Prajñ?karagupta argues that what is in the future can serve as a cause of something that preceded it. The normal construction of causality, which met with pretty much universal approval from all the schools of philosophy, is that a cause immediately precedes its product. For Prajñ?karagupta this understanding of causality which had imbedded in it a strict temporal relationship between prior cause and posterior effect was too limited. Prajñ?karagupta uses omens as a case in point. It is the future good fortune or misfortune, he argues, that causes an omen to appear. There are other cases in which a theory of future causes is called upon. Buddhists have a distinctive theory of inference, arguing that there are only two possible relationships between the terms in a valid inference and one of these is causality. One can infer a cause from its product because in the absence of a cause either a product would not exist or if it did, it would be eternal. But there is another feature of these inferences: it is not possible to infer a product from a cause, since causes do not always produce their products. Many things may intervene to stop a cause from functioning. This Buddhist theory ran up against several widely accepted I. Introduction: Philosophers Grapple with the Mystery of Time

he assumption in a conference talking about the future, is, I think, that the future is something we can in fact talk about as distinct from the present and the past by definition, in function and in ontological status. Alas, as I began to think more closely about these assumptions I was ready to call off the show. Many Indian philosophers in fact argued that it is impossible to define the three times, past, present and future as distinct from each other; some even went so far as to assert that no difference can be seen in the function of something that is past and something that is future. Both past and future can be objects of knowledge, and this is trickier, both can act as causes giving rise to products. This ability to cause something was seen by Buddhists and following them, by Jains too as the very definition of existence; an imaginary flower doesn't emit fragrance but a real flower does. If past, present and future things all can act as causes, then they are all equally existent. Debates over the ontological status of the past and future and the very nature of Time are many in Indian philosophy and have a complex history. More often than not such rarefied philosophical arguments existed in an intellectual world that was very different from the extensive space occupied by narrative literature in all of India's three classical religions, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. In some cases stories may even appear to be at odds with fundamental doctrines. An obvious example of such a disconnect between doctrine and story literature is the entire genre of J?takas or stories of the Buddha' s past births, in which the Buddha explains that he was the character in the past about whom the story was told, despite the pan-Buddhist denial of an enduring self. Stories from all three traditions have complex ways of dealing with the three times, past, present and future, and I will argue here that their treatment of time is one case in which narratives mirror the philosopher's concerns.

Debates about the nature of the past, present and future in Indian philosophy are debates about Time itself, K?la, as a substantial entity that can be clearly defined. The challenge for the philosopher who accepts the reality of Time is to explain how Time can be one entity and yet be experienced in three different ways, as T inferences; among them is the inference that a constellation x will rise soon because we now see constellation y, which we observe always precedes it. This looks like an inference of a future product, constellation x, from its cause, constellation y. There were ways around this, but Prajñ?karagupta's theory of future causality provided a new one. He said that this inference constellation x will rise, because constellation y is present, is in fact an inference of a cause, the future constellation x, from its product, the present constellation y. 3 This theory of backward causation radically undermines efforts to separate the three times; it implies that there is no difference in functioning between a cause that is past ( the normal theory) and a cause that is future( the new theory) and makes future, past and present functionally equivalent. 4 Given that the definition of existence in Buddhism is causal efficiency, in this theory past, present and future are not only equally existent; they cannot be defined as different from each other on the basis of whether or not they have causal efficiency. This is a radical theory. Well before Prajñ?karagupta Buddhist philosophers of the Sarv?sviv?da school had argued for the necessity of granting existence to past and future factors, and even some causal function, but they then endeavored to explain what differentiates past and future from present factors. They distinguished the present from the past and future by arguing that while past and future have capability, only present factors have activity. 5 Prajñ?karagupta's ideas were rejected by nonbuddhists, but N?g?rjuna's arguments about Time find a close parallel in the celebrated work of the Ved?nta philosopher ?r?Har?a, the Kha??ana kha??akh?dya. The Kha??ana has a more extensive refutation of the three times, past, present and future.

Prajñ?karagupta does not make any such distinction when he makes the case for future causality.

