中論 觀時品第十九

The questioner’s thesis is sturdy: “Time should exist, because it is established through dependence.” The three times depend upon one another, so all three exist; he also places “such dharmas as upper, middle, and lower and one and different” on the same ground.

Nāgārjuna does not deny dependence. He simply follows dependence to its end.

Present within One Another, or Not

If future and present truly exist because of the past, they must be within the past. Qingmu’s rule is: “Whenever a dharma is established in dependence upon a place, that dharma should exist in that place.” His example is: “Because light is established through a lamp, wherever the lamp exists, light should exist.”

But if all three times are within the past, “all three times would be called past time.” Once future and present are gone, the past loses its counterparts: “If future and present time are absent, past time should likewise be absent.”

Suppose one says they are not within the past. Then they are “like such objects as a jar and a robe, each established separately and not dependent upon the other.” Things that stand independently do not need dependence; the original reason withdraws itself.

And what if they do not depend? Qingmu asks only one question of location: “Where does present time exist?”

Once both gates have been traversed, he gathers them into one sentence: “Because time exists only through such mutual dependence, time in truth is absent.”

Not Only Time

“Upper, middle, lower, one, and different—dharmas such as these are all absent.” Apart from upper there is no middle or lower. One and different likewise arise “because of one there is different; because of different there is one.” Qingmu closes both ends: “If one truly existed, it should not exist because of different.”

What needs the other in order to exist does not exist from itself. Everything that can be named only through comparison is gathered into this sentence.

Years and Months Are Not Evidence

The questioner cites “distinctions such as years, months, days, and moments.” Nāgārjuna turns back to time itself: “Time at rest cannot be found, and time gone cannot be found.”

If it does not remain, it cannot be grasped; if it remains, it is no longer time. “If there is no mark of time, there is no time.”

Where the Chapter Lands

“Time exists because of things; apart from things, where is time? Things themselves have no possession—how much less could time exist!”

Qingmu says only two sentences: “Time is named because things arise; apart from things there is no time.”

Time is a name established on the arising and ceasing of things. Remove the things and no empty container called time is left; even the place where the name could be established is gone. Thus he closes very lightly: “In the preceding chapters, things have already been refuted through many kinds of causes and conditions. Since things are absent, where could time exist?”

The preceding refutations of things are enough. This chapter need only close the clasp.

Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva, author; the brahmin Qingmu, commentator; Tripiṭaka Master Kumārajīva of the Later Qin, translator. Treatise on the Middle, fascicle three, “Examination of Time, Chapter Nineteen,” Taishō T30n1564. Paragraph-initial〔T30 …〕marks a Taishō page-column-line anchor.

1. Question: Because the Three Times Depend upon One Another, Time Should Exist

〔T30 0025c02〕The questioner says: Time should exist, because it is established through mutual causation and dependence. Because past time exists, future and present time exist; because present time exists, past and future time exist; because future time exists, past and present time exist. Dharmas such as upper, middle, and lower and one and different likewise exist through mutual causation and dependence.

The respondent answers as follows.

2. Verse: If the Two Times Exist Because of the Past, They Should Be within the Past

If future and present time exist because of past time, then future and present time should be within past time.

3. Commentary: If They Are within the Past, All Three Times Become Past

If future and present time exist because of past time, then future and present time should be within past time. Why? Whenever a dharma is established in dependence upon a place, that dharma should exist in that place. For example, because light is established through a lamp, wherever the lamp exists, light should exist. In the same way, if future and present time are established because of past time, then future and present time should be within past time.

If future and present time existed within past time, then all three times would be called past time. Why? Because future and present time would be within past time. If every time were entirely past, then future and present time would be absent, because all would be past. If future and present time were absent, past time should likewise be absent. Why? Because past time is called past time only in dependence upon future and present time.

Just as future and present time are established because of past time, past time should likewise be established because of future and present time. Since future and present time are now absent, past time should also be absent. Therefore, the earlier statement that future and present time are established because of past time cannot be established.

If one says that future and present time are absent within past time yet can still be established because of past time, this too cannot be established. Why?

4. Verse: If They Are Not within the Past, How Can They Exist Because of the Past?

If future and present are absent within past time, then how could future and present time exist because of past time?

5. Commentary: If Each Has a Different Mark, They Do Not Depend upon One Another—Like a Jar and a Robe

If future and present time are not within past time, how can future and present time be established because of past time? Why? If the three times each have a different mark, they should not be established through mutual causation and dependence. They would be like such objects as a jar and a robe, each established separately and not dependent upon the other.

Yet without dependence upon past time, future and present time are not established; without dependence upon present time, past and future time are not established; without dependence upon future time, past and present time are not established. You previously said that although future and present time are absent within past time, they can still be established because of past time. This cannot be established.

