Samaya

It is defined by motion rather than by a clock. A paramāṇu, a single indivisible atom, moves from one point of space to the point immediately next to it, travelling at its slowest. The time that takes is one samaya. Nothing can happen faster, so nothing shorter exists to measure.

The definition is doing real work. It ties time to the two things that make change possible, an indivisible thing and an indivisible place, and it refuses to define time by itself. In Jain terms vartanā, the assisting of change, is what time is.

The tradition tests the claim with an illustration. A strong weaver tears a fine cloth and it sounds instantaneous. But the cloth is threads, and each thread parts after the one before it; and each thread is fibres, and each fibre parts after the one before it. Parting a single fibre still takes innumerable samaya. Whatever looks instant to us is not.

How many samaya make one āvalikā, the smallest measurable unit? The answer is not a number. It is asaṃkhyāta, innumerable, which in Jain mathematics is a precisely located category rather than a shrug. See the ladder of number: the samaya in an āvalikā are exactly jaghanya yuktāsaṃkhyāta, the least of the joined-innumerable.

The present is one samaya wide. Past samaya are ananta and future samaya are ananta, and between them stands a single indivisible instant which is the only part of time anything ever actually occupies.