Images and Symbols

Mircea Eliade

The philosophy of time in buddhism, page 79

Movement, and therefore time itself-duration-is a pragmatic postulate, just as the individual Ego is a pragmatic postulate according to Buddhism ; but the concept of motion corresponds to no external reality, for it is “something” of our own construction. The fluidity and momentariness of the sensible world, its constant annihilation, is the Mahayanic formula for expressing the unreality of the temporal world. It has sometimes been inferred from this Mahayanic conception of time that the philosophers of the Greater Vehicle thought of time as discontinuous, that “movement consists of a series of discontinuities” (Stchcrbatsky). But, as Coomaraswamy justly remarks (op. cit., p. 6o), a line is not made up of an infinite series of points but presents itself as a continuum. Vasubandhu himself says that “the arising of instants is uninterrupted” (nirantara-ksana-utpada). Etymologically, the term samtana, which Stcherbatsky translates by “series”, means “continuum”. 

There is nothing new in all this. The logicians and metaphysicians of the Greater V chicle did no more than press to their ultimate limits the pan-mdia11 intuitions about the ontological unreality of all that exists in Time. Fluidity conceals unreality. The only hope and the one way of salvation is the Buddha, who has rcv􀃑led the Dharma (the absolute reality) and shown the way to Nirvana. The sermons of the Buddha tirelessly repeat the central theme of his message : everything that is conditioned is unreal; but he never forgets to add that: “This is not I” (na me so atta). For he, the Buddha, is one with the Dharma, and therefore he is “simple, non-composite” (asamkhata), he is “a-temporal, timeless” (akaliko, as we read in the Anguttara Nikaya IV, 3 59-406). The Buddha repeats many times over that he has “transcended the reons” (kappatito • • • vip utnatto), that he is “not the man of the reons” (akkapiyo)-meaning that he is not engaged in the cyclic flow of time, that he has passed out of cosmic time.15 For him, says the Samyutta Nikiiya (I, 141), “there is neither past nor future” (na tassa paccha na purattham attlzi). To the Buddha, all times have become present time (Visuddhi Magga, 4I I) ; in other words, he has abolished the irreversibility of time.

The total present, the eternal present of the mystics, is stasis or non-duration. Expressed in spatial symbols, the non-durational etemal present is immobility. And, in fact, to denote the Wlcond.itioned state of the Buddha or of the liberated self (jivanmukta), Buddhism-and Yoga too-use expressions relating to imm.obility or stasis. “He whose thought is stable” (thita-citto; Digha Nikiiya II, 157), “he whose spirit is stable” (thit’ atta, ibid. I, 57), “stable”, “motionless”, etc. Let us not forget that the flrst and simplest definition of Yoga is that gtven by Patanjali himself at the beginning of his Yoga Sutra (I, 2) : “yogah cittavrittinirodhah”, “Yoga is the suppression of states of consciousness”. But suppression is only the final end. The yogi begins by “stopping”, by “immobilising” his states of consciousness, his psycho-mental flux. (The most usual meaning of nirodha is, moreover, that of “restriction” or “obstruction”, as in the acts of “shutting-up”, “enclosing”, etc.) We will return again to the effects that tlus stoppage or immobilisation of states of consciousness may have upon the yogis’ experience of time. He “whose thought is stable” and for whom time no longer flows, lives in an eternal present, in the nunc stans. The instant, the· present moment, the nunc, is called ksana in Sanskrit and khana in Pali.16 It is by the ksana, by the “moment”, that time is measured. But this term has also the meaning of “favourable moment”,’ “opportunity”, and for the Buddha it is by means of such a “favourable moment” that one can escape from time.