Transcript of talk on Shobogenzo
Given by Eido Mike Leutchford
8th December 2000
Chapter 11 – Uji. No. 2
So let’s resume on page 111:
Let us pause to reflect whether or not any of the whole of Existence or any of the whole Universe has leaked away from the present moment of Time.
Any questions on last week, shall we carry on?
Chris: Let’s carry on but I do have some questions at some point, about this section on doubt, I was a bit confused by that.
Shall we go back to it now before we move on? So page 110.
Ch: So I’ll read this bit:
The leaving and coming of the directions and traces [of Time] are clear, and so people do not doubt it.
Ch: I understand that bit.
They do not doubt it, but that does not mean that they know it.
Ch: So that’s basically saying that their naïve view of time…
We accept it, but we don’t really look at it.
Ch: Yes I understand that, so it’s the next bit that I don’t really understand:
The doubts which living beings, by our nature, have about every thing and every fact that we do not know, are not consistent; therefore our past history of doubt does not always exactly match our doubt now.
Well in fact he’s trying to break up our process view of doubt, and say that we doubt “every thing and every fact that we do not know”, but our doubt is not consistent. We usually think that we should carry on doubting something until we understand it, then we don’t doubt it any more. But he’s saying it’s not actually like that; we doubt something one day and we don’t doubt it the next day and so on. So he’s trying to break up this idea that we have very strongly, that you know, “no I don’t understand, now I do understand”. And of course behind this the kind of belief which is very strong that in fact that we attain something, the we’ve attained it and we keep it. He’s saying that reality is not like that, acceptance comes in the present moment, buddhanature comes in the present moment. This moment we feel balanced, at this moment we feel doubt, at this moment we feel clear, at this moment we feel unclear. So we can’t rely on anything being continuous from the third view point. Of course it’s stupid to say that the other process viewpoint is not true, so he says:
We can say for the present, however, that doubt is nothing other than Time.
So he means doubt is a state in the present moment, but we string moments together. Of course if we look from our normal…. what I call the process view, then we can find some continuum, and we can say that, you know, “I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure, then I was sure and now I’m sure”. But things are not always like that. So he says, “our past history of doubt does not always exactly match our doubt now”. Also the kind of doubts that we have change. So again he’s always trying to break up this time as a line viewpoint which is so strong for all of us and was even in those days.
Colin: I think that’s called “the A series”, have you come across the A series?
No.
C: A series and B series which derives from McTaggart, who was this very early 20th century philosopher who said that time is unreal, that’s his argument. He talked about the A series, which is where the future becomes the present, becomes the past, so that’s the A series. And the B series, I’ve got this article, I’ll let you have it. But the article is basically saying that Dogen doesn’t deny the A series, but he’s more of a B temporal thinker, has a B series view of time. You can say “earlier than” and “later than”, it’s tenseless, there’s no tense in making statements about time, whereas in the A series you talk about the future and the past.
Yes it would be interesting to read that, I don’t think I’ve heard of McTaggart.
Ch: Didn’t he write A Brief Experiment with Time or something like that?
C: Yes maybe.
Ok, well Master Dogen’s two views: one matches our normal view and the other one is that time is cut off.
C: Discreet, the discreet mode.
Discreet yes, it’s actually more than discreet, but discreet is a good way to start to look at it. It’s beyond discreet, because the problem with discreet is that we make a series of discreet functions, but he’s not talking… he saying that there’s no series, just now, now, now. And in Japanese he often uses the phrase, ipen, ipen – “one piece, one piece” - now, now. So this is beyond our power to abstract, we try to form an abstract picture of it and we fall back into the process view. So it’s pointing to a view which is no view. Is that ok? Shall we start back on page 111:
Yet in the time of the common man who does not learn the Buddha-Dharma there are views and opinions: when he hears the words "Existence –Time”, he thinks, “Sometimes I became [an angry demon with] three heads and eight arms, and sometimes I became the sixteen-foot or eight foot [golden body of Buddha] For example, it was like crossing a river or crossing a mountain. The mountain and the river may still exist, but now that I have crossed them and am living in a jeweled palace with crimson towers, the mountain and river are [as distant] from me as heaven is from the Earth.”
Now that’s the process view of time. He embellishes it a little, and in putting in the thing about the jeweled palace, again he’s referring to our desire to make progress, so we go to a better place.
