And it’s about this time right now, this moment of hearing a crow calling on a branch, a moment that’s gone already. It’s about our time, this big time we are all living in, this time of tsunamis, climate change, species extinction, undeclared war, Internet technology. This is a book about the mysteries of time, how layers of time blend together, how time hurries by and slows down. Readers need not know anything at all about Dogen. I say this as one who loves Dogen’s writings, but it’s not so important. Ruth Ozeki, an American Japanese and a longtime Zen practitioner, begins the novel with an epigraph from Uji, and the book can be read as one long commentary on Dogen. A time being is also a being who lives in time, who is alive, and who will therefore die.
The time being is a kind of eternal present. The time being is deep time, as opposed to linear, chronological time.
“The time being” is an English translation of the Japanese word uji, which is the title of a short piece of writing about time, by the 13th-century Zen master and poet Eihei Dogen.
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