6. Question: What Fault Is There If They Are Not Established Because of the Past?

〔T30 0026a04〕The questioner says: What fault is there if future and present time are not established because of past time?

The respondent answers as follows.

7. Verse: Without Dependence upon the Past, Both Times Are Absent

Without dependence upon past time, there is no future time and no present time. Therefore, both times are absent.

8. Commentary: Without Dependence upon the Past, Where Could Present and Future Exist?

Without dependence upon past time, future and present time cannot be established. Why? If present time exists without depending upon past time, where does present time exist? The same applies to future time: where does future time exist? Therefore, without dependence upon past time, future and present time are absent. Because time exists only through such mutual dependence, time in truth is absent.

9. Verse: The Other Two Times and Upper, Middle, Lower, One, and Different Are Likewise All Absent

Because of this meaning, one knows that the other two times, together with such dharmas as upper, middle, and lower and one and different, are all absent.

10. Commentary: Apart from Upper There Is No Middle or Lower; One and Different Depend upon Each Other

Because of this meaning, one should know that the other times—future and present—should likewise be absent, and that such dharmas as upper, middle, and lower and one and different should all likewise be absent.

For example, because there is an upper, there are a middle and a lower; apart from upper there is no middle or lower. If middle and lower existed apart from upper, they should not depend upon one another. Because of one, there is different; because of different, there is one. If one truly existed, it should not exist because of different; if different truly existed, it should not exist because of one. Dharmas of this kind should likewise be refuted in this way.

11. Question: Years, Months, Days, and Moments Differ, So Time Is Known to Exist

The questioner says: Since distinctions such as years, months, days, and moments exist, one knows that time exists.

The respondent answers as follows.

12. Verse: Neither Time at Rest nor Time Gone Can Be Found; Time Exists Because of Things

Time at rest cannot be found, and time gone cannot be found. If time cannot be found, how can the mark of time be spoken of?

Time exists because of things; apart from things, where is time? Things themselves have no possession—how much less could time exist!

13. Commentary: Because Things Are Absent, Time Is Absent

If time does not remain at rest, it should not be findable; yet time at rest likewise is absent. If time cannot be found, how can the mark of time be spoken of? If there is no mark of time, there is no time.

Time is named because things arise; apart from things there is no time. In the preceding chapters, things have already been refuted through many kinds of causes and conditions. Since things are absent, where could time exist?

Time is the hardest thing to doubt. Money can be absent, the body can decay, thoughts can stop; yet the words “yesterday,” “now,” and “tomorrow” seem to remain whatever happens. Even if not one thing in the world were left, time would seem to keep flowing.

This chapter asks about that “keep.”

Nāgārjuna does not begin by trying to prove that time does not exist. He lets the one who asserts time give his own reason first, then follows that reason all the way to its end. At the end, the speaker discovers that the very reason he offered is precisely why time cannot stand by itself.

This Question Comes Prepared

〔0025c02〕The questioner opens by saying: “Time should exist, because it is established through dependence.”

We should see the weight of this sentence. He is not naively saying, “Of course time exists.” He offers an argument: time is established because the three times depend upon one another. With the past, future and present can be spoken; with the present, past and future can be spoken; with the future, past and present can be spoken. Remove any one, and the other two cannot be established.

Nor does he speak only of time. He continues: “Dharmas such as upper, middle, and lower and one and different likewise exist through mutual dependence.” The triad of upper, middle, and lower and the pair one and different are likewise established only through mutual dependence. He places an entire class of things on the same principle: whatever is established in dependence exists.

This is an intelligent thesis, because dependence is among our most familiar experiences: without upper, lower cannot be spoken; without long, short cannot be spoken. He turns that familiarity into evidence and asks: how could a relation this secure be absent?

What Nāgārjuna does next is turn the word “dependence” over and look at its other side.

If They Truly Exist Because of the Past, the Other Two Times Must Reside within the Past

Nāgārjuna’s first verse says: “If future and present exist because of past time,” then “future and present should be within past time.”

The key to this step is a general rule Qingmu states for the reader: “Whenever a dharma is established in dependence upon a place, that dharma should exist in that place.” If a dharma is established only by depending on a certain place, it should be present in that place.

Qingmu immediately gives a visible example: “Because light is established through a lamp, wherever the lamp exists, light should exist.” Light exists because of a lamp, so light is present where the lamp is. One does not say that light depends upon the lamp while placing the lamp here and the light somewhere else. If cause and fruit truly stand in dependence, the fruit is located where its cause is.

Apply the rule to the three times: because future and present are established through the past, they must be within past time.

Then trouble begins. Qingmu says that if so, “all three times would be called past time.” If future is within the past and present is also within the past, all three occupy this one place called past and must all be called past. Three names collapse into one.

