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 with **verifiable provenance**.
 
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+**149 documents.** 141 CC0-1.0 · 8 CC-BY-4.0. 81 carry a DOI; 149 carry an OpenTimestamps proof.
 
 *Written by `npm run build` from the index itself — see scripts/build-index.mjs.*
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package/dist/corpus.json

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+      "slug": "abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity",
+      "repo": "TH/publications",
+      "genre": "defensive-publications",
+      "path": "defensive-publications/abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity.md",
+      "title": "Discreteness, Adjacency and Order: A Structural Comparison of the Theravāda Abhidhamma with Causal Sets and Loop Quantum Gravity",
+      "subtitle": "A four-row lens written for a reader who knows calculus but not physics — what each correspondence is, where it holds, and exactly where it breaks",
+      "authors": "Thon Ly · Miss Aquarius℠",
+      "category": "alignment",
+      "voice": "collaborative",
+      "metadata_convention": "yaml",
+      "date": "2026-09-27",
+      "status": "draft",
+      "licence": {
+        "id": "CC0-1.0",
+        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/",
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+      },
+      "text": "## Abstract\n\nThis paper compares, as structures, three things in two discrete theories of spacetime with three things in the Theravāda Abhidhamma. The theories are causal set theory and loop quantum gravity. The three things are **order**, **adjacency** and **ratio**. It is a lens and not a physics claim. No row predicts anything, and none says that a Buddhist text anticipated a theory of quantum gravity. For each row, a plain primer of the physics comes first, then the Abhidhamma material with its textual layer named in words, then the correspondence, and then the point where it breaks.\n\nFour rows survive an adversarial review run before drafting. A fifth was cut.\n\n1. **Order.** The *Paṭṭhāna*'s twenty-four conditions are **not** a partial order as a whole. Mutuality is symmetric. Co-nascence relates what a causal set leaves unrelated. Post-nascence runs backward. The object condition reaches the future and the time-free. What survives is a sub-relation defined over condition-*modes*, not whole conditions: the modes that always run from earlier-arising to later-arising (the five past-time conditions, pre-nascence, kamma across moments, and the pre-nascent modes of support, faculty, dissociation, presence and non-disappearance). They form an acyclic typed relation over which a strict order can be read, but not yet a causal set: the acyclicity comes from how the modes were selected, and the order sits on a clock the tradition assumes. The co-nascent and post-nascent modes, and the conditions that reach all three times, are typed structure that causal sets lack.\n2. **Grain and 3. boundary** (treated together as the adjacency row, the strongest). In loop quantum gravity, a spin-network link is the face two neighbouring grains of space share, and it carries a quantised area. In the Abhidhamma's sub-commentary, space is the non-mixing of touching neighbouring material groups (*kalāpa*), \"the limit of matter\", untouched by what it bounds. Both put the unit of spatial boundary at the adjacency between minimal units, and neither makes it one of the units. The row breaks in stated places: the dependence runs in opposite directions; the link is incident to both grains, while the delimiter is touched by neither; the Abhidhamma boundary is assigned no magnitude and is not an ultimate reality; kalāpas are matter in space while spin-network nodes are quanta of space; and the canonical layer's space is a cavity, not a boundary. The part that holds is the generic part (§9).\n4. **Ratio.** In the commentary and the manual, material phenomena other than the two intimations and the characteristics last 17 mind-moments (51 sub-moments). That is one clock, the mind-moment, and a multiplier, not two clocks. What survives is generic: a duration stated as a count of steps along a given succession. Every discrete clock shares that much. The features specific to causal sets (the longest chain, the statistics, an order that makes time rather than sitting on one) are all among the row's breaks.\n\nThe dropped row, *saṅkhāra* (the conditioned as a whole) against quantum causal histories, is reported along with the reason it was dropped.\n\n**Keywords:** causal set theory, loop quantum gravity, spin networks, area spectrum, quanta of space, partial order, Hasse diagram, discrete spacetime, relational space, Buddhist philosophy of space, Abhidhamma, Paṭṭhāna, kalāpa, paricchedarūpa, ākāsadhātu, Theravāda, Abhidharmakośa, momentariness.\n\n---\n\n## How to Read This Paper\n\nThis paper is written so that a reader who knows calculus, but no linear algebra, quantum mechanics or general relativity, can follow every step. Each physics section opens with a subsection marked **Physics primer**, which builds the idea from nothing. A reader who already knows the physics can skip those subsections. Everything else is written for the exhaustive reader: the Pāli is quoted, the textual layer of every Abhidhamma claim is named in words, and every correspondence ends with the place where it fails.\n\nFormulas are written in plain Unicode. Display formulas sit in monospace blocks. Where a formula is quoted, the source that derives it is cited.\n\n**Four textual layers are kept apart throughout.** They are named in words at each use:\n\n| Layer | Texts used here | Date (traditional or scholarly) |\n|---|---|---|\n| **canon** | *Dhammasaṅgaṇī*, *Vibhaṅga*, *Kathāvatthu*, *Paṭṭhāna* (Abhidhamma Piṭaka) | compiled over the last centuries BCE; the *Kathāvatthu* is traditionally dated to the Third Council |\n| **commentary** | *Visuddhimagga*, *Sammohavinodanī* (*Vibhaṅga* commentary), *Kathāvatthu* commentary | c. 5th century CE |\n| **manual** | *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* (Anuruddha) | variously dated; commonly c. 11th–12th century |\n| **sub-commentary** | *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā* (Sumaṅgala) | c. 12th century |\n\nA claim that holds only at a later layer is not a claim about the canon. Several rows below live, or die, on exactly that distinction.\n\n---\n\n## Terms\n\n| Term as the tradition writes it | Standard term used in this paper | Layer where it is defined |\n|---|---|---|\n| *paccaya*; *Paṭṭhāna* | condition; the canonical treatise on the 24 conditioning relations | canon (summarised in the manual, ch. 8) |\n| *anantara*, *samanantara* | proximity, contiguity (immediate succession of mind-moments) | canon |\n| *āsevana* | repetition | canon |\n| *natthi*, *vigata* | absence, disappearance | canon |\n| *sahajāta* | co-nascence (arising together) | canon |\n| *aññamañña* | mutuality | canon |\n| *purejāta* | pre-nascence (the condition arose earlier and still exists) | canon |\n| *pacchājāta* | post-nascence (the condition arises later than what it supports) | canon |\n| *sahajāta-*, *purejāta-*, *pacchājāta-* modes of *nissaya*, *indriya*, *vippayutta*, *atthi*, *avigata* | the co-nascent, pre-nascent and post-nascent modes (sub-types) of support, faculty, dissociation, presence and non-disappearance | canon (e.g. *Paṭṭhāna*: *atthipaccayena paccayo – sahajātaṃ, purejātaṃ …*); grouped in the manual, ch. 8 |\n| *kamma* (*nānākkhaṇika*) | volitional action (across different moments) | canon (*Paṭṭhāna*, e.g. *Kusalattika* §427: *nānākkhaṇikā – kusalā cetanā vipākānaṃ khandhānaṃ …*); the time classification is sub-commentarial |\n| *ārammaṇa* | object condition | canon |\n| *upanissaya*, *pakatūpanissaya* | decisive support; natural decisive support | canon |\n| *citta*, *cittakkhaṇa* | a moment of consciousness; a mind-moment | canon; the durations are commentarial |\n| *uppāda*, *ṭhiti*, *bhaṅga* | arising, presence, dissolution (the three sub-moments) | commentary and manual |\n| *rūpa-kalāpa* | smallest material cluster | commentary; systematised in the manual |\n| *suddhaṭṭhaka* | the \"pure octad\" (four great elements, colour, odour, taste, nutritive essence) | commentary and manual |\n| *ākāsadhātu* | the space element | canon |\n| *paricchedarūpa* | delimiting matter (space as the delimitation of material clusters) | manual and sub-commentary |\n| *anipphanna* | not concretely produced; having no intrinsic nature of its own | commentary (*Visuddhimagga*, *Sammohavinodanī*); manual |\n| *padaṭṭhāna* | proximate cause | commentary |\n| *paramāṇu* | the smallest unit on the commentarial size ladder | commentary |\n| *kālavimutta* | free of time (said of nibbāna and concepts) | manual; glossed in the sub-commentary |\n| *saṅkhāra*, *saṅkhata*, *asaṅkhata* | the conditioned; conditioned; unconditioned | canon |\n\n---\n\n## Findings disclosed\n\nThis paper is a study. It discloses no mechanism, so it carries findings and not claims. Each finding is stated in its surviving form, after the scope repairs of the 2026-09-28 revision, with its break beside it. The falsifiers are collected in §10.\n\n1. **Order (§3.3).** The *Paṭṭhāna*'s twenty-four conditions, taken whole, are not a partial order: mutuality makes 2-cycles, co-nascence relates what a causal order leaves unrelated, post-nascence runs from later to earlier, and the object condition reaches the future and the time-free. The condition-*modes* that always run from earlier-arising to later-arising form a relation *S*: proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence, disappearance, pre-nascence, kamma across moments, and the pre-nascent modes of support, faculty, dissociation, presence and non-disappearance. *S* is acyclic, and a strict order can be read over it. **Break:** *S* is acyclic because it was selected by an arising-time index the tradition assumes, so its acyclicity is not a finding about the text. Its transitive closure is the reader's construction, since the text asserts no composed relation. Local finiteness is unexamined. *S* alone conditions no arising, because every arising also needs co-nascent conditions. *S* relates events within one stream, plus the matter that conditions that stream, and joins streams only through the assumed index. So *S* is not a causal set in §3.1's sense, and the order it carries sits on a time where a causal set's order makes one.\n2. **Adjacency (§4.5, narrowed by §9).** Loop quantum gravity and the Theravāda sub-commentary both put the unit of spatial boundary at the adjacency between minimal units, and neither makes that boundary one of the units. On the question *what is between minimal units?*, the *Vibhāvinī*'s answer (a named, counted item of the material list, though not an ultimate reality) has the shape of loop quantum gravity's answer (a link), and not the shape of the Kashmiri Sarvāstivāda's (*nothing*). **Break:** the parts of the match that are specific to loop quantum gravity (a quantised magnitude on the boundary, volume derived from it) are the parts that fail. The dependence runs in opposite directions. The link is incident to both grains, while the delimiter is touched by neither. The delimiter is assigned no magnitude and is not an ultimate reality. Kalāpas are matter in space, and nodes are quanta of space. The canonical space element is a cavity, not a boundary. The shape that holds is also held by any cellular picture, and by the \"neither\" view of boundaries in the Western literature (§9).\n3. **Ratio (§5.3, narrowed by §9).** In the commentary and the manual, material phenomena other than the two intimations and the characteristics last seventeen mind-moments (fifty-one sub-moments), and the manual derives seventeen from the length of the longest cognitive process. The lifetime is one clock, the mind-moment, and a multiplier. What survives is generic: a duration is a count of steps along a given succession. **Break:** every discrete clock shares that much. The features specific to causal sets are the longest chain, a statistical relation to proper time, and an order that makes time rather than sitting on one. The Abhidhamma counts along one given stream, exactly, on a clock it assumes. So the specific part fails, and there is no second chain for a ratio to compare.\n4. **The dropped row (§6).** *Saṅkhāra* (the conditioned as a whole) set against quantum causal histories adds no structure beyond findings 1–3, and it maps a category that contains mind onto a structure that contains none. **Break:** the row would return if a structural feature of quantum causal histories were shown to have a *Paṭṭhāna* counterpart not already in findings 1–3.\n\n---\n\n## Prior Art and Non-Assertion Statement\n\nThis document is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. **The authors and HeartBank® will not seek patent** on anything herein. Nothing here is a mechanism. The paper is a study, and its disclosures are the numbered findings under *Findings disclosed* above, each with its break stated beside it.\n\n**What is already public, and cited rather than claimed:**\n\n- **Causal-set becoming linked to a Buddhist school.** Rafael Sorkin, a founder of causal set theory, remarked in 2007 that the \"accretive time\" of his growth models \"seems close to that … of the 'Vibhajavadin' school within the Buddhist philosophical tradition\". Fay Dowker quoted the remark in 2022 and invited a scholar to examine the earliest records. This institution's sibling paper, *the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time*, answers that invitation: the Pāli Vibhajjavāda is presentist, and so is the **foil** of causal-set growth, not its twin. This paper does not revisit that finding and does not contradict it.\n- **Causal sets as the discrete theory of order.** Bombelli, Lee, Meyer and Sorkin (1987); Rideout and Sorkin (2000) on sequential growth; Wüthrich and Callender (2017) on what kind of becoming a causal set allows.\n- **Quanta of space and the discrete area spectrum.** Rovelli and Smolin (1995); Ashtekar and Lewandowski (1997); Rovelli and Upadhya's primer (1998); Rovelli's Zakopane lectures (2011); Bianchi, Doná and Speziale (2011) on spin-network nodes as polyhedra.\n- **Syntheses of order and spin networks.** Markopoulou and Smolin (1997); Markopoulou (2000), *quantum causal histories*; Hawkins, Markopoulou and Sahlmann (2003).\n- **Buddhism read against physics in general.** Carlo Rovelli's *Helgoland* (2021) reads relational quantum mechanics beside Nāgārjuna. Popular and scholarly comparisons of Abhidhamma momentariness with quantum physics exist, among them *The Ephemeral Projector* (ResearchGate). A 2026-07-31 blog post, self-labelled AI-generated and without citations, compares causal set theory and the Abhidhamma in general terms (ekasiswanto.wordpress.com). The Grokipedia article \"Kalapa (atomism)\" compares the kalāpa's size to the Planck length. The Wikipedia article of the same name, read on the date of writing, does not.\n- **The scholarly expositions of the Abhidhamma material this paper reads.** None of these compares the material with physics. Each already expounds a textual point the rows depend on.\n  - Y. Karunadasa, *Buddhist Analysis of Matter* (1967), chs. 5 and 7. It reads the space element as cavities and interstices, \"bounded or delimited space\", with *pariccheda* meaning both what delimits and what is delimited. It sets the Theravāda space element beside the Vaibhāṣika pair (unconditioned *ākāśa*; the conditioned *ākāśadhātu* of door, window, mouth and nose). It reports the *Kathāvatthu*'s two-trees argument. And it explains pre-nascence and post-nascence by the longer duration of matter than of mind. ⚠️ **It cuts against the adjacency row in one respect.** On its reading, the later scholiasts' classing of the space element as *anipphanna* means that it is \"neither *rūpa* … nor a *dhamma* … in the true sense\", \"nothing but the mere limitation of matter\". §4.4 and §4.6 carry this.\n  - Bhikkhu Bodhi (gen. ed.), *A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma* (1993), ch. VI and ch. VIII. It sets out the sub-types (modes) of each condition, among them base-prenascence support, prenascence faculty (the five sensitivities, \"arisen at the static phase of the past bhavaṅga citta\"), and the prenascent and postnascent types of dissociation, presence and non-disappearance. It also states that non-concretely produced matter, the space element included, is \"not included among the ultimate realities\". Its introduction dates the seventeen-moment lifetime of matter, the three sub-moments and the kalāpa to the commentaries.\n  - U Nārada Mūlapaṭṭhāna Sayadaw (with Thein Nyun), *Conditional Relations* (*Paṭṭhāna*), vol. I (PTS Translation Series 37, 1969). An English translation of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana *Paṭṭhāna* with an introduction and charts that work through each condition's modes (for example, \"base-prenascence-dependence\"). It is the route for the canonical-layer check of row 1 that §11 lists as owed.\n  - Alexander von Rospatt, *The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of this Doctrine up to Vasubandhu* (1995). The standard study of the doctrine of moments. **Cited by its bibliographic record only: it was not reached for this revision**, so the paper does not characterise what it says about the seventeen-moment lifetime.\n- **The Indian debate on whether minimal material units touch** (*Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* ad I.43, cross-tradition, §4.3 below). It is the oldest neighbour of the adjacency row and predates every physics comparison by more than a millennium.\n\n**The census.