time transcendence-acceptance in zen buddhism

American Academy of Religion

Time Transcendence-Acceptance in Zen BuddhismAuthor(s): Winston L. KingSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp. 217-228Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1460969 .

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Time Transcendence-Acceptance in Zen Buddhism

WINSTON L. KING

AS A context for this discussion I shall first sketch briefly three of the main methods of dealing with time within major religious traditions. This is no mere tour deforce; for since all religions seek to transcend

time in some manner or other, the differences between them and Zen at this

point may throw some light on the latter. At least the following types of

religious time-ideology may be distinguished: the primitive immanental; the Hindu-Buddhist cyclical; the Jewish-Christian-Muslim linear-historical -

though in historical actuality these types have not always been maintained in their purity nor been uninfluenced by one other.'

I

Primitive time-sense on the whole is non-historical. There are of course

many primitive myths of the origin of man and his world, and also a vivid awareness of change and recurrence in seasonal and human life-cycles. Such themes indeed comprise the central mode of time-awareness for primitives; for it is the seasonal and life cycles by and large that are incorporated into the primitive ritual and symbolic structures. But a sense of world-ending, according to either the cyclical mode or the linear one, is here quite rare or

functionally unimportant. What, then, is the primitive religious mode of

dealing with time's relativities and destructiveness, i. e., of seeking to transcend time in an existentially significant manner? We may term it qualified immanentalism. Where any true sense of a final historical goal or even of a

grand cyclic ending is lacking, time-awareness must be concentrated in the

present. Thus, there are here no sharp dichotomies between a sacred past, a blessed future, and a secular present; the eternal realities are presently present, available in traditional ritualized forms. For the primitive, all times can be ritually transformed into sacrally present time.

Yet this is not an absolutely immanental mysticism, for two reasons: (1) There is an awareness that within the seasonal cycle some periods are

WINSTON L. KING is Professor of History of Religions at Vanderbilt University and Literary Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. This article is based on a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Academy in Chicago, October 19-22, 1967.

1 A question may be raised concerning certain intermediate types, such as Chinese

yang-yin dualism. For other purposes such distinctions may be validly made; here yang-yin is roughly included in the cyclical type, and the Taoist view is considered immanental.

217



218 WINSTON L. KING

more blessed (because more valuable) than others. The season of sowing and the act of impregnating with growth-potential are cherished for the sake of the subsequent fruiting and harvest seasons. And this same principle applies to the human life-cycle as well. (2) There seems also to be some sense that primordial time - as portrayed in the myths of that Beginning when the ordered patterns of present life were permanently set - is in some sense superior to present time. In primitivism, though not as sharply emphasized as in the Judeo-Christian mythos of Eden, such superiority is nevertheless

definitely present. Thus, the rituals in which Potency is made fully immanent seem to take the primordial order as a model. Or, perhaps better, these rituals seek to make the primordial fully and savingly present in the present act.

In the Hindu-Buddhist cyclical tradition, there is a strong sense of the destructive power of time over all that human beings hold precious. This is epitomized in the words of Krishna to Arjuna:

I am come as Time, the waster of peoples, Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin. All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand -

no matter -

By me these men are slain already.2

Indeed, it might be said that this poignant sense of time as "the waster of

peoples" is most dramatically expressed in, and intensified by, the whole cyclical Hindu-Buddhist view that completely relativizes historical time.3 All time, even eternities of it, finally passes. Whether we consider a second or an eon, one is as fleeting as the other, depending entirely upon our choice of time-scales. So also all times are repeated endlessly. Thus, nowhere in time - past, present, or future - is there any time or time-conditioned structure that is unique, and hence holy. Yet there is a relativistic preference for some time-periods over others, perhaps not fundamentally dissimilar to the primitive preference for primordial time. For in both Hinduism and Buddhism the beginning of any cycle is always assumed to be better in every way than its ending, and better than our present and decadent portion of it. For example, according to the Hindu Puranas, at the age's beginning social dharma was pure and undefiled, and every caste was in its proper place and

harmoniously performing its socio-religious function. And according to the Buddhist Dhiga-Nikaya, inhabitants of newly formed universes are purely radiant, morally upright, and live for 80,000 years. There is also that nos- talgic Buddhist "remembrance" of the wonderful days of the Buddha's life- time, when arahats were numbered in the thousands. Nevertheless, as noted, the "goodness" or "badness" of any epoch is only relative - for it will be endlessly repeated for every living individual and every existent world until

2 The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isher- wood, New York: New American Library, 1954, p. 94.

3 As Huston Smith has suggested to me, this relativity applies only to world-historical time, not to the individual whose destiny is chronologically cumulative.