The opponent here, a representative of a realist school like the Ny?ya or Vai?e?ika, holds that time is a substance and that it is one, all-pervasive, and eternal. ?r?Har?a replies that in that case the present time would never be perceived as past or future, since by definition if it is one and unchanging it would always have to be perceived as present. The opponent is allowed to refine his doctrine somewhat and say that time is a single substance but that it is also three-fold by nature. In that case, ?r?Har?a replies, when something is perceived as present it should also be perceived as past and future, since all time by its very nature is three-fold, past, present and future. The next suggestion is closer to what realist philosophers actually do say, and that is that time is one but it is differentiated into past and present by its association with something external to it, namely the activity of the sun. This is not going to solve the problem, since the past and the future and the present will all share this characteristic of being delimited by the movement of the sun. If it is the same solar activity, we are back where we started from-that it is impossible to differentiate the past and future from the present. Next the opponent tries to improve his position by saying that the present time is characterized by the movement of the sun that is currently taking place, while the past time is characterized by a movement of the sun that no longer exists and the future by a movement of the sun that is yet to come into being. It is not difficult to see what the problem is with this formulation: the definition of the present requires that we already know what the present is, since it requires that we are able to distinguish the activity of the sun as present, past and future. You thus need to know the present to know the present. And one can also ask what activity determines that the present activity of the sun is present? Again, it is not hard to see that this eventually results in an infinite regress of activities to demarcate an infinite series of present activities. ?r?Har?a continues, but the general trend of the argument is clear. The past, present and future are inextricably intertwined and every effort to define them as separate from each other must end in failure. In fact whatever definition the opponent can give for one of the three times applies equally to the other two times 7

In their debates with other philosophers Jains stand somewhere in between N?g?rjuna and ?r?Har?a on the one hand and their realist opponents on the other.

. ?r?Har?a ends up in the same place as N?g?rjuna: past, present and future would all be one and the same time.

8 They repeat several arguments shared by N?g?rjuna and ?r?Har?aagainst the Ny?ya/Vai?e?ika contention that Time is a substance that is one, all pervasive, and eternal. 9 7 See also Jonathan Duquette and Krishnamurti Ramasubramanian, "?r?har?a on the Indefinability of Time", in Space, Time and the Limits of Understanding, eds. S. Wuppulari & G. Ghirardi, Springer: The Frontiers Collection, 2017, pp. 2-16. 8 I make this qualification since much of the Jain concept of time is specifically Jain and never enters into mainstream philosophical literature. See for example the Dravyasamgraha of Nemicandra with English Translation of Vijay, K. Jain, Dehdradun: Vikalp Printers, N.D. II. The Lives of the Buddhas: Past, Present and Future Jain thinking it seems did not entirely escape the conundrum of making sense of Time on the one hand and the three times on the other.

It is often difficult to move from the abstract arguments of the philosopher to other forms of writing and to know if the rarified philosophical speculations had any bearing on life closer to the ground: on literature or on religious practice. I hope to show that in fact we can see in narratives and poems from all the three religious traditions the same kinds of slippage between past, present and future that the philosophers highlight and in the Jain case we may even find a clear distinction between remote and near past. I begin with selected Buddhist literature.

The three times glide into each other in many ways in the narratives of the lives of the Buddhas. It has been noted that generally the past and the future are described in Buddhist literature with the same phrases, "many aeons from now in the past" or "many aeons from now in the future": an?gatea dhvaneasam khyeyekalpe or at?te 'dhvaniasam khyeyekalpe. It is possible to substitute past for future and future for past 10 without changing anything else in the phrase. 12 In a way this could serve as a metaphor for the treatment of the past and future in the literature that treats the lives of the Buddhas, in whichthe past, present and future seem virtually identical and are always intertwined. For Buddhists, ??kyamuni, called by scholars the historical Buddha to distinguish him from the mythical Buddhas of the past and future, was only one of many Buddhas. There were Buddhas in the past and will be Buddhas in the future. The Pali Buddhavamsa is probably the best known text on the Buddhas of the past and tells the lives of 25 past Buddhas. 13 Descriptions of the events in the lives of the Buddhas of the past and future exist in the Sanskrit Buddhist traditions as well. The Mah?vastu includes two recensions of a Many Buddhas Sutra, Bahubuddhaka sutra; the speaker is the Buddha of the present ??kyamuni, and he tells of both the past Buddhas who came before him and Maitreya, the Buddha who will come after him. A version of the Many Buddhas Sutra or Bahubuddhaka sutra has been discovered among the very earliest Buddhist manuscripts from Gilgit, bringing the date of this genre of texts down to the 1 st c CE.

An earlier Pali sutta the Mah?pad?na sutta, had told the lives of the seven Buddhas of the past. There is also in Palian An?gatavamsa, "The Future Lineage", that describes the coming of the future Buddha Maitreya, after a brief account of some of the Buddhas of the past. It is not uncommon for texts to include accounts of both the Buddhas of the past and the future.