** A quick novelty census ran on 2026-09-27. Its pre-registration was pushed publicly before any query was made: `thonly/publications` commit `7348ba2`, `timestamps/census/physics-lens-prereg.md`. The search covered the English web (including dharma sites and popular Buddhism-and-physics writing), and arXiv, Google Scholar, PhilPapers, GitHub and Google Patents by keyword. Thai, Burmese, Sinhala, Chinese, Japanese and Khmer sources were **not run**, and no books were read. The pre-registered control, the known comparison *The Ephemeral Projector*, was found.\n\n| Conjunct | Found | Verdict |\n|---|---|---|\n| (a) the *Paṭṭhāna*'s typed conditions against causal-set order | a general causal-set–Abhidhamma resonance (the AI-generated post; names no *Paṭṭhāna* condition) | **narrowed** at general width; the typed-relation comparison was not found |\n| (b) kalāpa against spin-network nodes | kalāpas compared with atoms, quanta and the Planck length in popular writing | **narrowed** at \"smallest unit\" width; the spin-network-specific comparison was not found |\n| (c) *paricchedarūpa* (space as the between) against area on spin-network links | the commentarial reading of space as delimitation is public; no comparison with loop quantum gravity | **not found in that aperture on that date** |\n| (d) *saṅkhāra* against quantum causal histories | — | not found; **dropped before drafting** (§6) |\n| (e) the 17-moment lifetime as a discrete-time ratio | Sorkin and Dowker link causal-set becoming to Buddhist momentariness | **narrowed** at general width; the chain-length reading of the ratio was not found |\n| the composition of rows in one structural map | — | **not found in that aperture on that date** |\n\n⛔ \"Not found in that aperture on that date\" is a statement about a search. It is not a claim of priority, and nothing in this paper is offered as new. As a study that makes no priority claim, this paper owes no further census before deposit (ruled 2026-09-28); a literature census could narrow or kill the rows above, and would be reported here as a revision.\n\n---\n\n## 1 · What Kind of Comparison This Is\n\nPhysics has two great theories that do not fit together. General relativity describes gravity as the smooth geometry of spacetime. Quantum theory describes everything else as discrete, probabilistic excitations. A theory of **quantum gravity** would describe what spacetime is at the smallest scale, where both matter. Two of the candidate programmes make spacetime itself discrete:\n\n- **Causal set theory** says spacetime, at bottom, is a set of events and a relation of *before*. Everything else, including distance and dimension, is to be recovered from counting.\n- **Loop quantum gravity** says space, at bottom, is a network of grains whose areas and volumes come in discrete steps.\n\nThe Theravāda Abhidhamma is also a discrete analysis. It resolves experience and matter into momentary phenomena (*dhamma*), connected by twenty-four typed conditioning relations. It gives matter a smallest cluster, and it gives space a definition.\n\nIt is therefore tempting to line the two up. That temptation has a long and mostly poor history, from *The Tao of Physics* onward, and this paper is built to resist it. Every row below is a **structural** comparison: it asks whether two frameworks share a *shape* (an order, an adjacency, a ratio), and it names exactly where the shape stops being shared. The Abhidhamma is an analysis of what can be known in experience. Quantum gravity is a theory of what spacetime is. Whether the two can be compared at all is the strongest objection to this paper, and §8 carries it rather than answering it.\n\n**The map, in one table:**\n\n```\n  ROW          PHYSICS SIDE                          ABHIDHAMMA SIDE                        SURVIVING FORM\n  ───────────  ────────────────────────────────────  ─────────────────────────────────────  ──────────────────────────────────\n  1 ORDER      causal set: a locally finite           the Paṭṭhāna's 24 typed conditions    only the earlier→later MODES (S) are\n               partial order (\"before\")               (classified by manual + sub-comm.)    acyclic, by selection: a strict order,\n                                                                                            not yet a causal set; the rest is\n                                                                                            typing a causal set lacks\n  2 GRAIN      spin-network node: a quantum OF        rūpa-kalāpa: smallest material        survives only as what row 3\n               space, with a volume                   cluster (matter IN space)             presupposes; matter ≠ geometry\n  3 BOUNDARY   spin-network link: the face two        paricchedarūpa: the non-mixing of     both put the unit of spatial\n               grains share; carries quantised area   touching neighbours; \"limit of matter\" boundary at the ADJACENCY, not in\n                                                                                            a unit (strongest row; the shared\n                                                                                            part is generic; seven breaks)\n  4 RATIO      proper time ∝ length of the longest    most matter lasts 17 mind-moments     one clock and a multiplier; only\n               chain between two events               (51 sub-moments)                      the generic part survives: a\n                                                                                            duration as a count of steps\n  ─ DROPPED ─  quantum causal histories               saṅkhāra (the conditioned as a whole)  category error; added no structure\n```\n\nRows 2 and 3 are one argument told from two ends, so they share one section (§4).\n\n---\n\n## 2 · A Note on Discreteness\n\nTwo different things are called *discrete* in this paper, and they must not be confused.\n\n- **Object discreteness.** The world is made of separate pieces, like grains of sand. The kalāpa is discrete in this sense, and so are the elements of a causal set.\n- **Spectral discreteness.** A *measured quantity* can take only values from a list with gaps, like the rungs of a ladder rather than a ramp. Loop quantum gravity is discrete in this sense. Rovelli warns explicitly (Zakopane lectures, §I.A) that its discreteness \"is not given by the fact that the grains of space … are discrete objects. Rather, it is given by the fact that the size of each grain is quantized in discrete steps.\"\n\nThe Abhidhamma has object discreteness in abundance: moments, clusters, sub-moments. Its quantities are restricted only as **counts** of discrete units: a duration is a whole number of sub-moments, and a size is a step on a ladder of powers of thirty-six (§4.2). It never quantises a magnitude that is not a count, and that is what spectral discreteness is. In particular, its delimiting space (manual and sub-commentary) is assigned no magnitude at all (§4.6). This single fact limits every row below.\n\n---\n\n## 3 · Row 1 — Order\n\n### 3.1 · Physics primer: partial orders and causal sets\n\n**A relation** is a rule that says, for any two things *x* and *y*, whether *x* stands in it to *y*. \"Is an ancestor of\" is a relation on people. Write it *x* ≺ *y*.\n\n**A partial order** is a relation with two properties:\n\n```\n  irreflexive:   never  x ≺ x                       (nothing precedes itself)\n  transitive:    if  x ≺ y  and  y ≺ z,  then  x ≺ z  (ancestors of ancestors are ancestors)\n```\n\nTogether these make it **acyclic**: you can never follow the arrows and return to where you started. It is called *partial* because some pairs are not related either way. Two cousins are neither ancestor of the other.\n\n**A causal set** is a partial order on a set of events, with one more property, **local finiteness**: between any two related events, only finitely many events lie. The relation means \"can causally influence\". In relativity, two events are either causally related (one is in the other's past light cone) or **spacelike**: too far apart in space, for the time between them, for any signal to connect them. In a causal set, spacelike simply means *unrelated*.\n\n**Links and the Hasse diagram.** If *x* ≺ *y* and nothing lies between them, the pair is a **link** (mathematicians say *covering relation*). Drawing only the links, with later events higher, gives the **Hasse diagram**. Every other relation can be recovered by following links upward, since the order is transitive.\n\n```\n            e       f            later events higher\n             \\     /\n              \\   /\n                d                only LINKS are drawn;\n              /   \\              a ≺ d, a ≺ e, a ≺ f, b ≺ e … follow by transitivity\n             b     c\n              \\   /              b and c are UNRELATED (spacelike):\n                a                neither can influence the other\n```\n\n**Order plus number.** Sorkin's slogan for the programme is *order + number = geometry*. Two classical theorems (Hawking, King and McCarthy 1976; Malament 1977) show that, for spacetimes that are past- and future-distinguishing, the causal order fixes the geometry up to a conformal factor, that is, up to a local scale. Causal set theory supplies the missing scale by **counting**. Events are scattered at random (a \"sprinkling\") with, on average, one event per unit of spacetime volume in Planck units, so the number of events in a region measures its volume.\n\n**Time as chain length.** A **chain** is a sequence *x*₁ ≺ *x*₂ ≺ … ≺ *x*ₙ. Between two related events, the length of the **longest** chain grows in proportion to the proper time between them: the time a clock carried from one to the other would read. The result holds asymptotically and in expectation, for random sprinklings into Minkowski space (Brightwell and Gregory 1991). In a causal set, a duration *is* a count of steps. §5 uses exactly this.\n\n**Growth.** In Rideout and Sorkin's sequential-growth models, the causal set is not given all at once. It grows, one element at a time, each new element born to the future of some existing ones. What is born stays. Sorkin reads this as a real becoming, a *growing block*: a past that accumulates and a future that does not yet exist.\n\n### 3.2 · The Abhidhamma side: twenty-four typed relations\n\nThe *Paṭṭhāna*, the last book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka (canon), analyses how phenomena condition one another under twenty-four named conditions (*paccaya*). The manual (*Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha*, ch. 8) summarises them, and the sub-commentary (the *Vibhāvinī*) classifies each by the **time** its conditioning reaches. On the manual's ch. 8 it states:\n\n> *… anantarasamanantaraāsevananatthivigatavasena pañcannaṃ atītakālikānaṃ, kammapaccayassa atītavattamānavasena dvikālikassa, ārammaṇaadhipatiupanissayapaccayānaṃ tikālikānaṃ, itaresaṃ pannarasannaṃ paccuppannakālikānañca vasena kālattayavanto, nibbānapaññattivasena kālavimuttā ca …*\n>\n> … [things are] possessed of the three times by way of the five belonging to the past (proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence, disappearance), the kamma condition belonging to two times (past and present), the object, predominance and decisive-support conditions belonging to three times, and the remaining fifteen belonging to the present; **and free of time, by way of nibbāna and concepts** …\n\nThe count checks: 5 + 1 + 3 + 15 = 24. The tetrad sorts the conditions by the time their conditioning state may have, and the same sentence then sets the time-free (nibbāna and concepts) beside the three times. So the classification is not exhaustive of what can condition: the object condition, placed among the three-time conditions, also reaches the time-free.\n\nThe remaining fifteen are root (*hetu*), co-nascence, mutuality, support (*nissaya*), pre-nascence, post-nascence, result (*vipāka*), nutriment (*āhāra*), faculty (*indriya*), jhāna, path (*magga*), association (*sampayutta*), dissociation (*vippayutta*), presence (*atthi*) and non-disappearance (*avigata*). \"Belonging to the present\" means the conditioning state exists when the conditioned one does. It does not mean that the two arose together. Pre-nascence belongs to the present because its condition arose earlier and still stands. So \"present\" is not \"co-nascent\", and several of the fifteen have **modes**, which the canon itself names. The *Paṭṭhāna* gives the presence condition as *sahajātaṃ, purejātaṃ, pacchājātaṃ, āhāraṃ, indriyaṃ* (co-nascent, pre-nascent, post-nascent, nutriment, faculty), and the dissociation condition as *sahajātaṃ, purejātaṃ, pacchājātaṃ*. The manual groups the modes (ch. 8, CST §30–§34):\n\n| Condition | Co-nascent mode | Pre-nascent mode (condition arose earlier) | Post-nascent mode |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| support (*nissaya*) | mind with mind, the great elements with derived matter | the six bases for the seven consciousness elements, during the course of existence | — |\n| faculty (*indriya*) | the immaterial faculties for co-nascent mind and matter | the five sensitivities for the five kinds of sense consciousness | — (the material life faculty, for the matter of its own cluster, is a third, separate mode) |\n| dissociation (*vippayutta*) | mind for co-nascent matter; the base at rebirth-linking | the six bases, during the course of existence, *purejātavasena* | later mind for the earlier-arisen body |\n| presence, non-disappearance (*atthi*, *avigata*) | *sahajātaṃ* | *purejātaṃ* | *pacchājātaṃ* (edible food and material life are two further, separate modes) |\n\nThe manual names the pre-nascent mode in words for dissociation, presence and non-disappearance. For support and faculty the pre-nascent reading is the one the canon gives for the base (*vatthu kusalānaṃ khandhānaṃ nissayapaccayena paccayo*) and the one the standard modern exposition gives for the sensitivities (Bodhi 1993, ch. VIII: \"prenascence faculty\"). At rebirth-linking the base arises together with the mind and is co-nascent, which is why the manual limits the pre-nascent mode to the course of existence.\n\nA condition in the Abhidhamma is **typed**. The relation is not just \"*x* conditions *y*\", but \"*x* conditions *y* **as** object\", \"**as** kamma\", \"**as** co-nascent\", and so on. One pair can stand in several types at once.\n\n### 3.3 · The correspondence, and its surviving form\n\n**The whole is not a partial order.** Four features break it:\n\n| Feature | Text (layer) | Why it is not a partial order |\n|---|---|---|\n| **Mutuality** (*aññamañña*) | canon; manual ch. 8 | *x* conditions *y* and *y* conditions *x*: a 2-cycle. A partial order forbids cycles. |\n| **Co-nascence** (*sahajāta*) | canon; manual ch. 8 | relates what arises **together**. A causal order leaves simultaneous, unlinked events *unrelated* (spacelike). |\n| **Post-nascence** (*pacchājāta*) | manual ch. 8: *\"pacchājātā cittacetasikā dhammā purejātassa imassa kāyassa pacchājātavasena\"* — \"later-arisen consciousness and its concomitants [condition] this body, arisen earlier, by way of post-nascence\" | the condition arises **after** what it supports: ordered by arising, the arrow runs backward. |\n| **Object** (*ārammaṇa*) | manual ch. 3: mind-door objects may be *\"paccuppannamatītaṃ anāgataṃ kālavimuttañca\"* (present, past, future, and free of time); the sub-commentary glosses the time-free as *\"nibbānaṃ, paññatti ca\"* (nibbāna and concepts) | a future object conditions a present mind, and a time-free object is in no order at all. |\n\n**The surviving form.** Because several conditions have modes, the surviving relation is defined over condition-**modes**, not over whole conditions. Some modes always run from what arose **earlier** to what arises **later**:\n\n```\n  the ACYCLIC SUB-RELATION S  (defined over MODES)\n  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────\n  anantara, samanantara     the moment just ceased → the next moment\n  āsevana                   a moment → the next, as repetition\n  natthi, vigata            the moment just ceased → the next (by its absence)\n  purejāta                  an earlier-arisen, still-present base or object → a later-arising mind\n  kamma (nānākkhaṇika)      a past volition → its later result, across many moments\n  pre-nascent MODES of      the same earlier-arisen bases (and, for faculty, the five\n    nissaya, indriya,         sensitivities) → the later-arising consciousness, during the\n    vippayutta, atthi,        course of existence\n    avigata\n```\n\nThe co-nascent and post-nascent modes of those five conditions stay out of S, and so does kamma's co-nascent mode.\n\n**Every one of the twenty-four, assigned:**\n\n| Where it goes | Conditions (or modes) |\n|---|---|\n| **in S** (whole condition) | proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence, disappearance, pre-nascence |\n| **in S** (one mode only) | kamma (across moments); support, faculty, dissociation, presence, non-disappearance (pre-nascent modes) |\n| **out**: co-nascent only | root, co-nascence, mutuality, result, jhāna, path, association; the co-nascent modes of kamma, support, faculty, dissociation, presence, non-disappearance, predominance and nutriment |\n| **out**: runs backward | post-nascence; the post-nascent modes of dissociation, presence and non-disappearance |\n| **out**: reaches three times, or the time-free | object, predominance (object mode), decisive support |\n| **out**: not sorted by arising here | nutriment (edible food); faculty and presence (material life), whose relata co-exist in one body without a stated arising order |\n\n**Why S is acyclic (a one-line proof).** Let *t*(*x*) be the moment at which phenomenon *x* arises. For every mode in S, *x* S *y* implies *t*(*x*) < *t*(*y*). Along any chain *x*₁ S *x*₂ S … S *x*ₙ, the arising times strictly increase, so the chain can never return to *x*₁. ⚠️ **This proof shows less than it seems to.