Blink And You Miss It: An Introduction to Momentariness

Today I would like to talk about momentariness.

Actually, I always want to talk about momentariness. I just think it’s cool that Buddhist scholars and yogis knew we were living in a trippy quantum universe 1500 years ago.

Momentariness is one of the most interesting Buddhist doctrines for me. It seems almost too simple but once you start digging into it, it will take you into emptiness, universal consciousness, the quantum multiverse and a whole different way to look at the mindstream.

Let’s take any object, like a pot.

(“Consider any object, such as… oh, I don’t know, just pulling this one out of nowhere… A POT.” – Every Buddhist or Hindu philosopher ever. It’s always a pot.)

Take a look in your proverbial kitchen. Is the pot you bought last year the same as the one you have today?

The one from last year was fresh from Bed, Bath & Beyond. It didn’t have any stains or weird spots or burn marks on the bottom.

Your pot now? Not so much. Pot A (earlier pot) and Pot B (current pot) have different characteristics.

But whatever, you might say, it still works the same, it’s the same pot even if it has a few spots.

Ok, fine. So what if tomorrow it gets a hole in the bottom and you can’t boil water with it anymore? What if the handle falls off? What if you throw it out and it gets melted down as scrap metal and made into something else, or into a new pot? At what point does it cease to be the pot that you bought last year?

We tend to prescribe the existence of an object to its function and, to some degree, its characteristics. When the pot breaks or the pen runs out of ink, it’s not “really” a pot or a pen anymore. This is sort of the basis for the semi-realist take on momentariness put forward by the Gelugpa, especially Je Tsongkhapa and Khedrup Je, but I’ll get to that later.

Let’s go instead to how Dharmakirti – King of Logic and epistemologist extraordinaire – would view the momentariness of all specifically characterized phenomena.

But first, let’s divide all objects into two groups. This will become relevant, I promise. In Dharmakirti’s ontology you have:

·      Specifically characterized phenomena. These are real, individual objects like a pot (yes), a tree, a horse, etc. They are by nature impermanent and always changing.

·      Generally characterized phenomena. Conceptual concepts that don’t exist in any single, specific way, such as “animals,” “being strong,” “old men.” These are mental objects. They’re permanent. Are they real? Do they exist or not? WELL GEE THANKS FOR ASKING. Dharmakirti says no. They sort of blink in and out of existence in as far as they’re expressed in specifically characterized phenomena but they’re essentially fictional, just concepts that we use to organize our perceptions. This puts him in the antirealist camp. (Versus, for example, most Hindu schools which are realist, meaning they ascribe more reality to abstract concepts than individual manifestations. Buddhist antirealism that denies the reality of conceptual constructs in favor of discrete objects leads to a more universal antirealism once we see that these individual objects which we seem to interact with are actually, on our perceptual level, concepts.)

Anyway! We see these mind-concepts at work all the time, creating the commonsense reality that we usually experience.

The Sautrantika school provides the framework for a lot of Dharmakirti’s arguments when he’s not going full-on Yogacara. They show the mind creating solid objects and categories out of perceptions that are ontologically distinct in three ways. There’s a mixture of place, time and nature.

·      Place: you see a pot on your left and a pot on your right. You recognize that they both belong to the category “pot,” so they are kind of “the same thing.”

·      Time: you see one pot in the morning and the evening. You think of it as being the same object. (This is obviously the most important one for momentariness.)

·      Nature: you see a steel pot and a copper pot. Again, you recognize they both belong to the category of “pot,” have the same nature as being pots, and they’re basically the same thing to you.

So are they really different objects? With place and nature, it’s pretty clear that you’re dealing with two separate objects that get lumped into the same category. With the mixture of time… it sure looks like one pot.

Only from the macro view though – if you look at the pot from a microscopic/subatomic level, you’ll see that the particles are in constant motion. The molecules and atoms are vibrating. The electrons are doing their trippy little orbits and the quarks are doing whatever quarks do.

There’s always a level where you can find change. There’s always some difference between Pot At Moment A and Pot At Moment B.

You never step in the same river twice: the water is always flowing.

At this point it looks like momentariness is just another word for impermanence, and there’s definitely overlap between the two concepts. All phenomena have the nature of being momentary because they’re impermanent, changing from moment to moment. But we can go one step further.

In the lower schools, and our everyday sense of reality, being impermanent means an object is created, endures for sometime and then decays out of existence. It works in daily life but there are two problems with this.

First, it’s impossible to say when exactly a given object is created or destroyed. Going back to your pot, is it destroyed when it no longer functions? Technically, the object is still there.

Or, take a tree. A seed forms and detaches from a mother tree, falls to the ground, sprouts, sends down roots, sends up a little branch… at what point do we say the new tree comes into being?

The tree lives for a while, then it dies, falls over, starts to rot, eventually sinks into the ground and becomes a part of the soil around it. At what point does this tree cease to be?

You get the picture. This is how fuzzy it is for all physical objects if you look at them closely enough.

There’s another problem. If Pot At Moment A has a certain set of characteristics and Pot At Moment B has a different set, they must be separate objects. You can’t have a single thing with two sets of characteristics.

I already noted that the subatomic arrangement of an object would be different at two different times, but even if that weren’t the case, it would still be a different object. Time is also a dimension. Pot At Moment B is different from Pot At Moment A simply because it is at a different point in its timeline. It is, if you will, one moment farther from its creation and closer to its destruction.

It’s like the object blinks into being, endures for a moment and then blinks out again, replaced by an almost identical object which is one moment older.

Any object you perceive is actually a continuum of these momentary objects, an infinite collection of them, which our mind (running in a straight line along the time dimension) projects as a single, enduring object. An object that seems stable is actually like a film where all the frames are basically the same.

Objects do have the nature of arising, abiding and ceasing, but all three happen in a moment, every moment.

Time, meanwhile, is not moving at all. It’s a condition of the mind that functions once the changes in the objects (including our minds) are dramatic enough for us to perceive them.

This is momentariness in a nutshell. There are a lot of implications and a few problems, such as:

·      If objects have only a momentary existence, how do we have an experience of continuity?

·      How do these moments have any existence, because they must be infinitely small?

·      Since this is true for individual objects, what about the material world as a whole?

·      How does karma function here?

I hope to address these soon but this post is already approaching TL;DR and I have just so much to say about momentariness so I’ll leave it here for now.