Dōgen’s treatment of *uji*—being-time—upends the familiar picture of time as a neutral line along which a solid self travels from past to future. In this vision, time is not a container in which things appear and disappear; rather, each existent is itself a particular configuration of time. To be is to be-time: mountains, people, thoughts, and even acts of practice are not merely situated within time, they are expressions of time’s very nature. Past, present, and future are therefore not three separate regions laid out in a row, but aspects of a single, dynamic reality that is always manifesting as concrete beings and events.

From this standpoint, what is usually called a “moment” is not a thin, vanishing instant wedged between what has been and what will be. Each moment is complete in itself, the full actuality of the universe at that juncture, rather than a mere stepping-stone toward something else. Past and future are not sealed off from this completeness: they are active within the present as memory, karmic effect, intention, and possibility. Thus, past, present, and future mutually condition and interpenetrate one another, so that the meaning of the past shifts with present understanding, and the shape of the future is continually formed in present practice.

This has profound implications for how self and continuity are understood. Instead of a single, enduring subject marching along a temporal line, there is a succession of distinct being-times, each one a fresh and complete configuration of causes and conditions. The “self” of ten years ago is not literally carried forward as a fixed substance; that being-time has fully exhausted itself, and the present self is a new, though causally related, manifestation. Continuity is thus a pattern of relation rather than an unchanging core persisting through time, and different beings may stand in different temporal relations to one another, such that what is past from one standpoint may be present or future from another.

Within this framework, spiritual practice is not an activity performed now in order to gain enlightenment at some later date. Zazen and realization are themselves modes of being-time; the act of practice at any given moment is already the full realization of that moment’s being-time. To sit in meditation is not to wait for a future breakthrough but to participate directly in the dynamic, impermanent unfolding of being-time as it is. In this way, the conventional fixation on a future goal gives way to an appreciation of each moment as complete, impermanent, and inseparable from all times.