn’t really exist. But although it doesn’t really exist, it is really useful.

His sentences are contradictory; this is the big problem with reading the Shobogenzo. Making sense of that is not so easy until we notice that reality is not contradictory, but our explanations of it have to contradict each other to try and grasp it. We say today went very quickly; we say today was exactly 24 hours. We usually call one objective and right, the other subjective and wrong. He gives them equal value.

I am seeing things moving, and yet of course that’s always in the moment. From an article about vision, which I can’t remember so clearly, it seems that what we see as a continuum is filled in by our brain or our memory. There’s no doubt that there’s some process which we track with our consciousness, but it contradicts the instantaneous view in our brain. Buddhism says: think about it, you’ll tie yourself up in knots; stop thinking, then the knots will disappear.

Question: So even just on the mundane level, we’re building a picture.

Yes, a kind of constructed world. This doesn’t mean it’s not real: we all construct it, then we all agree on it so we can share it. But it’s not shared by beings that don’t have our way of communicating. The plant doesn’t share it; the dog shares it partly.

Question: So we have to try and unlearn all that?

No, just we can notice how we are.

Time is a survival tool: we learn to plant at a certain time of year, depending on the position of the sun. It’s a puzzle … what is time?

Time is us

This person I think of as myself is a “person” that I put together at one time-present.

The “me” that was here this morning doesn’t exist, and the “me” that’s going to eat beans and beef burgers later doesn’t exist either. I create “Michael” at this moment; we spread ourselves out through time, but Master Dogen says that this all happens at one time-present. We create a life, a personality, ourselves; not that they are not real, but they are real creations that we make at the present. I wake up one morning feeling depressed, and I create a depressed “me”: my life has been terrible and it’s going to be terrible. Another morning I create a happy “me”.

We can’t help constructing a self, and we can’t live without process; but process we create at this moment. And I can’t get rid of myself: I love myself too much, and hate myself sometimes. We create ourselves at every moment. So in that way we’re illusions, but we are real illusions.

Not a pine tree is in a time-present, but a pine tree is a time-present. We say “I am in the here and now”, but he says “I am the here and now”. Not that time is flowing through us: time is us. Without us, there is no time. Which implies, among other things, that time is a human construction.

He says living beings are time-present, buddhas are time-present: there’s time and there’s me, and it’s all one. Even our being angry here and now is the Universe. The words have already separated them, and he wants to stick the words back together: buddhatime-present, persontime-present. We can imagine this room without us sitting in it, but at this moment there’s just roomus.

Doing makes us real

Master Dogen describes a person who has clarified their real state and lets go of understanding the nature of each thing. That sounds like a special kind of person, but it’s a common, everyday state, and we can call it action: picking up a cup and drinking the tea. When we act fully, we let go of understanding; it’s impossible to think about what we’re doing and do it fully at the same time. If you think about hitting the ball, you miss it. After a while jogging you’re just jogging; in zazen we can settle down sometimes to a state where we are just sitting: shikan-taza.

In order to experience time-present in the sense that Master Dogen is trying to describe it, we need to act; we can’t experience it by thinking about it. If we think while we do something, we split ourselves; in ancient Buddhism that was described as having two moons. When we just throw ourselves into what we’re doing, we are one moon: we are whole.

We can’t grasp the present, but Buddhism says we have a way to experience it. If we talk about it as far as we’re able, and if we practice it, it grasps us: we can’t grasp it but it grasps us, and in grasping us it gives us a focus. This is all Tim Henman wants to do: forget about the point you just lost and hit the ball, now. That’s what musicians want to do, isn’t it?

Asked about Bodhidharma’s purpose in coming from India to China, Master Baso answered that at one time-present he was moved to raise his eyebrow and wink, and at another he was not. Master Baso is trying to say that Bodhidharma just went: there’s something natural in his actions. We expect results from our efforts, but Buddhism teaches that things unfold naturally. Bodhidharma didn’t have a strong intention such as, “I’m going to China to spread Buddhism!” Just that’s what happened. Some replies in the koan stories sound so strange that people think there’s some mystical secret there, but I always work from the point of view that they must have been saying something sensible and down to earth.

