Abstract
This study reads the Buddhist debate on whether past and future things exist (the "three times") against the growing-block view of time that causal set theory's sequential-growth models are offered to support. Rafael Sorkin (2007) remarked that the "accretive time" of these models seems close to C.D. Broad's and to the "Vibhajavadin" school's; Fay Dowker (2022) invited a scholar to determine that school's view of time from the earliest records. The records give no single view under the name. In the northern Abhidharma, the Vibhajyavādins hold that the present and past action whose fruit is not yet given exist, but not past action that has given its fruit, nor the future. That past thins, so the view resembles causal-set accretion only in keeping some past and denying the future; no position in the debate keeps every born element, as a growing block does. In the Pāli tradition, Vibhajjavāda is the Mahāvihāra's self-designation, and its Kathāvatthu refutes four rival views of time, among them the northern view's past half. The Mahāvihāra holds presentism about conditioned phenomena, the view Sorkin offers his growth as an alternative to. On a second axis, the beginning, the Paṭṭhāna's proximity condition, as the commentaries draw it, gives a stream of mind no first member. Classical sequential growth is past-finite; the one past-infinite growth study read (Bento, Dowker and Zalel 2022) builds a consistent covariant framework but offers no dynamics yet that grows a beginningless past in the physical order of its births.
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Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "Causal Set Theory, the Growing Block, and the Buddhist Debate on the Three Times: What the Earliest Vibhajjavādin Records Say — Presentism, Eternalism and Beginningless Time in Abhidharma Texts Compared with Sequential-Growth Models", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12055