6 Mondays, February 27-April 3, 6:30-8:30 pm. Taught by Jitsudo Tom Biddle
Designed for those who have taken the introduction to Zen Meditation series and practitioners with an interest in exploring the strikingly innovative, and challenging, re-conception of Buddhist thought brought about by the thirteenth century founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan. Dōgen Zenji reformulated many fundamental Buddhist concepts, but none more radically than his writings on the relationship between the nature of being and time, and the flawed understandings of both. Most vividly captured in the Uji (Being-Time) fascicle of his master work, the Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen’s conception of “being-time”, and the possible experience of liberation inherent in it, permeates the extensive body of his profound, subtle, and poetic writing.
Join Jitsudo Tom Biddle in an attempt to explore the content and extent of Dōgen Zenji’s interpretation of temporality as the key to unlocking the questions of life and death, self and world, beings and Buddha-nature, and illusion and realization. The class begins at the beginning, with the first fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō, the Genjōkoan, and takes up several more relevant essays leading to a close examination of Uji, Shōji (Birth and Death), and Gyōji (Continuous Practice). The class exploration will be greatly aided by the teachings of Dainin Katagiri, Roshi, compiled and edited in the book “Each Moment Is the Universe, Zen and the Way of Being Time”.
Each class begins with meditation.