Abbot's Teaching
Happy New Ksana
by Michael Zenkai Taiun Elliston Sensei,
February 13, 2000
Now that all the hoopla over the New Year, New Century, and New Millennium has died down (at least until 2001), perhaps a few words can emerge out of the relative quiet about the Zen view of time.
Without revisiting the conventional analysis of the illusory nature of humankind's marking of time via invented calendars, exhaustively belabored in the media as usual, it may be useful to examine the more personal implications of our concept (and consequent percept) of time for our own practice.
Implicit in that last statement is an underlying theme of Zen practice--that our very apprehension of reality is molded by our ideas about it. This is the basis for including the functioning of the discriminating mind in establishing the conditions whereby we might transcend its limitations. As Dogen Zenji suggested, we use the discriminating mind to awaken the bodhi-mind. Please approach the following in this spirit.
Daisetz Suzuki, in one of his early publications on Zen to the Western world, made the case that the Eastern and Western ways of thinking, and thus perceiving, have historically been at wide variance. Perhaps with the mainstreaming of the actual practice of Zen meditation in the West, this is changing. Nonetheless, certain Western habits of cognition seem to be pervasive in their effects upon our culture, and our scientific as well as our personal view of reality.
Dr. Suzuki pointed out, for example, that the invention of measured time was a great development of the human intellect, and indeed was critical to the later development of agriculture and all that followed--e.g. the industrial revolution--in that it allowed us to conceive of time as lineal, and thus to extract processes of cause and effect along a time-line, epitomized by Henry Ford's triumphal assembly-line.
We can imagine that, absent this understanding, it would have been impossible to get early people to do the backbreaking work of cultivating crops, when they initially had no concept that the planting of the seed would later result to the harvesting of the grain. (Several myths of history treat of the miraculous discovery of agriculture in various cultures.)
However, Suzuki lamented, while the application of measured, lineal time was a great discovery-invention, it also became a "spiritual tragedy," as people took it to be a literal description of the nature of time itself.
Reinforcing this concept of time is our conventional notion of space. Buckminster Fuller, in his exposition of Geodesic Geometry, (the most widely-known output of which are geodesic domes) illustrated that the Cartesian coordinate system has adversely affected the conventional view of the structure of nature's geometry, and of space itself. People generally believe that ninety-degree (square) geometries are inherently structural, when they are demonstrably not, and that time is a "fourth dimension" akin to the "three dimensions" of space. This way of thinking apparently affects, and skews, the view not just of untrained novices, but also that of some scientists.
Time is often conceived in like manner as being analogous to an axis ("x, y, z"), which then has directionality--the "arrow of time." In the macro-cosmos this makes some sense--the earth, relative to the sun, was so many miles further "back" in its orbit when you began reading this than it is now. But the orbits through which the heavenly bodies move are also geodesics determined by the local curvature of space, etcetera; and their very motion is relative only to each other, not to some "still-point zero" at the center of the universe (e.g. the locus of the primordial singularity where the "big bang" originated). And while the motion of the cosmos does not seem to be reversible, at the center of each body, it is "still"--relative to itself--or "from the other side," as the Tibetans would phrase it.
On the micro-level of subatomic particles, scientists report that events indeed do appear to be reversible, and that the directionality of time may not be determinant. Let's leave that debate to the scientists and return to the view of Zen as regards time.
Dogen Zenji wrote an essay called "Uji"--"Being-Time," with which you may be familiar. Some say that in this essay he anticipated Einstein's theory of Relativity. Again, leaving that to the experts, I would like to focus attention on one simple idea that Dogen seems to be getting at in "Uji"--that "being" is "time," and "time is "being." That is, Being = Time. This identity, like that of E = mc2, to my mind expresses a profound truth in its ultimate simplicity. The ramifications of the equation are what we need to understand.
If Being = Time, there is no time outside of being, and certainly no being outside of time. It also means there is no space without time, and no time without space. It certainly does not mean that time is another "dimension," like those that we attribute to space.
The problem with attributing such pat characteristics to time and space is that it tends to reify our concepts of reality as the way reality is, and so to supplant inherent mystery with comforting preconception. In other words, it may be just another avoidance technique, a diversionary tactic against an innate, but childish (and therefore unacceptable) sense of wonder; and, perhaps, an evasive maneuver useful for staving off panic.
It is truly terrifying, not comprehending space-time.
However, conceiving (and perceiving) time as measurable--and therefore measured--means that we can only try to "use time," to "save time," to "not waste time," to consume time as a commodity. And then by extension to judge our activities against the inexorable drumbeat of time, and to further judge ourselves and others as imposing upon, and costing us, our precious time--which we have already lost to this concept of time. How do we gain it back?
Just sit--the universal answer. It is said that "the barriers of time and space fall away" while doing zazen. This would be akin to "dropping off of body-mind," or "removing the barrier between self and other," would it not?
Suzuki stressed the differences in Western and Eastern sensibilities--the Western tendency toward divergent analysis, dissecting reality to examine its parts, an "algebraic" or linear bent of mind; versus the Eastern yen (no pun) for convergent simultaneity, "all-at-onceness," a "geometric" or spatial grasp of the coincident. Actually we all seem to have both polarities of discriminating mind. Hopefully there is a kind of universal maturation which is occurring, wherein these apparent polarities are revealed to be more nurture than nature, more cultural that genetic.
In our assimilation of Zen we tend to practice "against type," as an actor who accepts an uncomfortable role. In this way we optimize our chances of overcoming, or transcending, our knee-jerk tendencies. My teacher, the venerable Matsuoka-Roshi, mocked our concept of a desired reincarnation in a future life, his eyes sparkling as he exclaimed: "Reincarnation every moment!"
From this we can take the position that there is only one moment, only one day, only one year, only one century, only one millennium. It is beginningless and endless. The "first cause is not known," or more to the point--irrelevant. We do not argue that this view is right as opposed to wrong. It is complete Path we practice, not right versus wrong. We only suggest these views as "tonic for our times." These may be more useful ways of regarding things as you establish the basis for awakening.
It is said that the Buddha could "speak a word" in a ksana, the smallest particle of time. It is also said that in all his years of teaching, he uttered not a word. What do you make of that?
May your "new year" find you living the truth of "everyday is a happy day." This is our direct heritage from Matsuoka-Roshi and our beginningless lineage.