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“A lot of people, especially these days, feel like there simply isn’t enough time—ever. Too much to take care of, too many things to do, not enough time to do them. So details become an annoyance: we can’t ignore them, so we rush to get through them and go on to the important things.
We see time as a limited container stuffed full—and yet we have to stuff still more into it. So we are in a crisis of time, as many of our idioms about time suggest: pressed for time, running out of time, wasting or saving time, time pressure, and so on. We don’t have time for taking care of details. Or so we think.
But time isn’t a container—time is life. There is always exactly enough time.
Once Yun-yen was sweeping up the temple grounds. His dharma brother Tao-wu said, “Too busy!†Yun-yen said, “You should know there’s one who’s not busy.†Tao-wu said, “Oh, then there are two moons?†Yun-yen held up his broom and said, “Which moon is this?â€
Once I gave a retreat on this story, and a lot of people concerned about time pressure and busyness attended. Somehow the retreat came to the attention of Oprah Winfrey’s producers, and they asked me to write an article about it and eventually to be a guest on her show. But I couldn’t go to Chicago. I was too busy!
Yun-yen is saying that although he is fully immersed in what he is doing, he isn’t busy.
Being busy or not isn’t a matter of how much you have to do. It depends on your view, your attitude. If you insist that time is a limited container that’s nearly full and now you are trying to stuff three or four more things into it, then yes, you are too busy. You become anxious.
But if you recognize that time is life, then you just do whatever you are doing when you are doing it, and when it is finished, you do something else. Maybe you don’t complete all the tasks on your list. But nothing is ever complete! We will all die with unfinished business—and, at the same time, with everything complete.
There aren’t “two moons†(important things and unimportant things, busyness and unbusyness). There’s just one moon. It includes everything.
Yun-yen’s sweeping up right now is all he needs. Everything is there in it. I am sure that when Yun-yen finished sweeping, he went on to do something else, just like us.
And although Yun-yen is a monastic whose tasks are simple, his lesson applies to us as well. We also sweep. But whether we are sweeping or talking on the telephone or working on a spreadsheet, it’s the same. “There is one here who isn’t busy,†who knows how to do what needs to be done.
This story reminds me of another story, about the contemporary Korean Zen master Seung Sahn, who spent much of his life teaching in the United States. (His Kwan Um School of Zen is still going strong.) He would always preach that students ought to just do what they were doing. They ought to do one thing and do it completely.
Once a student caught him eating breakfast while reading the paper. The student said, “You teach us to just do one thing. And look at you, eating and reading at the same time.†Seung Sahn said, “Yes, but I am just reading and eating.â€â€Share
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