Once collapsed into one, the trouble deepens. If everything is past, future and present are absent. Qingmu then presses: “If future and present time are absent, past time should likewise be absent.” Why can even the past not be preserved? Because “past time is called past time only in dependence upon future and present time.” The name past can be spoken only relative to future and present. When two of the three die, the one that remains can no longer be itself.

Here it is worth pausing. The questioner originally used dependence to establish time. Nāgārjuna does not deny dependence; he only follows it one step backward. If dependence is bidirectional, “just as future and present time are established because of past time, past time should likewise be established because of future and present time.” When one end falls, the other cannot stand.

Qingmu’s judgment is brief: “This cannot be so.”

Then Say They Are Not within the Past—but Dependence Disappears with That

The questioner still has a retreat: one could say that future and present are not within past time, but nevertheless are established because of the past. Would that not avoid collapsing the three times into one?

Nāgārjuna’s second verse blocks that point: “If future and present are absent within past time,” then “how can future and present time depend upon the past?”

Qingmu explains this step with another analogy. He says: “If the three times each have a different mark, they should not be established through mutual dependence,” but should be “like such objects as a jar and a robe, each established separately and not dependent upon the other.” A jar is a jar and a robe a robe; each has its own appearance and is established separately, with neither relying on the other. If the three times are not present within one another, they become unrelated things like jar and robe. Unrelated things have no relation of dependence.

The questioner is therefore trapped at both ends. Say they are present within one another, and the three times collapse into one and the entire system fails. Say they are not present within one another, and one admits that the three times stand independently, so the original reason—“established through dependence”—invalidates itself.

Qingmu adds an important passage that unfolds this bind through all three rotations: “Without dependence upon past time, future and present time are not established”; without the present, past and future are not established; without the future, past and present are not established. Each of the three times takes a turn as cause and fruit. None can stand outside the circle and guarantee the others.

Could They Simply Not Depend?

〔0026a04〕The questioner therefore asks: “What fault is there if future and present time are not established because of past time?” What happens if dependence is simply abandoned?

Nāgārjuna’s answer is extremely short: “Without dependence upon past time, there is no future time,” and “there is likewise no present time; therefore, both times are absent.”

Qingmu brings the sentence down to its most concrete point. He does not ask abstractly whether establishment succeeds, but asks about location: “Where does present time exist?” If present is not spoken relative to past, exactly where does this thing called present point? The same holds for future: without a relative reference, it cannot even be indicated.

Thus, by this passage both paths have been exhausted: dependence does not establish it, and nondependence does not establish it. Qingmu gathers the result into one sentence: “Because time exists only through such mutual dependence, time in truth is absent.”

This must be read precisely. It does not say that time has never appeared in our days. It says that time exists only in dependence; what exists in dependence has no body of time that stands by itself. Years still pass, but the “thing” said to pass cannot be found.

This Refutation Does Not Stop with Time

The fourth verse widens the field: “Because of this meaning, one knows the other two times,” and even “upper, middle, lower, one, and different—dharmas such as these are all absent.”

The questioner had casually staked upper, middle, lower, one, and different on the same reasoning. Nāgārjuna accepts the wager exactly as offered: since you say they are likewise established in dependence, they likewise cannot withstand this question.

Qingmu’s example belongs to everyone: “Because there is an upper, there are a middle and a lower; apart from upper there is no middle or lower.” Remove upper and middle and lower immediately lose their place. Conversely, “if middle and lower existed apart from upper, they should not depend upon one another.” If middle and lower can establish themselves apart from upper, they never depended upon it in the first place, and the thesis withdraws itself.

The pair one and different is tighter still. Qingmu says: “Because of one, there is different; because of different, there is one.” Different is said relative to one, and one relative to different. He then seals both sides: “If one truly existed, it should not exist because of different”; “if different truly existed, it should not exist because of one.” To exist truly means to be established by oneself. What is established by itself does not need the other in order to exist. Once one admits dependence on the other, one admits that it does not truly exist by itself.

Qingmu finally extends the point to the entire class in one sentence: “Dharmas of this kind should likewise be refuted in this way.”

Anything named only through comparison—long and short, large and small, high and low, before and after, this and that—is included in the sentence. Time is merely the most stubborn example.

Do Years, Months, Days, and Moments Not Count as Evidence?

The questioner finally invokes common sense: “Since distinctions such as years, months, days, and moments exist, one knows that time exists.”

This is the most powerful question because it appeals to experience anyone can check. Days truly pass one by one; moments truly move minute by minute. If measures can be distinguished, how could time be absent?

Nāgārjuna’s fifth verse does not deny these measures. It turns back to ask in what state this supposed time itself exists: “Time at rest cannot be found, and time gone cannot be found”; therefore, “if time cannot be found, how can the mark of time be spoken of?”

