[summary by Angie Weicekauskas , '93]
The Indian conception of time is very different from what the Western mind regards as intuitively obvious. In Indian thought, time, like other phenomena, is conceived statically rather than dynamically. It is, of course, recognized that the things of this world are always moving and changing. But the substance of things is seen as basically unchanging, its underlying reality unaffected by the ceaseless flux. The Indian does not concede that we never step into the same river twice; he directs our attention not to the flow of water but to the river itself, the unchanging universal. Indian thought places a high value on universality, and the connection between this, and the static conception of phenomena, is of course not accidental. "The one remains, the many change and flee."
This static conception of time permeates Indian thought. It could hardly fail to do so, for it is present in the very forms of language itself, conditioning all philosophical thinking. Tn the classical Indian languages, there are no words which corresponded to the concept "to become." The verb formed from the root bhu can be translated as both "to become" and "to exist." These two aspects of perceived reality, conceived as antithetical by the Western mind, are not even distinguished. "To become" is merely an aspect of "to exist." The noun bhava, formed from the same root, can mean either "being born" or ''existing'' (1); in other words, to become is to be born. To express the idea of change at all, Indians had to make shift with the words anyatha bhavati or anyathabhava-"being otherwise." Becoming is expressed in terms of being, dynamic is seen as a phase of static.
The point of view permeates the language. The noun, which expresses the more stable and unchanging aspects of a thing, is in Sanskrit more likely to be used than the verb, and correspondingly adjectives are more frequent than adverbs. In classical Sanskrit,(2) indeed, especially in prose writings, it became usual to employ verbal nouns or participles instead of finite verbs. For example, the sentence "Because of the rain, the food appears" is expressed in classical Sanskrit as "Because of the rain, appearance of the food (is possible)." It has been the practice since ancient times to use the participial form instead of the finite verb to express the past tense, and it became a common expression in colloquialism of the later periods.(3) Sanskrit will also use an adjective, which is static in feeling, to express an idea which might take a verb in the languages of the West. The classic Western expression of the sense of flux uses a vivid and specific verb. "All things flow" (panta rei [in Greek, the phrase attributed to Heraclitus]), The corresponding idea is expressed in Sanskrit as sarvam anityam, "all existences are impermanent."
We find the same habit of mind conditioning the use of periphrastic forms. The periphrastic perfect, though seldom found in the Vedas, appears frequently in the literature after the Brahmanas. "He went" becomes gamayam cakara (literally, "he did going"). Again, the periphrastic future may be used to express future action.(4) For example, the word gantasi (you are the one who goes) is used to express the meaning "you will go," thus directing the attention away from the action to the stable state of the actor.
The primacy of the noun is illustrated in the Sanskrit denominative, a category of verb not found in the classical grammar of the West. For example, the denominative putrlyati is formed from the noun putra (son) and means "to desire to have a son," and svamlyati, from the noun svamin (master) means "to regard as a master." Generally speaking, the denominative connotes the meaning of "to be . . . ," "to work as . . . ," "to regard as . . . ," "to desire . . . ," but the real emphasis of the word is on the noun.
Similarly, the meaning "to be able to," expressed in Western languages by verbs or auxiliary verbs, is expressed in Sanskrit by an adjective, sakya, or an indeclinable, sakyam. For example, na devasuraih sarvaifh sakyah prasahitum yudhi (Ramayana II, 86, 11 ) = non potest proelio superari a cunctis dis daemonibusque(5) (he cannot be conquered in battle by all the gods and spirits).
In Sanskrit, then, finite verbs are seldom used; the verb appears mainly as a verbal noun, and the nominal sentence is more often used than the verbal sentence. Usage of the infinitive of the verb is also limited; it is never used as subject(6) or as object. When it seems necessary to use the infinitive as an object, an abstract noun formed from the root of the verb is used instead, thus directing attention from the changing aspect of the action to the unchanging universal: "to appear" does not equal "appearance."
The centrality of the noun is further illustrated by the absence in Sanskrit of the adverbial suffix which is common to all Western languages. Adjectives are converted into adverbs by adding (w=s) in Greek, -ment in French, -Iy and -lich in English and German. In Sanskrit, however, the accusative case of the adjective is used if it is necessary to modify the verb. Ablative and locative cases of adjectives may also be used adverbially. The adverb itself is not even acknowledged as a part of speech in Sanskrit.