But true reasoning is not limited to this one line [of thought].
There we are, the one line of thought means the process view of time, or time as a line.
That is to say, when I was climbing a mountain or crossing a river, I was there in that Time. There must have been Time in me. And I actually exist now, [so] Time could not have departed. I Time does not have the form of leaving and coming, the Time of climbing a mountain is the present as Existence-Time. If Time does retain the form of leaving and coming, I have this present moment of Existence-Time, which is Existence-Time itself.
Now he’s trying to get away from the process view of time, and he says, “I actually exist now so Time could not have departed”. So what he’s trying to say is that there aren’t many different times, there’s only time. So the present is the present, and although we look back at the past and say the past was the present, in fact that’s not strictly speaking true, because the present is where time exists now. So “when I was climbing a mountain or crossing a river, I was there in that Time. There must have been Time in me"” Or in other words, time and the situation were the one thing. “And I actually exist now so Time could not have departed”. So in a way, the only way we can understand those two sentences is to say that the present contains the past; that is, the past is not back there, but the past is back there, but the only way we can envisage that, is to imagine time being kind of laid on top of each other, rather than spread out. And so he’s trying to do something very difficult, that is, he’s trying to explain something which we can’t conceptualise.
How could that Time of climbing the mountain and crossing the river fail to swallow, and fail to vomit, this Time [now] in the jeweled palace with crimson towers?
So the time of climbing the mountain and crossing the river includes, (swallow) and excludes (vomits) this time now. So what he’s saying is that the time of climbing the mountain and the time now are different and yet not different; they include and yet exclude. So the present includes and yet excludes the past. And we’re helpless to get any further with that, but we can sense it.
C: Sensing being a kind of a trace?
Trace, taste, something. So we sit in Zazen to experience reality which is ungraspable, and we do experience, and it is ungraspable. So although we experience it and taste it and sense it and see a trace of it, yet we can’t grasp it. So when we read his words which throw us this way and that, we can smell something in it, yet we can’t get at it. So we know from our experience that somehow, now, and now, and now, are all here, yet they can’t be. So they can be but they can’t be; we have a complete contradiction there. This is why he writes in contradictions, because that’s our real experience. Then he switches back and says in the process view:
The three heads and eight arms were Time yesterday; the sixteen-foot or eight-foot [golden body] is Time today.
Remember these are quotes from the original poem.
Even so, this Buddhist principle of yesterday and today is just about moments in which we go directly into the mountains and look out across a thousand or ten-thousand peaks; it is not about what has passed.
So in that sentence again he’s trying to say well, we say yesterday and today, but actually it’s all here, but we can’t grasp it but we can sense it. So he uses the metaphor of, “we go directly into the mountains and look out across a thousand or ten-thousand peaks”, as a kind of sensing of infinity. Although we can sense infinity, we can’t pinpoint past, present or future in infinity.
C: The image I have there when he says that you go into the mountains and see a thousand peaks, it’s almost like you see this row of peaks like points of time.
That’s another way to look at it yes.
C: That would be a process view wouldn’t it?
Yes.
C: Because when you’re in the midst of it, and they’re all around you, and there are all these peaks arising, that would not be the process view would it?
Well we can say it includes the process view which is part of reality too.
C: Yes, so it’s a little bit like looking at a kind of perceptual shift, you see a duck or you see a rabbit, you know you can either see one or the other.
Ah yes, an inkblot, yes that’s right. So we can say it’s like moving from two dimensions into three dimensions, so our view of the past, present and future is two dimensional normally, but he wants us to have a three dimensional view…
C: Which is the vertical axis?
If we get into axes we…he wants us to see it as something real here, but we see it as something like that. What the axis would be is… it’s not three dimensional in space, but three dimensional in time if you like.
C: So what about space-time?
Well he says, he identifies in this chapter occurrence and time, or existence and time. And it’s possible, certainly in Master Nagarjuna’s time, the concept of space then was not the same as the concept of space that we have, because we’ve built it, we’ve expanded our conceptual picture of space. But for instance in Master Nagarjuna’s time it was more a gap between two things, was space. Rather than, we think of space, you know, we look back on the Earth and everything, then we go up in planes and we can look down, and in Master Dogen’s time it may have been the same too, but he identifies existence and space and time. So in that original poem, “Sometimes the Earth and space”, if we’re looking at an oibject, the object is in time, the object is time. If we’re looking at space, space is in time, space is time. So he identifies time with every existent thing, including space. And therefore he identifies it with the present, or existence. So existence can be space or it can be an object. I’ll carry on:
The three heads and eight arms pass instantly as my Existence-Time; though they seem to be in the distance, they are [moments of] the present.
