Each Moment Is the Universe
by Dainin Katagiri
It’s easy to regard time as a commodity—we even speak of
"saving" or "spending" it. We often regard it as an enemy, when we feel it slipping away before we’re ready for time to be up. The Zen view of time is radically different than that: time is not something separate from our life; rather, our life is time. Understand this, says Dainin Katagiri Roshi, and you can live fully and freely right where you are in each moment.
Katagiri bases his teaching on Being Time, a text by the most famous of all Zen masters, Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), to show that time is a creative, dynamic process that continuously produces the universe and everything in it—and that to understand this is to discover a gateway to freedom from the dissatisfactions of everyday life.
He guides us in contemplating impermanence, the present moment, and the ungraspable nature of past and future. He discusses time as part of our inner being, made manifest through constant change in ourselves and our surroundings. And these ideas are by no means metaphysical abstractions: they can be directly perceived by any of us through meditation.
From Chapter 2: The Search for Meaning and Security
Buddhism teaches us to face the truth of impermanence and to accept the fact that life consists of moments that appear and disappear at superspeed. But it’s not so easy to do this. We want to believe in the continuity of our lives so that we can say, "Yes, I exist!" So instead of looking directly at time itself, we try to escape the cruel fact that impermanence constantly cuts off our lives. Unconsciously, our minds decorate time with many ornaments in order to make our lives more secure and meaningful.
Using his own life as an example of this, in the Tenzokyokun (Instructions to the Cook), Dogen Zenji tells how, as a young monk traveling in China, he once encountered an old priest serving in the office of tenzo, or head cook. Dogen felt the tenzo was working too hard for a person of his age, so he asked him, “Reverend sir, why don’t you do zazen or read the koans of ancient persons? What is the use of working so hard as a tenzo priest?” These questions come from Dogen’s sensing the unbearable gap between his mind and time, and wanting relief. They show that the young Dogen does not know how to just be present and live comfortably in the transient stream of time. Instead, he is trying to make his monk’s life meaningful.
If you become a monk, you ask: What is the purpose of monks? If you become a human being, you ask: What is the purpose of human beings? But no matter how long you try to follow a meaningful purpose in life, impermanence always cuts it off. When you realize this, you really wonder: Why do we have to live with effort? Why don’t we just live as we like?
Dogen was looking for meaning when he went to China to find an answer to the question: If we are already buddhas, why is it that we have to do spiritual practice? That is really Dogen’s question when he asks, “What is the use of working so hard as a tenzo priest?” He thinks the old man should forget about daily living and just do zazen or study the writings of the patriarchs. But Dogen is just creating ornaments.
Since human beings have been born in this world, we have decorated our lives with lots of ornaments in order to make time more meaningful. We develop remarkable civilizations of culture, politics, beauty, and pleasure. We create intellectual disciplines such as history, economics, science, philosophy, or psychology, and then we believe that they make life meaningful.
Maybe we believe that a spiritual life can help us find meaning. So we create ideas such as God, Buddha, universal energy, the last judgment and paradise after death, theology, mythology, or morality and ethics, and then we try to depend on them to make us feel that life is worth living. Century after century we have done this, trying to find real spiritual security through making time meaningful. But still there is no solution, because they are all just ornaments. We still ask: How can you make human life meaningful? What is spiritual security?
We believe that we can make time meaningful, because we usually suppose that time is running on a road from here to there, toward a certain destination, from 12:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. We believe there is a stream of time that flows continuously from the past through the present to the future, so we say that there is one beginning and one end to this world. Then we think that time goes from a beginning to an end with a particular purpose, and we expect that we can make progress and feel satisfied as a result. But if you are seeking to know time in its naked nature, you cannot believe this because time is not a succession of constantly connected moments going toward a certain destination; in the transient stream of time, moments appear and disappear. Impermanence constantly cuts off your life, so every moment is separate.
I don’t want to reject ornaments. There’s nothing wrong with science, culture, and religion. Ornaments are important. Without ornaments you cannot exist. But if you take those concepts and ideas away, what’s left? Just the transient stream of time! No matter how long you try to make your life meaningful, you cannot find a way to do it unless you face the original nature of time. So before you use ornaments, make those ornaments more meaningful by seeing deeply into human life based on time. Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security. That is why in Buddhism we don’t try to escape from impermanence; we face time itself in our daily living.
Dogen went to China to study Zen Buddhism in order to enhance his life: to accomplish the main purpose of his life as a Zen monk and to make his life meaningful. Those are wonderful ornaments, but this is not the total, overall picture of human life. There is still something you cannot find that way because there are many things that cannot be made into ornaments. That is why the old monk said to Dogen, "Good foreigner, you seem to be ignorant of the true training and character of Buddhism." In other words, you don’t know the real meaning of Buddhist practice or the real character of Buddhist scriptures. This gave Dogen a really big shock.
Later that year, the tenzo visited Dogen, and Dogen asked him, "What are words?" The tenzo said, "One, two, three, four, five." This answer indicates decorating life with ornaments in order to make it meaningful, instead of facing the real nature of time, where there are no concepts, no ideas, nothing to say. The tenzo is telling Dogen: Look at how you decorate daily living with lots of ornaments! Then Dogen asked, "What is practice?" The old monk said, "Nothing is closed in the universe." Saying that nothing is closed in the universe leads you to touch the core of your life, which is always present before you try to bring any concept or idea into it. It is saying: Do zazen! Dogen was really impressed by the old monk’s answers and wrote, "I owe it entirely to him that I could, to some extent, grasp the true meaning of the character and discipline of Buddhism."
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