Carl Jung’s work with German author Richard Wilhelm on the Chinese classics, the I Ching, The Secret of the Golden Flower and The Book of Consciousness and Life, brought his considerable intuitive intelligence to bear on the “problem” of time.

Ultimately he believed that every moment has a time-signature, a character that confers a common nature to a time-moment regardless of spacial separation. Compare this with Dogen’s notion of Being-time. (See our Life of Dogen — listed in Archives in the sidebar).

Jung termed this coincidental factor Synchronicity to explain the persistently prophetic nature of the I Ching when used as an oracle.

Japanese Zen master, D. T. Suzuki concurs, “As with Buddhists ‘Here’ is ‘Now’ and ‘Now’ is ‘Here’. The idea developed in regard to time also applies to space.”

It is clear that Jung’s mental furniture comprised all the elements necessary for a full participation in the rich philosophies of the East, with their almost total concentration on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

At his home in Switzerland, Jung carved the following words on a block of stone, “Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child.”

We know that time and space can’t exist without each other, and come into existence together, like Siamese twins. What exists in space also exists in the concurrent segment of time, so can’t be separated.

A Life of Bankei by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

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Of the three disciplines of Buddhism, sila (precepts), dhyana (meditation) and prajna (wisdom), the Zen schools were said to give greater emphasis to meditation. While it is certainly true that meditation, or methods of awakening, assumed priority over doctrinal matters, masters like Hui Neng and Dogen were aware that a balanced approach was necessary. Hui Neng believed that dhyana and prajna arose together and were not to be separated. Dogen frequently stressed the precepts to his students, and many of his homilies are variations on the ethical side of Buddhism, though given a practical edge through the belief that morality brings one into alignment with satori, since true moral behaviour is without self.

In the Buddha’s time, there were no sutras and sastras. Most scriptural material was held in the memory of monks. The Buddhist canon had not yet been established. Mind to mind transmission was the order of the day. Zen aimed to come closer to that situation and thus move closer to the Buddha’s intention. When Dogen returned from China he was intent on making zazen the principal means of practice within the Soto school. And since each one of his students was already the Buddha, it was only necessary to act like it; that is to say, to assume the true nature during sitting, standing, walking and lying down. Thus all aspects of life are given a sacramental significance.

Towards the end of his short life (he died of cancer at fifty-three) he became more and more attracted to the life of retreat, away from the turmoil of “the world of dust”. He turned down offers from the Emperor, who granted him an honorific title and ceremonial robe. He died in Kyoto, where he was receiving medical care in the house of a disciple, in 1253.

Master Dogen provides the literary, contemplative side of Zen. Thus he complements the contributions of Hui Neng and Rinzai, and fleshes out the Zen corpus into a coherent whole. His amazingly quirky, but astonishingly insightful writings are one of the glories of spiritual literature. Only now are they beginning to be fully understood by modern-day thinkers, religious and philosophical, who are taking a great interest in this 13th Century Japanese sage.

The work, however, was never meant to be set in concrete, or to form the basis for a “system” of thought. Dogen’s purpose was to use words interactively, directly in the consciousness of his readers. His lines are movement, not stasis; life, not theology. His bequest is enlightenment, not scripture.

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

The Einsteinian notion of space-time, a continuum in which time represents the fourth dimension, was apparently anticipated by Dogen, for whom time was inseparable from “being”. Time, of course, can only exist within a context of space, since it is a function of movement. But since being, or put another way, consciousness, is self-identical with space, time itself is inseparable from being.

Dogen said: “So-called time of being means time is already being; all being is time…Self is arrayed as the whole world. You should perceive that each point, each thing of this whole world is an individual time.”

Shunryu Suzuki elaborates this point: “Moment after moment each one of us repeats this activity (of breathing). Here there is no idea of time and space. Time and space are one. We do things one after the other, that is all. At one o’clock you will eat your lunch. To eat lunch is itself one o’clock. You will be somewhere, but that place cannot be separated from one o’clock.” To create an idea of a place separate from one o’clock, as when we say “I wish I had gone somewhere else for lunch,” is playing mind-games, weaving illusion.