14 Another text, the Bhadrakalpika Sutra, gives information about the usual Buddhas of the immediate past and the future Buddha Maitreya, but then talks about some further 999 Buddhas of the future. 15 The lives of past Buddhas and future Buddha(s) in all these texts are formulaic and remarkably similar to each other. The speaker is the present Buddha, ??kyamuni, and being Omniscient he knows equally both past and future. The past and the future are both objects of perceptual knowledge for the Buddha. Richard Salomon in discussing these texts that combine accounts of future and past Buddhas remarks that in Buddhist sources there is no difference between history and prophecy. 16 The sense that the three times are not distinct from each other is conveyed by the fact that the lives of the Buddhas are so formulaic; as the present Buddha describes the lives of other Buddhas it is clear there is indeed very little if anything at all that differentiates a past Buddha from a future or the present Buddha. Indeed, in the Mah?vastu accounts of the many Buddhas, the past merges almost entirely into the future, that is, the present, the time of the narrator, as ??kyamuni, the present Buddha, recounts how in the past he was a merchant and made a vow to become a Buddha under a past Buddha who was also named ??kyamuni and lived in the city of Kapilavastu.

In fact, this is clear from the title of the texts: in Pali accounts of the past Buddhas and of the future Buddha are both called va?sas, a term we usually translate as history, but which is more properly an account of a lineage. I return to this use of the term va?sa below.

These texts in fact provide a narrative parallel to the Buddhist philosopher's denial that there is anything unique about the past or the future or that it is possible to define one to the exclusion of the other. For the philosopher, given the dependence of the three times on each other, the conclusion was clear: since something can only depend on another thing that exists at the same time as itself, it must be admitted that all three times, dependent as they are on each other, would have to exist at the same time, meaning that they all would have to be either past, present or future. This makes it utter nonsense to speak of three distinct times, past, present and future. Again, for the philosopher this absurd situation was meant to lead any thoughtful person to reject entirely the very notion of time. But for those who wrote the life stories of the past, present and future Buddhas, this kind of entanglement of past, present and future was a boon. It became a means to express the eternal nature of the Buddhist teaching and ensure that the object of Buddhist practice, Liberation or the achievement of Buddhahood, was open to the future. 17 The present Buddha ??kyamuni also comes from Kapilavastu. The past is a double for the future, which in the time of the narrativeis the present. That the present ??kyamuni is exactly like the past Buddha ??kyamuni is clear from the content of the vow he makes at the very beginning of the Mah?vastu, "In the future may I be a Buddha exactly like this one; may I also be named ??kyamuni and have a city called Kapilavastu." 18 particular past ??kyamuni was not the only past Buddha with that name; in fact our ??kyamuni had worshipped a vast number of ??kyamuni Buddhas. 19 Scholars familiar with Buddhist literature could easily add other examples of narratives in which past, present and future entwine. The entire genre of Jataka stories, stories of the past births of the Buddha, would be an obvious place to start. In the jatakas the Buddha tells a story of the past that is meant to explain the present. The texts use a telling simile; revealing the past, concealed to his audience, is like drawing out the moon that was behind a cloud. The moon and the past are there, but are temporarily invisible.

The Buddhas of the past are indistinguishable from each other and from the Buddha of the future/present not only in their actions but even in name.

Lives of the Buddhas, whether they extend back into the past or move ahead to the future, in these accounts also remain deeply rooted in the present by the central presence of the historical Buddha ??kyamuni. Even where the past Buddha is not given the same name as the present Buddha as is the case in the Mah?vastu, nonetheless in a text like the Buddhavamsa the present Buddha ??kyamuni is the narrator and as he relates the lives of the past Buddhas he emphasizes who he was at that time and what meritorious deeds he did. In some cases he makes a resolve to become a Buddha in the future and attains a prediction that his desire will be fulfilled. The text is really an account of the past lives and deeds of ??kyamuni that resulted in his becoming the Buddha of the present age. In all these texts, whether the emphasis is on ??kyamuni's pious deeds or on predictions of future Buddhahood, whatever the names of the past Buddhas, the focus on the present Buddha brings together in his person the past, present and future. The past is significant because it is implies the future, which in the narrative is the present time. It is as almost as if the composer of these texts had something like N?g?rjuna's first verse in mind, that the present and the future are intimately tied to and dependent upon the past. The awareness of the inseparability of past, present and future, which led the philosopher to deny the very possibility of something called "time", is for these narratives part of their core structure and essential message.  Like the Buddhists, Jains believe in a series of past and future Jinas. There are twenty-four Jinas of our present world age, which constitute the Jinas of an extended present. I use the phrase extended present since many of these Jinas are said to have existed in a time remote from ours, although still in the present very long time cycle. Scholars believe that the last two in the traditional list of twenty-four, P?r?van?tha and Mah?v?ra, were historical figures. Jains also composed texts which told the life stories of these 24Jinas. Unlike the Buddhist narratives which are held together by the central figure of ??kyamuni, who narrates the stories of the other Buddhas and tells us how he worshipped the past Buddhas, resolved to become a Buddha under them and received a prediction from one or more of them that he would become a Buddha, there is no one Jina whose life is the central focus of all the narratives and around whom stories of the other Jinas cluster. 21 This no doubt reflects the fact that many of the Jinas in the list were full-fledged objects of worship in their own right, which was less the case with the individual Buddhas of the past. That the lives of the Jina are different from the lives of the Buddhas is reflected in the very different words Jains and Buddhists used to describe their texts. The lives of the Buddhas were often calledva?sas. A va?sa is a lineage history; royal va?sas give the history of a dynastic succession. Monastic va?sas detail the succession of monks in the position of chief monk or abbot. A vamsa thus implies a direct connection between the individuals whose stories are told, either through biology or discipleship. Even where the accounts are not given the title va?sa, the parallel between the account of the successive rebirths of ??kyamuni at the time of the past Buddhas and a royal genealogy is clear from the language of the texts. Thus the Mah?vastu describes the prediction for Buddhahood given ??kyamuni by the previous Buddha K??yapa as his "being concentrated to the position of crown prince", yuvar?jye 'bhi?ikta?. 22 Even when the lives of the twenty-four Jinas were put together as a collection, there was still minimal or no continuity from one life to another. In fact there are By contrast the lives of the Jinasare most often called caritas, something we might translate as "Account of the Deeds". Caritas of different individuals were often collected into a single text, but there was no expectation of any connection between the subjects of the different caritas.