Master Dogen comments that the mountains and the oceans and Bodhidharma’s eyebrows and eyes are one whole, and that the mountains, the oceans, even the bright star that appeared to Gautama Buddha are time-present. He’s running round and round Master Baso’s words to reinforce that time-present is just what’s here and now, and what is here and now is not separate. That’s the most I can say about that.

If I get up and run around the room, in my action I’m making the Universe real. The Universe making the Universe real suggests there’s no separation between me and the Universe. In zazen we share space with the whole Universe. In the moment of acting, especially in zazen, there’s an equality, a balance between me and the world. That’s what we feel when we sit by the side of the lake and become one with the scenery; in that moment the Universe is making itself real, and we experience that perfection just for a moment. Just to share the Universe with everything is enough.

Sometimes we actively want to make ourselves balanced; sometimes the situation drags us in. Master Dogen says there’s another case: suddenly, spontaneously, we feel contented. We can become real just out of nowhere. That’s the Universe making the Universe real: there’s not an intention from the inside, or something imposed from the outside, but the two things meet. It’s difficult to explain, but we do experience things like that.

When we put all our effort into what we’re doing, we can say that we become one with everything. When we become one with everything, we stop thinking about becoming one with everything. He’s saying that our efforts in the moment create the world, and it sounds very unlikely. I’d like somebody to show me a moment in which they’re not making an effort. Doing something makes us real. When we do something we make ourselves and the Universe real.

The state we are in

Many people think that buddhas are something you become after very strenuous effort: then you’ve hit the jackpot. But if we think of buddha as someone who is awake, it’s quite straightforward. If you’re awake here and you see everything around you, you’re a buddha; if half of you is missing and thinking something, you’re not. We’re all buddhas, but we don’t like to accept it, because we create an image of somebody better than ourselves, and that somebody is only an image.

When we practise zazen, we sit in our state, whatever it is. And that state is buddha. If we expect it to be pure, calm and peaceful, we may be disappointed, but the state of being disappointed in zazen is the state of buddha.

I like to say zazen is sitting in balance. The posture is rock solid, but it’s dynamic: to keep balance you have to wobble a little. And because Buddhism says that body and mind are two sides of one whole, if we balance our body we balance our mind. Sometimes we’re thinking, sometimes we’re stopping ourselves thinking, sometimes we move beyond thinking; all of those are part of zazen. State is the wrong word really: we wobble around, and that wobbling around is buddha.

At the point of balance there is no effort, but we can’t keep that exact position, so we make an effort to come back. You can’t intentionally stop yourself thinking, because the intention is a thought; noticing that you’re thinking, stopping yourself and correcting your posture are all the same thing. When we describe it, we split ourselves into two: a “me” and the other part that I do things to. So zazen is self-regulating, providing we make some effort to reach the point where there’s no effort. So it’s a contradiction.

When we feel irritated or sleepy, we might feel this isn’t proper zazen, but that’s who we are at that moment. Master Dogen says time-present is always made real without ridding ourselves of hindrances and delusions. To be present is not to realise you’re angry and stop being angry; it’s simply to realise that you’re angry.

Even the times when we seem to be blundering along heedlessly are time-present, Master Dogen says. In his sense, perfection is the present moment: not something better than what is here, but what is here is perfection. Heedlessly blundering along is just heedlessly blundering along; it’s time-present, it’s real. And he says we shouldn’t force it into being present. To force something into being present is to say, “Yes, I’m present, I can see I’m present.” Then we’re thinking about being present. But when we pick up a cup of tea and drink it, we don’t need to think whether we’re present or not: we’re completely here.

Wanting to find the truth, realising it and practising all happen at a time-present. Even the moment in which people make efforts and reject the state of buddha, Master Dogen says, is time-present. And he says that the state of buddha which wants to search for the truth, practise zazen, attain the truth and enter the balanced state exists at time-present. That sentence suggests that our sincere effort itself is being a buddha: buddhas making buddha — he’s turning things on their head a little.

