So I come to understand that I am my own transience, I am my own living of my own life, I am just this historically embedded process and not any kind of substance. I am a chain of events and exchanges. I am not an immortal soul, I am a human life towards the end of its eighth decade. I am a verb, not a noun, and I am nearly over. Soon, the play will end - for me, at least. At this stage of the game, talk of there being any ‘more’ for me is absurd. I’d better start counting my blessings and living in and for the Now, because my future prospects are negligible. Looking around me, I observe that nearly all of my contemporaries have similarly given up any thoughts of‘life after death, because they too know that the very idea is now absurd. Everything is transient, including me, and you, and including even the doctrine stated in this sentence. (Compare the Buddhist doctrine of‘the emptiness of Emptiness’.) Nothing can be pinned down firmly or permanently any more, because there is no firm substance or Ground out there to pin it to.
By such considerations as these, modern philosophy has come to a fresh appreciation of the radical temporality of all being. All beings are ‘in be-ing’, parts of the flux. Outsidelessly, everything is passing, including us and anything we can hope to produce. Our continuing desire to find something Absolute to cling to is now not our salvation, but our problem. We need to be cured of it.
Thus the prime religious question today is about how we can find ‘religious meaning’, or ‘eternal life’, in a world in which everything - all being, truth and value - is secondary, language-mediated, contingent and utterly transient. In traditional discussions of the subject it was said that there are three main kinds of evil, namely Sin, Pain, and Death: that is, Moral Evil, Physical Evil, and Metaphysical Evil, or Finitude.1 Of these three, it was Sin, or moral evil, that seemed most important to people who lived in a religion-based culture. Then, in the more science-based and humanistic Modern period after about 1680 people’s thoughts turned more to the problem of pain and suffering: in a law-governed world created by a supposedly benevolent Designer-God, why is there so much suffering? And how far can we diminish the amount of suffering in the world by developing and introducing better technologies, and better political arrangements?
Today, the argument has moved on again. People seem to remain as capable as ever of incomprehensibly wicked behaviour, but describing such behaviour as sinful or evil and seeking religious remedies for it does not seem quite so useful as formerly it did. As for the problem of suffering, we have learnt that a great deal can be done to diminish it by modern medicine, by applied science, and by competent social administration. Already most people can expect to live a full span of life, with much more varied company and wider cultural provision than our ancestors could ever have hoped for. To quite a large extent, we can make things better for ourselves and have already done so.
However, as everyone knows, there is no immediate prospect of our being altogether freed either from the shadow of sudden personal disaster or from the certainty of our own eternal death, and my present argument is simply that the extraordinary technical and political advances of the twentieth century have for many or most people shifted the spotlight away from moral and physical evil, and towards metaphysical evil.
Everything is utterly contingent; everything passes away, and I will soon pass away. So how am I to avoid sinking into the pessimism of the very long line of male literary curmudgeons who began with Schopenhauer and are now numberless?
Several answers are given. A very common one, given by Nietzsche, is that we must say a wholehearted Yes to life now, in the present moment. We cannot now hope to make our present life bearable by appealing to some Higher World or promised future in which everything will be put right, but it is possible to feel in the present moment that one is happy, and that our life is worthwhile. There are many familiar literary examples of this sentiment - for example in Browning, and in Henry James.
A second and somewhat subtler argument aims to show us that our feelings of discontent are irrational. It says: Things are what they are. Outsidelessly, we are humans in our human world, a world of signs in motion, and therefore of change. Very well: everything is empty, in the Buddhist sense. Everything is secondary, everything is transient - but how do you suppose things could really be otherwise? In an eternal and perfect world there could be no persons and no life. Think about human life: it is often messy and prickly and it is always death-haunted, but you would rather have it than not, wouldn’t you? Therefore, as the Bible says: ‘Choose life!’2
A third argument runs as follows: most of our gloomy thoughts about transience depend upon a contrast between ourselves, thought of as stable and self-identical beings, and time, as a power distinct from ourselves that threatens us.
For example, time may be seen as a rushing railway train or coach that hurtles along carrying us aboard it, and that will at some future moment crash and kill us all. Or time may be seen as eroding us and wearing us away by its constant attrition. Or we may picture ourselves as all sitting in a huge waiting-room. Now and again a name is called out, and one of us is led away, never to be seen again.3 And so it has always been: every one of us will eventually be called and must disappear into the unknown; but we have no idea of who will be next, nor of what to expect.
And so it goes on: the three illustrations I have just given could be multiplied indefinitely by anyone with a good knowledge of literature - and especially of poetry. But they all depend upon thinking of time as extrinsic, other than ourselves, and as a threat. But twenty years ago Dogen taught me to think: ‘Wait a minute. I am the time of my life.4 I am my own being. I myself am slipping away at exactly the same speed as everything else.’ And that gave me a sudden thought of eternity-in-the-midst-of-time. A similar effect can be produced by the old illustration of Einstein’s treatment of time; for suppose that you are riding on a beam of light that is travelling away from a clock-face. Look back - and time is standing still!
Stories like these help to make a general point: the more I can learn to see myself as being just the moving process of my own life, so that I really am completely embedded in and coincident with my own temporality the closer I get to a consoling intuition of eternity in the midst of utter transience. People’s fear of time and death is a fear of being left out. But I’m not being left out. I am always in the midst of It All.
All three of the types of argument that have been quoted have some value, and the third in particular has stayed with me. From time to time in the past I have used ‘the Fountain’ as a symbol of it. Every bit of the fountain is nothing but rushing formless transience: but now stand back from it a while, and see how it becomes still and consoling, a symbol of healing, refreshment, calm, and life’s endless self-renewal.
Thus it appears that today, fully as much as in any earlier period, the contemplation of a great unifying religious symbol may give rise to intense religious comfort and happiness.
1 See G. W. Leibniz, Theodicée, 1710; and John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, London: Macmillan and New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
2 Deuteronomy 30.19, etc.
3 A story from Pascal’s Pensées.
4 See Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-Nature: Dogen’s Understanding of Temporality, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1990.