It's easy to regard time as a commodity--we even speak of "saving" or "spending" it. We often regard it as an enemy, when we feel it slipping away before we're ready for time to be up. The Zen view of time is radically different than that: time is not something separate from our life; rather, our life "is" time. Understand this, says Dainin Katagiri Roshi, and you can live fully and freely right where you are in each moment.
Katagiri bases his teaching on "Being Time," a text by the most famous of all Zen masters, Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), to show that time is a creative, dynamic process that continuously produces the universe and everything in it--and that to understand this is to discover a gateway to freedom from the dissatisfactions of everyday life. He guides us in contemplating impermanence, the present moment, and the ungraspable nature of past and future. He discusses time as part of our inner being, made manifest through constant change in ourselves and our surroundings. And these ideas are by no means metaphysical abstractions: they can be directly perceived by any of us through meditation.

Dainin Katagiri (1928-1990) was a central figure in the transmission of Zen in America. His first book, "Returning to Silence, " emphasized the need to return to our original, enlightened state of being, and became one of the classics of Zen in America. In "You Have to Say Something, " selections from his talks have been collected to address another key theme of Katagiri's teaching: that of bringing Zen insight to bear on our everyday experience. "To live life fully," Katagiri says, "means to take care of your life day by day, moment to moment, right here, right now." To do this, he teaches, we must plunge into our life completely, bringing to it the same wholeheartedness that is required in Zen meditation. When we approach life in this way, every activity--everything we do, everything we say--becomes an opportunity for manifesting our own innate wisdom. With extraordinary freshness and immediacy, Katagiri shows the reader how this wisdom not only enlivens our spiritual practice but can help make our life a rich, seamless whole.

For twenty-five hundred years Buddhism has taught that everyone is Buddha--already enlightened, lacking nothing. But still there is the question of how we can experience that truth in our lives. In this book, Dainin Katagiri points to the manifestation of enlightenment right here, right now, in our everyday routine. Genuineness of practice lies in "just living" our lives wholeheartedly. The Zen practice of sitting meditation "(zazen) "is this not a means to an end but is the activity of enlightenment itself. That is why Katagiri Roshi says, "Don't expect enlightenment--just sit down "
Based on the author's talks to his American students, "Returning to Silence " contains the basic teachings of the Buddha, with special emphasis on the meaning of faith and on meditation. It also offers a commentary on "The Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance" from Dogen Zenji's "Shobogenzo, "which speaks in depth about the appropriate actions of those who guide others in the practice of the Buddha Way. Throughout these pages, Katagiri Roshi energetically brings to life the message that "Buddha is your daily life."