Tag Archives: Time

It needs to be stressed that Buddhism takes a very different stance on the notion of time and its effect on sentient beings. In Christianity there is a triadic-understanding: a person is born at one particular junction in time-based reality, then undergoes a certain trial-based system in which he/she must perform in a moral manner to be made worthy of entering into—eternal life in which they depart from this world in order to enter eternally into God’s “heaven”. So it’s essentially going from point A to point B in a linear fashion with no other variables interfering. From the Buddhist stance, one’s purported lifespan has always been ongoing in an unending cyclic-fashion. The wheel of samsara spins in a diurnal manner and there is no escape from it since one consistently becomes reborn again and again into one of the six realms of impermanence—hence the problem is how to bring this cyclic-existence to a final and successful conclusion. In this model of time, the mind-stream of sentient beings is beginningless, quelling any notion of linear time with a predestination in mind. So for a Buddhist, linear time is not real and is non-existent (except in relative fashion). Ch’an Master Hui-neng goes even further: read more