only two occasions in the lives of the Jinas in which a later Jina is said to be a rebirth of someone who had appeared in the life of a previous Jina. This is a stark contrast to the Buddhist texts like the Buddhava?sa or the Mah?vastuin which as we have seen the historical Buddha ??kyamuni appears as the main character in the life of the past Buddhas. Perhaps the best-known collection of the lives of the Jinas is the 12 th c. Tri?a??i?al? k?puru?acarita of the ?vet?mbara monk Hemacandra. It begins with the first Jina of our world age, ??abhan?tha, and ends with the last Jina, Mah?v?ra.

The life of Mah?v?ra is somewhat atypical in the number of unfortunate prior rebirths for Mah?v?ra that it recounts. It is also unusual that two of these rebirths appear in the stories of earlier Jinas, creating a tenuous connection between the lives of different Jinas. In the account of ??abhan?tha we meet the Jina's grandson, Mar?ci. Mar?ci attends the preaching of his grandfather ??abhan?tha, who predicts that he will one day become a V?sudeva, a World-emperor or Cakravartin, and a Jina. The Jains single out a number of special individuals in theiruniversal history; V?sudevasare wicked people who are defeated by their antagonists, the Prativ?sudevas. 23 Mar?ci has a surprising career for a future Jina; he becomes a false ascetic and is subsequently reborn in low rebirths, in which he commits many violent acts. He turns up in his rebirth as a V?sudeva named Trip???ha at the preaching assembly of the eleventh Jina?rey??sa, where he finally gains solid faith in the Jain teachings. This does not stop him, however, from living a dissolute life and falling prey to violent anger. From that birth he is reborn in hell more than once; he endures several rebirths as animals and finally as a human begins to acquire good karma. 24 He will eventually become the last JinaMah?v?ra. Trip???ha is mentioned again in the biography of the sixteenth Jina, ??ntin?tha, one of whose previous rebirths is as a son of Trip????a's brother-in-law. 25

23 John E Cort,"Genres of Jain History", Journal of Indian Philosophy, 23: 469-506, 1995. 24 The deeds of Trip???ha are told in the two Jina biographies, that of Mah?v?ra and ?rey??sa, Tri?a??i?al? k?caritavols 3: 9-59 and 6: 10-17. References are to the translation by Helen M. Johnson, Baroda:  Oriental Institute, 1931-1962   25   Tri?a??i?al? k?puru?acarita, vol. III, Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1949, p 208.

Even from this brief account it is clear that although the lives of the three Jinas ??abhan?tha, ?rey??sa and Mah?v?ra and perhaps ??ntin?thahave this minimal point of contact through ??abhan?tha's grandson Mar?ci and his subsequent rebirth as the V?sudeva Trip???ha, this association in no way serves to constructa linear account of the virtuous deeds that the previous rebirths of the Jina Mah?v?ra performed under past Jinas and that led to his becoming a Jina. Many of Mar?ci's and Trip??tha's deeds, as we have just noted, are in fact quite heinous and lead to bad rebirths, in low caste families, or even