TIME TRANSCENDENCE-ACCEPTANCE IN ZEN BUDDHISM 219

Time, the Destroyer, is finally escaped in some absolute dimension. Until then, relative goods are only relatively good, and good only as they minister to that escape. The intrinsically good states of body-mind are those that

qualitatively participate in the ultimate Timelessness. In the Jewish-Christian-Muslim sense of a linear-historical time, a "real"

time marches on to a final goal at history's end, or even "beyond" it. Yet this

goal, even when "beyond" history, incorporates in itself the good and evil

wrought within and by means of historical time-structures. For each moment is inherently unique in its contribution to the final eternity, never repeating what has gone before - despite such a world-weary lament as that of Ecclesiastes.

However, while the contrast of linear to cyclical time may thus seem to be absolute, there are two or three curious similarities of the linear view to the cyclical pattern: (1) Even in linear time all present time is relatively evil. It is evil relative to its beginning. God looked upon his creation and saw that it was very good - but it has never been in that condition since. Further, it is evil relative to the final state of things - the Messianic Age, the New Jerusalem, or life in Paradise. (2) Perhaps linear time is also implicitly evil in some absolute sense. For those final goals toward which all human history moves are seen as irreversible when once attained. Thus, though change as

producing novelty may be blessed by Jewish-Christian progressivists, these final states as traditionally conceived have no place for change - not even Hell, which is an unchanging changefulness. (3) In good cyclical fashion, the final linear-historical time-denying state is much like the condition in or before the beginning of time. The New Jerusalem and Paradise are the Garden of Eden with modern and urban improvements. The aboriginal God-man

harmony is restored and all the time-engendered, divisive dichotomies are forever destroyed. Historical progression has at best contributed only a few

peripheral features. Once primordial goodness has been regained, let history perish forever!

II

Where does Zen's pattern of salvational time-transcendence fit into this context? Two likenesses may be noted immediately: (1) It is obvious that for all its rejection of tradition, Zen has in some degree inherited the Hindu- Buddhist craving for a present experience of an absolutely time-transcending awareness, which is the earnest of man's true and ultimate condition. (There are equally important differences, to be noted later.) (2) There is a strong affinity here with the immanentalism of the primitive. In this respect Zen may be called a modified primitivism. Like primitive primitivism, Zen seeks a pure non-temporal experience within the temporal itself, not apart from it.

With this brief introduction we may now analyze more specifically the Zen philosophy of time. That philosophy is part and parcel of its basic and defining attitude toward all life and experience. It would say: If "time-



220 WINSTON L. KING

awareness" be taken to mean conceptualized divisions and distinctions within

temporal experience, then time-awareness is evil. Philosophically speaking, there is in Zen considerable similarity to the Bergsonian view, namely, that when we attempt to conceptualize time by dividing it into units for measure- ment or by thinking of it as past-present-future, we destroy its flowing existential unity and chop it up into dessicated and unreal fragments.

However, Zen is not so much worried about philosophies of time as such, or about establishing a mere theory of free will, as it is concerned to counter- act the existential effects of all time-dichotomizing of any sort - whether as

sacred-profane, good-bad, subjective-objective, or present-past-future - and to achieve integral subjective freedom. For to dichotomize time in any way is to subjectivize it in the wrong way. It is to center all time-distinctions around one's own narrow, space-time individuality. By the same token, it is to fail to realize the radically subjective but non-individual dimension of time- awareness.

When centered around the false identity-sense of man, time distinctions come to be instruments of a very subtle but powerful kind of enslavement of True Self to false self. To give a few examples: Inner time versus outer time, mental time versus body-time, my time versus others' time - all these distinctions separate me from the great flowing unity of that cosmos of which I am an integral part. Thereby I become totally immured within my prison- house of false identity. Or one may divide time into sacred and secular time

by virtue of what one does therein. Thus does sutra-saying or meditation- time become opposed to sleeping-, eating-, garden-hoeing time. This again is a false, unspiritual institutionalization of our time-experience.

