There it is, staring me in the face on page 310 of my edition of Being and Time. It's now rather faded from many readings and delvings. But it's only now that the magnificence of it is catching up with me.
So imagine my sense of the uncanny (if you like) when I saw Heidegger describing the “everyday” (as opposed to “authentic”) notion of time as “awaiting.”
In other words, something is already “happening” (but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones: let's just call it death, to be clear) and confused being ignores it, projecting into the future as if it were living in a rigid series of instants.
This is precisely what Trungpa Rinpoche used to say about samsara. “Samsara is waiting for something to happen.” He is not on record as having said it, however, since he said it in talks that have not yet been published. But some of his closest students have told me about it, since they are among my best friends
Now it's clear that Trungpa read a lot of phenomenology and I'm betting that he read Heidegger. So the interesting question arises, who is influencing whom there? Here you have an immensely powerful (make of him what you will) German philosopher channeling something like Buddhism and Taoism, and influencing an immensely powerful Tibetan teacher.
Think about it: samsara is waiting for something to happen. It's defined variously as a cycle of confusion and suffering. But why is it a cycle? Why is it confused? Why does it involve suffering? It seems to me that Heidegger's and Trungpa's overlapping definitions are very profound.
The Wheel of Life mandala depicts samsara occurring within the jaws of death. It struck me that Trungpa and Heidegger are both trying to look fairly squarely into the mouth of death there.