# Volume XIX Issue VII Version I


# ( A )

worse in hell or as animals. 26 Jinas gain the karma that determines that they will become Jinas in their second to last rebirth, after which they are reborn in heaven. From heaven they are reborn on earth to become Jinas. 27 Mah?v?ra gained his so-called T?rthankarak?t karma after being an ideal ruler who renounced and lived the life of an exemplary Jain monk. 28 The account of his deeds in that birth is brief indeed, so brief as to make us wonder if the author suspected that virtuous deeds make less exciting reading than wicked ones. We are told simply that as prince Nandana he ruled righteously and then renounced; as a monk he engaged in rigorous asceticism. Instead of deeds we are given a long list of his virtues, redolent of monastic scholasticism, rejecting five of this and four of that, knowing the 11 canonical scriptures and practicing twelve-fold penance, etc. 29 In fact this long list of his virtues in his second to last rebirth comes as something of a surprise after the wickedness of Trip???ha, recounted in some detail. Also significant is that Prince Nandana renounces the world to become a monk under the tutelage of another monk and not under a past Jina. 30 26 The Buddha could also have unfortunate past births; in the Temiya or M?gapakkjaj?taka, 538, we learn that the Bodhisattva, having been king in Banaras for twenty years was born in hell, where he spent 80 years.After that he was born in heaven. https://www.tipitaka.org/romn/ accessed December 30, 2018. Bodhisattopitad?v?sativass ?nib?r??asiya?rajja?k?retv?tatocutoussadanirayenibbattitv?as?tivassas ahass?nitatthapaccitv?tatocavitv?t?vati?sabhavanenibbatti. 27 The second to last rebirth is also important in Buddhism; for the Therav?dins it is the birth as Vessantara, but for other groups it is under the Buddha K??yapa. On this see Tournier 236-239. 28 There is a standard list of the deeds that lead to binding the karma that will result in being a Jina. It begins with worshipping the Jinas and their images and includes looking after your gurus and fellow monks, mastering the scriptures, avoiding breaking the rules of proper conduct, meditating and practicing austerities. They are detailed in the biography of the first Jina, Johnson vol. 1, Baroda: Oriental Institute 1931, pp.80-85. The list of Nandana's virtues does not correspond to this standard list of actions leading to becoming a Tirthankara. There is no effort, even in this one Jina biography that has connections to the lives of other Jinas, to establish anything like a lineage of Jinas in which there is continuity between the Jinas of the distant past and the present. There is also a sharp disjuncture over the long term between the past and future rebirths within this single biography. The rebirths of Mah?v?ra in the distant past, in hell, as animals, are in stark contrast to his birth as a righteous prince and then a god and finally as the prince who will become the Jina. If we look at the individual rebirths, however, proximate rebirths are closely connected. Thus the wicked Trip??ha goes to hell for his violent deeds, and the imperfect ascetic Mar?cikeeps turning up in low caste families. The distinction between remote and proximate past, so important to the Jain philosopher Prabh?candra, I would argue, is essential to understanding the trajectory of the rebirths in this biography. Even in the lives of the other Jinas, where there is more consistency over the many rebirths, the belief that the karma to become a Jina is bound in the penultimate human birth implies a special status for the proximate past. 31 The past lives of a Jina, proximate and remote, were all important to the Jina's life story, so fundamental that they even came to be listed in short hymns of praise to the Jinas. The 13 th century monk Dharmaghosa composed a number of hymns to praise the Jinas that list the Jina's rebirths.

The life of Mah?v?ra differs in another way from the vast numbers of didactic stories that Jains loved to tell. In the bulk of stories, there is no disjunction between the present and the rebirths of the proximate and distant past The world of Jain didactic stories verges on the claustrophobic, with souls transmigrating together over countless rebirths. Past enmities and loves continually resurface and explain otherwise seemingly random attachments and hatreds. In these stories, moreover, past, present and future as emotional experiences are indistinguishable, as souls repeat their past entanglements and head for more of the same in the future. These stories, and to a lesser extent the lives of the other Jinas, are consistent with the reticence of the Jain philosopher on the question of how past, present and future can be distinguished from each other. 32 31 At times Buddhists will also make a distinction between remote and proximate past, as in the d?renid?na and avid?renid?na in the biography of the Buddha in the j?taka??hakath?. The distinction between remote and proximate past is well known to the Sanskrit grammarians; thus the perfect tense is enjoined for the remote past, while the aorist is intended to denote recent past. HarmutScharfe, Grammatical Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977, p. 96. 32 Jainastotrasandoha, vol.1, ed Caturavijaya Muni, Ahmedabad: Sarabhai Manilal Nabab, 1932, pp. 106-112. He has a series of short Prakrit poems in praise of each of the Jinas of the present world cycle, and he begins each poem by saying that he praises the Jina by reciting his past births. The hymn to the first Jina ??abhan?tha begins in this way: I praise Rsabha, the son of N?bhi and Marudevi, who is radiant like gold and has as his sign the bull, who is five bows tall. I praise him by telling of his thirteen past births. O Lord! You were the merchant Dha?a in the city Khiipai??ha, and in the second birth you were born in the land of the Uttarakurus, and a god in the third." For the last birth in which he is the Jina, Dharmaghosa provides more than just the place of birth; he gives the dates of the Jina's descent from heaven, birth, renunciation, achievement of Omniscience and Final Nirvana. He closes with a prayer that the Jina, praised in this way, will grant him wisdom, joy, and glory in the Dharma. Dharmagho?a's praise hymns of the other Jinas of the present world age are similar, although the number of past births he names for each Jina varies.

