Sense and nonsense of time

My father asked me a question when I was little: what is the fastest thing in the world? Like any other kid, I tossed up a rocket, and he responded in the negative, and affirmed that the fastest thing is the mind. The notion that the movement of thought is the fastest, astonished me.

There is no doubt that the analysis of time is a complicated thing; I am here merely drawing attention to facts and fictions that are combined to portray an impression of time. For example, the time taken by a train to get to a city is derived from events which are in time. This is physical time (kalika) that is measured by the clock. ‘Going to a city’ by mind does not involve physical events in between, so, it must be psychologically derived by past experiences.

Use of physical time in day-to-day life makes sense, but the use of psychological time to become something (by desire) that is not present here and now does not make much sense. We appear to do just that by mixing up psychological time with physical time to cause all sorts of stress and anxiety. Do we think around existence in psychological or physical time? Does neither time exist?

Kalavadins, a group of eternalists in contemporary of the Buddha, claimed that time is an absolute reality and strictly distinct. Even for Isaac Newton in 17th century, time was absolute and universal. Albert Einstein in 1905 disputed Newtonian time by the theory of Relativity in which he specified that time is not independent of the universe, but elastic and relative to the motion of an observer. For Einstein, the passing of time was an illusion. Moreover, he wrote that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.

Two millenniums before western philosophers, the Buddhist thought expounded by answering to Kalavadins that time has no objective reality and has no existence outside the world of phenomena (dhammas). In other words, time does not exist in real sense—avijjamana pannatti—like dhammas that arise and cease through causes and conditions. The theory of causality (an equivalent term for Paticcasamuppada) categorised that past, present and future are a concept of time and the Buddha advised us not to entertain views around the past and the future. The mind is designed to operate in the present because everything we experience is a product of six internal bases and six corresponding sense objects.

If we cannot talk about time without causally produced events, thinking about future is nothing but extrapolating the past or present with imaginary or predicted causes and conditions. As such any notion of deterministic future cannot stand in the Buddhist thought. For this reason, I think the Buddha never talked about the future in absolute accuracy, apart from a few exceptions, for example heinous crimes in which effect will be without intervals (anantarrika-kamma).

To replace the belief of absolute time, the Abhidhamma had invented a few entities in various scales such as khana (moment), santati (continuum or moving now) and addhan (duration). Any attempt to extend these entities into samsaric cycle, phenomenal integration by an observer—a self—is necessary to place them in temporal scale. All these entities, as far as I see, should be understood in relation to phenomena. A phenomenon is not a function of time and self, but vice versa. Without such a consideration, these entities sound more metaphysical than empirical and may well fall into the line of Kalavadines.

For example, if ‘khana’ is defined as a moment in physical time, it should have a duration. Any division of the duration should have characteristics of the whole duration. If ‘khana’ represents the entirety of its divisions—many consciousnesses as advocated by the Abhidhamma—to cognise what ‘khana’ is, one needs to go into all divisions at once, which is impossible. If we were to say it does not have a duration, several moments have no duration either. Therefore, ‘khana’ cannot be understood in terms of physical time. The exact nature of santati—continuum—is also debatable and cannot be grasped easily by us, due to the fact that phenomenal overlaps between successive santati are needed for ‘moving now’. It is nevertheless accepted in the commentarial tradition and recognised as perceptible time.

Since time is a conceptual construct that cannot be distinct outside of phenomena and their observers, I think ‘samaya’—confluence of conditions (paccaya samaggi)—is the most sensible way to put time into psychological perspective, in which no chronological sequence can be recognised. Samaya has widely been used in the early Buddhist literature, for examples, “ekam samayan” (at one time) in the Sutta Pitakaya, “tena samayena” (at that time) in the Vinaya Pitakaya and “yasmin samaye” (at which time) in the Abhidhamma Pitakaya.

Life is nothing more than the confluence of conditions one after the other. Attachment to time by always attempting to become ‘something’ in the future seems a major issue for us not being able to realise the Dhamma. In this life, we are fulfilling our time (‘kalam karoti’) in both physical and psychological senses, and before fulfilling our time (‘kalakiriya’), eradicating our attachment to time is necessary to put an end to becoming (bhava).

DR KEMACHANDRA