Examination of Time

We live inside time without thinking about it. Yesterday is behind us, tomorrow ahead, and now is the thin edge between them, sliding forward. We picture time as a river that would go on flowing even if nothing happened in it. This chapter, only six verses long, asks whether past, present and future can be found as things in their own right, and whether there is any time at all apart from the things that change.

The reasoning is the same tool used throughout the work: what is defined only in relation to something else cannot also stand on its own. It continues the analysis of motion in Chapter 2, where the present moment of going could not be found between the gone and the not yet gone, and of arising and ceasing in Chapter 7.

The verses

The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Three times that define each other

What makes the present the present? Only that it comes after the past and before the future. 'Present' and 'future' are defined by their relation to 'past'. Verses 19.1 to 19.3 take this ordinary fact seriously and ask how the relation could hold if each time were a thing in its own right.

First option (19.1). Suppose present and future really depend on the past, as a child depends on a parent who is there. Then they would have to be present in the past, available to be related to. But a present that is already in the past is past, not present.

Second option (19.2). Suppose instead they are not in the past at all. Then the past has nothing to do with them. How could they depend on something they never meet?

Third option (19.3). Suppose they do not depend on the past at all. Then they lose what made them present and future. A 'now' with no before is not a now; a 'later' with nothing earlier is not later. So, taken as self-standing items, neither a present time nor a future time is found.

Verse 19.4 says the same test works from each starting point. Begin with the future, and the past and present fail in the same way; begin with the present, and so on. It also works for every set of terms defined against each other: high, low and middle; one and many; long and short. Each member is what it is only through the others, so none can be found standing alone.

The target here was real. The Sarvāstivāda school of Abhidharma held that the basic elements of experience exist in all three times, past, present and future, and that only their activity changes. Time was given a structure of its own, and its pieces given natures. Nāgārjuna's verses take that structure apart.

Can time be caught?

Verse 19.5 approaches from another side. If time were a thing, we could grasp it, pick it out and point to it. Could we?

A time that does not stay, that is gone the instant it arrives, cannot be grasped: before we can point to it, it has passed. A time that does stay is not time; a moment that lasts unchanged is not passing, and passing is what time was supposed to be. Since the only time we could catch would be one that stays, and no such time is found, what is it that we are designating when we say 'time'?

No time apart from things

The last verse (19.6) gives the conclusion in two steps. First, if time depends on things, it is not found without things. We know time only through change: the hour by the clock's hands, the year by the seasons, a life by its ageing. Take away every change and there is nothing left to call time passing.

Second, no thing at all is found. This does not mean that nothing appears. It means, as earlier chapters showed, that no thing is found existing from its own side. So time cannot borrow solidity from them. Time is designated together with changing things, as the 'when' of their changing, and neither the things nor the time is found standing alone.

The owner's main book gives a lived test. Under a general anaesthetic you count backward from ten, reach seven, and then a nurse is saying your name in another room. Three hours have passed on the clock, and none in experience. If time were a river flowing by itself, it should have carried you through those hours, however unconsciously. It did not. The hours are present in the framework of the operating theatre, recorded and charted, and absent from the framework of your experience. Both are correct within their frame. Neither finds a time that passed on its own.

What is left standing

None of this stops clocks from working or appointments from being kept. 'The train leaves at nine' is true, and you can miss it. Physics measures time with great precision, and history orders events reliably. What the chapter removes is the further picture of time as a container or a river that exists before and apart from anything happening. Time is fully real as the measure of change, within the frameworks that measure it. It is simply not a thing on its own. Seeing this has practical weight: the past that seems to press on us and the future that seems to loom are not places where things are stored, waiting. They are designated now, on what appears now.

In the books

The two books take up this chapter's themes in several places.

• Interlude: Same Words, Different Worlds (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the section 'Time': the river picture, the Sarvāstivāda view of the three times, and Nāgārjuna's analysis (verses 19.1–6).
• Chapter 1, The Substantialist Misconception, the section 'The Innate Sense of Reality': no one has ever met time apart from change; each of the three times is established only in dependence on the others.
• Chapter 8, States of Awareness, Deep Sleep, and Death, the section 'A Lived Example: Going Under': the general anaesthetic, three hours on the clock and none in experience.
• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'Do We Actually Think Substantially?': time pictured as a river and as a stuff we spend, and the anaesthetic as counter-evidence.

Talks on YouTube:

• Core Logic 3: Tripartite Temporal/Spatial Analysis, the three-way analysis used in verses 19.1–3 (given on MMK Chapter 2).

Words to know

• Time (kāla): here, time taken as a thing in its own right, a container or a flow.
• The three times: past (atīta), present (pratyutpanna) and future (anāgata).
• Dependence (apekṣā): being defined in relation to something else, as present is to past.
• Thing, entity (bhāva): a thing taken as existing from its own side; time is designated on such things, which are themselves not found.
• Designated (prajñapta): named and picked out in dependence, within a framework, without a self-standing referent.