Dogen’s ideas on being and time, which have aroused a lot of interest among modern thinkers, arise from his basic theme of the non-dual suchness of the world, the unity of being. All dimensions and systems of measurement, therefore, are just mentally-created facets of the one central reality, and ultimately are indistinguishable from each other and the underlying reality realm.

The ramifications of this temporal system include the concept of all things existing in their own “being-time” for all time. Thus at this instant you and this time are identical. But you also participate in the whole structure of being-time, which is timeless. This means that you have always existed, and past moments are still in existence, but exclusively within their own being-times. The notion resembles a roll of movie film, where individual frames can be observed and put into motion as being-time. However, the whole drama exists timelessly as the reel of film.

Dogen also points out that time can seem to be moving in various ways, from past to present to future, or the reverse, depending on the standpoint of the observer. In this he seems to be looking forward to Quantum Theory and other developments of mathematical relativity.

A number of current writers are making the connection between modern science and ancient Eastern philosophies, for example, Fritjof Capra in his interesting account, The Tao of Physics. Despite such ideas, Dogen was never diverted by mind-games and always remained firmly in the Buddhistic realm of direct experience. Words to him were only fingers pointing to the moon. Never the moon itself.

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A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

When Dogen returned to Japan after his enlightenment experience in China he did not at first settle into a formal career. He was offered thirteen locations for establishing his own temple but not one satisfied him. Eventually he was installed at a temple outside Kyoto where he began to teach his own version of the Chinese Ts’ao Tung (Japanese Soto) school.

By dropping the cultural forms associated with more esoteric schools of Buddhism, Dogen was able to present a very pure form of practice, close to the original methods of the Buddha. He emphasised not so much that everyone has Buddha-nature, but that everyone is Buddha-nature. This non-dualism enabled him to profess a very direct path to enlightenment; in fact, so direct that the candidate merely assumes the mantle and posture of the Buddhahood he knows he already possesses. As Shunryu Suzuki puts it: “this is the sudden way, because when your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life is enlightenment.”

Over the next few years he began to lay down the framework of teaching that we know today as the Soto school of Zen. Its basic tenets were those of Bodhidharma, direct pointing to reality by-passing names and form, transmission of enlightenment from mind to mind, and the assumption that each is already enlightened, is Buddha-mind.

His methods were largely psychological, though arising directly from metaphysical experience, and, given his own nature, more intellectually-based than those of the Rinzai school. By this time he had designated two successors, Ejo and Gi’in, and had begun his long-term literary work, the Shobogenzo.

Finally, after much fund-raising and great difficulty in finding a suitable site, Dogen was able formally to open his own monastery, Eiheiji, in modern Fukui, ninety miles or so north of Kyoto, and some 4000 feet above sea level. Today, Eiheiji is one of the two main temples of the Soto school in Japan. It has around seventy beautifully crafted buildings set among giant cedars and a crashing waterfall.

Suzuki Roshi recalls some of the atmosphere of Eiheiji when he was a monk there early in the 20th Century. Just before you enter the monastery, he wrote, there is a small bridge called Half-Dipper Bridge. Whenever Dogen took water from the river he would use only half, returning the rest to the river as a mark of respect to the water. The monks still observe this practice today, not from any idea of economy, but because: “When we feel the beauty of the river, when we are at one with the water, we intuitively do it Dogen’s way. It is our true nature to do so. But if your true nature is covered by ideas of economy or efficiency, Dogen’s way makes no sense.”

By the same token, he thought, our modern environmental problems will not be solved by scientific interventions, but only when we resume the perspective of our true non-dual nature. To be at one with the Earth, means we replace whatever we do not need and respect the eco-system that provides it.

Now Read Part 5