Summer 2007 — Uji

Across these five talks, Mike reads Dogen’s Uji from his own modern interpretation, rendering its title as “time-present” to suggest a oneness of time and our existence in time. In his reading, the chapter sets contradictory pictures of time side by side – a measured process through the day, a journey that leaves the past behind, a range of peaks seen from where we stand, a series of separate moments – and these pictures are models, not descriptions of what time is. What they point to, for Mike, is the concrete present in which we already are, a present moment that is already complete,^3.9 though we easily overlook it because we are trained to prefer words about it to our own experience. This does not abolish ordinary time: Mike holds that a civilization rests on a shared belief in time as a measurable process, and that finding a crack in our linear view of time is a kind of liberation,^2.14 not a claim that there is no such thing as time.

He prepares the ground for the chapter with Susannah Vrobel’s question of how the now can have depth, Nagarjuna’s verses on the interdependence of past, present and future, and Dignaga and Dharmakirti’s theory of instantaneous being; their present as a point without duration makes no sense to him, because we are still here. Time as we measure it is for him a shared human concept, and what these Buddhist thinkers and T. S. Eliot point to once it is set aside is, in his account, the present moment where we are; in zazen we investigate it as participants, losing ourselves in thought and coming back, again and again, to what we are actually doing. Taking up the chapter’s line that the person I think of as myself is one I put together at one time-present, Mike says that we construct ourselves and our world at each moment, and he reads its person who sees only each thing, each thing, not as a superhuman ideal but as the simple state of action that everyone knows, as in cutting a bramble in one fluid act. Against the belief that our past has made us what we are, he presents, in his own words, what he takes to be Dogen’s other view: what we are like now is just what we are like now, while stressing that Dogen does not deny the scientific view of cause and effect and that in another way we can of course learn from the past. When the chapter says that people treat the state of a buddha as something to attain by effort, although even that effort is time-present, Mike sums it up in a line he links to Wittgenstein: the place we are all trying to get to is the place we are already at. Reading that time-present is made real without ridding ourselves of hindrances and delusions, he explains that trying to get rid of what hinders us actually hinders us: we come into the present naturally, by leaving things as they are, because being fully present is a state of body and mind, not just a mental state. He reads the chapter’s statement that nothing could ever be made real without our moment-by-moment effort as Dogen’s description of reality – a person and the world meeting in an instant^4.54.64.7 – and carefully distinguishes it from solipsism.

Science, he adds, can link one event to the next in ever finer detail but can never find what is in the gap between them, and he relates the chapter’s warning against assuming an unchanging entity that passes from moment to moment to the self, the life and the flowing time we put behind the present. Toward the end of the series, Mike reads Baso’s answer about raising an eyebrow and winking as showing that our life is created moment by moment by our action now,^5.15.25.3 beyond right and wrong; plans remain necessary in society but are not our life itself, and this does not mean we should stop caring about right and wrong. He does not call conceptualization bad and grants that talking about time requires labels, but from the word Dogen uses in the original, which translates as restrict, he concludes that to describe something is to restrict it,^5.105.11 since a label turns a flow such as anger into an object. He calls the chapter difficult because, without denying our normal view of time, it puts forward the almost unacceptable point that we are just living at this moment, and he traces Dogen’s realization to what we notice in zazen. In the closing discussion he places the state of buddha in being natural in this moment rather than in something to be attained, and says that, although we cannot find out who we are, knowing that we can’t find out who we are is finding out.