In another hymn in Sanskrit Dharmaghosa praises the twenty-four Jinas of the future world age. 33 While full-fledged biographies of these future Jinas do not seem to have been written, Dharmagho?a names one past incarnation for each of them, suggesting that there was a tradition of at least one past rebirth of each Jina. Dharmagho?a's list is close to the one given byHemacandra in the 12 th c. 34 These past incarnations belong in fact to the present, by which I mean the present world age. The list of previous incarnations tells us something else about what this linking of future with a past rebirth can accomplish. Among the names of the previous rebirths are virtuous characters who appear in Jain story literature. Several are Jain lay women. Revat?, for example, is the past rebirth named for the Jina Citragupta. Her story is told in a number of didactic story collections. Although just a lay woman, Revat? was said to have been praised above all the Jain ascetics. She triumphs over tests put to her by someone who doubts that a mere laywoman can be so distinguished. 35 By celebrating the future Jinas along with a present rebirth the hymn has created a space for bringing into the world of the Jinas, those most honored individuals, a new group of exemplary men and women. 36

IV. What Time is it? Time in the R?m?ya?a

These two sets of hymns, of the twenty-four Jinas of our world age and of the future Jinas also make use of different types of the past; the rebirths of the twenty-four Jinas of our world age begin as the biographies do with the distant past, working their way to the near past, while the hymns to the future Jinas look to the recent past.

My final example is from the first book of the R?m?ya?a. 37 33 Jainastotrasandoha, p. 241. Lists of the future Jinas with brief details figure as predictions in some of the Jina biographies, for example in the biographies of ??abhan?tha and Mah?v?ra in the Tri?a??i?al?k?puru?acarita, vol.1 pp 347-350; vol.6 p. 347.   34   Tri?a??i?al?k?carita, vol 6 p. 347. The differences are for the former birth of the 18 th Jina, G?rgali in Hemacandra, M?rgali in Dharmagho?a and for the twenty-third Jina, Dv?ramada in Hemacandra and Amara in Dharmgagho?a. 35 B?hatkath?ko?a, tr. Phyllis Granoff, The Forest of Thieves and the Magic Garden, Penguin:Delhi 1998, 256-264. 36 See also Appleton, p. 122, for similar comments about King ?re?ika, who will be the first Jina of the future. 37 R?m?ya?a 1.8-1.10.GRETIL http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/ 1_sanskr/2_epic/ramayana/ram_01_u.htm accessed July 4, 2018.

It is a remarkably complex treatment of time and verb tenses and I would suggest leaves the reader with the sense that it is hard to know what is past, what is future, what is present when they all so seamlessly turn into each other. King Da?aratha, R?ma's father, laments the fact that he has no son and wants to perform a sacrifice to get an heir. He asks for guidance and his charioteer Sumantra tells him what he must do. What he relates is of something that had been told in the past, that embodied a prediction for the future, and that is going to come to fruition in the present. Sumantra quotes the sage's words directly, retaining the original future tense. The sage Sanatkum?ra predicts that a child will be born to the ascetic Vibh???aka. Named ??ya???ga, this child will also be an ascetic, living in the forest. Romap?da, king of the Angas, will by his sins cause a terrible draught to afflict his kingdom. His counselors will tell him to fetch ??ya???ga and marry him to his daughter??nt?. The king mustentice ??ya???gato come out of the forest by having prostitutes lure him from his hermitage. Thus so far the quote what the sage Sanatkum?ra had said, describing what will happen in the future. The account then turns in one verse to the past, as the narrator intervenes, making sure that King Da?aratha and we know that what was described as taking place in the future is already in the past. Sumantra tells King Da?aratha, in this way the king of the Angas had the ascetic's son ??ya???ga brought to the kingdom, it rained, and ??ya???ga was married to ??nt? (8.21). The narrator then returns to the prediction, "??ya???ga will bring you sons. Just so much have I told you of what the sage Sanatkum?ra said." Da?aratha is delighted and wants to know more about how ??ya???ga was made to come out of his hermitage.Sumantra obliges,but now places in the past the events that had been described in the future inSanatkum?ra's prediction. He then returns to the prediction of the future that Sanatkum?ra gave and the tense switches to the future. Sanatkum?ra predicted, There will be a king named Da?aratha and this Da?aratha, desiring a son will ask for Romap?da to send ??ya???gato him to make a sacrifice so that he can get a son. ??ya???ga will come, perform the sacrifice, and thereby ensure that Da?aratha has a successor.

