Zen Master Dogen Character Analysis

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing
bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and
had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. […] Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word
now. […] The word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning.

[..] [N]ow felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail […].

NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

[…]

Had Dogen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics [.]

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing
bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and
had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. […] Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

When I was a little kid in Sunnyvale, I became obsessed with the word
now. […] The word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning.

[..] [N]ow felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail […].

NOW felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop. I was just a kid, and I thought if I could truly grasp the meaning of the big fish NOW I would be able to save little fish Naoko, but the word always slipped away from me.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

[…]

Had Dogen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics [.]