There are other curious illustrations of this tendency to comprehend things through their static aspects. To connect two ideas, Western languages use such conjunctions as and or then; Sanskrit, in contrast, will express the same idea by adding the demonstrative pronoun sa to the subject of the sentence, as if "John runs and jumps" were to be expressed as "John running he jumping." The conjunction emphasizes the separateness of events; the demonstrative focuses on the subject, unchanging through time.
On the whole, then, Western people comprehend action through its changing aspects, while Indians tend to comprehend it attributively. In particular, many Indians consider that action is an unchanging aspect, even an attribute, of existence. Westerners tend to regard action as an active phenomenon while Indians tend to look upon it statically. In the sentence sabbe sankhara anicca (all things are impermanent), a basic idea of Indian Buddhism, anicca, is an adjective. For an Indian, even the statement that "all things of this world are changing and moving" is not, as it was for Heraclitus, the expression of the changing aspects of existences, but the expression of a static and unchanging state.
In Indian philosophy the Absolute is generally explained as a Being beyond all temporal appearances. These exist and change in time; the Absolute, in contrast, is essentially static. In the Upanisads, the Absolute is repeatedly expressed as "Imperishable."(7) "Atman is imperishable for it cannot be destroyed.... It is unfettered, it does not suffer, it is not injured."(8) "This is that great unborn Self who is imperishable, incorruptible, eternal, fearless, Brahman."(9) Early Buddhism does not lay emphasis on a metaphysical Absolute as such, but the same habit of mind is found in the principle of pratltyasamutpada, later developed in Mahayana Buddhism, which states that nothing can disappear or arise. In Indian thought, as in the Sanskrit language, it is the idea of Being which receives central consideration.
Indian philosophers in general replace the concept of Becoming by three aspects of temporal existence: Appearance, Extinction, and Continuance. All three states are clearly conceived as static. They are referred to early in the Upanisads and are generally accepted by the orthodox schools of Brahmanism and Jainism. Buddhism also designates these as the three aspects of the conditioned or phenomenal being.(l0) Other words which are considered equivalent to "becoming" (vikara, vikriya, parinama, viparinama, etc.) in fact express the specialization of the simple into the complex and should be understood as meaning "evolution" or "development," rather than "becoming." Indian philosophy contains a number of variations on the three basic states, and the Sarvastivada school, the most eminent of Abhidharma Buddhist schools, added a fourth, namely jara or "decaying," which was interpreted as "changing to the other" (anyathabhava, anyathatva).(ll) This might seem to come close to "becoming"; the theory, however, was not accepted by all Buddhist schools, and Decay is no real analogue of Becoming as the idea appears in Westem philosophy.
There are evident similarities here to ancient Greek thought, at least in its Platonic and Parmenidean aspects. Plato formulated the antithesis between Being and Becoming; he saw the true essence of reality as consisting of changeless, timeless 'forms.' Geometry, as an investigation of the fixed forms of material bodies in space, was the typical pattern of science in ancient times, and in the physical sciences only statics was developed. Interest in the changing world of phenomena, however, was also an important element in Greek thought; "all things flow" is after all as Greek as Plato's ideal forms. Modern thought has concerned itself increasingly (though not exclusively) with Becoming; kinetics has replaced statics in the center of the physicist's attention, and mathematics has turned to analytics and algebra, in which variable quantities are examined. Modern thought is described as "progressive," "dynamic"; the unique contribution of Indian thought, in contrast, can be a kind of rest and joyfulness which may be very welcome to those who are tired of the frantic movement of their culture.
The persistent Indian conception of a transcendent reality as more important than the phenomenal world it underlies and sustains results in a kind of paralysis of the individual's sensitivity to time, if we understand "time" to mean the passage and flow of specific events in our experience. This paralysis manifests itself in a characteristic lack of time concepts which non-Indians regard as common sense. (Indian thought may show an intense preoccupation with other, more metaphysical senses of time; in the Vedic period time was seen as the fundamental principle of the universe, "Time, the steed, [who] runs with seven reins, thousand-eyed, ageless, rich in seed. The seers, thinking holy thoughts, mount him, all the worlds are his wheels.... With seven wheels does this Time ride, seven navels has he, immortality is his axle.... Time, the first god, now hastens onward''(l2) But this is hardly the time in which human beings carry on their common concerns. )
Language, as usual, is where this lack of common-sense concepts is most clearly seen: the Indian people did not have a clear awareness of the discrimination of tense. Although in Sanskrit, as in Greek, there are five kinds of tenses, they are not sharply discriminated in meaning.(l3) To indicate past time, the imperfect, perfect, past participle active, aorist and historical present are used almost indiscriminately,(14) and the frequency with which a given tense is used varies not according to meaning but according to historical period. The aorist is often used in the sixth century B.C., for instance, but in classical Sanskrit is no longer common. The discrimination between absolute past and relative past is not clearly made in the ancient Indian language.
