What is, according to Dōgen, is temporal. In fact, it is not correct to say that all things exist in time; rather, all things are time. Each thing is a unit of time.
"The rat is time, the tiger is time, sentient beings are time, buddhas are time. Pine trees and bamboos, mountains and seas, self and other are really time. - Dōgen, "The Time-Being," in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, trans. Robert Aitken et al. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 78, 79, 81
Time has colors; good and evil are times. - Kim, Dōgen Kigen, p. 144.
"You must see all the various things of the whole world as so many times." - Dōgen, "Being Time: Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō Uji," trans. Norman Waddell, Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 12 (I) (May 1979): 117.
What does it mean to say that things are times? When one asks what kind of entity reality is composed of, the answers often fall into one of the two categories defined by the contrast of being and becoming. That is, metaphysical reflections often take either space or time as one's root metaphor and then articulate an account of reality as such with either spatial units (atoms, substances, matter) or temporal units (events, moments, occasions) as the basic model of an individual.
The result is some form of substance metaphysics or some form of process metaphysics. In terms of this contrast, Dōgen clearly opposes substance metaphysics and articulates a form of process metaphysics. According to Dōgen, every concrete thing is an event, a moment, or an occasion.
"In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments." - Dōgen, "The Time-Being," p. 78. The term translated in this quote as "moments" does not imply the briefest duration and could be translated simply as "times."
However, although all the various things of the world are times, Dōgen rejects the contrast of being and time described in the previous paragraph. Reality as such is not composed of times as opposed to beings. For Dōgen, just as beings are really time, time is really being. Neither category is given any form of ontological priority. This is one of the most significant differences between Dōgen's metaphysics and Whitehead's process metaphysics.
A moment is equally being and becoming: "time, just as it is, is being, and being is all time." -Dōgen, "Being Time," p. 116. Kim translates this as "The existence-time ... means that time is already existence and existence is necessarily time" (Kim, Dōgen Kigen, p. 143).
In order to express this idea, Dōgen coins the term "being-time" (uji 有時). Thus, according to Dōgen, the world is composed of units of being-time. Insofar as anything is anything at all, it is a unit of being-time.
What is the character of reality if reality is composed of units of being-time? Each unit of being-time is impermanent, Dōgen says, and he develops this idea in terms of what he calls "flowing." The term here translated as "flowing" is kyōryaku, which Heine translates as "total passage"; Kim has "continuity" or "dynamism"; Kasulis has "ranging" ("The Zen Philosopher: A Review Article on Dōgen Scholarship in English," Philosophy East and West 28 [3] [July 1978]: 353-373, at p. 370); Abe Masao and Waddell have "Being-time has the virtue of seriatim passage" ("Being Time," p. 120). But since it is part of Dōgen's goal to reject the idea of linear progress, the term "seriatim" seems an unhappy choice.
Each unit of being-time "has the quality of flowing... The entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows." - Dōgen, "The Time-Being," pp. 78, 80.
As I see it, Dōgen's concept of "flowing" does three jobs. First, it describes the fact that all things are dynamic or active. The whole world in which human beings live is composed not of inanimate objects and dead matter; rather it moves, and (as Dōgen sometimes suggests) lives.
"Now when dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, 'What you see as a palace is running water,' they will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, 'Mountains flow'." - Dōgen, "Mountains and Water Sutra," in Tanahashi and Aitken, Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 104.
Thus, to say that all things flow means that every unit of being-time is an activity. Every concrete thing takes place.
Second, the word "flow" also describes the kind of activity that all things are, or how they are active. Dōgen is especially interested in avoiding the suggestion that the word "flow" implies that things become or move in any sort of linear direction, presumably because this would imply the privilege of either past or future over the other.
"Do not think that flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west.... Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing." - Dōgen, "The Time-Being," p. 80.
Flowing is not a process or a becoming in the teleological sense of realizing potential or creative synthesis. Rather, flowing occurs all over, all at once. Each moment is a "total dynamic activity" that is itself. Dōgen describes the movement of an activity as "ascending and descending up and down."
"Spring invariably flows through spring. Although flowing itself is not spring, flowing occurs throughout spring."
Each entity/activity is self-sufficient and complete unto itself:
"Because mountains and waters have been active since before the Empty Eon, they are alive at this moment.... Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness."
"Flowing is completed at just this moment of spring."
Dōgen also seeks to convey this idea that being is really an activity-that-brings-itself-about by making nouns into verbs -- for example, "entirely worlding the entire world with the whole world," "spring passes through spring," "impeding impedes impeding."
Third and last, the concept of flowing describes the relation or continuity of things. Flowing is also called walking forward and backward; it is unceasing and it is not in one direction. The movement or flow of a unit of being-time is not just forward or back, into the future or into the past, but from the past and future into the present and within the present itself.
"So-called today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today. And today flows into today, tomorrow flows into tomorrow."
"The path of water runs upward and downward and in all directions."
Dōgen recognizes that the idea that things are really activities that "flow" contradicts people's ordinary view of things. From the commonsense standpoint, a thing is an object. If there is an activity that is not the activity of some thing, then the apparent activity must not be real after all. An activity without some underlying thing that does the activity seems evanescent and detached from reality, like a relation or a quality. Dōgen opposes this everyday view, saying,
"You mustn't by your own maneuvers make it a nothingness; you mustn't forcibly make it a being." - Dōgen, "Being Time," pp. 122-123.
Although Dōgen stresses the creative activity and the interrelated continuity of things, he also notes that each unit of being-time (that is, of reality) is in a sense "cut off" and independent of its own past and future. He gives the following example.
Firewood is reduced to ash and cannot become firewood again. So, one should not hold the view that ash is succeeding and firewood is preceding. One must know that firewood dwells in the dharma-position of firewood [of which] there is preceding and succeeding. Although there is before and after it is cut off from before and after. Ashes are in the dharma-position of ashes [of which] there is preceding and succeeding. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it has been reduced to ashes, so man does not resume life after death. - Dōgen, "Genjōkōan," trans. Steven Heine, in his Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 93. In place of "firewood dwelling in the dharma-position of firewood," Tanahashi and Aitken have "firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood" (Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 70).
The central concept here is that of "dwelling in a dharma situation" (jūhōi 住法位). Whereas the concept of "flowing" suggests that everything that exists is an activity, "dwelling" says that each activity takes place in a particular spatial and temporal location. Cut off from its past and future, it seems, each entity/activity is self-sufficient and discontinuous from the rest.
Dōgen recognizes that the idea that things abide in any sense contradicts the Buddhist tradition, but he sticks to his guns.
"Buddha said, 'All things are ultimately liberated. There is nowhere that they abide.' You should know that even though all things are liberated, and not tied to anything, they abide in their own phenomenal expression" (Dōgen, "Mountains and Water Sutra," p. 102).
This is not to say that dwelling or abiding in a dharma position is a description of stasis: insofar as each abiding moment is not an abstraction but rather an actual event, it is involved in the dynamic activity of producing itself, all at once.
"The sharp, vital quick itself of dharmas dwelling in their dharma positions, is being-time." -Dōgen, "Being Time," p. 122; Abe and Waddell explain that the phrase translated as "sharp, vital quick" is kappatsupatchi, "an onomatopoetic description of the lively slapping of a landed fish" ("Being Time," p. 122 n. 32). Kim translates the sentence as "living vigorously in a Dharma-situation -- such is existence-time" (Dōgen Kigen, p. 151).
Reference: Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2000, pp. 34-55 © University of Hawaii Press