ACTION, CONDITIONING, TIME, AND TIMELESSNESS

The thought of Buddhism is continuous with that of the pre-Buddhist Brahmanical tradition, where ideas of time and life after death had evolved slowly but decisively. The earliest Vedic religion had little that can be called soteriology; the extant texts stress the aspiration for good things in this life: sons, cattle, victory in war, and so on. The word normally translated ‘immortality’, amṛtam, in its earliest occurrences meant more simply non-dying, in the sense of continuing life; thus it was no paradox for Vedic hymns to aspire to the possession of amṛtam as a ‘full life’ lasting a hundred years. There was a notion of timelessness, an ‘unborn’, which was, to use the Vedic image as adapted by T. S. Eliot, ‘the still point of the turning world’ of time; it was also its timeless structure, the whole rather than its temporal constituents taken sequentially. This whole was the recurring year, whose constituent parts (days and nights, months, seasons) formed the spokes of the invariable but incessant wheel of time, whose movement was both symbolized and constituted by the daily and yearly cycle of the sun.