In modern Hindustani as well, we find similar linguistic phenomena. The adverb kal means both "yesterday" and "tomorrow." Parson means "the day after tomorrow" as well as "the day before yesterday"; atarson means equally "three days ago" or "three days from now." The meaning of these terms can be determined only through context.
Since the lack of common-sense time concepts is built into the language of India, both ancient and modern, it is not surprising to find it manifested in Indian religion and historiography. The Buddha was born under a tree in the park at Lumbini, attained Enlightenment under a tree at Gaya, and entered Nirvana under a tree at Kusinagara. These three events, according to common-sense notions, must have taken place on different dates, yet they are all celebrated by Indians and South Asiatics on the same Wesak day in May. Indians have not exerted themselves to grasp the concept of time quantitatively, and have never written historical books with accurate dates. According to the Indian world view, the universe, world, and social order are eternal; personal life, however, is only one sample of a succession of lives existing repeatedly in limitless time. If one's life is conceived as infinitely repeated, it becomes meaningless. The idea of the transmigration of souls, the perpetual self-revolution of rebirth, has appeared only occasionally in the West, but in India it is a basic assumption of the common people as well as of philosophers. Passing phenomena, whether the events of the individual life or of more generalized history, have no real significance. It is natural enough that no importance is given to providing them with accurate dates.
We should thus be prepared to find the Indian conception of history very different from our own. Indian books of history are few in number, and these few are tinged with a fantastic and legendary color. They are not products of historical science but rather works of art. Usually they are written in verse. Indians are not satisfied with the simple description of facts in the language of daily use. They beautify the past and try to idealize it. They ignore precise figures, exact sequences of events, and other details of time and place. Far from exerting themselves to give exact sizes of armies, say, or expenditures, they exaggerate astronomically with magnificent and brilliant hyperbole.
As an example, consider the Mahavamsa, the most reliable work of history produced in ancient Ceylon. Even this book, though highly informative from the modern historian's point of view, is saturated with a mysterious and legendary atmosphere. For instance, though Mahanaman, the author of the Mahavamsa, lived in the fifth century A.D., in an age not too distant from the time of King Dutthagamani, his descriptions of this greatest of Ceylon's rulers are already full of fantastic elements, and the reader must make a careful distinction between myth and that which is historically true. The histories or "chronicles" of medieval European monks and the biographies of eminent Buddhist monks in China and Japan have a similar style, but the Mahavamsa stretches historical truth to an incomparably greater degree.
Another example is Kalhana's Rajataranginl, the chronicle of a Kashmiri dynasty and one of the best historical works ever written by an Indian. In it Kalhana details the social situation of his time and the activities of the various personages in it with an accuracy that no other Indian book of history has attained. Yet Oldenberg can still describe it in these terms:
If one removes all the poetic elements from Kalhana's story, and compares it with events of the time, he will find that the account is in essence on a level no higher than that of a more or less accurate article in a newspaper or a cartoon in a political comic paper. The process of formation that this story has undergone is not that of historical thinking but that of poetry- poetry in the Indian sense with its brilliant quality and also with its weakness. And Kalhana himself has a very distinct idea on this point; he feels himself as a poet and he is a poet.(15)
It is worth pointing out that Kalhana scarcely pays heed to causal sequence when considering historical events. His dates are inaccurate and sometimes clearly the products of pure imagination.
The Indians themselves have attached little significance to their books of history; most Indians have been much more interested in religion and poetry than in historical documentation. For the Indians, a minor error in the recitation of the Vedas has been a serious matter. But they have been thoroughly indifferent to the erroneous recording of dates or facts in their books of history.(l6) This lack of historical consciousness is distinctly observable in the Buddhist attitude to the rules of their order. In the period after the death of the Buddha, Buddhists had to establish new precepts in order to meet changing social conditions. As some of the new rules were not compatible with the older ones, they hesitated to include them in the traditional books of ordination (patimokkhas), and instead attached them to the patimokkhas as supplements. Although they would not alter the traditional books, however, they were not afraid to claim the authority of the Buddha's own teaching even for these supplementary precepts of their own creation, completely ignoring the historical facts. Their concern for the proper observance of the precepts was far stronger than their regard for historical accuracy.
