I set off in search of a cup of tea…

“…. I set off in search of a cup of tea. At Hakujukan, the lodge next to Eiheiji, I encountered a friendly [Buddhist] nun with a kind, open face. I asked her a question, and we fell into easy conversation.”

So writes Beth Kempton, in her new book Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived. I listened in…

“[The nun] confirmed that Shōbōgenzō is a kind of cosmology, a metaphysical study of the nature of the universe exploring “time” beyond the scope of what most of us can comprehend, and that even though it was written in a different era, it is just as relevant today.

The nun gently cautioned me, “When studying Dōgen you have to remember that he is not talking about the minute by minute scheduling of time that creates the illusion of this world of speed. He is talking about the vastness of time – the scope of a human lifespan, which is at once minuscule and unimaginably huge.”

Dōgen wrote that there are 6,400,099,980 moments in a day. No one seems to know where he got that figure from, but it makes the point that a moment is infinitesimally small. He said sixty-five moments arise and disappear in the space of a finger snap, each moment over almost before it has begun. The actual duration is less important than the fact that it illustrates Dōgen’s “moment” not as a span of time we can intellectually grasp, but one so short that in living it, we experience “time” as something that flows in us, as we flow as it.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, writing eight hundred years after Dōgen, has put it this way: “If by ‘time’ we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.”

The nun was a similar age to me, and I explained why I was there, and how I was seeking answers to questions about how to live so when I get to the end of my life and look back, I will know I lived it well.

Smiling, she said, “If you take care of the present moment, and give the now your full attention, it connects to both past and future. You can see that everything now has been born from the past, and everything now connects to the future. So, your job is to take care of now, as well as you can.”

The nun told me of her life before taking her vows, back when she had long hair and cute shoes. She said things were a lot easier now she was walking this path of sufficiency and contentment… There was not a line on her face, and when she laughed, which she did often, she seemed to glow.

I asked her how she made the decision to become a nun and she simply said, “It was time.”

“But how do you know when it’s time for something so significant?” I asked.

”Follow the threads of connection,” she counseled. “Be where you have to be. Don’t force the answers. They will arrive, and you will know.”

*     *     *

Day wanes at an old stone fort high on the hillside…

Sun descends…

Moon rises…

From the eastern sea in Antigua.