** S was *selected* by the condition *t*(*x*) < *t*(*y*), so its acyclicity follows from the selection and is not a finding about the text. A strict order can be read over S, and its transitive closure is a partial order. But the closure is the reader's construction (see the next paragraph), and whether S meets the rest of §3.1's definition is taken up in §3.4.\n\n⚠️ **One condition was removed from S by the adversarial review.** The original list included *pakatūpanissaya* (natural decisive support). The sub-commentary classes decisive support as **tikālika**, reaching all three times (quoted above), and the manual's list of natural decisive supports includes present things (a person, climate, food, lodging). It is therefore not guaranteed to run earlier-to-later, and it is out.\n\n**A second, smaller correspondence: generators, not closure.** The manual and the sub-commentary present the conditions as primitive. Neither says that because *x* conditions *y* and *y* conditions *z*, *x* conditions *z*. Whether the *Paṭṭhāna* itself anywhere composes two conditions into a third is part of the canonical check this paper owes (§11); U Nārada's translation (1969), which works through the *Paṭṭhāna*'s own permutations, is the route for it. On the manual's presentation, the relations are **primitive**, like a causal set presented by its links rather than by its full transitive order. The likeness is partial. Proximity (*anantara*) holds only between immediate successors, so it is link-like in the strict Hasse sense. Kamma across moments, however, spans many intermediate moments and is still primitive, so S is a set of generating relations that is neither the Hasse diagram nor the full order.\n\nThe surviving form of the row, stated once:\n\n> **As the manual and the *Vibhāvinī* classify the *Paṭṭhāna*'s conditions, the condition-modes that always run from earlier-arising to later-arising (proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence, disappearance, pre-nascence, kamma across moments, and the pre-nascent modes of support, faculty, dissociation, presence and non-disappearance) form an acyclic typed relation over which a strict order, but not yet a causal set in §3.1's sense, can be read. The remaining conditions and modes (the co-nascent ones, the post-nascent ones, and the object, predominance and decisive-support conditions that reach all three times) are typed structure that a causal set does not have.**\n\n### 3.4 · Where it breaks\n\n- **Different kinds of order.** Causal sets keep their past: in sequential growth, what is born stays. The Theravāda is **presentist**: only present phenomena exist (the sibling paper, from *Kathāvatthu* §282–§304). S is an order of *conditioning*, not an order of *co-existing* elements. Its earlier relatum has usually ceased by the time the later arises. The sibling paper's phrase is **influence without existence**. So the two orders are not the same kind of thing, and this paper does not say they are.\n- **S borrows a clock.** The proof above uses *t*(*x*), an index of arising moments that the Abhidhamma assumes. S is acyclic **because** it respects a succession given in advance. In a causal set there is no succession apart from the order: the order *is* the time. The Abhidhamma's order sits on a time; the causal set's order makes one.\n- **S is not a causal set in §3.1's own sense.** Four gaps remain between S and that definition. (1) Acyclicity follows from the selection by *t*, as noted under the proof. (2) The transitive closure, which a partial order needs, adds exactly the composed relations the texts do not assert, so the closure is the reader's construction. (3) Local finiteness is unexamined: nothing here counts how many phenomena lie between two related ones, and the answer depends on the index *t* again. (4) S alone conditions no arising. Every arising also needs co-nascent conditions, which are outside S, so S is not a sufficient account of how anything comes to be. \"A strict order can be read over S\" is the whole of what survives.\n- **A forest of streams, joined only by the assumed index.** S relates moments within one mental continuum (proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence, disappearance), a body's bases to its own mind, and a past volition to its own results. Through the pre-nascent object mode it also links external matter to a mind that perceives it (the five objects for the five-door process, manual ch. 8, CST §19). Two minds that see one object therefore share a predecessor. But nothing in S orders a moment in one stream before a moment in another, so any order between streams comes from *t*, which no text defines as a global index. Co-nascence, moreover, presupposes that a mind and the matter it originates arise at once, a simultaneity that a causal set does not have: there, events with no causal relation are only *unrelated*. This bears on §3.5's third falsifier (a temporal order the tradition asserts that S cannot connect). It fires if the tradition asserts an order between moments of different streams. This revision found no text that does. A claim that one mind-moment occurs everywhere at once was checked and has no textual basis that this revision could find. So the falsifier is not shown to fire, but the surviving form holds only per stream, joined by *t*.\n- **Typing has no counterpart.** A causal set has one relation. The *Paṭṭhāna* has twenty-four, and its analytical power lies in the types. Loop-gravity syntheses add structure (spins, Hilbert spaces) to causal relations, but none of it corresponds to *object*, *predominance* or *kamma*. §6 returns to this.\n- **Mind is inside the relation.** Most *Paṭṭhāna* conditions have mental relata. Nothing in a causal set is mental.\n\n### 3.5 · What would falsify this row\n\n- **A textual case in which a member of S holds with the conditioned arising at or before the condition** (for example, a canonical or commentarial passage in which proximity or pre-nascence runs from a later to an earlier phenomenon). S would then not be acyclic, and the surviving form fails.\n- **A sub-commentarial or commentarial passage placing kamma's cross-moment conditioning on a present or future relatum.** This would remove kamma from S.\n- **A temporal order the tradition asserts that S cannot connect.** If the tradition orders two phenomena in time, and no chain in S links them, then S does not carry the tradition's own temporal order, and \"a strict order can be read over it\" reduces to a formality. (§3.4 applies this test to orders between streams.)\n\n---\n\n## 4 · Rows 2 and 3 — Grain and Boundary: Where Space Is\n\n### 4.1 · Physics primer: spin networks, and what \"area has a discrete spectrum\" means\n\n**Geometry is a field.** In general relativity, the gravitational field *is* the geometry of spacetime: it decides lengths, areas and volumes. There is no stage apart from it. If the gravitational field is quantised, then lengths, areas and volumes become quantum quantities, and quantum quantities typically come in steps.\n\n**What \"spectrum\" means.** In quantum theory, each measurable quantity is represented by an operator: a rule which, given the state of a system, yields the possible results of measuring it. The list of possible results is the quantity's **spectrum**. A spectrum is **discrete** if the possible results are separated by gaps. Think of a function that can only take values on the rungs of a ladder. An electron's energy in an atom has a discrete spectrum, and that is why atoms emit light at sharp colours. Loop quantum gravity finds that **area and volume** have discrete spectra (Rovelli and Smolin 1995; Ashtekar and Lewandowski 1997).\n\n**A spin network.** A quantum state of space in loop quantum gravity is described by a **graph**: points (**nodes**) joined by lines (**links**). Each link carries a label *j* called a **spin**, taking values *j* = ½, 1, 3/2, 2, …. Each node carries a second label, the **intertwiner**, which records how the links meeting there fit together.\n\n```\n                 j₁\n                 │\n         j₄ ─────●───── j₂          ● a NODE: a grain (\"quantum\") of space\n                 │n                  each line: a LINK, labelled by a spin j\n                 j₃                  the node's volume depends on j₁…j₄ and the intertwiner\n```\n\n**Area lives on links.** Take any surface. Its area is a sum over the links that pierce it:\n\n```\n  A  =  8πγ ℓ_P²  Σ  √( j (j + 1) )          sum over the links crossing the surface\n\n  ℓ_P  = √(ħG / c³)  ≈  1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ m       the Planck length\n  γ    = the Barbero–Immirzi parameter, a dimensionless constant of the theory\n         (γ ≈ 0.2375 from black-hole entropy counting, Domagala–Lewandowski\n          and Meissner 2004; ≈ 0.274 under the later Ghosh–Mitra counting;\n          the value depends on the state-counting convention)\n```\n\nThis is the formula for links that cross the surface transversally. When a node lies on the surface itself, the general formula adds further terms (Ashtekar and Lewandowski 1997). The smallest non-zero area is one link with *j* = ½:\n\n```\n  A_min  =  8πγ ℓ_P² √(3/4)  =  4√3 π γ ℓ_P²   ≈  21.8 γ ℓ_P²\n```\n\nThere is nothing between zero and this value. That gap is what \"area has a discrete spectrum\" means.\n\n**Volume lives at nodes.** Each node has a volume, but volume is not an independent label. It is **computed** from the spins of the links meeting there and from the intertwiner, and it takes discrete values. A node where only three links meet has **zero** volume: the volume operator vanishes on gauge-invariant two- and three-valent nodes (Loll 1996, who also computed the four-valent spectrum). In the geometric picture below, the same fact reads simply: three faces whose area-vectors sum to zero must lie in one plane, and a flat shape has no volume. Volume needs at least four links.\n\n**Nodes are quanta of space, not things in space.** Rovelli (Zakopane lectures, §I.A): the quanta of gravity \"do not live in space, but give rise to space themselves.\" There is no background in which the network sits. \"Where\" means \"which node, adjacent to which\".\n\n**Grains and faces.** Bianchi, Doná and Speziale (2011) showed that a node can be read as a small polyhedron, a *quantum polyhedron*, whose faces are its links. The reading is semiclassical: coherent spin-network states represent semiclassical polyhedra, which is most reliable at large spins and least trustworthy at small spins, including the *j* = ½ where the smallest area sits. Adjacency is also definite only for a spin-network basis state on a fixed graph; a general quantum state of space is a superposition of graphs. Rovelli states the consequence plainly (Zakopane lectures, §II.F): \"Two grains *n* and *n′* are adjacent if there is a link *l* connecting the two, and in this case the area of the elementary surface separating the two grains is determined by the spin of the link joining *n* and *n′*.\"\n\n```\n   ┌───────────────┐┌───────────────┐\n   │   grain  n    ││   grain  n′   │       the face they share IS the link l;\n   │   (volume)    ││   (volume)    │       its area = 8πγℓ_P² √(j_l (j_l + 1))\n   └───────────────┘└───────────────┘\n\n   the same thing as a graph:     n ●────────── j_l ──────────● n′\n```\n\n**In one sentence:** in loop quantum gravity, the boundary between two neighbouring grains of space is the adjacency itself, and it carries a quantised area.\n\n### 4.2 · The Abhidhamma side: the grain\n\n**The kalāpa is matter.** The smallest material cluster (*rūpa-kalāpa*) is not in the canonical Abhidhamma books. The *Dhammasaṅgaṇī* has no kalāpa vocabulary. The clusters appear in the commentary (the *Visuddhimagga* names the \"pure octad\", *suddhaṭṭhaka*, and the decads), and the manual systematises them into twenty-one kinds (*Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* ch. 6: *\"kalāpā ekavīsati\"*). The simplest, the pure octad, is eight inseparable material phenomena: the four great elements (extension, cohesion, heat, motion) together with colour, odour, taste and nutritive essence.\n\n**The commentarial size ladder.** The *Vibhaṅga* commentary (*Sammohavinodanī*), in a passage teaching a monk to see small faults as large, gives a ladder of sizes:\n\n> *chattiṃsa paramāṇavo ekassa aṇuno pamāṇaṃ. Chattiṃsa aṇū ekāya tajjāriyā pamāṇaṃ. Chattiṃsa tajjāriyo eko rathareṇu.*\n>\n> Thirty-six *paramāṇu* make the measure of one *aṇu*; thirty-six *aṇu*, one *tajjārī*; thirty-six *tajjārī*, one *rathareṇu* [a mote of chariot dust].\n\nSo one *paramāṇu* is 1/36³ = **1/46,656** of a chariot-dust mote. The commentary describes the *paramāṇu* as *ākāsakoṭṭhāsika*, of the order of a portion of space, and says it is visible only to the divine eye. ⚠️ **The ladder is for the *paramāṇu*, not the kalāpa.** The commentary does not use the word kalāpa there. The identification of the two, common in modern summaries (including both encyclopedia articles cited above), is later exegesis.\n\n### 4.3 · The Abhidhamma side: the boundary, in four layers\n\n**Canon — a cavity.** The *Dhammasaṅgaṇī* (§637) defines the space element:\n\n> *Katamaṃ taṃ rūpaṃ ākāsadhātu? Yo ākāso ākāsagataṃ aghaṃ aghagataṃ vivaro vivaragataṃ asamphuṭṭhaṃ catūhi mahābhūtehi — idaṃ taṃ rūpaṃ ākāsadhātu.*\n>\n> What is the material phenomenon that is the space element? That which is space, belonging to space, void, belonging to the void, an opening, belonging to an opening, **untouched by the four great elements** — this is the space element.\n\nThe *Vibhaṅga*, also canon, gives examples of the internal space element: the ear-holes, the nostrils, the mouth, the passage by which food is swallowed, where it rests and where it leaves. **At the canonical layer, space is a cavity with extent**: a gap in matter, the kind of thing that has room in it.\n\n**Canon — not unconditioned.** The *Kathāvatthu* (VI.6, §460–462, verified in the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana text) refutes the thesis *\"ākāso asaṅkhato\"*, that space is unconditioned. One of its arguments is homely: *\"Udapāne khaññamāne anākāso ākāso hotīti? Āmantā.\"* When a well is dug, does what was not space become space? Yes. And when an empty jar is filled, space disappears. Something that can be made and unmade is not unconditioned. The commentary attributes the rejected thesis to the Uttarāpathakas and the Mahisāsakas (so spelled there). The Mahiṃsāsakas are one of the four Vibhajjavādin branches in Cousins's account (Cousins 2001), which the sibling paper uses. Once again, the branch that kept the Pāli canon argues against a sibling branch.\n\n**Commentary — three spaces, and a characterisation.** The *Kathāvatthu* commentary distinguishes three spaces:\n\n> *tividho ākāso — paricchedākāso, kasiṇugghāṭimākāso, ajaṭākāso … Tesu paricchedākāso saṅkhato, itare dve paññattimattā.*\n>\n> Space is threefold: delimiting space, the space left by removing a meditation disk, and unentangled [open] space … Of these, **delimiting space is conditioned; the other two are mere concepts.**\n\nThe *Visuddhimagga* (ch. XIV, CST ¶442) characterises the space element in its fourfold formula:\n\n> *Rūpaparicchedalakkhaṇā ākāsadhātu, rūpapariyantappakāsanarasā, rūpamariyādapaccupaṭṭhānā, asamphuṭṭhabhāvacchiddavivarabhāvapaccupaṭṭhānā vā, paricchinnarūpapadaṭṭhānā. Yāya paricchinnesu rūpesu idamito uddhamadho tiriyanti ca hoti.*\n>\n> The space element has the characteristic of delimiting matter; its function is to display the boundaries of matter; it is manifested as the confines of matter, or as the state of being untouched, as holes and openings; **its proximate cause is the matter delimited.** It is that by which one can say of delimited material things, \"this is above, below, around that.\"\n\nThe last sentence matters for §4.5. Direction and position are defined only **relative to delimited matter**.\n\n**Manual — not a constituent.** The *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* (ch. 6, the verse closing the section on kalāpas):\n\n> *Kalāpānaṃ pariccheda-lakkhaṇattā vicakkhaṇā; Na kalāpaṅgamiccāhu, ākāsaṃ lakkhaṇāni ca.*\n>\n> Because space has the characteristic of delimiting the kalāpas, and because of the nature of the characteristics, the wise do not call space, nor the characteristics, a constituent of a kalāpa.\n\nSpace is **between** kalāpas, never **in** one. The manual also classes this delimiting matter (*paricchedarūpa*) as **anipphanna**: not concretely produced, with no intrinsic nature of its own. The term is older than the manual; the *Visuddhimagga* and the *Sammohavinodanī* already use it. It is counted as one of the twenty-eight material phenomena, but the standard expositions do not count it among the ultimate realities (Bodhi 1993, ch. VI), and one reads it as \"nothing but the mere limitation of matter\" (Karunadasa 1967, ch. 5).\n\n**Sub-commentary — the non-mixing of touching neighbours.** The *Vibhāvinī*, on the same chapter:\n\n> *Cakkhudasakādiekekakalāpagatarūpānaṃ kalāpantarehi asaṃkiṇṇabhāvāpādanavasena paricchedakaṃ, tehi vā paricchijjamānaṃ, tesaṃ paricchedamattaṃ vā rūpaṃ paricchedarūpaṃ … Vijjamānepi ca kalāpantarabhūtehi kalāpantarabhūtānaṃ samphuṭṭhabhāve taṃtaṃrūpavivittatā rūpapariyanto ākāso. Yesañca so paricchedo, tehi sayaṃ asamphuṭṭhoyeva. Aññathā paricchinnatā na siyā tesaṃ rūpānaṃ byāpībhāvāpattito. Abyāpitā hi asamphuṭṭhatā.*\n>\n> Delimiting matter is what delimits the matter in each kalāpa (the eye-decad and the rest) by making it **unmixed with neighbouring kalāpas**; or what is delimited by them; or their mere delimitation … **Even where neighbouring kalāpas touch one another, space is the separateness of each one's matter, the limit of matter.