Qingmu opens the two gates: “If time does not remain at rest, it should not be findable; yet time at rest likewise is absent.” If time flows without remaining, at the moment one reaches to grasp it, it is no longer that moment, so it cannot be found. If time remains, what remains unmoving is no longer time: past, present, and future crowd into one place, and years and months lose their meaning. Moving, it cannot be grasped; unmoving, it cannot be grasped.

If it cannot be grasped, its appearance cannot be stated. Qingmu continues: “If there is no mark of time, there is no time.”

The measures can be distinguished—that is true. Yet the thing measured by those measures is never produced.

Time Exists Because of Things

The sixth verse is where the chapter comes to rest: “Time exists because of things; apart from things, where is time?” The next sentence completes the point: “Things themselves have no possession—how much less could time exist!”

Qingmu’s explanation has only two sentences, yet they are the root of the entire chapter: “Time is named because things arise; apart from things there is no time.”

The name time is established on the arising of things. Flowers bloom and fall, and so there are spring and autumn; a child grows taller, and so there are years. What is called a span of time is really a certain group of things arising, changing, and fading. Remove the things, and one does not leave behind an empty container of time—even the place on which the name time could be established is absent.

Nāgārjuna’s final question therefore advances by layers: things themselves have no possession; how much less time, which receives its name only in dependence upon things.

At the end, Qingmu gathers the preceding chapters of the entire treatise as the basis: “In the preceding chapters, things have already been refuted through many kinds of causes and conditions. Since things are absent, where could time exist?”

This sentence closes the lock on the chapter. The chapter can end so lightly not because it alone wields enormous force, but because the preceding chapters have already refuted things one by one. Time is a name hung on things; when the hook is absent, what was hung upon it naturally falls.

What a Reader Can Carry Away from This Chapter

First, see both sides of dependence. People habitually take dependence as sturdy evidence: when two ends fit so tightly, how could they be false? This chapter answers that the tighter they fit, the more clearly neither end can produce a share that belongs to itself. Dependence establishes names, not self-existing bodies.

Second, notice how you speak of time. When people discuss time, they often quietly treat it as an independent thing: time passes quickly, there is no time, time softens everything—as though something were flowing there. Qingmu will say only, “Time is named because things arise.” Apart from these very things that arise and cease, there is nothing else called time that flows.

Third, this question can be carried elsewhere. Nāgārjuna gathers upper, middle, lower, one, and different into the same refutation. In daily life, every judgment that stands only by comparison—good and bad, success and failure, fast and slow, winning and losing—can be asked: if the contrasting end is removed, what remains of this end?

Carried Forward: Jizang’s Mirror

The preceding is the meaning of the chapter itself. What follows uses the Sui–Tang Three Treatises tradition as a mirror held alongside it—a mirror is not the treatise, but another way to see the same verses.

In his Commentary on the Treatise on the Middle, Jizang first cites an older Vibhāṣā interpretation to set the chapter’s tone: dharmas themselves are time; time is provisionally named because of dharmas, and apart from dharmas there is no separate time. Although the time of the three periods has no separate body, the dharmas within time are certainly not absent. This distinction separates refuting a body of time from annihilating dharmas.

For the chapter’s first refutation, he lays out five successive challenges: first, mutual dependence means mutual presence; next, mutual presence makes all three share the name past; next, sharing the name past removes the other two times; next, removing the other two also removes the past; and finally, without the future as its cause of designation, the past itself is absent. He raises an objection: a lamp and its light exist simultaneously, so one can say light is present where the lamp is, but the three times are earlier and later—how can they be compared? His answer is that although earlier-and-later differs from simultaneity, the relation of mutual causation does not differ, so the challenge still applies. He extends the same set of challenges to the mutual dependence of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.

He presses the two gates of remaining and going still further. If the body of time remains, it is constantly one single moment; within one moment there are no years or months, and without years or months that moment itself cannot count as a moment. If time does not remain, each moment ceases separately with no continuity, so how could years accumulate? He follows the worldly calculation—moments accumulate into days, days into months, months into years—and asks: if one day ceases, there is a later day without the earlier, so how can days accumulate into a month? If one day does not cease, there is only that one day, an earlier without a later, and again no month can accumulate. Neither gate succeeds.

In the final verse, he judges the first half to say that time exists because of things and thus that things are the body of time, while the second half closes by saying that since things are absent, time is absent. He gives flowers and fruits by which spring and autumn are known as his example: flowers, fruits, and other things have already been refuted in many ways; because things are absent, time is absent.

This mirror places the chapter within the interpretive structure of the Three Treatises lineage. Its divisions and levels of challenge are Jizang’s additions, not the original words of Nāgārjuna’s verses or Qingmu’s extended commentary. The readings are recorded side by side without adjudication, each returned to its own place.