It’s like learning to ski or to row: at first there’s a very fine knife-edge; if you keep doing it, one day it becomes a plateau. If we practise zazen regularly every day, the balance point spreads. But that plateau is still a knife-edge.

Sometimes in zazen we keep thinking, “five minutes to go, my legs are hurting, I’ve got to do this tomorrow”. All these worries come from our view of time, and all those things spread us out again. But in the posture of zazen, even when our mind is really busy, we settle, whether we like it or not. It may only be a small amount; we may just settle enough not to get up and run out. The posture itself in zazen gets us.

Question: With this house buying, my whole existence was over on that side. I couldn’t do my normal 25 minutes.

People imagine that a Zen master doesn’t have those kinds of experiences, but that’s a load of rubbish: all human beings are affected by what goes on in their lives. But we can notice, hopefully, that we are being dragged into the future by a house purchase, and just that noticing itself is a kind of solution to the problem. That is noticing who we are. Even if we can only make ourselves sit for 5 minutes, it’s a very powerful way to calm ourselves down.

Will and words

Master Kisho from the Sho region … preaches to the assembly:

At one time-present will is present but words are absent. At one time-present words are present but will is absent. …

Sometimes we want to say something but it doesn’t come out; sometimes it comes out before we want to say it. The poem describes a situation which we experience in our normal lives. There is a state in which things happen naturally, and Master Dogen says, it’s OK, all of those situations happen at time-present. In the original, he illustrates “before the moment of absence has ended, the moment of presence has come” with a donkey and a horse: the donkey hasn’t left yet but the horse has come. It doesn’t have any kind of mystical significance; donkeys and horses were like the trucks of medieval China. The way I have translated it suggests the moment where we just spontaneously speak.

Before the will has left, the words arrive. To be present does not mean that something has arrived. To be absent does not mean that something has left.

Just now we are quiet, just now we speak; the time to speak doesn’t arrive from somewhere. It’s like his Spring: not a process of Spring coming and leaving, but just Spring here and now.

I’m lost for words. When we describe something with a word, that word doesn’t exactly fit the object; in some way it restricts the object. When I say “Mike”, I limit you, and in doing that, I don’t describe you. As he says, a description of a thing is never the thing itself. Then he gives an example of a meeting: when I meet a person, a “person” meets another “person”; that’s an objective picture. But when I meet myself, he says, a manifestation meets a manifestation; we can’t objectify meeting ourselves.

When he says half a buddha, or will and words half-present, it’s his way of denying that words can match reality, of breaking our perfect picture.

Scientists haven’t yet found a model for how human beings speak. We plan what we’re going to say, but it’s a kind of guideline. Buddhism doesn’t preempt what science is discovering, but it says that our real experience is often that nothing comes out, or something different to what we thought.

Question: Isn’t there something apart from time: what we say comes out of nothing? So it’s impossible for a scientist…

Yes, that’s the point. But scientists can’t say that it’s impossible; they will look at it more closely and see a more detailed picture. What Master Dogen says is, understanding is great, we should try to understand, but don’t forget we’re doing it. We’re doing it while we’re thinking about it, and doing it is a kind of miracle. We can say it comes out of nothing; we can’t say that scientifically, but we can say it.

Master Dogen says that even those who see time as present now can’t express clearly what they have already got, and even those who have long been asserting that they have it already can’t stop trying to find out who they already are. We look for who we are, and if we find who we are, then say that we’ve found who we are, we’ve lost who we are. I can’t express any more than that.

Question: Why are you still trying to grasp it intellectually?

I don’t know, but I like it. Human beings have this kind of curiosity; in Buddhism it’s called the will to the truth.

Question: Surely conceptualising the experience of zazen is an impediment to experiencing time as it is?

Yes, I agree. Let’s throw it away! But after a bit we start thinking again, don’t we? We need both to throw it away, and to discuss and to write and to think about it – both. But we don’t need to hang on to one or the other.

We can’t escape the present

There’s something in which everything exists, and Buddhism calls that something Dharma, or reality. We don’t know what it is. But whether we work it out or not, we’re always in it. Master Dogen says whatever we do we can’t get out of the present. Nobody has ever done anything in any other place than in time-present.