Perhaps the key point, for both Zen effort and our evaluation of Zen time-

experience, is the sequential aspect of time. Ought time be divided existen-

tially into past, present, and future --or better, present and non-present time? The Zen answer is, No!4 For not only does such a distinction lead to that already-condemned abstraction of time-units from out of the true ex-

periential flow of time; it also results in the devaluation and emasculation of the only time that is really at our disposal: the present moment.

This criticism of ordinary time-sense is, to my mind, especially pertinent, with regard to the traditional religious time-philosophies already noted. Let us observe their implications with regard to present time. Do we speak of a

holy past - those times of pure doctrine and fervent belief in the days of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha? Or even of a primordial Garden of Eden? All such schemes denigrate the present and put us into a paralyzing straitjacket of interpretation of it and reaction to it in terms of some impos- sibly idealized past. Thus, by idolizing the past one can never have the present in its fullness of possibility.

4 Does Zen ever say a flat "No" to anything? It seems to be against dualism at every point - but in a non-dualistic manner!




What are we to say of religious views that look to the future for their vindication in some final-absolute state of blessedness? This, too, results in a devaluation of the present. For in all apocalyptic visions of historical realization, every future moment is, in one sense at least, better than this present moment, because it is at least one moment nearer the Final Blessedness. This is especially true even when we think of those last evil days immediately before the final apocalypse when (according to the books of Daniel and Revelation) there will be distress and suffering such as the world has not known up to that time. For such distresses, being the birth pangs of the new age, are a necessary and blessed evil. This observation is borne out by the scarcely concealed rejoicing over the present evils of the world by contem- porary apocalypticists - not because they revel in our distresses, but because the greater our distresses the nearer that blessed end Event.

What is the logic of all this for action in the present - especially if the end Event is near at hand? A holding-action of some sort is the best we can achieve. Since the issue is predetermined, what we do has no real importance or effect, save perhaps upon our own individual destinies. If no street is worthy to be compared with the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, why bother at all about paving our streets?

Obviously, Zen will have no part in this idolatrously paralyzing concern for some future golden age. Indeed, it rejects even the mild eschatology expressed in the Buddhist theory of the worsening ages that must follow the death of a particular historical Buddha. The eschatological myth of older ages that the cosmos must someday necessarily be burned up in a cosmic fire also entered into Buddhism. Buddhists, however, in their interpretation of this myth have always accepted it on the dimension of religious existence and transformed the idea of the end of the world into an existential problem. Viewed from this standpoint, this world as it is . . . is, as such, the world ablaze in the all-consuming cosmic conflagration. The end of the world is an actuality here and now, as a fact and fate directly underneath our very feet.6

A further implication of this is the Zen rejection of the traditional Hindu- Buddhist cyclical view of time. This latter, relativistically better-than-now view of the primordial days of this present universe is only slightly less ob- jectionable than harder-line Christian creationism and eschatology. Further, the traditional Hindu-Buddhist type of escape from the world of time into some absolute called Nirvana or Brahman is no proper antidote. To set up some Absolute is to create a fatal dichotomy between realities and appear- ances, absolutes and relativities, eternity and time. Here, as in other time- dichotomies, the present is devalued. At best, it is viewed as strictly instru- mental to the attainment of eternity; at worst, it is a demonic and illusory shadow-shape. When the present is lived under the aspect of a static eternity, it is not fully, freely, or creatively lived.

6 "Science and Zen," The Eastern Buddhist, New Series, I, 1 (September, 1965), 88.



222 WINSTON L. KING

Thus, Zen rejects all the traditional religious modes of dealing with time, including some Buddhist varieties, because they dichotomize existence at the

expense of the immediate present. Hence, as suggested above, Zen is in some respects closer to primitive immanentalism than to any of the great historic religious traditions in its quest for pure, non-conceptualized, non-fragmented time-experience. But it lacks the slightest interest in primitive earth-beginning myths; such are without existential significance for Zen. Its own primordial- time expressions, such as "What was your original face before you were born?," have absolutely no time-sequential significance. They represent only a fully immanental sense of the human being's identity with the eternal world- process, in which there is neither before nor after but only Now.