** And it is itself untouched by the things it delimits. Otherwise those material things would not be delimited, since they would come to pervade one another. For non-pervasion is non-touching.\n\n```\n   ┌────────────┐ ┊ ┌────────────┐\n   │ kalāpa K₁  │ ┊ │ kalāpa K₂  │      K₁ and K₂ may TOUCH;\n   │ (8+ rūpas) │ ┊ │ (8+ rūpas) │      space is the ┊ : their non-mixing,\n   └────────────┘ ┊ └────────────┘      \"the limit of matter\"\n                  ↑\n         paricchedarūpa — not a constituent of either (manual);\n         untouched by what it bounds (sub-commentary);\n         no nature of its own; no magnitude assigned (anipphanna);\n         its proximate cause is the matter it delimits (commentary)\n```\n\n### 4.4 · An older neighbour: do minimal units touch? *(cross-tradition: Sarvāstivāda, in Sanskrit)*\n\nThe *Vibhāvinī*'s wording answers a question the Indian schools had argued for centuries. The *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* (ad I.43, Pradhan ed., pp. 32–33) asks it directly:\n\n> *kiṃ punaḥ paramāṇavaḥ spṛśanty anyonyam āhosvin na / na spṛśantīti kāśmīrakāḥ / … yadi tāvat sarvātmanā spṛśeyur miśrībhaveyur dravyāṇi / athaikadeśena sāvayavāḥ prasajyeran / niravayavāś ca paramāṇavaḥ*\n>\n> Do atoms touch one another, or not? The Kashmiri masters say they do not touch. … If they touched with their whole selves, the substances would **mix**. If they touched with a part, they would have parts. But atoms are partless.\n\nThe same passage adds that contact means only arising *without interval*, and that \"their being without interval is just that there is nothing between them\" (*tad evaiṣāṃ nirantaratvaṃ yan madhye nāsti kiñcit*). ⚠️ *nirantaratvaṃ* is this paper's emendation: the GRETIL e-text reads *niruttaratvaṃ* [032|20]. The emendation follows the passage's own *nirantara* in the line before, and Pradhan's printed page was not checked. Bhadanta Vasumitra holds that they do not touch, and that we call it touching when there is no interval.\n\nTwo cautions before the comparison. First, the *Kośa*'s contact debate concerns **partless atoms** (*paramāṇu*). Its functional counterpart of the kalāpa is a different item, the smallest aggregate of eight substances (*aṣṭadravyaka*, ad II.22), the counterpart of the pure octad. So the comparison below is of the **role** of minimal units, and it does not identify the *Kośa*'s atom with the *Sammohavinodanī*'s *paramāṇu* (which §4.2 already keeps apart from the kalāpa). Second, the *Kośa* also has a conditioned space element. Besides unconditioned *ākāśa* (I.5), it names the cavity: *dvāravātāyanamukhanāsikādiṣu chidram ākāśadhātvākhyam* (I.28, [018|13]), \"the hole in a door, a window, the mouth, the nose and so on is called the space element\", which it says is light and darkness (*ālokatamasī kila*). That is a close parallel to the *Vibhaṅga*'s ear-holes and nostrils (§4.3).\n\nThe two traditions share the premise: **if minimal units truly touched, they would mix.** The *Vibhāvinī* keeps the premise by making touching conventional only: \"non-pervasion is non-touching\" (*abyāpitā hi asamphuṭṭhatā*). They draw different conclusions:\n\n| | Do the units touch? | What is between them? |\n|---|---|---|\n| Kashmiri Sarvāstivāda (*Kośa* ad I.43) | no | **nothing** (\"nothing between them\") |\n| Theravāda sub-commentary (*Vibhāvinī*) | conventionally yes; strictly no (non-pervasion is non-touching) | **something**: delimiting matter, the non-mixing — counted among the material phenomena, though *anipphanna* and not an ultimate reality |\n| Loop quantum gravity | grains share a face | **something**: the link, which carries area |\n\nOn this one question, the Theravāda answer and loop quantum gravity have the same *shape*: the between is not nothing. It is a named, counted item of the list (one of the twenty-eight material phenomena in one, a link in the other), and it is not itself one of the minimal units: not a kalāpa, not a node. The Kashmiri answer makes the between empty. ⚠️ Two limits on that shape. The Theravāda item is counted but is not an ultimate reality, and Karunadasa (1967) reads it as the mere limitation of matter, which moves it toward the Kashmiri *nothing*: what separates the two answers on that reading is that one names and counts the between and the other does not. And the two \"neither\" relations are opposite in incidence (§4.6, break 6). The Sarvāstivāda counts *ākāśa* among the unconditioned (I.5), which is the thesis the *Kathāvatthu* refutes, and separately names the conditioned cavity (I.28).\n\n### 4.5 · The correspondence, and its surviving form\n\n> **Both frameworks put the unit of spatial boundary at the adjacency between minimal units.** In loop quantum gravity, a spin-network link is the face that two neighbouring grains of space share. In the *Vibhāvinī*, space is the non-mixing of touching neighbouring kalāpas, \"the limit of matter\", untouched by what it bounds and a constituent of neither. In neither framework is the boundary itself one of the minimal units. In both, \"where\" is defined by adjacency and not by a background: Rovelli's quanta \"do not live in space\", and the *Visuddhimagga*'s space is \"that by which one can say of delimited material things, 'this is above, below, around that'\".\n\nThat is the whole of the claim. Everything else in this section limits it.\n\n**The grain row survives only through the boundary row.** Kalāpa against node, taken alone, is a comparison of a smallest-unit-of-matter with a smallest-unit-of-space. That is the general \"smallest unit\" comparison the census found common, and it fails on the matter/geometry distinction below. It earns a line in the table only because the boundary row presupposes minimal units with neighbours.\n\n### 4.6 · Where it breaks\n\n1. **The dependence runs in opposite directions.** In loop quantum gravity, the adjacency data come first: the spins on the links, with the intertwiners, determine the volumes of the nodes. In the Abhidhamma, the matter comes first: the space element's **proximate cause is the matter delimited** (*paricchinnarūpapadaṭṭhānā*, commentary). One builds the grain from its boundaries. The other derives the boundary from its grains.\n2. **Magnitude.** Loop-gravity area is observable and has a discrete spectrum, with a smallest non-zero value. Abhidhamma delimiting matter is *anipphanna*: it has no nature of its own, and no magnitude is assigned to it. (\"No magnitude\" is this paper's reading of *anipphanna*; no text says \"it has no size\" in those words.) There is no \"how much\" boundary between two kalāpas. The canonical cavity (break 4) does have extent, but no text measures it. The Abhidhamma boundary is object-discrete (it is one item between two items), but not spectrally discrete (§2).\n3. **Matter against geometry.** Kalāpas are matter *in* space. Their octad includes colour, odour and taste. Spin-network nodes are quanta *of* space and carry no qualities except geometry. The commentarial size ladder (§4.2) measures the *paramāṇu* against a chariot-dust mote, which presupposes a background of lengths. That is exactly the background loop quantum gravity denies.\n4. **Layer.** The correspondence holds at the **sub-commentary** layer. At the **canonical** layer, space is a cavity with extent: ear-holes, a well being dug, an opening. A cavity is volume-like, not face-like. So the canon's space corresponds, if to anything, to a region, not to a link. The between-kalāpas reading enters with the commentary's *paricchedākāsa* and is completed only in the manual and sub-commentary, more than a millennium after the canon was compiled.\n5. **Open space.** The commentary calls open space (*ajaṭākāsa*) a mere concept. Loop quantum gravity has no space without the network: a region with no nodes has no geometry at all. The two may look alike here, but the likeness is loose. One says that open space is a *designation*; the other says there is *nothing there to designate*.\n6. **Opposite incidence.** A spin-network link is a face **incident to both** grains: each grain's polyhedron has it as one of its own faces, and the area belongs to the geometry of both. The *Vibhāvinī*'s delimiter is **untouched by both** kalāpas (*tehi sayaṃ asamphuṭṭhoyeva*) and a constituent of neither. \"Belongs to neither neighbour\" covers both only because it is vague. Said exactly, the link is shared and the delimiter is excluded, which are opposite relations. What the two have in common is only that the boundary is not itself a minimal unit.\n7. **Counted, but not ultimate.** The delimiter is one of the twenty-eight material phenomena, but it is not an ultimate reality (Bodhi 1993), and on Karunadasa's reading (1967) it is \"nothing but the mere limitation of matter\". The link in loop quantum gravity is as real as anything in the theory. So the Theravāda \"something\" between kalāpas is a *named* something, not a real unit, and the row's contrast with the Kashmiri *nothing* rests on the naming and counting.\n\n### 4.7 · What would falsify this row\n\n- **A text, at any layer, that makes delimiting matter a constituent of a kalāpa**, or places space inside a cluster rather than between clusters. The manual's verse would then be contradicted within the tradition, and the \"between\" would lose its textual footing.\n- **A formulation of loop quantum gravity in which the area between adjacent grains is not carried by their adjacency.** For example, the polyhedral reading may not hold at small spins, since it is a semiclassical, coherent-state interpretation; or area might attach to nodes rather than links. The physics side of the correspondence would then go.\n- **A reading of the *Vibhāvinī* on which \"space\" is a gap with nothing in it** (the Kashmiri answer), rather than a counted *rūpa*. The §4.4 table would then collapse, and the row would reduce to the generic \"space is between\" of §9. ⚠️ This falsifier is **partly engaged** already. The *Vibhāvinī*'s own third gloss is \"their mere delimitation\" (*tesaṃ paricchedamattaṃ*), and Karunadasa reads the *anipphanna* class as \"nothing but the mere limitation of matter\". What keeps the row from collapsing is only that the tradition still lists and counts the item. If that counting were shown to be nominal and nothing more, the falsifier would fire.\n\n---\n\n## 5 · Row 4 — Ratio: Time as a Count\n\n### 5.1 · Physics primer: a duration is a number of steps\n\nRecall from §3.1 that in a causal set the proper time between two related events is proportional to the length of the longest chain between them. There is no clock apart from counting. Two durations can be compared by comparing chain lengths, and the ratio is meaningful even though no unit of time is ever introduced. (Converting to seconds needs the sprinkling density, one element per Planck volume. The ratio does not need it.)\n\n### 5.2 · The Abhidhamma side\n\n**Three sub-moments per mind-moment.** The manual (ch. 4): *\"Uppādaṭhitibhaṅgavasena khaṇattayaṃ ekacittakkhaṇaṃ nāma\"* — a mind-moment consists of three sub-moments: arising, presence, dissolution.\n\n**Seventeen mind-moments per material phenomenon.** The next line: *\"Tāni pana sattarasa cittakkhaṇāni rūpadhammānamāyu\"* — seventeen such mind-moments are the lifespan of material phenomena. The manual then shows where seventeen comes from. It is the length of the longest process by which a sense object is known: one past life-continuum moment, two vibrations of the life-continuum, and fourteen moments of the process itself: *\"cuddasa vīthicittuppādā, dve bhavaṅgacalanāni, pubbevātītakamekacittakkhaṇanti katvā sattarasa cittakkhaṇāni paripūrenti.\"* **Seventeen is a consistency condition.** A physical object must last as long as the longest process that cognises it.\n\n**Fifty-one sub-moments, with exceptions.** The sub-commentary: *\"Visuṃ visuṃ pana ekapaññāsa cittakkhaṇāni honti. Rūpadhammānanti viññattilakkhaṇarūpavajjānaṃ rūpadhammānaṃ\"* — counted separately, they are fifty-one; \"material phenomena\" means those other than the intimations and the characteristic phenomena. It then states the exceptions. The two intimations (bodily and vocal) last one mind-moment. Of the characteristics, arising and impermanence match the mind-moment's arising and dissolution sub-moments, and decay lasts forty-nine sub-moments. **There is no single material clock.**\n\n**The presence sub-moment is disputed inside the tradition.** The sub-commentary reports that \"some reject the presence moment of consciousness\" (*keci pana cittassa ṭhitikkhaṇaṃ paṭisedhenti*). The reason given is that the canonical *Yamaka* names only arising and dissolution: *\"bhaṅguppādāva kathitā, na ṭhitikkhaṇo\"*. The author names no one (*keci*, \"some\"). The cross-reference beside the passage, which locates the view in the *Vibhaṅga Mūlaṭīkā*, is an editorial parenthesis of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, not Sumaṅgala's. He then **rejects** the dissent, citing the *Vibhaṅga* commentary's \"three sub-moments each, by way of arising, presence and dissolution\". Without presence, this paper's arithmetic gives 17 × 2 = **34** in place of 17 × 3 = 51; the dissent itself states no count. The dissent would also leave decay's forty-nine sub-moments undefined, since that figure is counted with the presence sub-moment.\n\n**An absolute scale, rhetorically.** The *Vibhaṅga* commentary says of feeling, a mental factor present in every consciousness, that \"in the moment of a finger-snap it arises and ceases a hundred thousand *koṭi* times\" (*ekaccharakkhaṇe koṭisatasahassasaṅkhyā uppajjitvā nirujjhati*). Read with *koṭi* as ten million, that is 10¹² moments per finger-snap. If a finger-snap is taken as about a tenth of a second (this paper's assumption; the text gives no duration), a moment would be about 10⁻¹³ seconds, many orders of magnitude shorter than any timescale on which perception is measured. The figure is best read as rhetoric for \"unimaginably fast\", not as a measurement. But it means one cannot say the tradition offers **no** absolute unit. It offers one, and the offer cannot be taken literally.\n\n### 5.3 · The correspondence, and its surviving form\n\nThe Abhidhamma measures the lifetime of matter **in mind-moments**: a chain of seventeen mind-moments, linked by proximity (*anantara*), that runs through a mental stream. The chain has seventeen elements and sixteen proximity links. This paper counts the chain by its **elements**, as the manual does (*sattarasa cittakkhaṇāni*, seventeen moments), because each mind-moment is itself a stretch of time. A causal-set chain is conventionally counted by its links, since its elements are points; the difference of one does not matter at large counts, but it does at seventeen. So the lifetime is a duration stated as a count of steps along a chain, with no unit.\n\n> **The seventeen-moment lifetime of material phenomena, other than the two intimations and the characteristics (sub-commentary), is one clock and a multiplier, not two clocks. \"One clock\" is the mind-moment, not a single lifetime shared by all matter. What survives is generic: a duration stated as the count of steps along a given succession — here a chain of seventeen mind-moments — which every discrete clock shares, and which is the causal-set sense of time as chain length only in that generic part (§9).**\n\nThe row's name, *ratio*, needs one correction. The ratio is 17 : 1, a material lifetime against one mind-moment, but both terms are read off the **same** chain. There is no second chain to compare with the first. Matter has no chain of its own in S, so the row gives a ratio of durations, not a ratio of two chain lengths.\n\n### 5.4 · Where it breaks\n\n- **One clock.** A ratio between two *independent* clocks is an observable: it could come out differently. Here matter is timed by the mind's chain, and the number seventeen is fixed by the length of the cognitive process. The ratio is a definition that makes the system consistent, not a finding.\n- **Deterministic against statistical.** In a causal set, chain length tracks proper time only on average, over a random sprinkling. The Abhidhamma's count is exact.\n- **A privileged chain.** A causal set has no preferred chain: proper time belongs to the *longest* chain between two events, whichever it is. The Abhidhamma counts along one privileged sequence, a single mental stream.\n- **An order on a time, not an order that makes one.** §3.4 found that the Abhidhamma's order sits on a succession given in advance. A count of steps along a given succession is what every discrete clock does. The causal-set-specific part of \"time as chain length\" is that there is no succession apart from the order. That part is absent here (see §9).\n- **The count itself is contested.** Fifty-one depends on the presence sub-moment, which an anonymous dissent, reported and rejected by the sub-commentary, denies.\n- **No physics prediction.** A unitless ratio fixed by consistency cannot predict a physical measurement. The only empirical programme it could seed is in perception science (calibrate a mind-moment against one measurement, predict an independent one). That is a separate programme with its own pre-registration, and not a physics claim.\n\n### 5.5 · What would falsify this row\n\n- **A text stating the lifetime of matter in units independent of the mind-moment**, such as a count of material moments or an external measure. The \"one clock\" reading would fail, and the ratio would become an observable.\n- **A reading on which seventeen is observed rather than derived.** For example, a commentarial passage might present seventeen as reported meditative experience, independent of the cognitive-process arithmetic. The \"consistency condition\" reading would then weaken.