One Time, One Meeting

One Sunday morning, a lifetime ago, I sat with my family in the First Methodist Church in Clinton, Iowa. The pew was hard, as if designed to punish us for our sins. Our black-frocked minister was well into his latest long-winded sermon, but I wasn’t listening. My attention was riveted on the elderly man in the pew ahead of me.

On the nape of his leathery neck, deep creases had etched an elongated “X.” Whenever he bowed his head, the creases would recede. When he looked up again, they would re-emerge. As the service continued, these marks of age and experience exhibited various degrees of depth and prominence. During the responsive readings, they nearly vanished. During the singing of the Doxology, which he probably knew by heart, they stood out boldly, like furrows in a freshly plowed field.

Why that memory has stayed with me is anybody’s guess. And why the experience in which it played a part has survived the depredations of time is a mystery too complex to fathom. I suspect, however, that the longevity of the memory has something to do with the quality of my attention at the time. To be sure, the object of my contemplation was other than it was supposed to be, but my engagement must have been wholehearted. “What you look hard at,” wrote the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, “seems to look hard at you.” And those experiences in which we’ve been most fully engaged are the ones we’re most likely to remember.

In everyday life, such full engagement is more the exception than the rule. It’s no secret that many of us spend a large proportion of our waking lives daydreaming about the past or future or losing ourselves in speculative thought. And even when we imagine that we are “being present” or “living in the moment,” we may be experiencing the present moment as a stepping-stone toward something else, an instrument in the service of a desired outcome. In Zen teachings, this habitual (and often competitive) focus on a goal is known as a “gaining idea.” A deeply conditioned habit of mind, it inclines us to perceive any one moment or event as a point on a linear progression. That the same moment or event might possess its own inherent value is farthest from our minds. The present moment is seen and felt as relative, which is to say, as a means toward a finite end.

Fortunately, there is another way of experiencing our daily lives, one that we may cultivate at any time. Pointing us in that direction, Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Soto Zen tradition, offers this admonition:

Firewood becomes ashes, it does not become wood again. Don’t think that wood is first, ashes after. Your understanding must penetrate that although firewood is firewood, it has a before and after; that having this before, this after, it is free of these.  . . Life is life, death is death and are each in their own place like winter and spring. Winter does not become spring, spring does not become winter.

What Dogen is urging us to recognize is the “suchness” of firewood, its unique and perfect nature, independent of its past and future states. Rather than think of firewood as “post-beech-tree” or “pre-ashes,” we are to regard it as a thing in itself, with its own place in the natural order. In the language of Zen, a stick of firewood has its own “Dharma position” or phenomenal expression.

Commenting on Dogen’s observation, the Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura likens the independent status of firewood to that of the present moment:

As Dogen discusses in “Genjokoan,” the moment when firewood dwells in the Dharma position of firewood is a perfect moment. The before and after of the moment is cut off, and both past and future are reflected in that moment. The next moment is the same. Each moment is an absolute and independent moment, is discontinuous and disconnected like a stone woman. And yet, the stone woman gives birth, the discontinuous moment brings about the next moment.

Each moment of our experience, in other words, is both absolute and relative. In its absolute dimension, it is discontinuous and independent; in its relative dimension, it is connected to the past and future.

The relative and absolute dimensions of our lives are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are complementary. My experience of watching an old man’s neck wrinkles come and go, an experience that gave birth to a lasting memory, occurred in linear time. In its relative, historical dimension, it is continuous with both my upbringing and my present life. But in its ultimate, absolute dimension, that same experience transcended the conditions that brought it into being. A time-bound moment in which I was fully absorbed, it has become, paradoxically, a timeless presence, a bright remembered buoy in the onrushing river of time.

—

Eihei Dogen, Genjokoan, tr. by Yasuda Joshu Roshi and Anzan Hoshin Roshi.

Shohaku Okumura, The Mountains and Waters Sutra (Wisdom, 2018), Kindle edition, location 2145-46.

Photo: “Stacked Beechwood at Stillachtal,” by Franzfoto.