Back in January 2024 I discussed Dōgen, referencing Jacqueline Stone’s article, “Seeking Enlightenment in the Last Age.” In fact, her explanation of Dōgen’s interpretation of time was one reason I sought out Leighton’s book on Dōgen.
Because this “now” is absolute, and because “there is no time that has not arrived,” Buddhahood is not a potential that will unfold in the future, but can be realized only in the present moment. In other words, attaining Buddhahood is not, in Dōgen’s view, a gradual evolving from potential to realization associated with a linear view of time.
Leighton’s book offers this explanation of the source of Dōgen’s view of time:
Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p107Returning to consideration of other Mahāyāna approaches to temporality, the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, or Flower Ornament Sutra, in the chapter on “Detachment from the World” speaks of ten times through which great bodhisattvas explain past, present, and future. These ten times are the past, present, and future of the past; the past, present, and future of the future; the past, present, and future of this present; and finally, the interfusion of those previous nine times as the tenth, “being the one instant of the present.”
This all fits very nicely within the concept of 3,000 Worlds in a Single Thought Moment
While I’m on the topic of time, I want to set aside these definitions of a kalpa:
Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p110-111Basic Indian cosmology offers a very wide view of time that was adopted by Buddhism. There is a recurring cycle in every universe of four kalpas: the formation or becoming, continuity or the abiding, the decaying, and the “nonmanifest” or empty. A kalpa is an incalculably long period of time, with one colorful traditional description of its duration as “the image of a bird that flies once every hundred years over the peak of Mount Everest with a piece of silk in her talons; the length of time it would take the silk to wear down the mountain completely is said to be one kalpa.” Another calculation is that a short kalpa “is the time required to empty a hundred square mile city enclosure filled with poppy seeds if one seed were to be removed every three years.”