As for the Present instant, it is so inscrutable that I wonder whether no sceptic has ever attacked its reality. I can fancy one of them dipping his pen in his blackest ink to commence the assault, and then suddenly reflecting that his entire life is in the Present,— the “living present,” as we say,— this instant when all hopes and fears concerning it come to their end, this Living Death in which we are born anew. It is plainly that Nascent State between the Determinate and the Indeterminate …
— Peirce, EP2:358
It is also what Buddhists call ‘birth-and-death’ (shoji), and the impermanence which according to Dogen is the buddha-nature.
The determination for enlightenment is the seed of all elements of buddhahood … it is like an all-encompassing net, taking in all beings who can be guided.
— Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1476-8)
The determination (or aspiration) for enlightenment is the turning sign whose final interpretant reveals the nascent buddha-nature. How long does this revelation, this realization take? As long as the time.
The ‘principle of the identity of man and Buddha’ (Bielefeldt 1988, 165) has informed a wide variety of Buddhist practices through which sentient beings might overcome, here and now, the delusions masking that identity. The prophetic writings of Blake develop a parallel idea in three themes: first, ‘the loss of the identity of divine and human natures which brought about the Fall … second, the struggle to regain this identity in the fallen world which was completed by Jesus; and, third, the apocalypse’ (Frye 1947, 270). In Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas (subtitled ‘The Last Judgment’), we learn that all dominator gods are really distorted images of fallen Man. If they resist this recognition of their true nature and try to assert ‘their Dominion above The Human form Divine,’ they will be ‘Thrown down from their high Station,’ and in the apocalypse (after a protracted struggle in the subconscious) will resume their true function
In the Eternal heavens of Human Imagination: buried beneath
In dark Oblivion with incessant pangs ages on ages
In Enmity & war first weakend, then in stern repentance
They must renew their brightness, & their disorganizd functions
Again reorganize till they resume the image of the human,
Cooperating in the bliss of Man, obeying his Will,
Servants to the infinite & Eternal of the Human form.
Likewise in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we are tasked to recognize the terrifying wrathful gods as projections of our own fears, and thus to overcome our own delusions and recover our true form.
Just a brief comment on the Peirce quotation. In another place Peirce analyses the ‘moment’ as the minimum of lived time as distinguished from the ‘instant’ which he calls a mathematical abstraction. The moment for Peirce is tripartite (as it is for Bergson), the past flowing into the present flowing into the future so that to try to separate the ‘now’ from this flow is really a *lived* impossibility.