Obviously, then, the only sacred time for Zen is the split-second present in which we now live. It is so "holy" above all other times because it is the only time we have at our disposal. To go a step further: It is "holy" because it is the only real time - all other "times" being conceptual non-realities. It seems to me that the Buddhist theoretical "point-instant" sense of reality, distinguished by Stcherbatsky in his Buddhist Logic, is here existentially appropriated. The only reality, not merely in metaphysical theory but in actual experience, is here-now. We participate in Reality fully only by here- now living. Further, be it noted again, this here-now is a psychological- existential one, not a sequential-mathematical one. It is not to be conceptually set over against, or distinguished from, other kinds of time, such as past or present. It is to be totally lived with all one's powers of mind, heart, and body.

Such rejection of all the usual modes of dealing with time, whether linear, cyclical, or modified-immanental, would seem to throw us directly into the arms of the mystics, into a completely "timeless" trance-state kind of awareness. We must come back to this point, but at this juncture one important qualification should be mentioned. While Zen has been accused by eminent authorities of being a form of mysticism - the same accusation having been vigorously denied by D. T. Suzuki - in its time-awareness it must be considered at the very least a very special type of mysticism. For it aims at no heavenly visions, no stigmata, no ineffable, supra-temporal state of awareness - not even at the jhanic states or the nirodha-samapatti of early Bud- dhism. If there is a time-transcendence here, it is accomplished in the midst of time-experienced entities and particularities, even by means of them, and not in timeless, thingless, ecstasy.

III

We must now turn very specifically to Zen's own method of dealing with time, in order both to define it and to question whether it does indeed transcend the sacred-profane distinction, as Zen seeks to do everywhere and in everything. The matter may be put into context and focus in the following way. Zen experience, at least ideally in enlightenment (satori), seeks to evade both horns of the time dilemma: its segmentation into conceptualized




fragments (as in most philosophies and in the historically minded religions), and the experience of timeless blankness (as in mysticism). Dr. Hisamatsu writes: "Although Po-Ch'ang Huai-lai said 'Do not remember anything at all,' and Huang-po said 'subject and object are both forgotten,' this is not a blank loss of consciousness. On the contrary: This is rather Supreme Aware- ness in which there is not the slightest unawareness or unclarity."6

From this we gather that Zen seeks to keep both the transcendent and the immanent, the absolute and the conditioned, the universal and the particular, the temporal moment and the eternal Unity together in one integral consciousness that locates itself in our existential present. The reality of neither side in any of these dichotomies is to be sacrificed to the other, or even sub- ordinated to it. Thus come into being all those epigrammatic Zen expressions about seeing the three million worlds dancing on the tip of one's finger, or finding the whole cosmos in a drop of dew or in the down of a small bird's

wing. This view is further expressed in the conviction that the True Buddha

Nature is within us, indeed is us; and that satori is only the existential realization that we are - in our very living ordinariness and without waiting for some personal transformation or future age - that Buddha-nature itself. We are Buddhas in the midst of our daily life. Or to put it in other words - somewhat parallel to the Alice-in-wonderland world, wherein one must run with all his might to stay where he is - in Zen, after one has run with all his might and arrived at satori, he finds that he is where (and what) he always was already. It is not the utter strangeness of the new life that opens to him, but its utter familiarity, as though he had known it forever. In such an awareness, it would seem, past-present-future distinctions are existentially irrele- vant and hence transcended, though awareness of them is not blanked out (in contrast to the mystic) in a timeless, identityless trance. Thus, we

may define Zen time-transcendence as the existential realization of time's irrelevance, ever and always.

The same thought may be put into other words. To most time-conscious beings the future is terrifying because of its ambiguity. On the one hand, the future may turn out to be terrifyingly different from the present - so much so that all present familiarities and securities of any sort are destroyed. This is the threat of time as the grim antagonist of all things human, achieving its climactic and final action in death. But, on the other hand, the future may be terrifyingly similar to the present - so much so that it seems but a replay of what has been happening forever (especially if one believes in endless re- births). Hence, the basic quality of man's hope for the future is one of a

reassuring familiarity mixed in proper proportion with novelty. Zen would tell us that in such hopefulness we are victims of a whip-

6 Shin-ichi Hisamatsu, "The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness," Philosophical Studies of Japan, II, n.d., p. 73.