Reading this story for the first time, it can be difficult to keep track of what is happening when. Like the Buddhist stories, the account is anchored in the present by a narrator, in this case the charioteer Sumantra, who is prompted to tell the story by the king Da?aratha, also in the present. Sumantra dips into the past to relate what a seer had once predicted; the prediction is of the future and told in the future tense, but it turns out that some of the future it predicted has already happened and other events are taking place in the here and now. The prediction says that there will be a king Da?aratha; in fact there is a king Da?aratha and he is listening to the story. The seer in the past also described how ??ya???ga would be brought to the kingdom of Romap?da to stop the drought, future tense; when Da?aratha asks how this was done, the narrator in the present tells him, but this time he uses the past tense. Some of what in the past was the futureis now the past from the vantage point of the present; some events that were in the future are now the present. It is, I think, clear that if we are confused about what is happening when it is because these three times, past, present and future, are as N?g?rjuna and ?r?Har?a had insisted, relative concepts, slippery concepts that slide one into the other and cannot be defined except with reference to each other. The impression that the tenses are unstable is heightened in the original by the fact that Sanskrit has no indirect discourse. Thus a speaker from the past uses the future tense, and a present narrator retells the same events using the past tense. The same events are both future and past as the story is told.

The entanglement of past, present and future, is in some ways one of the central themes of the first book of the R?m?ya?a. The opening chapters of the epic offer two strikingly different summaries of the epic. As the first chapter begins the epic's traditional author V?lm?ki asks the sage N?rada who was the most virtuous and heroic man in the world. N?rada replies that it was R?ma and he proceeds to tell in brief all that R?ma has done. N?rada uses the past tense throughout; he begins with a recitation of all R?ma's glorious qualities and then gets right into the heart of the epic story. R?ma's father wanted to crown him king, but instead in keeping with a promise he made to one of his wives, he is forced to banish R?ma to the forest and crown her son instead. R?ma's wife S?t? is abducted by the demon R?va?a whom R?ma defeats. N?rada's account ends with R?ma's recovery of S?t?, his return to Ayodhy? and his taking over the kingship. All of this has already happened. N?rada then switches to the future with a prediction of the greatness of R?ma's rule, when everyone will prosper and righteousness will prevail. This seems straightforward; V?lm?ki will compose a poem about something that has happened in the past. But it is not quite so simple. In the next chapter the god Brahm? comes to V?lm?ki and he tells V?lm?ki again that he should compose a poem about R?ma that includes things both known and hidden. V?lm?ki thus composes his poem about what has happened to R?ma in the past (2.31) but also about what will happen to him in the future (3.29). What was missing in N?rada's account of R?ma's deeds is here specifically named: the abandonment of S?t? (3.28). V?lm?ki acquires the knowledge of the future through the god Brahm?'s aid and composes an account of the deeds of R?ma, a carita that includes an account of the future, sabhavi?ya?sahottaram (4.2). The R?m?ya?a, then, in its entirety is to be about the three times, to mingle past and future, and it is not surprising that its first major event, the birth of R?ma, examined above, does just that, when it uses a present narrator to describe a future prediction made in the past and realized partially in the present and partially in a time that was future from the perspective of the speaker who made the prediction, but past from the perspective of the King who is now learning about it.

Throughout the first book of the R?m?ya?a the past, present and future are inextricably linked to each other. R?ma's education is accomplished through a journey that he makes with the sage Vi?v?mitra. Stopping at various points along the way R?ma learns of his lineage and the great deeds of his ancestors. Many of the stories he is told involve the past, predictions of the future or curses made in the past, and present resolutions. Here is a typical episode. R?ma and Vi?v?mitra have come to the city Mithil?. Just outside the city is a deserted hermitage, and R?ma asks Vi?v?mitra to tell him about the place. Vi?v?mitra begins with an account of the past. This was once the hermitage of the sage Gautama, who with his wife Ahaly? practiced austerities there. The god Indra lusted after Ahaly? and taking on the outward form of her husband slept with her. She was not fooled by his disguise, but she was curious to know what it would be like to sleep with the god. Gautama is also not fooled and he curses Indra to lose his testicles and Ahaly? to remain in the hermitage invisible to all for one thousand years, living only on air, fasting, sleeping on ashes (1.47.28-30). His curse is also a statement of what will happen in the future; "You will remain here, he tells her, living on wind". She will be released from the curse when R?ma enters the forest and she offers him hospitality. We are familiar with the pattern: a story of what happens in the past includes a prediction of the future. We return to the present when Vi?v?mitra tells R?ma that he should now rescue Ahaly?, and this he does. Past, future, present; there is a synchrony to these events as the future becomes the present, a present that is driven by the past future prediction.


