Vasubandhu · Theology
Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness (ksanikavada): everything arises and perishes instant by instant, felt continuity is really a rapid succession of momentary factors, and the Sarvastivada claim that dharmas ‘exist in all three times’ betrays the very impermanence it means to honour.
Every Buddhist agreed that all things are impermanent. Vasubandhu, following the Sautrantika thinkers, pushed the idea to its razor edge: things are not merely perishable in the long run, they are momentary. A flame, a thought, a mountain - each exists for only a single instant (ksana), arising and immediately passing away, replaced in the next instant by a successor so similar that we mistake the series for a single enduring thing. What you call ‘this candle flame, burning steadily’ is really a rapid relay of distinct flame-moments, each a fresh arising. The apparent thing is like a line of falling dominoes or a whirled torch that paints a circle of fire in the dark: the circle is real to the eye but there is no ring, only a point of light in swift succession of positions. Reality, on this view, does not endure; it flickers, faster than any perception, and re-creates the world instant by instant.
Vasubandhu’s great opponents here were the Sarvastivadins, whose very name means ‘the ones who say all exists.’ Faced with a puzzle - how can a present mind know a past object, or how can a past deed cause a future fruit, if the past and future are simply nothing? - they gave a bold answer: the basic factors of reality (dharmas) exist in all three times. A dharma is future, then present, then past, but throughout it truly exists; what changes is only its mode or activity, not its existence. The pot that shattered still exists, as a past pot; the fruit not yet ripened already exists, as a future fruit. This let them explain memory, causation, and karma neatly - the past object is really there to be known. But Vasubandhu saw a fatal cost. If a thing exists in the past and the future just as it does in the present, then in what sense does it ever really arise or perish? The Sarvastivadins, trying to save impermanence’s explanatory work, had quietly made everything permanent.
If only the present instant exists, Vasubandhu owes us an account of the very things the Sarvastivadins invoked their three-times theory to explain - above all, how a cause that has utterly perished can produce an effect. His answer relies on immediate succession. A cause does not need to persist and reach forward to touch its effect; it need only give rise, as it perishes, to the next momentary factor in the stream, which gives rise to the next, and so on. The seed does not endure into the sprout; the last moment of the seed-series conditions the first moment of the sprout-series, and the causal line runs on unbroken though nothing lasts. Continuity is carried not by an enduring substance but by lawful moment-to-moment conditioning. This is momentariness’s master stroke: it keeps all the connectedness of the world - memory, growth, karma, causation - while abolishing every enduring thing. The universe hangs together not because anything stays, but because each vanishing instant hands on its inheritance to the next.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Vasubandhu held all conditioned things to be momentary (ksanika) - arising and perishing in an instant, needing no separate cause to destroy them - and that he argued against the Sarvastivada thesis that dharmas exist in all three times (past, present, future). Explain momentariness and why he thought…
Leads to Heraclitus.
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