224 WINSTON L. KING

sawing action of the past-future dichotomy, and therefore can never fully attend to the present, torn as we are by regret for the past and apprehension about the future. By contrast, a satori-awareness that lives fully in the present has the best of both past and future values. The reassuring sense of familiarity with what a man truly is and indeed has always been, is found in each tem-

poral moment as one comes to it in post-satori fashion. It is like encountering an old friend in each new moment. There is no apprehension about the unex-

pected, about the appearance of the half-feared, half-desired element. Each new moment is part and parcel of that same living flow of reality of which we are living parts - for we are not separate from it, nor it from us. Further, as we encounter the future no subconscious ghosts from our own pasts or

depths can haunt us. The total depth of our self and awareness, the agelong reality that is our True Nature, is all here totally present to our present level of consciousness in its full depth. With satori we are become Buddhas, with, so to speak, a million lifetimes of past experience to call upon.

At the same time there is an infinite freshness and newness about every moment. For from the post-satori view, the novel particularity of each new moment is as real as its familiar eternity. And when such moments, when

every moment as it comes, is fully accepted in all its present reality, and is neither dreaded nor anticipated, then such moments live in all their fresh, creative beauty. One is then able to accept them in their fullness and to give them his own fullness in return.

IV

We may pause now for breath in this poetic flow - which probably no

genuine Zen devotee would accept as an authentic portrayal of Zen - and come to a final question. If such a one-in-everything and everything-in-one awareness is allowed as possible or indeed as actually achieved - I speak from outside it - do we have herein a genuine transcendence of temporal dimension in any such way as to confound all the usual sacred-profane distinctions? I presume that this question could be put as follows: On the one hand, is Zen satori a "religious" experience by our usual standards, in which some "sacred" reality or experience is discovered over against some "secular" one, or is satori a reality by virtue of which all other experiences become secular or common? On the other hand, if we are to attempt to describe Zen satori - in which all times and all experiences become equally sacred - as

"religious," must we then redefine "religion?" Or, more easily, should we exclude Zen as imperfectly religious or even non-religious? The question may be cast in still another form, which I prefer: Granted that Zen finds its existential center in a present living, and presently-lived Now as its Holy Center, is there anything that we can set over against it as the profane?

We may explore this question of Here-Now as a Holy Center - pos- sibly over against some "profane" periphery--in three contexts: (1) the holy experience as seen from the outside; (2) the experience as seen from the inside, if possible; and (3) the ontological implications of the experience.




1. With regard to the first context, where an outsider observes another who has the holy experience, there is a clear time-sequence in terms of a

before Holy-Nowness and an after Holy-Nowness. Indeed, Zen goes out of its way to indicate that so far as the usual view of human life is concerned - that of a man being born, living in time, and disappearing from

time-space - there is a distinct moment at which satori-consciousness breaks

upon a man. All the accounts we have of such experiences very sharply pin- point them, much as some Christian conversion-experiences have been pin- pointed in time and space. "I was talking to the master and he pulled my nose," or "I barked my shin on a sharp corner," or "the scrape of my hoe on a stone in the garden penetrated my consciousness - and when this hap- pened I was suddenly enlightened." So report our witnesses. Indeed this is one of the major marks of Zen "orthodoxy": the experience must come sud-

denly or it is not Zen.7 It is like a stone striking the surface of a quiet pool (of one's former consciousness) and sending the whole of it into shivering ripples, as Suzuki has described it. It is like looking at a picture-puzzle and

suddenly seeing its heretofore hidden secret. And having once seen it that

way, one can never look at it in the old way. Thus, though the experiencer himself may now transcend time-conscious-

ness - even though he reports that he is but rediscovering what he always "knew" (that trees are trees, mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers, or that his ordinary self is a Buddha-self and his most ordinary action is in- stinct with holy isness) - yet it may have taken him five, ten, or fifteen

years of "ordinary" time to realize this. The outsider will of necessity say, despite the paradoxes of the language of faith, that in those years of strenuous effort, the experiencer of satori has become a different man. Or, Zen-wise, he is now differently the same as he was before, or the samely different, whichever you will. That moment when he first broke through into this new Holy- Now awareness is to be sharply distinguished from all the time that went before, even though that time has now become non-time for him and is swallowed up in the presently-living present. So also, by implication, even