If we’re sitting in zazen and go off into a long train of thought, we may believe that we’re in that thought and not notice the room at all. But somebody looking at us will just see us quietly sitting where we are. The one who drifted off can say, “I wasn’t there,” but the person sitting next to them can say, “Yes, you were.” Which is reality? We can talk about different realities, parallel Universes, but all of those hypotheses are made by people who are always in this reality. Whether we’re confused or enlightened or angry or buddhas, we can’t escape from time-present.

Question: What do scientists say about the big bang?

Gautama Buddha said, according to Master Nagarjuna, the world has no beginning and no end. We may have to revise him. What he means by that is that the present is always here: time-present never disappears, so time-present continues for ever. I think that scientific achievement is absolutely amazing, but many of the theories started because a little line on a spectrogram moved one millimetre to the right. Not that the theories are wrong, but we should notice the basis of the theory. In terms of Master Dogen’s philosophy, the time line going back to the beginning of the Universe only exists as a creation in all of our minds at this moment. But because it exists in all of our minds, it has tremendous power. People who think about previous lives, the past of the Universe or the future have all, without any exception, done it from the present. We can never escape the present is what Dogen is saying. That’s all he’s saying.

Question: Why does he explain such a simple statement in such a massive tangle of knots?

The only reason that I can say this simple sentence is because I looked at everything he said. Some people are stupid, and they’re very lucky, because they often see things very simply and straightforwardly. Us poor people who are clever have to go through the tangle, until we can see something which points us out of the tangle into this place here and now.

Coming back to the ground

You can’t escape: all the ideas that human-kind have ever had have been from people in the present. It’s not a view that explains the whole of science and society, it’s just a view that explains something very fundamental. And something that we need, because we’re all moving forward somewhere in a shared constructed world, and that puts a lot of pressure on us. Buddhism says that we’re making the pressure up, but let’s not forget that we’re just sitting here making it up; so let’s return to this ground where we are and take the pressure off. Then we go back in again. The constructed world is vital. But there’s a more fundamental basis: to notice where we are and what we’re doing, in a very simple way.

We shouldn’t say thinking has no value: if Ella hadn’t thought through the breakfast this morning, we wouldn’t have got it moving through so smoothly. But there’s something other than thinking which maintains us; if we only think and never stop, we go mad. The instances when we think are the basis of society, but the instances in which we act and stop thinking, hoovering or making a cup of tea, are the basis of our life.

We don’t notice that this action of getting up and making a cup of tea saves us; our action through the day saves us and brings us back to reality. Buddhism says hammering away at the computer is important, but just as important is to go to the toilet. Having lunch rather than working through saves us. If we don’t, we’re on the conveyor belt which sweeps us away from the present.

Press the key, press the key, push the broom: Buddhism says it’s the same thing. All of our simple actions are the grounds of our lives. We can say that little children, as long as they haven’t been disturbed too much, are buddhas, and parents who look after them are very realistic, because their children hold them in the present.

Self-regulation is another word for zazen, I think. If we practise zazen every day, if only for a short time, it acts as a regulating mechanism. Sport and yoga do too, but zazen is stripped of all the extras; for me it is the essence of all activity.

Question: Can you get into that same state with something intellectual?

No, I don’t think you can: it’s very difficult to be balanced just by using our intellect, so we need something to counter-balance it. I can’t give you a complete answer. But we ground ourselves in thousands of different ways. Master Dogen says that zazen is not the only way to become balanced, but it’s the standard traditional way of Buddhists. We can say people who pursue their own field in a balanced way, very sincerely, are buddhas, but they don’t know they’re buddhas.

Dogen says dropping off body and mind: whenever we drop off body and mind we’re in the balanced state, whether we wipe the toilet bowl or leap over the high jump. In Master Dogen’s writing, realised means to act, to make real. To realise yourself means to make yourself real, and to make yourself real means to do something. We could say do something means enter the state where we drop off body and mind: anything where, when we do it, we’re not separating mind and body.

Question: Which is anything, sincerely?

Yes.