# V. Concluding Remarks

All the texts I selected for study in this essay are lives: lives of the Buddhas, lives of the Jinas, and the life of R?ma. They all deal with the past, present and future, albeit in different ways. The treatment of time in these texts is distinctive, and I attempted to show that in each group of texts it has strong resonances to what philosophers were arguing about the nature of time. In the Buddhist lives of the Buddhas, it is indeed difficult, as N?g?rjuna argued, to distinguish past, present and future, so dependent are they on each other. And as ??kyamuni in the present tells how he worshipped ??kyamuni in the past, and made a vow to be exactly like him in the future, past and present and future do seem to be happening at the same time. The same melting of past, present and future into each other, I argued, is evident in the R?m?ya?a. The Jain philosopher I studied here had concerns that were not apparent in N?g?rjuna, nor in the Ved?nta philosopher ?r?Har?a, who was his contemporary. Prabh?candra was more concerned about distinguishing the remote past from the immediate past than from distinguishing past from present or future. Reading the biography of the Jina Mah?v?ra I focused on the sharp a distinction between how remote rebirths and proximate rebirths functioned, mirroring the importance that this difference had for the philosopher. I suspect that it was to a great extent the future that troubled the philosophers most, in particular, what determined the future and if it was possible or even desirable to escape the pull of the past. I would further argue that what made for somewhat muddled philosophy made for compelling stories; after all, the relationship of the future and present to the past, both remote past and proximate past, continues to engage us, as readers of these stories and authors of our own personal narratives.

Volume XIX Issue VII Version I 29 ( A )


14  For a discussion of the Mah?vastu sections on the Buddhas of the past see Vincent Tournier La formation du Mah?vastu, Paris: École Francaised'Extreme-Orient, 2017, ch 2, pp. 125-194.  15  It seems that the texts listing Buddhas other than ??kyamuni were initially about the past Buddhas, which is what we see in the PaliBuddhava?sa.Continuing into the future with Maitreya occurs in the Mah?vastu.Maitreya is also mentioned in the M?lasarv?stiv?daBhai?ajyavastu. See Tournier 156-169.

			3 Anne Clavel, "Can the Rise of Rohi?? be Inferred from the Rise of K?ttik?? A Buddhist-Jaina Controversy", Buddhist and Jaina Studies, ed. J.Soni, M.Pahlke and C. Cüppers,Lumbini: Lumbini International  Research Institute, 2014, pp.342-367.  4  On backward causation see Eli Franco, Jit?ri on Backward Causaiton (bh?vik?ra?av?da) in KL Dhammajoti, ed Buddhist Meditative Praxis Traditiional Teachings &Modern Applications, Hong Kong Centre of Buddhsit Studies The University of Hong Kong, 2015, 81-117. I thank Eli Franco for sharing with me his edition of Jit?ri's text. 5 On the Sarv?stiv?da theory see Collett Cox, Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence, Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1995, 141-145. 6 Kha??anakha??akh?dya ed. Pandit Lakshmana Sastri Dravida, Benaras: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series,1914. pp. 1238-1248.
			For example, see the discussion in Pt. Sukhlalji'sTattv?rthaS?tra, L.D Series 44, Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology,1974. p. 164.
			Richard Salomon, Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara: An Introduction with Selected Translations (Classics of Indian Buddhism) Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications 2018, chapter 8. 17 Mah?vastu, I.47; 3.239; 3. 243. GRETIL http://gretil.sub.unigoettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/mhvastuu.htm accessed July 5, 2018. This 18 Mah?vastu 1.1. http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_ rellit/buddh/mhvastuu.htm, accessed July 5, 2018. On the past
			Naomi Appleton, Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-Life Stories, Cambridge University Press 2014, pp. 116-126, contrasts Jain and Buddhist treatments of the lives of the Jinas and Buddhas with a different emphasis. 22 Mah?vastu 1.1; Tournier p. 239.
			Year 2019 © 2019 Global JournalsIs there a Future? Some Answers from Indian Philosophical and Narrative Literature
			© 2019 Global JournalsIs there a Future? Some Answers from Indian Philosophical and Narrative Literature