"Uji" - Being/Time

[tariki]

Having waffled in The Cafe, here is an excerpt from "Uji"....

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

Dōgen Zenji, Uji

I think of D.T.Suzuki who speaks of an eschatology of "the present moment".

In the West, time is often understood in a completely linear way. Often we can simply end up living for tomorrow, a life then of anticipations and epitaphs. Never of the present - which is all moments. 

 

[tariki]

I have read about five translations of Dogen's "Genjokoan" (the actualisation of reality) They vary greatly. 

I have tracked down another translation of the excerpt from "Uji" (Being/Time) given in my first post.

 

Here it is:-

You reckon time only as something that does nothing but pass by. You do not understand it as something not yet arrived. Although our various understandings are time, there is no chance for them to be drawn in by time. There has never yet been anyone who supposed time to be coming and going who has penetrated to see it as being-time dwelling in its dharma-position. What chance is there, then, for a time to arrive when you will break through the barrier into total emancipation? Even if someone did know that dwelling-position, who would be able truly to give an utterance that preserved what he had thus gained? And even were someone able to utter such an utterance at will, he could still not avoid groping to make his original face immediately present.

What are the implications of this? Do the two translations come to the very same thing? if so, what is this "thing"?

Or are they two separate "things"?

 

"We are what we understand"

 

The Word as Text and the Living Word.