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Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost American Buddhist teachers and scholars and is known affectionately to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the "American Lama." Surya Das is the author of the bestselling books Awakening the Buddha Within and Buddha Is as Buddha Does, founder and spiritual director of the Dzogchen Center, and founder of the Western Buddhist Teachers Network. A sought-after speaker who teaches, lectures, and conducts retreats around the world, he lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

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We're all given the same twenty-four hours a day.We can spend our time feeling hurried and harried,overwhelmed by chores and demands, distractedand burned out . . . or we can awaken to BuddhaStandard Time, the realm of timelessness whereevery choice, every action, and every breath canbe one of renewal and infinite possibilities.

Buddha Standard Time shares one of the greatrealizations of Buddhism, an insight that anyonecan learn to apply. The minutes and hoursof our days do not simply march from futureto present to past. Rather, each moment isintersected by a fourth dimension. By learningto live in this dimension—Buddha StandardTime—we reduce the amount of stress in our livesand find greater focus, fulfillment, creativity, andeven wisdom.

Drawing on Tibetan Buddhism and other greatwisdom traditions, as well as on neuroscience andholistic traditions, renowned teacher and nationalbestselling author Lama Surya Das shares real worldexamples, practical exercises, and essentialtechniques.

The pace and pressure of today's world feels relentless.That is why, now more than ever, we need theancient wisdom contained in Buddha StandardTime. Far from being at the mercy of time'sdemands, we will finally realize that we have, infact, all the time in the world.

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Buddha Standard Time

HarperOne

Chapter One

Awakening to Natural Time
ROSALIND. I pray you, what is?t o?clock?
ORLANDO. You should ask me what time o? day; there?s no
clock in the forest.
?Shakespeare, As You Like It

FROM SWITZERLAND?The beautiful neutral land of high Alpine
mountains, pristine lakes, and charming handicrafts?comes this bizarre story:
The clockmaster A. P. Simmerling yesterday wrecked his own
business, causing damages of two hundred thousand dollars to his
clocks. According to insiders, Mr. Simmerling was a perfectionist,
and he always tried to synchronize all the clocks in his shop. The
introduction of summer and wintertime, in which all the clocks
had to be periodically set backwards or forwards, proved to be too
much of a challenge to bridge. It became Mr. Simmerling?s
self-appointed mission to smash the entire interior of his shop with
a pre-war German cuckoo clock. Miraculously, the little birdie
survived the massacre. Until at least an hour after the carnage,
a Frisian standing clock also continued crying for help. Luckily,
there was a funny farm nearby where not only the patients but the
clocks ran late. After all the clocks were silenced and her husband
was led away, Mrs. Simmerling confided to local authorities of a
great relief.
An obsession with order and time can drive us mad. Clocks, like mod-
ern society, are impersonal and mechanical, and sometimes they make us
want to rebel. Although most of us will not wind up smashing our clocks
to pieces like poor Mr. Simmerling, the first step toward living in Buddha
Standard Time is learning to release ourselves from the tyranny of artificial
time. When we harmonize with nature and the rhythmic flow of Natural
Time, we rediscover the cycles of growth, change, decay, and regeneration
in the world around us, bringing a better sense of awareness and
connectedness to our busy days.
Since the earliest humans learned to tell the days, months, and years
by observing the heavens, we have been imposing order on the flow of
time. Calendars, zodiacs, and other inventions helped us calculate the
rising and setting of the sun and moon and connect the dots between the
stars and our earthly fortunes. The Egyptians invented the sundial and
water clock, the first timepieces, contributing to the orderly functioning of
early civilization. The Chinese gave us the sextant, allowing nautical timing
and measurement by the motions of the stars and the celestial clock.
The Indians conceived the kalpa, an immeasurably long eon, beautifully
defined as the time it takes a rare Himalayan bird to, stroke by stroke, wear
down Mt. Sumeru with the brush of a silk scarf in its beak. The Maya, the
greatest timekeepers of antiquity, left behind seventeen calendars, including
the Long Count, which runs out in 2012. The Incas kept time upon
intricately knotted strings, some of which survive. The Romans gave us the
Julian calendar and leap year. The British bequeathed the time zones and
Greenwich mean time, the Swiss the cuckoo clock and bejeweled watch,
and the Americans the atomic clock and the big bang, the theoretical start
of it all.

Until the Renaissance, humans operated mostly on Natural Time in
sync with the daylight and darkness, the seasons, the tides, and other
terrestrial and celestial cycles. But in perhaps the greatest time innovation of
all, with the Industrial Revolution, not only were handicrafts displaced by
more efficiently manufactured goods, but time itself became a commodity
and an increasingly scarce and valuable one at that. The world has
been shrinking and spinning faster and faster ever since, as everyone works
harder to produce more in less time.

Starbucks recently shaved eight seconds off the wait time at its counters
by waiving signatures on all credit-card orders of less than twenty-five
dollars. It saved another fourteen seconds by introducing a larger scoop so that
baristas need to dip into the ice bucket only once to make a large Frappuccino.
If you are waiting in a long line, as I have, for your early-morning pick-me-
up, you appreciate the minutes saved. But multiply this breakneck example
many times over and it becomes clear that we?re growing accustomed to a
lightning-fast lifestyle that ultimately puts stress on us all.
From early morning to late at night, from preschool to retirement,
responsible citizens that we are, we rush through our lives in order to
scrimp on time. But what if time did not control us? What if we felt that
our time and our lives were our own? The first step toward reclaiming them
is to awaken to Natural Time, to get back in touch with the rhythms that
humans observed until just a couple of centuries ago, and that some
traditional societies in undeveloped countries still observe. Those clans, tribes,
and nomads may be trying to modernize and progress both materially and
technologically, but we have much to learn by getting back in touch with
their respect for the timeless and primordial rhythms of Natural Time.

Buddhist Time Management

I think I?ve been studying time my whole life, but looking back, I see I was
not always connected to Natural Time. As a kid living in suburban Long
Island with a restless spirit mostly channeled through a love of competitive
sports, I grew up tethered to the clock and stopwatch. By age twenty,
though, I was thousands of miles away, in dusty, windswept Rajasthan,
India, where I sat in silent meditation for ten days in a Buddhist shrine hall.
Always a bit of a control freak with an inborn sense of responsibility not to
waste a single hour, minute, or second, I suddenly had to surrender to days
divided into twelve- to fourteen-hour-long meditation sessions, punctuated
only by temple chimes; hours spent in total silence except for periods
of chanting and one fifty minute Buddhist discourse from the meditation
master each evening. To my initial dismay, there were no meals after midday.
But there was plenty of time to ruminate from noon till breakfast the
next morning. In that extraordinary environment, I heard and experienced
what Buddha said: to enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one?s
family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and refine one?s mind.
As for myself, I was sitting there partly because of the turmoil back
home. The ?60s had turned the world upside down. With bombs falling on
rice farmers in Vietnam and peaceful Buddhist monks setting themselves
on fire?my first image of Buddhism?I didn?t know any longer how to
live my life. So after college I gathered together money I?d received as
graduation gifts and money I?d saved from my bar mitzvah and summer jobs,
sold my guitar, my typewriter, and my textbooks, and got on a plane to
India. My brain was whirling with questions. In that topsy-turvy era when
four young working class rockers from England were the world?s highest
authorities on love, peace, and the meaning of life, authentic answers were
in short supply. I didn?t realize yet that I had come to India, following in
the footsteps of the...