In “Uji”, Dogen is trying to tell us something about time. The problem is that the only means he has to communicate with us are words like “time”, that we think we already understand. It’s like trying to understand how a telescope works by looking at a distant telescope though your own telescope with its thoroughly smudged lens.

Faced with this problem, the approach Dogen takes is to resort to his patented trick, which basically amounts to hitting us over the head with the telescope. He keeps using the word “time” in weird, disconcerting, unaccustomed ways, forcing us to see it outside of our usual framework.

Which is all fine and good but now I am faced with the problem of trying to translate this into English. Suddenly we are confronted with a layered series of issues, including what Dogen’s theory of time is, what typical preconceptions of time people of his time listening to or reading “Uji” had that he was taking for granted and trying to break through; but also the preconceptions of the typical reader of the 21st century in the West about “time” and the word “time”.

In particular, it seems to me that the word “toki” as it existed in medieval Japanese may not even correspond that closely to the word “time” in modern-day English, even though all translators mechanically translate “toki” as “time”. I have the suspicion that 700 years ago people in Japan had a more quantum view of time, where now people in the West have a more wave view. They viewed time as a series of moments, coming one at a time, whereas we view time as a flow, as an unmeasurable quantity, like a river. Given this gap, translating “toki” as “time” in “Uji” is misleading—or even just wrong.

That’s why I think “toki” should be translated as “moments”, and why I am translating the title of the fascicle as “Some-Moments”—explicitly trying to capture the ambiguity that Dogen was constructing with his neologism “Uji”, able to be parsed as either “Ji which U” (moments which are something), or “Ji for U-ing” (moments for something).

Besides, translating “toki” as “moments” makes the whole fascicle read much better in English translation—which is at least one valid test of the quality of a translator’s terminology decisions, and one which one wishes were applied by more translators.

Continuing our reporting in this space on attempts to tear down the wall between church and state by a Catholic fringe element led by His Eminence Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, American bishops recently completely repudiated Chaput’s bizarre notion that Catholics should spend all their energy trying to elect anti-abortion zealots to public office while ignoring dead Iraqi children, giving him only five votes out of 230 in an election for president of the United States Conference of Bishops.

Elected instead was Bishop Skylstead of Spokane, in spite of criticism by the fanatics that he spent too much time talking about low-priority issues such as war and capital punishment. The same fanatics also tried to make an issue of Skylstead’s creative approach of taking the diocese into bankruptcy in order to deal fairly with the victimes of decades of priestly pedophilia.

I personally find that I do my best Zazen after bathing, for then I am freshest, but this is not absolutely essential. In Sojiji it was not possible for priests, in their junior years, to have a bath more often than once every five days, according to the rules, but still they must do their Zazen every day. Since I was a woman and, during my junior years the women’s bathroom had not yet been built, I frequently had to do without a bath for as long as two months which has proved to me that, although personal freshness is a definite aid to meditation, it is not absolutely essential.

Whew.

The above is from a great book, now out of print (I picked it up on Amazon’s used service) called “Zen is Eternal Life”, by Roshi P.T.N.H. Jiyu-Kennett. I really like this book. It harkens back to a simpler time, when Zen what was they did in Japanese Zen temples, but it still covers interesting topics such as the relationship between Zen and Gautamistic Buddhism. The last half of the book contains her own translations of several Zen classics including lots of Dogen. Of course I can and do quibble about the translation but that’s just me being picky.

I also picked up a new Zen book called “The Path of the Human Being” by Dennis Genpo Merzel. Genpo Roshi is a great teacher, but his book is just so earnest and boring and devoid of any fun or spirit or insight.

My notes on my stay at Eiheiji have been put up in French translation on the web site of a Paris-based community led by Eric Rommeluère, “Un Zen Occidentale”. I hope they prove of some use to French zen students.

Today the NYT carried the obituary of Gordon Onslow Ford, an American surrealist who I never heard of. I found it interesting, though, that they described his paintings as having “a cheerful decorative appeal and a spiritual optimism informed by Carl Jung’s psychology, Zen Buddhism and the artist’s own metaphysical and aesthetic theories.” Must be the first time in recorded history that some one has described Zen Buddhism as “optimistic”, although it certainly makes sense to me.

I’ve finished the first draft of my translation of Bendowa. This is Dogen’s great overview of zazen. (2004-03-25: now also available in HTML format without footnotes.)

Finished “Under the Banner of Heaven”. I was glad to see that Krakauer pointed out that the teachings of the Mormon faith are in some ways responsible for the way the Elizabeth Smart abduction unfolded. Any normal kid would have screamed and run away.

The Mormon teaching that there are old guys with white beards who are prophets (or worse yet, Gods) is the only reason Elizabeth would have connected to the crazy ideas that “Emmanuel” aka Brian David Mitchell fed her. That’s the precise point that I made in various discussions I had with people before she was found.

Having said that, this book is disappointing. I would have hoped for a fuller accounting of the psychological reasons for, or at least hypothesis as to why a major religion such as Mormonism would have adopted polygamy. The book covers a lot of gritty detail of polygamous life in the fundamental communities, but fails to discuss how polygamy worked in the mainstream Mormon culture of the mid-to-late-1800’s. He also wastes time discussing the Meadows Mountain Massacre and other minor events that relate to the polygamy issue only indirectly. And where is the discussion of other polygamous societies? I think that Krakauer did a lot of reporting and writing, but not enough thinking.

Where do the following phenomena fit in the world of psychological and emotional development or lack thereof?

1. Physical things look brighter and crisper.
2. Childhood memories bubble up at every opportunity.
3. Things you’ve seen a thousand times before seem to look different.
4. You have the sensation that reality is like bread being kneaded.

I still remember quite clearly when I was about five or six, I suppose, and got told in Sunday School about the good news: after we die, we get to keep on living forever!

That seemed like a really bad idea to me at the time, and it still does. Actually I got reminded of this watching that old Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise movie, “Interview with the Vampire”, which is about this nasty problem of living forever, among many other things.

I’d never had much of an urge to see that movie, thinking it was just a stupid vampire flick. Then someone gave it to me and I had nothing better to do than to actually watch it. Turns out that in addition to being a meditation on eternal life, the vampire motif works well as a metaphor for basic aspects of human existence like the nature of transformation and desire. Too bad I’m not coherent enough right now to embroider meaningfully on this theme.

My translation of Dogen’s Genjo Koan, called The Present Issue, is now on-line.