Living in this world of make believe it is hard to convince myself that most of the illusory manifestations that pops up within and without myself, are intrinsically not real and how much harder it is to convince others. What is real and what is not kinda overlaps and sometimes one gets lost in them and forgets what the practice is all about when it comes to putting life into perspective. Putting life into perspective, what that even mean? Life happens moment to moment as far as I have been alive and there was never a doubt in my mind that the next will happen one way or another and the last moment will never ever return except as my memory or upon my reflection. A friend once told me that I have no plans for the future in my life, I simply live without any sense of planning my next move except off course for the simple necessities of daily chores and routine survival, like doing the dishes and cooking the dinner. Even then I just had to ask my daughter before I sat at the computer what i should make for dinner tonight; I had no plan of making Kailan, (kinda spinach like veggie) chicken but there it is as she suggested, Kailan chicken it is. My life as I am beginning to discover has no real perspective to it to speak of and never had as it seems events simply happens and I simply respond as best I can moment to moment.
Just finished reading "For The Time Being'', a novel by Ruth Ozeki and at the end of the novel and it's worth quoting here,
"The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can't understand what it is to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, you have to understand what a moment is.
In my dream I asked her, What on earth is a moment?
A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,o99,980 moments.
When I looked up afterward I discovered that this was the exact number cited by Zen Master Dogen in his master work the Shobogenzo, ( the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)
Numerals resist the eye, so let me spell it out in words: six billion, four hundred million, ninety-nine thousand and eighty. That's how many moments Zen Master Dogen posited are in one day and after rattled off the number old Jiko snapped her fingers. Her fingers were crazily bent and twisted with arthritis, so she was not very good at snapping, but she somehow got the point across.
Please try it, she said. Did you snap? Because if you did that snaps equals sixty-five moments.
The granularity of the Zen view of time becomes clear if you do the math or you can just take Jiko's word for it...
if start snapping your fingers now an continue snapping 98,463,,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen, and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak when you finish up your snapping 98,463,077 snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of s single day of your life....
That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.
And just like that, you die."
Appendix A: Zen Moments.
#ruthozeki, #shobogenzo, #zenmasterdogen, #thetimebeing
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