ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

        ya Sam:
        But that would be a very long instant if 
        we're talking about millions of light years, 
        right?
 
        Monte Davis:
        In a reference frame moving at the 
        speed of light in a vacuum, the 
        entire history of the universe is 
        instantaneous. One instant.
        There is no time.
 
        Now, you can tap-dance around that 
        by observing that no "thing" -- let alone 
        any sentient observer -- is moving or 
        can move at that speed.  A photon (and 
        substitute "an electromagnetic wavefront" 
        for "photon" at all times) has no mass 
        at -- is undefined at -- any lesser velocity. 
        But light itself does not know time.

Again, AtD is not a documentary, and the themes in Against the Day often cleave off, 
like photons in Iceland Spar, ambling away in very different directions:

6.2 Timelessness and Spacelessness

Yet Zen thinks that the preceding is still a partial understanding of “here and 
now.” To fully understand it, it is helpful to examine the following 
often-quoted phrase, as it is particularly illustrative. Zen demands the 
practitioner “to show one's original face before one's parents were born.” This 
demand points to an experiential dimension prior to the bifurcation between the 
subject and the object—and hence “not two”—where “prior” means negation of the 
spatial-temporal ordering principles such as in Kant's understanding of time and 
space as a priori forms of intuition. It points to a non-dualistic experiential 
dimension that is timeless (or zero time) and spaceless (or zero space), by 
which Zen means that neither time nor space is a delimiting condition for 
Zen-seeing. In timelessness there is no distinction between past, present and 
future or between “before” and “after”; in spacelessness there is no distinction 
between the whole and its parts. One can also say that both time 
and space, experienced from the point-of-view of the everyday standpoint, is 
relativized when timelessness temporizes and spacelessness spatializes, where 
timelessness and spacelessness characterize the bottomless ground. Accordingly, 
Zen contends that timelessness and spacelessness are the natural and original 
zone of all things including human beings, for they are all grounded in it. 
Taking these points together, the Zen enlightenment experience suggests a leap 
from a causal temporal series.

Consequently, Zen contends that “here and now” is enfolded in both timelessness 
and spacelessness. This means that one time contains all times and one part 
contains the whole, as in the case of a holographic dry plate in which a part 
contains the whole. Seen in this manner, “now” for the Zen person is a 
temporalization of timelessness, while “here” is equally a spatialization of 
spacelessness, even though he or she may be anchored in the perceptual field as 
understood above. In other words, for the Zen person both “now” and “here” are 
experienced as an expression of thing-events in their suchness, because, as 
mentioned in the foregoing, Zen takes timelessness and spacelessnes to be the 
original abode of thing-events. Caution must be exercised here, however. Zen's 
timelessness should not be confounded with the idea of eternity standing 
outside a temporal series (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Newton's “absolute time”) by 
means of a logical or intellectual transcendence, nor the spacelessness
 to be identified with “absolute space” (e.g., Newton) wherein there is no 
content of experience. In other words, Zen does not understand time and space by 
imposing a formal category on them, by presupposing in advance a form-matter 
distinction.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/#TimSpa
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/


Curators of the Buddha: 
The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism

Edited by Donald S. Lopez
Reviewed by Janet Gyatso


The essays that editor Donald Lopez has brought 
together open up for interrogation key moments 
of contact between Western scholars and Buddhists 
in the last two centuries. Charles Hallisey discusses 
a set of tendencies among Victorian Buddhologists 
that might be subject to postorientalist criticism--among 
them, the tendency to privilege early or classical 
Sanskrit biographies of the Buddha over later, 
vernacular ones and to portray early Buddhism as 
free of ritual--but he shows instead that an 
"intercultural mimesis" was at work based on what 
Theravada Buddhist themselves were claiming 
during the same period. Gustavo Benavides studies 
a side of the great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci not 
often noted: his romantic fascination with what be 
thought of as Buddhist timelessness and Zen 
mystical experience, and the intersections of that 
fascination with Tucci's involvement with Italian 
fascism during the 1930s and 1940s.

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/janet.htm

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=10,473,0,0,1,0