“The three heads and eight arms” represents the past here, three sentences ago he said that the three heads and eight arms were time yesterday. So “the three heads and eight arms pass instantly as my Existence-Time; though they seem to be in the distance, they are [moments of] the present.” In other words, although the past seems to have passed, and we’ve left it behind, yet it’s included in the present.
The sixteen- foot or eight-foot [golden body]
Which represents the future.
also passes instantly as my Existence-Time; though it seems to be yonder,
In the future.
it is [moments of] the present.
So again he’s trying to take us away from the linear view and say that everything is here. And that doesn’t mean that the past is the same as the present, or that the future is that same as the present, but the process of what we call “time passing”, doesn't spread things out into the distance and into the future. So past is in the present, future is in the present.
This being so, pine trees are Time, and bamboos are Time.
These are objects which we can see, especially around a temple; pine trees and clumps of bamboo are what you see when you look out of the temple window.
We should not understand only that Time flies. We should not learn that “flying” is the only ability of Time.
That’s the same sentence turned the other way around. And this is his most common tool.
C: What does he mean by “flying”, by time flying?
Passing, flying away. So again he means that the present disappears into the past. So we shouldn’t think only like that.
If we just left Time to fly away, some gaps in it might appear. Those who fail to experience and to hear the truth of Existence-Time do so because they understand [Time] only as having passed.
So those two sentences are saying that time is not only a process, we have to find another way to look at it. And what he’s saying is, if the present just keeps going into the past, we might find some gaps,. And it sounds a bit humorous to say that, but on the other hand it’s a real problem if we actually think logically, that the discreet time passing, actually there is a problem with a gap.
C: Between one moment and the next?
Yes, so if there’s one moment and then the next moment, is there a gap between them? And we can’t reach an answer on that. So “some gaps in it might appear” is not only a humorous you know, have a look and see whether you can see any gaps in time but a statement of a real logical problem. Even in the discreet view, as long as we think that time goes from the present to the past, we have this problem.
Ch: It’s like can you make a line by putting lots of dots down? The answer is you can never.
Is it?
Ch: It’s impossible to make a line out of dots.
Right, I won’t try then.
C: You mean a line would be joined?
Ch: Yes, it’s impossible to make a line out of dots, no matter how many dots you put down.
That’s right yes.
C: There’s a mathematical proof to demonstrate that.
Which makes the calculus a bit suspect doesn’t it? Because you take a lot of infinite points and let their accord between them decrease in length to zero.
Ch: Yes that’s right, that’s alright because you use (cords?)
Oh ok.
C: Because cords are joined?
Ch: Yes, as soon as you’ve got a cord then you can do it. But then yes…
So we shouldn’t “understand time only as having passed”, even if we think about it discreetly, still we have to be careful about thinking about it only as having passed.
To grasp the pivot and express it: all that exists throughout the whole Universe is lined up in a series and at the same time is individual moments of Time.
So he is expressing both of those views together now. And “to grasp the pivot” is quite a common expression he uses throughout the Shobogenzo, it was just a common expression in those times. “Pivot” means like for instance on a fan, the pivot point, the point around which everything rotates. To grasp a pivot is the same as, you know, putting your finger on the button, or something like that.
Ch: So it means to get to the point does it?
To get to the point yes. So he’s quite clearly saying there, both views are valid. But there is a problem with individual moments of time in that sentence, because in English, again it suggests a series, but what he actually says in Japanese or Chinese is, Jiji, that means “momentmoment”. So in translating that into English, we make it sound like a process, but what he puts in Japanese is “momentmoment”. And you can do that in medieval Japanese or Chinese. So we have to be careful not to interpret “individual moments of time” as means back to the discreet series, it doesn’t mean the discreet series it means now, now, now, now now now now now now now, now now.
Because [Time] is Existence-Time, it is my Existence-Time.
We can say that it’s not an abstract thing, “time is existence-time” is not abstract it really means my own life, my own self, my own existence is time.
Existence-Time has the virtue of passing in a series of moments.