\n\n---\n\n## 6 · The Row We Dropped, and Why\n\nThe first version of this lens had a fifth row: *saṅkhāra*, the conditioned as a whole (*sabbe saṅkhārā*, \"all conditioned things\"), against Fotini Markopoulou's **quantum causal histories**. That framework puts quantum state spaces on a causal set, and so joins causal order to quantum structure.\n\nIt was cut before drafting, for two reasons.\n\n1. **Category error.** *Saṅkhāra* includes the mental (*nāma*): consciousness, feeling, perception, volition. Nothing in a spin network or a quantum causal history models mind. A row that maps a category containing mind onto a structure that contains none is not a correspondence with a break. It is a correspondence that breaks everywhere.\n2. **No structure added.** Every structural feature the row could claim was already in rows 1–4: order in row 1, grains and adjacency in rows 2–3. The row said that the conditioned as a whole resembles order-plus-quanta as a whole. A resemblance with no new structure is decoration: a coherence that feels like evidence and is none.\n\n**The neighbour, stated accurately.** Markopoulou's 2000 paper assigns a finite-dimensional Hilbert space (a quantum state space) to each **event** and evolution operators between sets of events. The same paper already notes a problem: the evolution does not see the individual causal relations. It proposes, as an alternative, attaching the Hilbert spaces to the **edges** (the covering relations) and the operators to the events. On that reading, the state space on an edge from *p* to *q* is \"the state space of *p* as seen by *q*\". Hawkins, Markopoulou and Sahlmann (2003) then revised the definition. They put operator algebras on the events and made **each causal relation** carry a completely positive map, the most general quantum transformation, so that the evolution respects every individual relation.\n\nThere is an irony here, and it is recorded rather than used. Both moves make the **relation** a carrier of structure. That fits the *Paṭṭhāna*'s relation-first typing better than the original event-first definition did, but it does not rescue the row. A typed relation carrying a completely positive map is still not a relation of *object*, *predominance* or *kamma*.\n\n---\n\n## 7 · Why a Theravāda Space, and Not Nāgārjuna's\n\nThe best-known meeting of Buddhist thought and physics is Carlo Rovelli's reading of **Nāgārjuna** (cross-tradition: Madhyamaka) beside relational quantum mechanics, in *Helgoland*. On the relational view, a system has properties only relative to another system. On Nāgārjuna's, nothing has own-being (*svabhāva*): everything is empty of intrinsic existence. Rovelli finds the two congenial.\n\nThis paper does not use that pairing, for a reason of structure and not of loyalty. **Madhyamaka denies own-being (*svabhāva*) to every dharma**, so it admits no ultimately real units to put in adjacency. **The Theravāda Abhidhamma is realist about dharmas**: its moments, its material phenomena and its conditions are real events. A discrete theory needs discrete units and relations among them. The Theravāda supplies both, so it is the Buddhist framework that *can* be compared structurally with causal sets and spin networks. It is also the framework whose space can be put beside a link: space as the delimitation between real units. One point weakens the contrast and should be stated. The boundary at the centre of the adjacency row is the one Theravāda item defined as lacking own-nature (*anipphanna*). The units are real (*nipphanna*, concretely produced); their delimitation is not a unit. So the argument for the Theravāda over Madhyamaka rests on the **units**, not on the boundary: a discrete comparison needs real units, and only the Theravāda supplies them. The Madhyamaka comparison is a comparison of attitudes toward relation. It is real, but it is a different comparison.\n\n**The institution's ruling, stated plainly.** The institution publishing this paper has ruled, for its own purposes, that **delimiting space (*paricchedākāsa*) is conditioned; open space and the space of a removed meditation disk (*kasiṇa*) are concepts (*paññatti*); and only nibbāna is unconditioned.** The ruling follows the Theravāda reading of the space element as delimiting matter, and it declines the Sarvāstivāda reading of *ākāśa* as unconditioned. It follows the texts at each point. The canon's *Kathāvatthu* refutes \"space is unconditioned\" (VI.6). At the close of the same debate (§462) the Theravādin also declines to call space *conditioned* without qualification, and the commentary supplies the qualification: it is delimiting space that is conditioned, while open space and meditative space are mere concepts. A concept is not an unconditioned phenomenon, so nothing is left unconditioned but nibbāna. The Sarvāstivāda draws a comparable line: beside its unconditioned *ākāśa* (*Kośa* I.5), it names a conditioned space element, the cavity (I.28), as §4.4 records.\n\n---\n\n## 8 · The Strongest Objection, Carried\n\n**Objection.** \"The Abhidhamma is a phenomenology: an analysis of what appears in experience, made for the purpose of liberation. Quantum gravity is a theory of what spacetime is. The kalāpa contains colour, odour and taste, which are qualities of matter *as sensed*. The *Kathāvatthu* commentary says that space between two trees is known by the **mind**, from the absence of visible matter, not seen by the eye. A comparison of the two frameworks compares an account of knowing with an account of being. Any shared shape is a coincidence of two different questions.\"\n\n**What survives it.** Most of the objection stands, and the paper does not answer it away. Every row compares **formal shape**: an acyclic relation, a boundary located at an adjacency, a duration expressed as a count. Shape is the only thing two frameworks with different subject matter can share, and it is all this paper claims they share. The objection does not show that the shapes differ. It shows that shared shape proves nothing about shared subject matter, and the paper agrees. What the objection *does* remove is any reading of the lens as evidence that the Abhidhamma knew physics, or that physics vindicates the Abhidhamma. Neither reading was offered, and the objection makes sure neither can be taken.\n\n---\n\n## 9 · The Counter-Argument to This Paper's Strongest Claim\n\nThe strongest claim is the adjacency row (§4.5). Against it: **the idea that a boundary lives at the adjacency is not specific to loop quantum gravity.** It holds in any cellular picture of extended stuff: a cell complex, a Voronoi tessellation, a chessboard, and Regge calculus (Regge 1961), in which curved spacetime is approximated by flat simplices glued along shared faces, and the geometry is fixed by the edge lengths of neighbouring cells. The Western literature on boundaries has argued the ownership question directly. When two bodies touch, does the boundary belong to one of them (Bolzano), to neither (a view the literature traces to Leonardo), or is it two coincident boundaries, one belonging to each (Brentano)? (Varzi's survey; Casati and Varzi 1999, ch. 5.) The \"neither\" view is the nearest Western neighbour of the manual's \"a constituent of neither\". Brentano's is a contrast: his coincident boundaries are dependent parts of the bodies they bound, which is the opposite of the *Vibhāvinī*'s delimiter, untouched by both. Aristotle defined place as the innermost boundary of the containing body (*Physics* IV.4), a boundary account of *where* that is two millennia old and owes nothing to quanta. The *Kośa*'s debate (§4.4) shows the Indian schools arguing the same question in the first millennium. If the shared shape is generic, then the match with loop quantum gravity specifically is weaker than the table makes it look.\n\nWhat loop quantum gravity adds to the generic picture is that the adjacency carries a **quantised magnitude**, and that volume is **derived** from it. Those are exactly the two features the Abhidhamma lacks (§4.6, breaks 1 and 2). So the part of the row that is loop-quantum-gravity-specific is the part that fails, and the part that holds is generic. The row survives only in this form: *the Theravāda sub-commentary's answer to \"what is between minimal units?\" has the shape of the answer loop quantum gravity gives, and not the shape of the answer an earlier Indian school gave.* The paper does not refute the generic reading. It claims no more than that.\n\n**The same counter-argument, run on the ratio row (§5.3).** Against it: every discrete clock counts steps, so \"a duration is a count\" is not specific to causal sets. The causal-set-specific features are three: proper time is the length of the **longest** chain, whichever chain that is; the relation between chain length and proper time is **statistical**, holding on average over a random sprinkling; and there is **no succession apart from the order**, so the counting makes the time. All three are among §5.4's breaks, and §3.4 found that the Abhidhamma's order sits on a time rather than making one. So, as with the adjacency row, the causal-set-specific part is the part that fails, and what holds is generic: a duration stated as a count of steps along a given succession. The row survives only in that form.\n\n---\n\n## 10 · What Would Falsify These Findings — Collected\n\n| Row | The finding | Falsified by |\n|---|---|---|\n| 1 Order | the earlier→later sub-relation S, over condition-modes, is acyclic (by selection); a strict order, not yet a causal set, can be read over it; the rest is extra typing | a member of S with the conditioned arising at or before the condition, in any layer; cross-moment kamma with a present or future relatum; an asserted temporal order S cannot connect (for example, between two streams) |\n| 2–3 Adjacency | both put the unit of spatial boundary at the adjacency between minimal units, and neither makes it a unit; the shared part is generic | a text making delimiting matter a kalāpa constituent, or placing space inside a cluster; a formulation of loop quantum gravity in which area between adjacent grains is not carried by their adjacency; a reading of the *Vibhāvinī*'s space as mere absence (partly engaged, §4.7) |\n| 4 Ratio | one clock and a multiplier; only the generic part survives, a duration as a count of steps along a given succession | a text timing matter independently of mind-moments; seventeen shown to be observed rather than derived |\n| The dropped row | *saṅkhāra* ↔ quantum causal histories adds no structure | a structural feature of quantum causal histories with a *Paṭṭhāna* counterpart not already in rows 1–4 |\n\n---\n\n## 11 · Stake, and What Was and Was Not Done\n\n**The authors' stake.** The authors write from within the Theravāda. The institution publishing this paper grounds its values in the Pāli canon, has ruled the Theravāda reading of space over the Sarvāstivāda one, and uses the word *space* on an organisational map of its own. Nothing in this paper bears on that map, and the ruling was made so that the map would not borrow a predicate it should not have. There is a pull, for authors in this position, to see the tradition anticipate frontier physics. The founder's own question began as a hope that the Abhidhamma might hold the bridge between the discrete and the smooth. **The pull was acted on, and caught in several places.** The lens had five rows. An adversarial review run before any prose dropped one of them, treated rows 2 and 3 together, narrowed the order row, and removed a condition (*pakatūpanissaya*) from the surviving sub-relation. A later round of outside review, answered in this revision, caught the same pull in places the first review missed: summaries that dropped the qualifications their own sections carried, and a closing sentence that restored an identification §9 had withdrawn. The sibling paper's first framing made the same kind of error in the other direction and was reversed before drafting. The reversals are part of the result.\n\n**Done:**\n- The *Dhammasaṅgaṇī* (§637), the *Vibhaṅga* (space element), the *Kathāvatthu* (VI.6, §460–462; VI.7, §463–464) and its commentary, the *Visuddhimagga* (ch. XIV, ¶442; the kalāpa passages), the *Sammohavinodanī* (the size ladder; the finger-snap), the *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* (chs. 3, 4, 6, 8) and the *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā* (on chs. 3, 4, 6, 8), all read in the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition;\n- the *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* ad I.43 read in the GRETIL Sanskrit (after Pradhan);\n- Rovelli's Zakopane lectures, the Rovelli–Upadhya primer, Markopoulou (2000) and Hawkins–Markopoulou–Sahlmann (2003) read in full; Sorkin (2007) and Dowker (2022/2023) read in full for the sibling paper;\n- the census run as described;\n- in the 2026-09-28 revision: Karunadasa (1967, chs. 5 and 7) and Bodhi (1993, the introduction and chs. VI and VIII) read for the passages cited; U Nārada (1969) consulted only for its treatment of the conditions' modes; the *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* ad I.28 and II.22 read in the GRETIL Sanskrit; the *Paṭṭhāna* searched as described under *Not done*.\n\n**Not done:**\n- **The *Paṭṭhāna* itself was not read in full.** The conditions are characterised here through the manual and the sub-commentary. In this revision the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana *Paṭṭhāna* was searched for specific passages only: kamma across moments (*Kusalattika* §427), and the modes of presence, dissociation and support. A canonical-layer check of row 1, including whether the *Paṭṭhāna* anywhere composes two conditions, is owed; U Nārada's translation (1969) is the route.\n- The *Vibhaṅga Mūlaṭīkā*, to which the edition's cross-reference points, was not read. The dissent on the presence sub-moment is known only as the *Vibhāvinī* reports it.\n- Von Rospatt (1995) was not reached, and Casati and Varzi (1999) was cited through Varzi's survey, not read.\n- The later commentarial and modern literature on kalāpas (in Burmese, Thai and Sinhala traditions) was not read.\n- Vasubandhu's *Viṃśikā* critique of partless atoms, and Aristotle's *Physics* IV, were cited from standard knowledge and not re-read for this paper.\n- No physics was calculated, and no physicist has reviewed the primers. They were checked against the cited sources only.\n- The census was quick and English-only. The full census has not been run.\n\n---\n\n## 12 · Honest Limits\n\n- **This is a lens.** No row predicts a measurement, and no row can. The comparison is of formal shapes, and shared shape is not evidence of shared subject matter (§8).\n- **Two of the four rows are weak by their own account.** The grain row survives only as a presupposition of the boundary row. The ratio row is a definition, not a finding.\n- **The strongest row lives at a late layer.** The adjacency correspondence holds for the sub-commentary (c. 12th century), not for the canon, whose space is a cavity.\n- **The physics is secondary, and simplified.** The primers state standard results and cite their sources. They omit the dynamics of both theories, which are unsettled, and the area formula is given for transversal crossings only.\n- **Rows 2 and 3 presuppose three things the physics does not settle.** The area spectrum used is the **kinematical** one; whether it survives the imposition of the constraints is disputed. Definite adjacency holds only for a **spin-network basis state on a fixed graph**; a general state superposes graphs. And the grains-and-faces picture is the **semiclassical** polyhedral reading, least trustworthy at the small spins where the smallest area sits.\n- **Row 1 is not a causal set.** S is acyclic by selection, its transitive closure is the reader's construction, its local finiteness is unexamined, it alone conditions no arising, and it orders moments only within a stream, joined across streams by an index no text defines (§3.4).\n- **Translations are the authors'.** Where a Pāli or Sanskrit term has a contested rendering (*anipphanna*, *kālavimutta*, *ākāsakoṭṭhāsika*), the rendering chosen is a reading, not a settled equivalence.\n- **Edition.** Paragraph numbers follow the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition. The Pali Text Society's numbering differs; passages should be located by title and quotation.\n- **The census aperture was narrow.** Buddhism-and-physics comparison is a large, poorly indexed literature, much of it in books and in languages not searched. Absence from the search is weak evidence.\n\n---\n\n## 13 · Close\n\nThe *Kathāvatthu* commentary gives a small example. A person looks at two trees. The eye sees the trees. The mind, finding no matter between them, knows \"space\". Loop quantum gravity, asked where the space is between two grains, also answers *between*, and puts a number on it, which the text does not. The shared part is the generic one (§9). The two answers share that shape and have two subjects. This paper records the shape and marks the boundary between the subjects, which, as in the text it reads, belongs to neither side.\n\n---\n\n## Cross-Venue References\n\n| Venue | Identifier |\n|---|---|\n| Primary canonical | <https://thonly.org/research/abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity> |\n| GitHub | <https://github.com/thonly/publications/blob/main/defensive-publications/abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity.md> |\n| Sibling paper | <https://thonly.org/research/the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time> |\n| Census pre-registration (public) | `thonly/publications` commit `7348ba2`, `timestamps/census/physics-lens-prereg.md` |\n\n---\n\n## Acknowledgments\n\nThe authors thank the Vipassana Research Institute for the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana texts; the GRETIL project and the editors of its *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* e-text; and the physicists whose lectures and primers are written to be read by people outside the field. The reading of the sources, the adversarial review and the drafting were done with Miss Aquarius, the name under which this institution discloses its AI collaboration.