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| Buddhism better than Judaism for science? |
Those who have read the previous one on the three different types of support will remember that one of those three is sahajata paccaya — the condition by which things must always arise at the same time.
Paccaya is the Pali word for “cause” or “condition.” Jati is the Pali word for “birth.” Saha means “same” — so sahajata means “born at the same time.”
But Patthana goes further. It also offers us purejata paccaya and pacchajata paccaya. The jata part still means “born,” while pure is Pali for “before,” and paccha is Pali for “after” — so here we have “born before” and “born after” conditions.
Of these two, purejata paccaya, or “born-before condition,” is intuitively far easier to understand. This is a condition whereby the cause arises before the effect. We can think of countless examples in nature where this condition holds:
- a mother must always be born before her child,
- the fruit tree must always grow before the fruit,
- the river must exist before the fish come and swim in it.
In Abhidhamma terms, an example of this condition would be the various types of sensitive materiality that must already exist in order to support the consciousness that arises dependent on them. For example, eye-sensitive materiality must already exist in order for eye-consciousness to arise.
Another example occurs with some objects of attention. For example, eye-consciousness cannot arise without a visual object to cognize. So the visual object, which will be some kind of light or color, needs to already be existing and well established in order for eye-consciousness to arise. The cause comes first; the result comes after.
Pacchajata paccaya, however, is not as intuitive. Here we have the result arising first and the cause coming later. What?! Backwards [retro-] causality? Really? Well, no, not quite. It’s not really as mystical as it might sound.
Pacchajata paccaya is actually a condition whereby something that arises later is the cause for something that arose earlier to keep on existing. For example, there’s rain that falls after a tree already exists and helps keep that tree alive. Another example would be how children may at times give their otherwise exhausted parents a reason to keep on living, or indeed how students might give their weary teacher a reason to keep on teaching. ;-)
In Abhidhamma terms, we see that the consciousness and mental factors support materiality to keep on existing, even though the materiality existed first and the consciousness and mental factors came along later.
Why time has a direction
The truly powerful thing about these two conditions is that
they give a direction to time.
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| I study without but not within. |
Time, at least in the way we usually think about it, is just a concept. It is something the mind makes up to measure change.
This is easy to understand by choosing any unit of time and thinking about how it is defined.
- One year = the Earth goes round our Sun;
- One day = the Earth completes a full rotation on its axis;
- One second = the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. (Yes, that really is how it came to be defined).
Time is always measured in terms of an amount of change that has happened in that period. Change is what is really happening. Time is the mind’s overlay in order to measure and make sense of the change.
But if time is just a concept, does that mean that we can just choose to freeze or go back or forwards in time? Well, no, because what purejata paccaya and pacchajata paccaya tell us is that some things must always happen first and other things must always happen after.
The flow of change has a direction. It doesn’t just seem to have a direction on a conceptual level. The directionality of time is hard-baked into the building blocks of reality.
So here we have two unassuming conditions having a profound effect on our reality or at least on how we experience it. If reality itself unfolds directionally, what does that tell us about the nature of our own lives?
What things in our lives need to come first? What things must follow after in order to sustain us? Let me know in the comments how you see these two conditions quietly working in daily life and how they are shaping your Dhamma paths.
With metta and gratitude,
- Beth Upton; Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly
