Read an Excerpt

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.”