Friday, April 11, 2014

Waking Up

From 'A Tale for the Time Being' by Ruth Ozeki:

"Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she pondered her return to the city. Zen Master Dogen uses the phrase in "The Merits of Home-Leaving", which is the title of Chapter 86 of his Shobogenzo.

This is the chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explains the granular nature of time: the 6,400, 099,980 moments* that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to re-establish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around."

*Setsuna in Japanese, from the Sanskrit kshana

Page 62

Shobogenzo: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma12/shobo.html

No comments:

Post a Comment