Every moment is fleeting and illusive, just like a shadow instantly fades away, it has no real entity. At the same time, this simulacrum, the world of desire, attachment, and pain ceaselessly continues or passes over -Prattyasamutpda緣起-until you g...
Every moment is fleeting and illusive, just like a shadow instantly fades away, it has no real entity. At the same time, this simulacrum, the world of desire, attachment, and pain ceaselessly continues or passes over -Prattyasamutpda緣起-until you get to the final emancipation, the Nirvana涅槃. When Buddha first revealed a concept of the worldly time, he evinced these contradictory arguments. How can a notion of time, which dies out every second, be compatible with ever-circulating Nida? na因緣 and time? For many students of Buddhism, since Buddha entered Nirvana, it took hundreds of years to come to terms with this dilemma. Among them, in about A.D. 4th century, an eminent text, Abhidharma-kosa was written by Vasubandhu世親. In this text, especially in the fifth chapter, 分別隨眠品(How Bad Thoughts Motivate Karma) which describes how we come to create the deeds that create our world, there is an interesting debate over what was Buddha`s real intention when he made his remarks on time. This paper is a short commentary on this argument between Sarvstivda說一切有部 and Sautrntika經量部. Sarvstivda claimes that three chronological points, past, present, and future exist simultaneously. According to them, this idea of sarvakl三世實有 is directly derived from Buddha`s sacred teachings and buttresses Sarvstivda`s central doctrine of ``all exists`` (sarvasti 法體恒有). This is also due to the particular epistemology. That is, in the light of Sarvstivda, there can not be any perception without an object; therefore as long as we can speculate the existence of three time points and karmas imposed upon them, they exist. However, Sautrntika puts it differently. Sautrntika argues that time never remains. If a moment passes, it shall instantly disappear. The karma which is produced at this moment, not being dependant on any time point, becomes a seed and sleeps beneath one`s mind. The accumulation of these seeds forms a condition of a being and its fate. Therefore, Sautrntika challenges Sarvstivda`s epistemology. We can always recognize or think of things that do not exist in real world, just as we can imagine a horn of a rabbit. In a modern perspective, one can question this unconvincing dispute. Why were they bothering themselves clinging to a mere trifle? Having said that, this paper will not minimize the importance of justifying the coexistence of continuity and rupture in time. Trying to evade a jaundiced modern percepective, this paper will actively re-appreciate their debate and finally, acknowledge their necessity of theoretical discourse.