Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

[Jundo]

Re: Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

Interestingly, I found the following in a book I'm reading, Principles of Digital Audio:

"...physicists have suggested that time might come in discrete intervals. Specifically, the indivisible period of time might be 10 -43 second, known as Planck time. One theory is that no time interval can be shorter than this because the energy required to make the division would be so great that a black hole would be created and the event swallowed up inside it."

All time and space are swallowed up in each instant of sitting Zazen. Truly. Zazen is a singularity. 8)

Gassho, J

[ChrisA]

Re: Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

To Jundo's point, Dogen stated day consists of 6,400,099,180 moments, each of which provides an opportunity to be here, now, in practice-enlightenment. I wonder how that number compares to Planck time!

[Jundo]

Re: Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

To Jundo's point, Dogen stated day consists of 6,400,099,180 moments, each of which provides an opportunity to be here, now, in practice-enlightenment. I wonder how that number compares to Planck time!

Hmmm. Seems to be some mystery on exactly where Dogen came up with that number ... and sounds a bit like that fellow who calculated that the world was to end a couple of weeks ago! :shock: Dainin Katagiri Roshi said:

Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century Zen master who founded the Soto Zen school in Japan, always emphasized how important it is to see that human life is based on impermanence. In Gakudo Yojin-shu (Points to Watch in Buddhist Training), he mentions that the great patriarch Nagarjuna said, “The mind that sees into the flux of arising and decaying, and recognizes the transient nature of the world, is called the way-seeking mind.” In Shobogenzo, “Shukke-kudoku” (Merits of the Monastic’s Life), Dogen Zenji said that most people are not able to acquire the way-seeking mind of spiritual awareness without deeply understanding that a day consists of 6,400,099,180 moments. This is a wonderful number. I don’t know where Dogen found this number, but saying that there are 6,400,099,180 moments in a day is not talking about a mysterious idea; it is talking about something real. A moment is called ksana in Sanskrit. Sometimes we say that one finger snap has sixty moments, so one finger snap equals sixty ksana. A Buddhist dictionary may say that a moment equals one seventy-fifth of a second. According to the Abhidharma scriptures, a moment consists of sixty-five instants. The actual numbers are not so important, but we should have a sense of how quickly time goes.

According to Buddhist teaching, all beings in the universe appear and disappear in a moment. The term impermanence expresses the functioning of moment, or the appearance and disappearance of all beings as a moment. It means that all life is transient, constantly appearing and disappearing, constantly changing. You are transient, I am transient, and Buddha is transient. Everything is transient. Wherever you may go, transiency follows you. Transiency is the naked nature of time.

http://archive.thebuddhadharma.com/issu ... l/time.php

So, sounds like Dogen calculated that a day consists of 106,668,32 finger snaps! (6,400,099,180 divided by 60 = 106,668,32). I wonder if he actually tried it out!? 8)

Anyway, passing moments ... sounds pretty depressing perhaps, like sands through the hour glass. However, another way to look at such is as our passing away, and being freshly reborn, 6,400,099,180 times a day! 6,400,099,180 chances for a fresh start each day. Brad has a few nice pages on this in one of his books, pages 48 amd 49 here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=y8JGv6 ... en&f=false

Anyway, if the sands flow through the hour glass ... go with the flow!

By the way, speaking of amazing numbers, the Buddha seems to have gotten one right (from National Public Radio):

The Buddha Imagines The Unimaginable (And Gets It Right!)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/ ... dha-counts

Ezra: Well there's this episode about a counting contest between the Buddha and a mathematician named Arjuna where the prince is asked to calculate both a very big number and, yes, a very, very small number.

Me: Is that hard?

Ezra: Well, the small problem was to count the number of — I guess you could call them — atoms, the smallest possible unit, in a yojana.

Me: What's a yojanda?

Ezra: According to Alex Bellos, a journalist who included this tale in his new book Here's Looking at Euclid, a yojana is an ancient unit of length equivalent to around 10 kilometers.

Me: So the question is, roughly: How many atoms are there in a line 10 kilometers long?

Ezra: Kind of. And here, courtesy of the ancient texts, is his solution:

A yojana, the Buddha said, is equivalent to:

Four krosha, each of which was the length of
One thousand arcs, each of which was the length of
Four cubits, each of which was the length of
Two spans, each of which was the length of
Twelve phalanges of fingers, each of which was the length of
Seven grains of barley, each of which was the length of
Seven mustard seeds, each of which was the length of
Seven particles of dust stirred up by a cow, each of which was the length of
Seven specks of dust disturbed by a ram, each of which was the length of
Seven specks of dust stirred up by a hare, each of which was the length of
Seven specks of dust carried away by the wind, each of which was the length of
Seven tiny specks of dust, each of which was the length of
Seven minute specks of dust, each of which was the length of
Seven particles of the first atoms.


So here's the neat part: According to Alex Bellos, it turns out the Buddha's calculation got the size of an atom very close to right!

This was, in fact, a pretty good estimate. Just say that a finger is 4 centimeters long. The Buddha's "first atoms" are, therefore, 4 centimeters divided by 7 ten times, which is 0.04 meter x 7 to the minus 10 or 0.00000000001416 meter, which is more or less the size of a carbon atom.

Me: Wow!

Ezra: Well, remember, this is a legend so I wouldn't like, fall on my knees or anything...

Me: But still...

Ezra: Maybe the neat thing here lies in the notion that the civilization that gave rise to Buddhism was also the same civilization and culture that had a thing for and a means to express — usefulness aside — infinitely large and small numbers. A number describing the size of a carbon atom would be meaningless in a society that had no notion of atoms or building blocks of that scale.

Here's a group of ancient people (ancient Indians) trying not only to comprehend the infinite but somehow thought it important to name so many divisions of infinitely large and small.

Snap of the fingers Gassho, Jundo

[Myoku]

Re: Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

Who was it that said you can never put your foot in the same river twice :mrgreen:

You cannot even put the same foot in the river twice
_()_
Peter, playing with words

[will]

Re: Terminology question: setsuna-shoji

you can never put your foot in the same river twice

Perhaps not, but you can put it in your mouth infinite times ops:
Such is the double edge nature of those words we cling so tightly to!

Gassho,
John

This is funny. Funny thread.

Gassho

Will