though in the language of faith "all men are now Buddhas," actually they do not have the self-same Buddha-awareness of the one who has broken through to a new awareness of his and their Buddhahood. Indeed, to be as paradoxical as Zen, we may say that only by virtue of realizing that other men, unknow-

ingly, are Buddhas, and that a man has himself always been a Buddha unbe- known to himself, does he in fact become a Buddha. But it happens in time to a particular time-space enmeshed entity called a human being.

2. What then is to be said of the state of realization of Holy-Nowness itself? This has already been described in part. Is there aught to set over against it from the inside view? (All my conclusions must of course be tenta- tive, as arrived at from the outside.) There would seem to be some unevenness

'Huston Smith has reminded me that Rinzai Zen makes more of the suddenness of satori than does S6t5 Zen. I acknowledge that I have used Rinzai materials for the most part.



226 WINSTON L. KING

of post-satori experience, if we read between the lines. Some writers glorify the first experience, suggesting that not every moment of life thereafter was lived on the same glorious plane. Others, by contrast, are in fact quite sparing in their use of the word satori. Or they say, "I had one or two major ones, and a dozen or so lesser ones." Yet this again suggests that some experiences of Holy-Nowness are more intensive than others. But whichever of these flavors of witness is chosen, many would agree that though there is an initial and distinctive breakthrough experience - distinctive because of its existential and temporal priority - there are subsequently additional distinctive and deepening experiences. The solving of the first koan is not all that is re- quired for Here-Now awareness to reach its fullness. Further koans must be solved as well. Indeed, one's own existence itself must become a self-solving koan.

This inevitably reminds us of reports of mystical phenomena from other

religions: the experience of certain high points of ecstasy, which are unlike other experiences in their illuminative intensity and which, even though abstracted from the flow of ordinary experience, are regenerative of that experience. Their spiritual substance can be fed back transformingly into the totality of ordinary living. This raises the question of whether Zen in its Here-Now

experiences, integral to the lived time-space order and not abstracted from it, really differs in kind from such mystical experiences or only in degree. Since both types of experience, if genuine, transform daily consciousness by their occurrence, and since in their natural psychosomatic rhythms both are somewhat set apart in time from the rest of life by their degree of lucidity or intensity, is the seeming, transcendent abstractedness of other mystical experiences entirely different from Zen in-the-midst-of-time transcendencies? If not, in Zen there is, nevertheless, at least the more holy and the less holy, even if not the profane.

We may attack the same problem from a slightly different, but still inside, perspective. We say that mystical consciousness is timeless in its most intensive experiences; hence, it achieves one type of non-duality. But by the same token Zen would say that this is a false (because abstracted) non-duality, one that creates another false duality in its contrast to "ordinary" experience. By contrast, the Zen-experience, being solidly in time-space, indeed in terms of time-space, is of quite a different sort in its time-transcendence. For it transcends time by fully giving itself to time, yet always to the living flow of being-experienced time that is set over against nothing of any sort. Further, Zen keeps the temporal and the non-temporal together in the same act of consciousness. Time is both real and unreal, a moment and an eternity simul- taneously, and in the identical act of awareness. Has time, then, been existentially transcended for the satori-modified consciousness?

We may note that the above suggestion of a greater or lesser intensity, purity, or depth of such awareness at some points still applies, so that some moments become "holier" than others. More importantly, it is implied that in the Zen-awareness of time there is an abstraction of a different sort, but




equally an abstraction and hence a duality. This abstraction may be put in the form of a question: How does Zen-consciousness deal with the past and the future, those relics of a former state of awareness, those realities that on one plane of existence are integral to the psychosomatic organism in which Here-Now awareness takes place? If, after the analogy of living in a flowing stream of Here-Now immediacy, one disregards both past and future, shutting out from his awareness any conscious thought of the past or concern for the future, this too is an abstraction from the ordinary life in which man as man is integrally involved. Indeed, it is questionable to me whether there can be

