Thusness · John Tan

After Anatta · Explorations

Time

Where are past, present and future?

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This page is the whole picture. Each article zooms into one part of it.

Last updated 31 Oct 2026

Clocks work, trains leave at nine, and bodies age. Past, present and future, looked for one by one, are none of them found standing. Both stand, and this page shows how.

The question

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, and as a stuff we can spend, save or run out of.

Some Buddhists held a version of this too. The Sarvāstivāda school of Abhidharma taught that the basic elements of experience exist in all three times, and only their activity changes. Nāgārjuna asked whether past, present and future can be found as things in their own right, and whether there is any time at all apart from what changes.

The substance reading

Stated fairly, the substance view says: time is a container or a flow that exists before and apart from events. The past is stored somewhere behind us, the future is waiting ahead, and the present is a real slice of it, here now. Events are placed into time the way furniture is placed into a room.

past, stored now future, waiting Beneath them, a river of time that flows by itself.
The substance picture of time.

What the tradition says

A time that does not stay is not grasped, and a time that stays, which could be grasped, is not found. And how could a time that is not grasped be designated?

Nāgārjuna, MMK 19.5

If time exists in dependence on things, how could there be time without things? And not a single thing is found, so how will there be time?

Nāgārjuna, MMK 19.6

Firewood becomes ash and cannot return to being firewood. Yet we should not regard the ash as after and the firewood as before. Each abides in its own position.

Dōgen, Genjōkōan · paraphrase

Applying the logic

1 · What would a substance view say?Time is a container or a river that exists by itself. Past, present and future are three real places: the past kept, the future waiting, the present a slice we stand on.
2 · What does dependency say instead?The three times are defined through each other: the present is present only after a past and before a future (MMK 19.1–3). And time is designated on change: the hour by the clock's hands, the year by the seasons, a life by its ageing. Here and now are not a stage that appearing happens on; they arrive with it.
3 · What is affirmed conventionally?Clocks, calendars and appointments. "The train leaves at nine" is true, and you can miss it. Ageing, history, memory and plans. Physics measures time with great precision. Time is fully real as the measure of change, within the frameworks that measure it.
4 · What is never found?A time that stays and could be caught (MMK 19.5). A present with a width of its own, between the crossed and the not yet crossed (MMK 2.1). A first beginning (MMK 11.1). A river that flows when nothing happens.

The river that did not flow

Book 1 gives a test anyone who has had surgery can check. 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. 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.

Then the habit retreats, as Step 2 said it would: "but surely the present moment is real". Look for it. Walk across a room. The floor divides into what is behind the foot and what is ahead of it. The now of the step has no width of its own. The present, too, is designated, not a floor to stand on. Continuity is not lost: the flame at midnight is neither the flame at dusk nor an unrelated flame, and nothing travels between them.

Time is not a thing that changes happen in. It is named on the changing, together with it.

Two traps

Too much: eternalism

"Time is a cosmic river," or its refined form, "only the eternal Now is real." The second sounds like insight, and it is the same habit: the present moment made the ground everything appears in. Each moment is complete in its own position, with nothing underneath.

Too little: nihilism

"Time is an illusion, so lateness, ageing and consequences do not matter." The train still leaves at nine. Actions still ripen later. Emptiness denies a time that stands on its own, not before and after.

In practice

  • The past that presses on you and the future that looms are not places where things are stored, waiting. They are designated now, on what appears now: a memory, a plan, a tightness in the chest.
  • Listen to a sound fading. Look for the moment it passed from present to past. Every moment is full of change, and no moment is found as a slice.
  • The search for where suffering began can be set down. It ends by seeing how it is kept going now, by conditions that can change.

In the chain: this page goes with Vivid and Nowhere (4 of 7); The Logic of Dependency (6 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

In the books

Talks

Words to know

Time (kāla)
Here, time taken as a thing in its own right, a container or a flow. What the analysis does not find.
The three times
Past (atīta), present (pratyutpanna) and future (anāgata), each defined through the others.
Dharma position (jū hōi)
Dōgen's term: each moment complete in its own place, with before and after cut off.
No first limit
The Buddha's refusal to name a first beginning of the round of birth and death.
Designated (prajñapta)
Named in dependence, within a framework, with nothing standing behind the name.