Listen to Shinshu's Talk on Being Time
Dōgen Zenji's text Shōbōgenzō Uji was written as a guide for enacting Soto Zen practice. Shinshu Roberts, author of Being-Time: A Practitioner's Guide to Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō Uji (Wisdom Publications), will talk about a few of the important points that Dōgen believed were key to furthering our understanding of practice-realization as it pertains to the intersection of time and being.
“Impermanence is time itself, being itself—yet time and being are not at all as we imagine them to be. To really understand and fully embrace this point is to live in a radically different world—a world of awakening, inclusion, and love. Zen Master Dogen frames the teaching on impermanence explicitly as a teaching about time—and all of Dogen’s profoundly poetic teachings flow from his seminal understanding of time, as expressed in Uji (Being-Time), the famous—and famously difficult—essay in his masterwork, Shobogenzo. In Uji, Dogen teaches that time itself, being itself, is luminous awakening. It is all-inclusive, all-elusive, ultimately healing, and eternal.
In this book, Shinshu Roberts does full justice, as does no other book I know of, to Dogen’s words. She offers interpretation of Uji only after careful consideration and marshaling of many sources—and offers simple everyday examples to illustrate points that seem at first abstruse. If this text causes you to doubt your most cherished concepts about your life, it will have done its work.” —from the Foreword by Norman Fischer