any human consciousness without both an innate past-awareness and a future-

projection integral to the act of consciousness itself. Probably, Zen does not intend to do away with the practical reality of past and present distinctions. But if on the other hand we say, as suggested earlier, that there is a bringing in of some sense of the totality of one's past awareness in all its richness to

every new moment, is this a real use of the past? I am willing to concede the possibility of some sort of depth-awareness,

not so much by the conscious bringing of the sum of explicit memory to bear at each moment, but in the manner of a skilled performer of any sort, especially a jujitsu wrestler or Zen-trained swordsman. In such a man his training is so

deeply ingrained in his organism that his body-mind acts directly on the living situation without conscious thought, though the quintessence of much thought and experience is employed. Such would be an immanent, non-abstractive

type of past-present awareness; and if such an awareness can be directed to the whole of living, it will be the supreme spiritual achievement. This is

undoubtedly what the saints of all religions have sought and perhaps some- times achieved. In so doing they have conquered time by giving themselves to it, conquering it from within, so to speak, by its own weaponry.

The question still remains, even from the standpoint of this kind of consciousness, whether such consciousness ever is, or ever can be, fully pervasive of every action, at every moment, in a way that roots out the usual kind of

past-remembering back-when, or future-regarding tomorrow-then, action that seems necessary for carrying on any but the contemplative life. Perhaps Zen has no intention of doing so. Yet, if that is the case, then if we separate total-awareness moments from other less-than-total-awareness moments, we have reintroduced not only a qualitative dichotomy of a sacred-secular sort but almost inevitably a temporal distinction as well. Perhaps, as suggested earlier, the Zen-transcendence of time is primarily an existential realization of the irrelevance of dichotomous time-distinctions in moments of living action, and secondarily a full intention of making all moments living-action moments.

3. One question remains - by implication rather than on the basis of Zen statements: What are the ontological implications of Here-Now living? Granted that one might achieve such a level of consciousness and make it integral to his total manner of existence, is this merely a psychological, "subjective" accomplishment or is it an ontological, "objective" passing on



228 WINSTON L. KING

to another level of being? This question is posed with particular regard to death, which is the most absolute of all the forms of human bondage to time. How does Here-Now living transcend death - if it does?

On one occasion I discussed this question with Professor Keiji Nishitani at some length. I told him that I could see how Zen Here-Now awareness enables a man to live subjectively, i. e., emotionally and consciously, above the fear of death by means of the full acceptance of himself as an evanescent

phenomenon, a small wavelet upon the ocean of being, a passing moment within an everlasting process. Expressed in different terms, day-by-day and

moment-by-moment one may expand time into a kind of lived eternity by living each present moment and circumstance in full creative Here-Nowness. But there comes the moment of death within quite finite time-limits when, at least on the psychosomatic level, even the experience of eternity and Here- Nowness seems to end as definitively as it began with the initial satori. Is not Zen-transcendence primarily a psychological-subjective transcendence that still leaves man subject to death, this quintessence of time as evil?

Professor Nishitani, if I understood him rightly, would not have it so. He definitely rejected the "merely" psychological-subjective interpretation. Rather, he affirmed, Zen-transcendence of time is genuinely ontological. In the experience of the Great Death, when a man dies to his former-ordinary state of awareness, thus ceasing to live in the present as opposed to past and future, as well as to all other time distinctions, he passes to an entirely different level of being. He faces the nothingness of all things, including himself, and makes it a part of his own existential awareness and mode of being. Thereby, he overcomes the threat of nothingness and death, of time as a termination of being.

In this answer I hear two things: 1. There are echoes of the Theravada Buddhist statement that the dissolution of time-space individuality is not to be feared, because such individuality was never genuine anyway. There is no meaning in speaking of the "annihilation" or "cessation" of being when no real being is annihilated or ceases - even though, be it noted, it is the only "being" that we seem to have on hand just now. 2. There is here a similarity, whether conscious or not, to St. John's statement that right now, in the midst of time's impermanence and faced with the threat of death, we have eternal life.

I again raised the matter of the brute actuality of the disappearance of the psychosomatic organism, even when it is brimful of the experience of total- eternal Here-Nowness. I was gently chided by the suggestion that in making such statements my thinking showed the characteristics of subjective wave- thinking rather than those of objective ocean-thinking.



time transcendence-acceptance in zen buddhism

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