Self-Paced Practice Course
Uji - Being-Time
with Zenki Dillo Roshi
About This Course
In this course, Zenki Roshi provides a line-by-line commentary of the Dogen fascicle ‘Being-Time (Uji).’
The core teaching of all Buddhism is impermanence. When change or loss is not in accord with our preferences, that is what triggers our suffering. Dogen takes a fundamental approach to this. He makes clear that there is no being outside and beyond time, and there is no time dimension that is independent of being (what appears here now).
He treats impermanence as momentariness. Every moment of experience is an event that emerges out of the interdependence of all being-time as part of a process. Our present experience carries itself forward into the present while being connected to everything else. Yet, each moment also arises with unpredictable uncertainty and possibility.
This self-paced course can be an opportunity for you to enter into the embodied concreteness of this seemingly abstract teaching. How can we experience wholeness within our partialness, freedom within our limitations, connection within separateness, newness (birth) amidst loss (death)—right here in this moment?
If we want to enjoy our own lives as liberated aliveness—manifesting moment by moment—we need to discover our everyday activities as a place of practice.
What You Will Learn
- Discover that you do not have time or move through it: you are time. Dogen's strange compound "being-time" (uji) fuses what you are with the time you are, and the course works to make that inseparability felt, not merely understood.
- Shift from measuring time to living it. Clock time is counted from the outside; experiential time is the durational present you are always within, and with trained attention you can settle into it and even feel it lengthen.
- Receive a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time) that shows how immediate and applicable this seemingly remote text is to your life today.
- Be amazed that a text as difficult as Uji is not out of reach, even for newer practitioners, and how it helps you articulate insights you are already ready to have.
- Release the picture of the path as a ladder. Each moment is complete in itself, not a rung toward a later attainment; as on a long walk, no single step matters more than the rest, and none can be left out.
- Find that the past is not lost. The present is not a vanishing point cut off from what came before but a "now-field" that holds the past within it; practice frees you not by erasing your history but by changing how you carry it.
- Feel how time weaves rather than marches. Dogen's term for the way moments pass, kyōryaku, points not to a march from past to future but to an experiential weaving: the field of mind is the warp, the movement of time the weft. Memory and anticipation both happen now, and the newness of each moment is the ground of your freedom.
- Loosen the sense of being a separate self set against the world. Felt as paces rather than fixed objects, things stop colliding and unfold together; "the entire world" becomes a verb (the world worlds the world), and the bounded self relaxes into that activity.
- Stop straining to transcend your humanity and arrive more fully in it. Dogen keeps no realm beyond the here-and-now: the reactive, striving, comparative mind and the awakened one are equally being-time, so the practice is to find time's radiance in your ordinary hours, whatever state you are in.
- Learn what it means to say yes to your life. To be time is to meet this moment as it is and as it is already changing, floating as the river rather than watching from the bank or bracing against the current.
- See Dogen's poetic images as precise descriptions of how we exist, not as decoration: the eight opening images, the mountains and rivers, the loom, and the radiant golden Buddha each name a concrete way of being in time.
- Feel empowered to approach other Dogen texts on your own.
What You Get
This course consists of an introductory talk, 9 modules of commentary and interpretation, plus a concluding talk on how to practice in your daily life (see curriculum below). Each module contains a translation of the original text, a video dharma talk, the audio recording, and written materials to deepen your study. Altogether you will receive:
9+ Dharma talks originally given to a live audience
All Dharma talks and practice suggestions in mp3 audio format for easy download, so you can use the recordings while on the go
5 recaps and prompts that were originally given to a small study group (audio)
Access to several text translations pertaining to each module
Lifetime access to course
Plus:1 free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi to discuss questions about your practice
