DESCRIPTION
Dōgen’s 1240 essay titled Uji, which is included as a fascicle in the Shōbōgenzō ("Treasury of the True Dharma Eye") collection.
Dōgen 's writings can be notoriously difficult to understand and translate, frequently owing to his wordplay with Late Middle Japanese terms. The neologism uji (有時, "existence-/being-time") is the uncommon on'yomi Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese word yǒushí (有時, "sometimes; at times"), and plays with the more common kun'yomi native Japanese pronunciation of these two kanji characters as arutoki (或る時, ‘once’, ‘on one occasion’, or ‘once upon a time". In the multifaceted Japanese writing system, arutoki ("at one time; etc.") was archaically transcribed 有時 in kanbun ("Chinese character writing"), and is now either written 或る時 with -ru る in okurigana indicating a Group II verb stem, or simply あるとき in hiragana. Authors have described Dōgen's uji as an "intentional misreading" of ordinary language and a "deliberate misreading" of arutoki.
Dōgen etymologizes the two components of uji (有時) with usage examples from everyday Japanese. The first element u refers to "existence" or "being", and the second ji means "time; a time; times; the time when; at the time when; sometime; for a time". Several of Dōgen's earlier writings used the word arutoki, for example, in a kōan story, it repeatedly means "and then, one day" to signal that an important event is about to happen.