This lack of interest in history is very different from what we find in China. The Chinese derive their rules of social conduct from the examples of their ancestors as set down in their books of history. The Indians, on the other hand, gain their principles of behavior from their religious books, and at the same time fables and parables such as the Paricatantra and Hitopades'a contribute toward the diffusion of practical morals into daily life. These books, embodiments of the enduring spirit of folk-tale, present for contemplation eternal paradigms of human experience - paradigms which are by their nature timeless and in that sense, outside history.
The concentration on the universality behind and beyond the variety of concrete phenomena of our experience is in its essence contemplative. Language again provides a key to thought; the meditative character of Indian thought is forcibly illustrated in the concept of causal relations as expressed in the forms of Sanskrit itself. To indicate the causal relation between two notions, Sanskrit forms a compound which suggests that the natural order of thought is to begin with the effect and trace it back to the cause. Accordingly, the expression "effect and cause" (phalahetu) occurs instead of the familiar "cause and effect." The contemplative attitude thus erases time: one can only speak of "effect and cause" if the effect is already known and both effect and cause present to the contemplative mind sub specie aeternitatis. Although the Latin phrase suggests that this habit of thinking is not wholly foreign to the West, the natural order of Western thought is clear: it is to proceed temporally from cause to effect. Even though the relationship is seen, it is seen in time. In Sanskrit, in contrast, many expressions emphasize this meditative view in which progressive phenomena are seen as already complete. Karyakaranabhava means, not "the relation of cause and effect," but of "effect and cause." What would in Western languages appear as the "relation of the knower and the knowable" is in Sanskrit "the relation of the knowable and the knower (gamyagamakabhava).''(l7) We find similar reversals of Western order in the "relation of the generated and the generative (janyajanakabhava)"; "the relation of the proved and the prover (sadhyasadhakabhava)"; "the relation of the established and the establishing (vyayasthapyavyavasthapakabhava)'';(l8) "the relation of the activated and the activator (pravartyapravartayitrtva).''(l9) Each of these expressions appears reversed to Western minds, and even to other Orientals. Accordingly, when scholars translated the original texts into Chinese they changed the word order. Tibetan scholars also understood the causal relationship differently from the Indian; they translated phalahetu ("effect and cause") into rgyu dan hbras-bu ("cause and effect"). This way of thinking, in which the notion of effect is formed first and that of the cause inferred and stated afterward, is retrospective, and is basically different from the approach which starts from the cause. The retrospective, contemplative attitude is in further contrast to the thinking processes of natural science, through which, with the help of inductive and deductive reasoning, the cause of an effect is investigated and ascertained by functional correlation without giving primacy either to cause or effect.
Even when Indians do investigate the relation of two phenomena from cause to effect, they generally do not take the view that a single effect is caused by a single active movement, but prefer to consider that effects are produced by the combination of various causes. Therefore, most Indian thinkers do not employ the term which corresponds to the Aristotelian notion of efficient cause. While nimitta-karana is linguistically the equivalent of causa efficiens, it is also used to express the Western notion of causa occasionalis. The Sanskrit expression in fact describes a final cause or aim, that is, a teleological relation. And such relations, East and West, are traditional subjects of contemplation.
It would be incorrect to infer from the foregoing that the Indian people have no concept of abstract time. On the contrary, the view of the uncertainty and transiency of life which is at the center of both Buddhism and Jainism demonstrates that they understand from their heartfelt experience the changing phases of the world. Buddhism from the outset emphasized the transience and impermanence of human existence. All things pass away. On account of our fragility we are subject to disease and death. From transience comes suffering. The Buddha asked his disciples: "That which is transient, O monks, is it painful or pleasant?" "Painful O Master!"(20) Our dreams, our hopes, our wishes-all of them will be forgotten as if they had never been. This is a universal principle. "Whatever is subject to origination is subject also to destruction.''(2l) Necessary and inexorable is the death of all that is born. The difference is only in the degree of duration. Some things may last for years, others for a brief while only. But all must vanish. For the ignoble craving for worldly things must be substituted the noble aspiration for the "incomparable security of Nirvana free from corruption":
O transient are our life's experience!Their nature 'tis to rise and pass away
They happen in our ken, they cease to be.
O well for us when they are sunk to rest!(22)
There is no substance which abides forever. All matter is force; all substance is motion. The state of every individual is unstable, sure to pass away.
In later days the sentiment of impermanence became more peculiarly Indian than Buddhist. Suffering is seen as one with transience. Craving causes suffering since the impermanence of what we crave causes disappointment and sorrow. The Buddhist beatitude lies in our realization that all things are transient and we should not cling to them.
[On to Nakamura's comments on Japanese conceptions]
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