Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A student’s question about the nature of time opens this 13-minute session, prompting Geshe Pema Tsering to walk through Buddhist Abhidharma classification from first principles. Time, he explains, is neither mind nor form but belongs to a third category — “non-associated compositional factors” — phenomena that exist yet fit neither main type. He traces the reasoning: because things change constantly, moments arise sequentially, making time a functioning, impermanent phenomenon. He then distinguishes the collective karmic experience of time (seasons turning, hours passing) from individual experience (time feeling fast or slow depending on activity), and closes with the straightforward threefold division: past, present, and future. Useful for students curious about Buddhist metaphysics and how Abhidharma categorises abstract phenomena.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 WBS 2005 03 01.mp3
UUID: 61f48398-e9ce-4015-b149-64ae57609890
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Bodhisattva Way of Life 2005 Feb-Mar (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-03-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 13.4 minutes
Words: ~877
Okay. So first of all, time isn’t form. Time is what’s called a non associated compositional factor. Alright? Which means it’s neither consciousness nor form all right so in Buddhist cosmology or phenomenology, all phenomena are divided into three things.
They can either be mind, matter, or non associated compositional factors, which is a short form of saying not mind or matter. Alright, it’s like a miscellaneous category. These are things that exist but they don’t exist as mind and they don’t exist as form, okay? So time exists because is this if you have it could because things keep changing right because there is a constant change yeah and because there’s constant change one moment follows another moment follows another moment follows another yeah this is the nature of our existence there is constant change in our existence time exists because an hour runs out the next hour starts yeah it exists because previous moments of by relation to previous moments of mind of time future moments of time exist, right? And it’s the nature of our existence as humans in this realm to have the time scheme that we do, yeah?
That is winter runs out, spring comes about, autumn, winter, it goes like this, the world turns like this and we experience time like this. Now, in general, the cause for time to be like it is, is our karma. It’s a generic karma of being born as a a human being to experience time. Alright? Now so He wants to know if you understood understand what he’s saying.
Hang on. I’m not far met, but I haven’t finished it, and I haven’t finished translating what he said. Okay, so this is the experience that we have of things changing and changing and changing, and that’s part of our general experience as human beings that we share in terms of our karma or the results of our karmic actions with other beings, yeah? Now we can have a personal experience of time depending on how we use time or what we do with our time, so whether we’re working in our time and it feels like it’s happening slowly or we’re enjoying ourselves and feel like it’s happening fast we can have a personal experience of time but the way that time works is much more of a vaster experience that we share with other human beings which means one moment follows the next, follows the next, follows the next, so it’s part of our more general karmic experience as opposed to a personal experience. That means it’s not, it’s, yeah.
Okay. So in In Buddhist terms, yeah, there’s this thing that they study called Abhidharma or collected topics, whatever you want to call it. They divide things into things, yeah. So, it starts off with this idea that you have things that can be known and things that can’t be known, right. Things that can be known exist, things that can’t be known don’t exist, alright?
So from amongst things that can be known, you have two types of things that can be known, that which is that which is permanent and that which is a functioning thing, alright? Okay, so there’s a permanent or a functioning thing, permanent or impermanent, functioning thing yeah from amongst these two a functioning thing is that which undergoes momentary change yeah now as time undergoes momentary change it’s a functioning thing okay amongst functioning things, things that perform a function, there is three. There is that which is form and form includes all the things that we can visually see, all of the objects of the senses, so that is things that we can touch, things that we can smell, things that we can see, things that we can hear and so on, all of those kind of things. Then we have mind, alright? So we have form and you can have mind, yeah?
And so a mind is a moments of consciousness or different moments of mental activity, right? That take objects, yes? That’s mind and its definition is that it’s clear and known. Anything that doesn’t fit into those two categories gets lumped into the miscellaneous non associated compositional factors. So it’s not associated with form, it’s not associated with mind, but it’s still a compositional factor, it’s still a functioning thing, so it gets called a non associated compositional factor.
In this group of things we have time for one, it’s something we can know, right, but not something that we can say is mind and not something that we can say is form. Another thing is ownership, right, we can’t see ownership but we recognize its existence and we cannot, and it’s not mind either, yeah? So there’s these different group, a group of things that don’t quite fit into mind and don’t quite fit into form and they’re the non associated compositional factors and time’s one of them. And time has three different divisions, past, present, and future. So past is that which has gone, Present is that which is now, and, future is that which will happen in the future.
Alright? Tomorrow, the next day, or whenever. That’s the the divisions of time. Oh. That’s awesome.
Yeah. And time’s up.