\n\n---\n\n## Citations\n\n**Physics**\n\n1. Bombelli, L., Lee, J., Meyer, D. & Sorkin, R.D. (1987). \"Space-time as a causal set.\" *Physical Review Letters* 59: 521.\n2. Brightwell, G. & Gregory, R. (1991). \"Structure of random discrete spacetime.\" *Physical Review Letters* 66(3): 260–263.\n3. Rideout, D.P. & Sorkin, R.D. (2000). \"A classical sequential growth dynamics for causal sets.\" *Physical Review D* 61: 024002. arXiv:gr-qc/9904062.\n4. Sorkin, R.D. (2007). \"Relativity theory does not imply that the future already exists: a counterexample.\" In V. Petkov (ed.), *Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World*, Springer. arXiv:gr-qc/0703098.\n5. Dowker, F. (2022/2023). \"Causal Set Quantum Gravity and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.\" arXiv:2209.07653.\n6. Wüthrich, C. & Callender, C. (2017). \"What Becomes of a Causal Set?\" *British Journal for the Philosophy of Science* 68(3): 907–925. arXiv:1502.00018.\n7. Rovelli, C. & Smolin, L. (1995). \"Discreteness of area and volume in quantum gravity.\" *Nuclear Physics B* 442: 593–622; erratum B456: 753. arXiv:gr-qc/9411005.\n8. Ashtekar, A. & Lewandowski, J. (1997). \"Quantum theory of geometry I: Area operators.\" *Classical and Quantum Gravity* 14: A55–A82. arXiv:gr-qc/9602046.\n9. Loll, R. (1996). \"Spectrum of the volume operator in quantum gravity.\" *Nuclear Physics B* 460: 143–154. arXiv:gr-qc/9511030.\n10. Rovelli, C. & Upadhya, P. (1998). \"Loop quantum gravity and quanta of space: a primer.\" arXiv:gr-qc/9806079.\n11. Rovelli, C. (2011). \"Zakopane lectures on loop gravity.\" arXiv:1102.3660.\n12. Bianchi, E., Doná, P. & Speziale, S. (2011). \"Polyhedra in loop quantum gravity.\" *Physical Review D* 83: 044035. arXiv:1009.3402.\n13. Markopoulou, F. & Smolin, L. (1997). \"Causal evolution of spin networks.\" *Nuclear Physics B* 508: 409–430. arXiv:gr-qc/9702025.\n14. Markopoulou, F. (2000). \"Quantum causal histories.\" *Classical and Quantum Gravity* 17: 2059–2072. arXiv:hep-th/9904009.\n15. Hawkins, E., Markopoulou, F. & Sahlmann, H. (2003). \"Evolution in quantum causal histories.\" *Classical and Quantum Gravity* 20: 3839. arXiv:hep-th/0302111.\n16. Rovelli, C. (2021). *Helgoland*. Riverhead / Allen Lane (Italian ed. Adelphi, 2020). Chapter on Nāgārjuna.\n17. Hawking, S.W., King, A.R. & McCarthy, P.J. (1976). \"A new topology for curved space–time which incorporates the causal, differential, and conformal structures.\" *Journal of Mathematical Physics* 17(2): 174–181.\n18. Malament, D.B. (1977). \"The class of continuous timelike curves determines the topology of spacetime.\" *Journal of Mathematical Physics* 18(7): 1399–1404.\n19. Regge, T. (1961). \"General relativity without coordinates.\" *Il Nuovo Cimento* 19: 558–571.\n20. Domagala, M. & Lewandowski, J. (2004). \"Black-hole entropy from quantum geometry.\" *Classical and Quantum Gravity* 21: 5233–5244. arXiv:gr-qc/0407051.\n21. Meissner, K.A. (2004). \"Black-hole entropy in loop quantum gravity.\" *Classical and Quantum Gravity* 21: 5245–5252. arXiv:gr-qc/0407052.\n22. Ghosh, A. & Mitra, P. (2005). \"An improved estimate of black hole entropy in the quantum geometry approach.\" *Physics Letters B* 616: 114.\n\n**Pāli and Sanskrit sources** (Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, VRI `tipitaka-xml`, unless noted)\n\n23. *Dhammasaṅgaṇī* §637 (`abh01m.mul`).\n24. *Vibhaṅga*, *Dhātuvibhaṅga*, the space element (`abh02m.mul`).\n25. *Kathāvatthu* VI.6 *Ākāsakathā*, §460–462; VI.7, §463 (`abh03m3.mul`).\n26. *Kathāvatthu-aṭṭhakathā* on VI.6–7 (`abh03a.att`).\n27. Buddhaghosa. *Visuddhimagga* ch. XIV, ¶442 (the space element), and the kalāpa passages of the second volume (`e0101n.mul`, `e0102n.mul`).\n28. *Sammohavinodanī* (*Vibhaṅga-aṭṭhakathā*): the size ladder (gloss on *aṇumattesu vajjesu*); the finger-snap figure for feeling (`abh02a.att`).\n29. Anuruddha. *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* chs. 3, 4, 6, 8 (`abh07t`, bound with the sub-commentary).\n30. Sumaṅgala. *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā* on chs. 3, 4, 6, 8 (`abh07t`).\n31. Vasubandhu. *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* ad I.5, I.28, I.43 and II.22, ed. P. Pradhan (2nd ed., 1975), pp. 32–33 for I.43; GRETIL e-text (line references in square brackets are GRETIL's page|line).\n32. *Paṭṭhāna*, *Kusalattika*, *pañhāvāra* (`abh03m7.mul`): §427 (kamma across moments); the modes of the presence, dissociation and support conditions.\n\n**Other neighbours**\n\n33. Ly, T. & Miss Aquarius (2026). \"Causal Set Theory, the Growing Block, and the Buddhist Debate on the Three Times.\" <https://thonly.org/research/the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time>.\n34. *The Ephemeral Projector — A Comparative Analysis of Quantum Mechanics and Abhidhamma.* ResearchGate 397427972.\n35. \"Causal Set Theory and Abhidhamma: A Dialogue…\", ekasiswanto.wordpress.com, 2026-07-31 (self-labelled AI-generated).\n36. \"Kalapa (atomism).\" Grokipedia and Wikipedia, read 2026-09-27.\n37. Capra, F. (1975). *The Tao of Physics*. Shambhala.\n38. Aristotle. *Physics* IV.4 (place as the innermost boundary of the container).\n39. Vasubandhu. *Viṃśikā*, vv. 11–14 (the critique of partless atoms). Not re-read for this paper.\n40. Cousins, L.S. (2001). \"On the Vibhajjavādins: The Mahiṃsāsaka, Dhammaguttaka, Kassapiya and Tambapaṇṇiya branches of the ancient Theriyas.\" *Buddhist Studies Review* 18(2): 131–182.\n41. Karunadasa, Y. (1967). *Buddhist Analysis of Matter*. Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs. (Chs. 5 and 7 read for this revision.)\n42. Bodhi, Bhikkhu (gen. ed.) (1993). *A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: The Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Ācariya Anuruddha*. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society.\n43. Nārada, U (Mūlapaṭṭhāna Sayadaw), assisted by Thein Nyun (1969). *Conditional Relations (Paṭṭhāna)*, vol. I. Pali Text Society Translation Series 37. London: Luzac for the PTS.\n44. von Rospatt, A. (1995). *The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of this Doctrine up to Vasubandhu*. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. (Bibliographic record only; not reached.)\n45. Varzi, A. \"Boundary.\" *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* (read 2026-09-28).\n46. Casati, R. & Varzi, A. (1999). *Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation*. MIT Press, ch. 5. (Cited through Varzi's survey; not read.)",
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+      "title": "Causal Set Theory, the Growing Block, and the Buddhist Debate on the Three Times: What the Earliest Vibhajjavādin Records Say",
+      "subtitle": "An answer to an invitation in causal-set quantum gravity — and why the tradition that calls itself Vibhajjavāda is its foil, not its twin",
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+      "text": "## Abstract\n\nIn 2007 Rafael Sorkin, one of the founders of causal set theory, remarked in a footnote that the \"accretive time\" of his sequential-growth models \"seems close to that of C.D. Broad, and also to that of the 'Vibhajavadin' school within the Buddhist philosophical tradition.\" Fay Dowker, quoting him (2022; the wording below is that of her 2023 revision), added an invitation: *\"A interesting project for a scholar of Buddhism interested in physics would be to try to determine the 'Vibhajavadin' view of time, perception and epistemology in detail by examining the earliest existing records.\"*\n\nThis paper takes up that invitation from the Pāli sources, read against the northern ones. It finds that **there is no single Vibhajjavādin view of time to report.** The name has at least two referents:\n\n- **In the northern Abhidharma**, the *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* (ad V.25) defines the Vibhajyavādins as those who hold that **the present exists, and past action whose fruit has not yet been given exists, while ripened past action and the future do not**. Its past **thins**: an action drops out of existence once its fruit is given, and nothing but unripened action is kept at all. The view resembles Sorkin's accretion **only in keeping some past and denying the future.** No Buddhist position in the debate keeps every element once born, as a growing block does.\n- **In the Pāli tradition**, Vibhajjavāda is the Mahāvihāra's own name for itself. The commentary on the *Kathāvatthu* tells how the Third Council answered a king's question about the Buddha's doctrine with *\"Vibhajjavādī, mahārājā.\"* That same *Kathāvatthu* **refutes four rival positions on time**: *all exists*, *past aggregates exist*, *some past and some future exist*, and *exists as past*. The third states, in the *Kathāvatthu*'s own words, the past half of the view the *Kośa* calls Vibhajyavādin; the commentary names its holders the Kassapikas.\n\nThe two referents meet in one school name. Vasumitra's doxography gives the Kāśyapīya exactly the *Kośa*'s definition, and Stcherbatsky noted in 1923 that the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādins had been identified with the Kāśyapīyas. The northern and Pāli sources report that school's past alike and its future differently.\n\nSo the tradition that uses the name today holds **presentism about conditioned phenomena**: of conditioned dhammas only the present exists, and nibbāna stands outside the three times altogether. Presentism is exactly the view Sorkin says his model is not. Block-universe arguments, he writes, *\"presuppose that the sole alternative to the 'block universe' is a doctrine that identifies reality with a three-dimensional instant\"*, and his growth is offered as a third option. **The Pāli Vibhajjavāda is the foil of causal-set growth, not its twin.**\n\nWhat the Theravāda offers a causal-set physicist is a **contrast**, and its use is that it locates the disagreement exactly:\n\n- **Past action conditions the present without existing, and nothing persists in between.** The *Kathāvatthu* (§299) refutes the existence of past action whose result has not ripened; the Abhidhamma's kamma condition operates across moments.\n- **A consciousness can take a past object without being objectless** (*Kathāvatthu* IX.6).\n\nThis is a claim about influence, not about ordered existence. The paper's findings are listed, each with its falsifier, under *Findings disclosed*; the physics comparison stays labelled as a comparison.\n\n**Keywords:** causal set theory, sequential growth, growing block, presentism, eternalism, temporal becoming, Buddhist philosophy of time, Kathāvatthu, Abhidharmakośa, Sarvāstivāda, Kāśyapīya, Vibhajjavāda, Theravāda, Sorkin, Dowker.\n\n---\n\n## Findings disclosed\n\nThis paper is a study: it discloses readings of texts, not a mechanism. Its findings are listed here at the width that survived review and the census reported below, each with what would break it. The census's surviving width is **a reading of the *Kathāvatthu*'s time debates against Sorkin's and Dowker's causal-set remarks**; every finding is a part of that reading and nothing wider. The historical identifications the findings rely on are prior art and are cited as such (Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 43 n.; Vasumitra; Cousins 2001).\n\n1. **Read against Sorkin's footnote, \"Vibhajavadin\" has two referents, and they meet in one school.** The *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin (present plus unripened past action, no future) and the Mahāvihāra's self-designation are different positions. The *Kathāvatthu* §299 refutes the first view's past half in its own words, under the commentary's name *Kassapikā*; Vasumitra gives the Kāśyapīya the *Kośa*'s definition (§2.3, §5.1). *Breaks if:* the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin is shown to denote the Mahāvihāra specifically, or the §299 thesis is reliably attributed to a school other than the Kāśyapīya/Kassapika.\n2. **No position in the Buddhist three-times debate is a growing block.** The *Kośa*'s and the Kassapika's past exists only until an action's fruit is given, and it retains nothing but unripened action; the resemblance to Sorkin's accretion is confined to keeping some past and denying the future (§4). *Breaks if:* a Buddhist source is found that keeps every arisen dhamma as existing past while denying the future; or Sorkin's growth is read so that born elements cease to exist.\n3. **The Mahāvihāra's position, read against Sorkin, is presentism about conditioned dhammas: the very alternative he says block-universe arguments presuppose and his growth is meant to escape.** Nibbāna and concepts are time-free (*kālavimutta*) and fall outside the comparison (§3, §5.3). *Breaks if:* a primary Theravāda source affirms that past or future conditioned dhammas exist, including unripened past action, as distinct from their conditioning force.\n4. **The Theravāda's account of how the past acts is a contrast with causal-set growth, and it locates the disagreement at the past relatum.** The ceased act conditions its result across moments; it does not exist when the result arises (§299); and nothing persists between them, since the persisting store of kamma (*kammūpacaya*) is the opponent's doctrine in the commentary (§6). *Breaks if:* a primary Theravāda source treats past kamma as existing when it conditions (for example, by accepting a *kammūpacaya*); or the *Kathāvatthu*'s *atthi* (\"exists\") is shown to be an efficacy predicate, in which case the contrast with the *Kośa* reduces to a difference of wording (§10).\n5. **On Dowker's \"perception and epistemology\", the *Kathāvatthu* holds that a past object is a genuine object although it does not exist** (IX.6, §559; §6). *Breaks if:* §559 is read so that the past object is a present surrogate (a memory-image existing now) rather than the past itself.\n\n---\n\n## Prior Art and Non-Assertion Statement\n\nThis document is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. **The authors and HeartBank® will not seek patent** on anything herein. Nothing here is a mechanism; what the paper discloses is the numbered list under *Findings disclosed* above, dedicated to the public domain so that no one may enclose it.\n\n**What is already public, and cited rather than claimed:**\n\n- **The two-referent answer in outline.** Stcherbatsky, *The Central Conception of Buddhism* (1923), p. 43 and its footnote, is the nearest prior instance, found after the census below. It describes the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādins (citing AK V.24 ff.); it reports that the *Kathāvatthu* ascribes such opinions to the Kāśyapīyas and that Xuanzang's commentary identifies the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādins as the Kāśyapīyas; it remarks that the Theravādins seem to share the Sautrāntika view; and it notes the double sense of *vibhajyavāda*. This is the page Dowker cites.\n- **The Kāśyapīya's thesis in the northern doxography.** Vasumitra's *Samayabhedoparacanacakra* (Xuanzang's Chinese, T49 no. 2031) gives the Kāśyapīya the *Kośa*'s definition.\n- **The four debates in English.** Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids, *Points of Controversy* (Pali Text Society, 1915), translate the *Kathāvatthu* with the commentary's attributions. The *Kośa* passage is translated by La Vallée Poussin and, in English, by Pruden (1988–90).\n- **The mapping of the Buddhist three-times debate onto Western theories of time.** Kristie Miller classes the Theravādins and Sautrāntikas as presentists and the Sarvāstivādins as eternalists, adding that the Sarvāstivāda view is closer to a moving spotlight than to a block universe (\"A Taxonomy of Views about Time in Buddhist and Western Philosophy,\" *Philosophy East and West* 67.3, 2017). The Vibhajyavāda and Kāśyapīya positions are surveyed in an unpublished essay by Michel Gauvain, *Time and Temporality in Indian Buddhism* (academia.edu 43833572). Its gloss of Vibhajyavāda (\"time permanent, phenomena move from one time to another\") differs from the *Kośa*'s.\n- **The historical claim that *Vibhajjavādin* named a group of schools, not one** (L.S. Cousins, \"On the Vibhajjavādins,\" *Buddhist Studies Review* 18.2, 2001).\n- **Causal-set becoming as a philosophical topic** (Sorkin 2007; Wüthrich & Callender, \"What Becomes of a Causal Set?\", *BJPS* 68.3, 2017; Dowker 2022/2023).\n- **General comparisons of the Abhidhamma with causal sets or quantum physics**: a blog post of 2026-07-31, self-described as AI-generated, \"Causal Set Theory and Abhidhamma: A Dialogue Between Modern Physics and Buddhist Philosophy\" (<https://ekasiswanto.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/causal-set-theory-and-abhidhamma-a-dialogue-between-modern-physics-and-buddhist-philosophy/>), and *The Ephemeral Projector: A Comparative Analysis of Quantum Mechanics and Abhidhamma* (ResearchGate publication 397427972, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397427972>).\n\n**The census.** A quick novelty census ran on 2026-09-27. Its pre-registration was pushed publicly before any query: `thonly/publications` commit `7348ba2`, `timestamps/census/physics-lens-prereg.md`. Its aperture was the English web, arXiv, Google Scholar, PhilPapers, GitHub and Google Patents by keyword. Thai, Burmese, Sinhala, Chinese, Japanese and Khmer sources were **NOT RUN**, and books were not read. **Not found in that aperture on that date:** a reading of the *Kathāvatthu*'s time debates against Sorkin's and Dowker's causal-set remarks. The census also reported the two-referent answer as not found; that row is **narrowed** here, because Stcherbatsky's footnote, read after the census, already gives most of it. ⛔ A census result is a statement about a search, not a claim of priority. The comparison of Buddhism with physics is a crowded field, and much of it is unindexed.