The Zen Master's Dance by Jundo Cohen

Author:Jundo Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

Being-Time

UJI

It has been some months since my surgery and the doctors say that they got the cancer. They say I should see many more birthdays, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus or encounter something else along the way.

One of my Japanese doctors turned out to be a zazen practitioner with an interest in Dōgen. I am glad that he got off his cushion long enough to master that procedure and understood that “nothing to attain” did not prevent him from becoming an excellent surgeon.

This experience did add a few more scars to my body and wrinkles to my face. But perhaps these are due to the normal passage of time. The thought sometimes crosses my mind — as it does for anyone else — that the years are flying by, and I wonder where they’ve gone. It seems that I was just a little kid, then a teenager, and now I see white hairs and my father’s face looking at me in the mirror. When I sit zazen, my knees ache some days. How much more sand is left in my personal hourglass?

Fortunately, Dōgen left us with an interpenetrating vision of time, inspired by the Huayan and other Mahayana masters, as well as his own insight. Hundreds of years before Einstein made “relative time” a household world, Dōgen spoke of each of us, and all things, existing in our own vibrant being-time, connected to the being-time of all other beings and things in this vast, fluid universe.

Why is this important? Because it allows us to see the amazing, syncopated, backward-forward, moving-still, timeless-time of the great dance. It also frees us from simply witnessing time as an unstoppable flood in which our youth turns to old age, time passes quickly, life becomes death, and all is nothing but change. The Buddha taught that all composite things are impermanent and ever changing, but he also taught a way beyond all things and change.

Dōgen also knew this way of experiencing time that goes beyond time and no time, where all of time is held in each moment. Actually, we might better speak of ways (plural) of experiencing times and timeless. Dōgen lived an interflowing time and being, knew time as being, your being-time, which is a moment of the being-time of all the world.

Happy Non-Birthday! Birth and passing time are not all there is.

Happy Now-Birthday, now and now and now! In each and every moment, you and all the world are reborn.

Happy All-Birthday! As future flows into the past and present, while past becomes the future and present, we become younger and older and just this present age at once. One might say that this present instant holds fully your infancy and dotage, not to mention every moment from Big Bang to the universe’s Big Finale.

And on and on . . .

If you doubt the utility of Dōgen’s words, please hear them as medicine for our human tendency to experience time as a one-way rush from birth to death, bound in between by clock and calendar.

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