\n\n---\n\n## 1 · The Invitation\n\nCausal set theory replaces the spacetime continuum with a locally finite partial order: discrete events, related only by *before*. Sorkin's slogan is *order + number = geometry*. In its sequential-growth (\"classical sequential growth\") models the causal set is not given all at once; it **grows**, one element at a time, each new element born to the future of some of those already present. Sorkin argued that this growth gives an objective correlate of the passage of time, a becoming that relativity was thought to have ruled out. His 2007 paper, \"Relativity theory does not imply that the future already exists: a counterexample,\" makes the case. In §5 he describes what the growth yields as *\"something 'four dimensional' from the very beginning, but which at any stage of its growth is still incomplete\"*, and he adds the footnote:\n\n> The notion of \"accretive time\" that arises here seems close to that of C.D. Broad, and also to that of the \"Vibhajavadin\" school within the Buddhist philosophical tradition.\n\nFay Dowker, developing Sorkin's proposal as a response to the hard problem of consciousness (arXiv 2209.07653), quotes the footnote and adds her own. In the revision of 21 May 2023 it reads:\n\n> A interesting project for a scholar of Buddhism interested in physics would be to try to determine the \"Vibhajavadin\" view of time, perception and epistemology in detail by examining the earliest existing records.\n\n(The first version, of 16 September 2022, reads *\"would be to determine the 'Vibhajyavadin' view\"*, without *try to*.)\n\nFor the Vibhajavādin view her notes point to p. 43 of Stcherbatsky's *The Central Conception of Buddhism* (1923). Separately, they cite his *Buddhist Logic* (vol. 1, 1932, pp. 4–5) for early Buddhism as \"no Matter, no Substance, only separate elements, momentary flashes of efficient energy … a flow of existential moments.\"\n\nThe question is well posed, and it is answerable, because the records exist, in Pāli, Sanskrit and Chinese, and they are unusually explicit about time. What follows reads them.\n\n*Spelling note.* Sorkin and Dowker's 2023 revision write *Vibhajavadin*; Dowker's 2022 version writes *Vibhajyavadin*. They are quoted as written. Pāli sources give *Vibhajjavāda*, Sanskrit sources *Vibhajyavāda*. The spellings mark traditions, and this paper keeps them apart deliberately.\n\n---\n\n## 2 · Who Were the Vibhajjavādins?\n\n### 2.1 · The Pāli self-designation\n\nThe *Kathāvatthu* itself, the fifth book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, never uses the word. The self-designation is found in its commentary (*Kathāvatthu-aṭṭhakathā*, part of the *Pañcappakaraṇa-aṭṭhakathā* traditionally ascribed to Buddhaghosa, c. 5th century CE, drawing on older material). The commentary describes the Third Council under Aśoka: the king, having expelled monks of other views, asks the remaining monks what the Buddha taught.\n\n> *\"kiṃvādī, bhante, sammāsambuddho\"ti? \"Vibhajjavādī, mahārājā\"ti.*\n>\n> \"Of what doctrine, venerable sir, was the Fully Awakened One?\" — \"A Vibhajjavādin, great king.\"\n\nThe elder Moggaliputtatissa then composes the *Kathāvatthu* to refute the views that had arisen. In the tradition's own account, therefore, **the *Kathāvatthu* is the Vibhajjavādin record.**\n\n### 2.2 · A name for a group\n\nCousins (2001) shows that the word has two senses in the Pāli commentarial literature: an epithet of the Buddha (one who answers by analysis, *vibhajja*) and the name of a school. In the second sense it historically named the common ancestor of **four** schools: the Mahiṃsāsakas, the Dhammaguttikas (the commentary's form; Cousins's title writes *Dhammaguttaka*), the Kassapiyas and the Tambapaṇṇiyas, the last being the Mahāvihāra of Sri Lanka whose texts the Pāli canon preserves. The commentary's Third Council story, Cousins argues, draws its force from the double meaning. The present-day Theravāda is therefore **one branch** of the Vibhajjavādins, not the whole group. That matters below, because another branch reappears as an opponent.\n\nThe commentary's own family tree is different, and it is recorded here because it cuts against a tidy reading. Its schism narrative, taken from the *Dīpavaṃsa*, derives the Sabbatthivādins and the Dhammaguttikas from the Mahiṃsāsakas and then says: *\"Puna sabbatthivādakulato bhijjitvā kassapikā nāma jātā\"* (\"again, breaking from the Sabbatthivāda family, those called Kassapikas arose\"). The Pāli commentary thus files the Kassapikas under the Sabbatthivāda, where Cousins places them among the Vibhajjavādin branches. The findings below depend on *which school* held the §299 thesis, not on which family tree is right.\n\n### 2.3 · The northern definition `[cross-tradition]`\n\nThe Sarvāstivāda's own systematization, as reported and criticized by Vasubandhu, defines the two camps sharply (*Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* ad V.25, Pradhan ed., p. 296, ll. 4–6):\n\n> *ye hi sarvam astīti vadanti atītam anāgataṃ pratyutpannaṃ ca te sarvāstivādāḥ / ye tu kecid asti yat pratyutpannam adattaphalaṃ cātītaṃ karma kiñcin nāsti yad dattaphalam atītam anāgataṃ ceti vibhajya vadanti te vibhajyavādinaḥ /*\n>\n> Those who say that *all exists*, past, future and present, are Sarvāstivādins. Those who, *distinguishing* (*vibhajya*), say that something exists (the present, and past action that has not given its fruit) and something does not (past action that has given its fruit, and the future) are Vibhajyavādins.\n\nThe *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin, then, holds **present plus some past, and no future**. The name is glossed from the method: they *speak distinguishing*.\n\nStcherbatsky's p. 43, the page Dowker cites, describes the same school: an intermediate position that \"maintained the reality of the present facts and of that part of the past ones which had not already lost their influence, but the reality of the future ones and of that part of the past ones which had ceased to exhibit any influence it denied. Vasubandhu calls this school the Vibhajyavādins.\" **Dowker's pointer and the *Kośa* therefore agree.** Stcherbatsky's footnote goes further. It reports that the *Kathāvatthu* ascribes such opinions to the Kāśyapīyas, who also admitted the reality of that part of the future which was foreshadowed or fixed; that Xuanzang's commentary identifies the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādins as the Kāśyapīyas; that the Theravādins seem to have shared the Sautrāntika view; and that Vasubandhu seems not to know the explanation of *vibhajyavāda* as orthodoxy, the sense the *Kathāvatthu* commentary gives it.\n\nVasumitra's doxography of the schools, in Xuanzang's Chinese, gives the Kāśyapīya (飲光部) the same thesis. Among its tenets: 若業果已熟則無。業果未熟則有 (\"if the fruit of an action has ripened, it does not exist; if the fruit has not ripened, it exists\"). It adds that no formation has a future thing as its cause (無諸行以未來為因) and that all formations perish momentarily (一切行皆剎那滅).\n\nThe *Kośa*'s definition is a Sarvāstivādin doxographer's report of an opponent (§10). Two northern reports, the *Kośa* and Vasumitra, agree on it (both from a Sarvāstivāda milieu, so not fully independent), and the Pāli debate book states the same past-half in its own words (§3).\n\n---\n\n## 3 · The Earliest Pāli Record: Four Debates on Time\n\nThe *Kathāvatthu* is a book of debates. The Theravādin (*sakavādī*) cross-examines an opponent (*paravādī*) by paired questions until the opponent's thesis yields a consequence he must reject. Four early debates, all in its first chapter, concern time. The *Kathāvatthu* names no opponents; the attributions below are the commentary's. Paragraph numbers follow the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, whose chapter division differs from the Pali Text Society's; the § numbers are unambiguous. An English translation with the attributions is *Points of Controversy* (1915).\n\n| CST § | Debate | Opponent's thesis | Commentary's attribution |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| 282 | *Sabbamatthītikathā* | *sabbam atthi*: all exists | *\"seyyathāpi etarahi sabbamatthivādānaṃ\"* (the all-exists school, i.e. the Sarvāstivāda) |\n| 297 | *Atītakkhandhādikathā* | past and future things are aggregates, bases and elements, and therefore exist | the paravādin who \"wants past and future to exist because they do not give up being aggregates\" |\n| 299–300 | *Ekaccaṃ atthītikathā* | *some* of the past exists and some of the future (what is bound to arise). The restriction to action whose result has not ripened is in the *Kathāvatthu*'s own text: *\"atītā avipakkavipākā dhammā – te atthi\"* | *\"seyyathāpi kassapikā\"* (the Kassapikas; one of Cousins's four Vibhajjavādin branches, though the commentary's schism list derives them from the Sabbatthivāda, §2.2) |\n| 304 | *Hevatthikathā* | things exist *in one way* and not in another: the past exists *as past* | *\"seyyathāpi etarahi … andhakānaṃ\"* (the Andhakas) |\n\nThe refutations of *all exists* and *some exists* turn on one formula:\n\n> *Atītaṃ atthīti? Āmantā. Nanu atītaṃ niruddhaṃ vigataṃ vipariṇataṃ atthaṅgataṃ abbhatthaṅgatanti?* (§283)\n>\n> \"Does the past exist?\" — \"Yes.\" — \"But has the past not ceased, departed, changed, set, gone down?\"\n\nThe other two debates are refuted differently.\n\n- **§297 separates classification from existence.** The Theravādin grants that past things are *classified* as aggregates but denies that they *exist*. The *Kathāvatthu* itself quotes the *Niruttipatha Sutta* (SN 22.62) in the *Sabbamatthi* and *Atītakkhandhādi* debates (§296, §298): what has passed is designated *\"was\"*, never *\"is\"* or *\"will be\"*. The opponent answers with SN 22.48 (any form, past, future or present, is the form aggregate). The commentary applies the *Niruttipatha* to §297 and says the opponent's sutta proves the aggregates' *being aggregates*, not their existence. That sutta, in the Nikāyas themselves, is the oldest scriptural anchor of the view.\n- **The *Hevatthi* thesis grants that the past has ceased and says it exists *as past*** (*\"atītaṃ atītanti hevatthi, atītaṃ anāgatanti heva natthi\"*, §305). The ceased-formula cannot touch it. It is refuted by a different reductio: if the same past both is and is not, then existence and non-existence become one meaning (*\"atthaṭṭho natthaṭṭho … ekaṭṭhe same samabhāge tajjāte\"*, §304–305).\n\nAt §299 the Kassapika position is broken apart. If some of the past exists, then some of the past has ceased and some has not, and the part that has not ceased is not past. The same dilemma is run for the future at §300.\n\nThe position that remains, the Mahāvihāra's own, is **presentism about conditioned dhammas**: of conditioned phenomena only present ones exist; past and future are what *was* and what *will be*. The Abhidhamma adds a class that the three times do not cover. The root verse of *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* ch. 8 §37 reads *\"tekālikā dhammā, kālamuttā ca\"*, things of the three times and things free of time, and Sumaṅgala's sub-commentary names the time-free class: nibbāna and concepts (*nibbānapaññattivasena kālavimuttā ca*). Nibbāna is not a present dhamma; it is outside the question this debate asks.\n\n---\n\n## 4 · The Physicists' Map and the Buddhist Map\n\n```\n  WHAT EXISTS?              past          present        future        nearest physics picture\n  ───────────────────────   ───────────   ────────────   ───────────   ─────────────────────────────\n  Sarvāstivāda              all           all            all           eternalism: a moving spotlight,\n                                                                       not a block (Miller 2017) †\n  Kośa's Vibhajyavāda [X]   unripened     all            none          a past that THINS; resembles\n                            karma only                                 Sorkin's only in keeping some\n                                                                       past and denying the future\n  Kassapika (Kv §299–300)   unripened     all            what is       (no clean analogue: a past\n                            karma only                   bound to      that thins, a future that\n                                                         arise         is partly settled)\n  Andhaka (Kv §304)         \"as past\"     all            \"as future\"   a tensed-property reading\n  Mahāvihāra (Kv, refuting  none          all            none          PRESENTISM about conditioned\n  all four)                                                            dhammas ◀── what Sorkin says\n                                                                       his model is NOT ‡\n  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─   ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─   ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─   ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─\n  Sorkin's growth           every born    no single      none          growing block (accretion)\n  (for comparison)          element       global \"now\"\n\n  No Buddhist row keeps every born element.\n  † Miller (2017) classes the Sarvāstivādins as eternalists and says explicitly that they are not\n    block-universe theorists; their view looks like a moving spotlight. Cited, not claimed.\n  ‡ Of conditioned dhammas. Nibbāna and concepts are time-free (kālavimutta), outside all rows.\n  [X] cross-tradition (northern) source.\n```\n\nSorkin's growth is not presentism. In the sequential-growth models, what has been born **stays**: the causal set at any stage contains its whole past and lacks only its future. Sorkin's own words set the view against a present-only doctrine. Most arguments for the block universe, he writes, *\"presuppose that the sole alternative to the 'block universe' is a doctrine that identifies reality with a three-dimensional instant\"*. He also denies that the process has any single \"now\" spreading over it. Wüthrich and Callender (2017) examine what kind of becoming this is. They conclude that a novel, *global* becoming is compatible with causal sets, distinct from the *localized* becoming that Sorkin's advocates claim for it. Nothing in that literature reads the model as presentist.\n\n**On the Buddhist map, then, no row is a growing block.** The nearest is the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin, and only in two respects: it keeps some past, and it denies the future. Its past thins. An action ceases to exist once its fruit is given, and no other past dhamma is kept at all, where Sorkin's causal set keeps every element ever born. Sorkin's footnote points at a real resemblance in the school the northern sources describe, narrower than the word \"close\" suggests. It does not describe the school that uses the name today.\n\n---\n\n## 5 · The Answer to Dowker\n\nDowker asked for \"the Vibhajavadin view of time … by examining the earliest existing records.\" The records give a three-part answer.\n\n1. **There is no single Vibhajjavādin view of time, and the two referents converge on one school seen from two sides.** The name covered a family of schools (Cousins). In the northern sources it names a *present-plus-unripened-past* view, which Vasumitra and Xuanzang's commentary (as Stcherbatsky reports it) assign to the Kāśyapīya. The Pāli branch's own debate book refutes the past half of that view in its own words (§299), and its commentary names the holders *Kassapikā*. On the past, the northern and Pāli reports agree. On the future they differ: the *Kośa* and Vasumitra's Kāśyapīya deny it, while the Pāli debate has the Kassapika grant existence to a future that is bound to arise.\n2. **The view that resembles causal-set accretion most is the one the Pāli Vibhajjavādin record argues against, and the resemblance is partial.** Sorkin's instinct matched a real Buddhist position in keeping some past and denying the future. That position is the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavāda and the Kassapika's past half, not the Theravāda's, and its past thins where his is kept whole.\n3. **The Theravāda's own view is presentism about conditioned dhammas**, grounded in the *Niruttipatha Sutta* and defended in the *Kathāvatthu*: whatever is past has ceased, and what has ceased does not exist. Nibbāna and concepts are time-free and fall outside the three times.\n\nThis is a historical answer about what the records say. It takes no position on which view of time is true.\n\n---\n\n## 6 · The Contrast: Influence Without Existence\n\nIf the Theravāda is not a growing block, is there anything in it for a causal-set physicist? There is one thing, and it is a contrast rather than a correspondence.\n\nA presentist owes an account of how the past can matter if it does not exist. The Pāli Abhidhamma gives one. Its analysis of conditioning is the *Paṭṭhāna*, summarized in *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* ch. 8. The *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā*, Sumaṅgala's sub-commentary on the *Saṅgaha* (c. 12th century, a later layer than the *Saṅgaha* itself), states the temporal reach of every one of the twenty-four conditions. In the CST text, its comment on ch. 8, §37 sorts them so:\n\n```\n  TEMPORAL REACH (Vibhāvinī on Saṅgaha ch. 8 §37)        CONDITIONS                              COUNT\n  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────   ─────────────────────────────────────   ─────\n  past only (the moment just ceased)                     proximity, contiguity, repetition,          5\n                                                         absence, disappearance\n  past or present (dvikālika)                            kamma                                       1\n  all three times (tikālika)                             object, object-predominance,                3\n                                                         decisive support\n  present only (paccuppannakālika)                       the other fifteen                          15\n                                                                                                  ────\n                                                                                                    24\n  time-free (kālavimutta; Saṅgaha §37 root verse)        nibbāna, concepts (paññatti) — not a condition class\n```\n\n- **Five conditions reach only the immediate past:** proximity, contiguity, repetition, absence and disappearance (*anantara, samanantara, āsevana, natthi, vigata*). They carry the moment that has just ceased into the next.\n- **The kamma condition reaches past or present** (*dvikālika*). The *Saṅgaha*'s own root text says that volition conditions its results across different moments (*nānākkhaṇikā cetanā*, ch. 8 §17): an action long gone conditions its result now. The past act does not exist when its result arises; the *Kathāvatthu* (§299) refutes the thesis that past action whose result has not ripened exists. **Nothing persists between them.** The commentary on §299 gives the opponent's supporting doctrine as a persisting accumulation of kamma (*kammūpacaya*), and the Theravāda refuses it. The ceased act is a condition by kamma across moments, not a thing kept.\n- **Three conditions reach all three times** (*tikālika*): the object condition, object-predominance (*ārammaṇādhipati*; co-nascent predominance is present-only) and decisive support. So the future also conditions, as an object of thought or intention.\n- **The other fifteen conditions are present-only.**\n- **A time-free class stands outside the classification**: nibbāna and concepts are *kālavimutta* (§3).\n\nThe *Kathāvatthu* adds the epistemological half of Dowker's question. At IX.6 (§559) an opponent holds that a consciousness whose object is past has no object, since the past does not exist. The Theravādin refutes this: a mind can turn toward the past, attend to it and aspire concerning it, so a past object is a genuine object even though it does not exist. **Perception and memory reach what is not.**\n\nSo the Theravāda's answer to \"how does the past act?\" is **influence without existence**: the past conditions the present, and is cognized by it, without being real now. Set beside a causal set, this is a **contrast**, and its use is that it locates the disagreement exactly. In causal sets the order relation, not a background time, carries the physics, and the order holds *between elements that remain in the set*; the past is kept. The Theravāda keeps the effects of conditioning and discards the past relatum; nothing persists to be related. The two agree that the past acts and disagree about whether it is there. A presentist causal set would be a different ontology from Sorkin's, and whether one is coherent is a question for physics, not for this paper.\n\n---\n\n## 7 · The Strongest Objection, Carried\n\n**Objection.** \"Presentism is a Western category, and the Abhidhamma is a phenomenology of experience. It is not a metaphysics of spacetime. Mapping *atthi* ('exists') onto the ontology of a causal set compares two different questions.\"\n\n**What survives it.** Much of the objection stands, and the paper does not try to answer it away. The *Kathāvatthu*'s *atthi* is about dhammas, momentary mental and material phenomena, not about spacetime points. Its debates are about what may be *said* to exist in a doctrinal register. And the Abhidhamma's momentariness has no metric: its moments carry no length, and its \"present\" is not a global simultaneity slice, which causal sets deny in any case. What survives is historical and exact: which positions on the existence of the past and the future were taken, by whom, and which the Pāli tradition rejected. Sorkin's footnote made a historical claim, and a historical claim can be checked against records. That is all this paper does with the physics.\n\n**The counter-argument to this paper's own strongest claim.** Our strongest claim is that the Pāli Vibhajjavāda is Sorkin's foil. Against it, the provenance of Sorkin's word points away from the Pāli branch. Dowker's own pointer, Stcherbatsky p. 43, describes the *Kośa*'s school, and Stcherbatsky's footnote reports Xuanzang's commentary identifying that school with the Kāśyapīyas. So the referent of \"Vibhajavadin\" in the causal-set literature is the northern one by construction, and Sorkin's footnote is broadly right about the school it names. On this reading, a comparison with the Mahāvihāra changes the subject. We accept this. We claim only that the branch that preserved the Pāli canon, and uses the name today, holds the opposite view; that its record refutes the named school's past half; and that the resemblance even for the named school is partial (§4). Whether a reader of the footnote should have the Mahāvihāra in mind is a question about the word, and the records show why it is ambiguous.\n\n---\n\n## 8 · What Would Falsify These Findings\n\n- **A primary Theravāda source that affirms the existence of unripened past kamma** (as opposed to its conditioning force) would undo §3's reading of the Mahāvihāra as presentist.\n- **A reading of Sorkin's sequential growth in which past elements cease to exist**, rather than remain in the set, would move his view toward presentism and undo §4's placement. His own texts, read on the date of writing, say the opposite.\n- **A reliable attribution of the §299 thesis to a school other than the Kassapikas**, evidence that the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin denoted the Mahāvihāra specifically, or northern evidence separating Vasumitra's Kāśyapīya from the *Kośa*'s Vibhajyavādin, would change §5.1.\n- **A primary Theravāda source that treats past kamma, or a past object, as EXISTING when it conditions or is cognized** (for example, one that accepts a *kammūpacaya*) would undo §6's \"nothing persists\".\n- **A reading of *Kathāvatthu* IX.6 §559 on which the past object is a present surrogate**, a memory-image existing now, would undo the epistemological half of §6.\n\n---\n\n## 9 · Stake, and What Was and Was Not Done\n\n**The authors' stake.** The authors write from within the Theravāda, and the institution publishing this paper grounds its values in the Pāli canon and has ruled Theravāda readings over Sarvāstivāda ones on its own questions. That creates a pull toward finding one's tradition anticipated by frontier physics. **This paper's first draft of the thesis made exactly that error.** It read the Pāli presentism as Sorkin's \"becoming\", on his side. An adversarial review, run before any prose was written, found that Sorkin's growth keeps the past, and the thesis was reversed. The reversal is the paper. A later review round corrected a second overreach of the same kind in the other direction: the first published text placed the *Kośa*'s view at the growing block, which its own translation contradicts.\n\n**Done:**\n- The four time debates of the *Kathāvatthu*, the *Niruttipatha* quotations and §559, with their commentarial attributions, read in the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana text;\n- the commentary's schism narrative and its gloss on §299 (*kammūpacaya*) read in the same text;\n- the *Kośa*'s definition read in Pradhan's Sanskrit;\n- Stcherbatsky 1923, p. 43 and its footnote, read (archive.org, Digital Library of India copy);\n- Vasumitra's *Samayabhedoparacanacakra*, the Kāśyapīya section, read in Xuanzang's Chinese (CBETA T49 no. 2031);\n- Sorkin 2007 and Dowker 2022/2023 (both versions) read in full;\n- the temporal classification of the conditions read in the CST text of the *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā* (a sub-commentary, not the *Saṅgaha* itself), and *nānākkhaṇika* and the time-free class checked in the *Saṅgaha* root;\n- the census run as described.\n\n**Not done:**\n- The Sarvāstivāda *Vibhāṣā* and the Chinese Āgama parallels (where the Kāśyapīya view is also reported) were not consulted.\n- *Points of Controversy*, Pruden's translation of the *Kośa*, Cox's *Disputed Dharmas* (1995) and Bareau's *Les sectes bouddhiques du Petit Véhicule* (1955) were not read; they are named as the standard places to check this paper, not as sources for it.\n- Cousins was read in English; the Mahāvihāra's lineage texts (the *Dīpavaṃsa*) were read only as quoted by the commentary.\n- Later Theravāda exposition of kamma (for example, modern Burmese teaching of a kammic potency in the mental continuum) was not read (§10).\n- The physics of a presentist causal set was not attempted.\n\n---\n\n## 10 · Honest Limits\n\n- **The *Kathāvatthu*'s date is traditional.** It is ascribed to the Third Council (3rd century BCE), and its irregular structure has been read as growth over time, new controversies added as they arose (von Hinüber 2000, p. 71, as cited; not read directly for this paper). The four time debates are in its first chapter. The commentary that supplies the self-designation and the opponents' names is c. 5th century CE. \"Earliest existing records\" here means the earliest the Pāli tradition preserves, not the earliest that existed.\n- **The attributions are the commentary's.** The *Kathāvatthu* names no opponents. A later author's attribution is evidence about the tradition's self-understanding, not a contemporaneous report. The same commentary's schism list files the Kassapikas under the Sabbatthivāda (§2.2).\n- **The *Kośa*'s definition is a Sarvāstivādin doctrinal report.** Vasubandhu reports the Vibhajyavādins as the Sarvāstivāda's opponents in a polemical context. Vasumitra's agreement and the *Kathāvatthu*'s own wording at §299 corroborate its content, but no text of the Kāśyapīyas themselves is quoted here.\n- **\"Exists\" may be an efficacy predicate.** In the three-times controversy, existence is often keyed to causal efficacy: Stcherbatsky glosses the *Kośa* school's existent past as the part that \"had not already lost [its] influence\", and Miller reports the Sarvāstivāda marking the present as the causally efficacious moment. Where *exists* means *is efficacious*, the *Kośa*'s existent unripened karma and the Theravāda's non-existent but conditioning karma may differ more in wording than in ontology. §6's contrast holds only if the *Kathāvatthu*'s *atthi* is not an efficacy predicate; this paper reads it as not one, because the *Kathāvatthu* denies existence to exactly what it grants as a condition, but that reading is an interpretation.\n- **\"Nothing persists\" is stated at the layer of the *Kathāvatthu* and its commentary.** Later Theravāda exposition speaks of a kammic potency carried in the mental continuum. Whether that potency is a persisting store of the kind the commentary refuses, or a way of speaking about conditioning, was not examined.\n- **The time-free class.** \"Presentism\" in this paper is presentism about conditioned dhammas. Nibbāna and concepts are *kālavimutta* and fall outside the comparison. A reader who treats the Theravāda as presentist without that qualification misstates it.\n- **The physics mapping is a mapping of positions on existence.** It does not claim that any Buddhist school anticipated a theory of quantum gravity, and it makes no claim about which theory of time is correct.\n- **One edition.** Paragraph numbers are the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana's; the Pali Text Society's chapter numbering differs. A reader should locate passages by § number and title.\n- **The census was quick and English-only.** The field of Buddhism-and-physics comparison is large and poorly indexed. Absence from our search is weak evidence, and the census's own second NOT FOUND fell to a book it could not read (Stcherbatsky).\n\n---\n\n## 11 · Close\n\nSorkin heard, in a school name, an echo of the time his models grow. The echo is real and partial. It comes from one school of a family, the one the northern sources describe, whose past is kept only while its fruit is owed. The branch that kept the Pāli canon answered that view in its oldest debate book, with a question it asks of every past thing: *has it not ceased?* The answer to Dowker's invitation is that the earliest records disagree with each other on the existence of the past — the question on which, in a different register, the physics of becoming is still open.\n\n---\n\n## Cross-Venue References\n\n| Venue | Identifier |\n|---|---|\n| Primary canonical | <https://thonly.org/research/the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time> |\n| GitHub | <https://github.com/thonly/publications/blob/main/defensive-publications/the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time.md> |\n| Census pre-registration (public) | `thonly/publications` commit `7348ba2`, `timestamps/census/physics-lens-prereg.md` |\n| Sibling paper | <https://thonly.org/research/abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity> |\n\n---\n\n## Acknowledgments\n\nThe authors thank Rafael Sorkin and Fay Dowker, whose footnotes asked a question the Pāli sources can answer; the Vipassana Research Institute for the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana texts; the GRETIL project and the editors of its *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya* e-text (after Pradhan); the CBETA project for the Chinese canon; the Digital Library of India and the Internet Archive for Stcherbatsky's 1923 text; and the late L.S. Cousins. The reading of the sources, the adversarial review and the drafting were done with Miss Aquarius, the name under which this institution discloses its AI collaboration.\n\n---\n\n## Citations\n\n1. Sorkin, R.D. (2007). \"Relativity theory does not imply that the future already exists: a counterexample.\" In V. Petkov (ed.), *Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World*, Fundamental Theories of Physics, Springer. arXiv:gr-qc/0703098.\n2. Dowker, F. (2022/2023). \"Causal Set Quantum Gravity and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.\" arXiv:2209.07653 (v1, 16 September 2022; v2, 21 May 2023; the invitation is footnote 1 in both, worded as quoted from v2).\n3. Wüthrich, C. & Callender, C. (2017). \"What Becomes of a Causal Set?\" *British Journal for the Philosophy of Science* 68(3): 907–925. doi:10.1093/bjps/axv040. arXiv:1502.00018.\n4. Bombelli, L., Lee, J., Meyer, D. & Sorkin, R.D. (1987). \"Space-time as a causal set.\" *Physical Review Letters* 59: 521–524.\n5. *Kathāvatthu*. Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, VRI `tipitaka-xml`, `romn/abh03m3.mul.xml` (§282–§306; §559).\n6. *Kathāvatthu-aṭṭhakathā* (in *Pañcappakaraṇa-aṭṭhakathā*). Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, `romn/abh03a.att.xml`.\n7. *Niruttipatha Sutta*, Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.62; and SN 22.48 (the opponent's sutta).\n8. Sumaṅgala. *Abhidhammatthavibhāvinī-ṭīkā* on *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha* ch. 8 (§37). Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, `romn/abh07t.nrf.xml` (bound with the *Saṅgaha*).\n9. Anuruddha. *Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha*, ch. 8 §17 and §37 (root text). Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, `romn/abh07t.nrf.xml`.\n10. Vasubandhu. *Abhidharmakośabhāṣya*, ed. P. Pradhan (2nd ed., 1975), p. 296; GRETIL e-text (Hackett & Lusthaus). English translation: L.M. Pruden, *Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam* (from La Vallée Poussin's French), 4 vols., Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1988–90 (not read for this paper).\n11. Vasumitra. *Samayabhedoparacanacakra* (異部宗輪論), tr. Xuanzang. Taishō vol. 49, no. 2031; CBETA XML `T49n2031`.\n12. Cousins, L.S. (2001). \"On the Vibhajjavādins: the Mahiṃsāsaka, Dhammaguttaka, Kassapiya and Tambapaṇṇiya branches of the ancient Theriyas.\" *Buddhist Studies Review* 18(2): 131–182.\n13. Miller, K. (2017). \"A Taxonomy of Views about Time in Buddhist and Western Philosophy.\" *Philosophy East and West* 67(3): 763–782.\n14. Gauvain, Michel. \"Time and Temporality in Indian Buddhism.\" Unpublished essay, n.d. academia.edu 43833572.\n15. Stcherbatsky, Th. (1923). *The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word \"Dharma.\"* London: Royal Asiatic Society. p. 43 and n. (Read in the Digital Library of India copy, archive.org `in.ernet.dli.2015.99616`; Dowker cites a later Motilal Banarsidass printing, same pagination.)\n16. Stcherbatsky, Th. (1932). *Buddhist Logic*, vol. 1. Bibliotheca Buddhica XXVI. Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR. pp. 4–5 (as cited by Dowker).\n17. Broad, C.D. (1923). *Scientific Thought*. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. (The growing block.)\n18. Shwe Zan Aung & Rhys Davids, C.A.F. (trs.) (1915). *Points of Controversy, or Subjects of Discourse* (the *Kathāvatthu*). London: Pali Text Society (not read for this paper).\n19. von Hinüber, O. (2000). *A Handbook of Pāli Literature*. Berlin: de Gruyter. p. 71 (as cited; not read directly).\n20. Ly, T. & Miss Aquarius (2026). \"Discreteness, Adjacency and Order: A Structural Comparison of the Theravāda Abhidhamma with Causal Sets and Loop Quantum Gravity\" (sibling paper). <https://thonly.org/research/abhidhamma-and-discrete-quantum-gravity>.",
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