What characterizes a sense of the past when one is neither moving forward nor envisioning one’s self or one’s culture at the apex of evolution?1 Does it recede in any particular way from the vista of the present or point to other areas in more specific ways? What happens to the past when it is recalled in rituals of recitation that envision the past, not as an emblem for a nation, or of a people, but as a springboard out of history itself?These are phenomena with which a more than cursory reader (and reading) of the Purāṇas, and of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa in particular, must come to terms. The encyclopedic compendia of epic lore, doctrinal teachings, and devotional discourses known as Purāṇas have more often than not been approached extrinsically as documents for historical or religious studies. Consequently, these texts have usually been discussed through implicit teleological perspectives of modern (and, more often than not, Western) scholarship. The Purāṇas themselves, however, look at time quite differently, and nowhere is this more visible than in the most self-consciously aesthetic of the Purāṇas, the Bhāgavata. This essay, therefore, investigates “time in the Bhāgavata” as opposed to “the time of the Bhāgavata,” that is, it looks at the various intrinsic constructs of time within this seminal Purāṇa as opposed to pinning the text to a geographical or chronological grid.2
This study does not claim that the Bhāgavata is exemplary of the entire Purāṇic tradition, although the “cosmograph” of space and cyclic construct of the yugas, or successive epochs, does appear across the board in the Puraṇic literatures. Its focus, rather, is on specific time characteristics of this Puraṇa which, at its outset, refers to itself as nigama kalpataror galitam phalam, the ripened fruit of the tree of Vedic tradition, whose narrative is said to contain immortal nectar that has been carefully passed down. This reference to immortal nectar (amrta-dravya) brings up a crucial point: the Bhāgavata’s “sense of the past” is at once embodied as transmission (“being passed down”) and shot through with “eternity,” with a sense that its own supersensuous narrative can offer a window out of time. T. S. Eliot’s line from Burnt Norton, “only through time is time conquered,” is resonant here, for the Bhāgavata combines a Purāṇic sense of the past—that is, a mythic, paradigmatic recounting of happenings in days of yore—with an “ethos of avataraṇa,” the descent of the timeless Vishnu into this world of time, thus potentially transforming the world of time.
The Bhāgavata accomplishes this through its own particular historical sense, seeing itself as the offspring of the Great Epic, the Mahābhārata, appearing at the end of the Dvāpara and the beginning of the Kali age, offering an evolutive variant on the Epic’s principle concerns about dharma (the sacred law) and its ruminations on devastation at the end of an era. Thus, while offering a fair representation of the Epic and Purāṇic sense of time (even if there was no “Ur-Purāṇa,” good arguments have been given for the existence of a stream of Purāṇic discourse that has been codified through numerous volumes), the Bhāgavata’s aesthetic, theological, and devotional proclivities amplify and stretch both Epic and Purāṇic notions of time, retelling the traditional tales from a devotional Vaiṣṇava bhakti (and specifically Krishnaite) perspective, and in doing so pay ongoing homage to the timeless through time.
The Bhāgavata’s sense of time, moreover, is essential to its argument and its structure, as well as to its monumentality. In recasting the Epic’s narrative through its devotional perspective, it offers its own version of cyclical time—one that is peppered with various incarnations of the supreme god Vishnu—while simultaneously offering its own narrative as a “cure” for time itself. Within these two polarities of time in the Bhāgavata—transcendental timeless and cyclical time–bound—one also finds a variety of nuanced narratives of past and future offered from the perspectives of specific narrators in specific times and places. Indeed, one might describe the Bhāgavata’s sense of time as “narrative time,” since chronology is always subsumed under the particulars of “story” in the text. Though the overwhelming majority of verses in the Purāṇa appear in one form of the past tense or another (purāṇa can be literally translated as “ancient”), they reflect off one another in a ritualized maṇḍala (circular pattern) of remembrance that need not be limited to the past at all.
The specifics of this “remembrance,” of how the Bhāgavata makes use of a paradigmatic past and multiple time lines, theological discourse, and a deliberate aesthetic focus, through a poetic construct of sound and sense, contribute to the text’s conscious effort to create specific rasas or narrative flavors. The idea of rasa, or “aesthetic mood,” as the goal of the literary work of art is adapted from the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition.3 The Bhāgavata moves this tradition a step further by envisioning all rasas as flowing from (and back to) the fountainhead of the divine and therefore having the ability to inculcate the timeless through time, for those whose hearts have been awakened by the text itself. The Bhāgavata, in this regard, declares itself to be a sound incarnation of the Absolute, an avatāra appearing in the absence of an embodied divinity at the start of the Kali age.
CONSTRUCTS OF TIME
Time is both a creative and a destructive force in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and these features are often envisioned as one and the same. Kāla, as “all-powerful time,” co-initiates the process of creation in the moving world, a process that entails inevitable dissolution and destruction.4 Nevertheless, the Bhāgavata’s narrative opens squarely (or perhaps one should say “circuitously”) within the traditional “yuga construct” of Indian cyclical time. In its opening chapter, a group of sages meeting for a prolonged ritual of recitation in the Naimiṣa forest decry the situation in the Kali yuga (1.1.10), the fourth and darkest of the four epochs in which human beings’ memory and moral capacities have become debilitated. Whether the yuga construct is inherited from the Epics, the Vedas, or the agrarian economy as D. D. Kosambi has contended (1965) is an interesting question. By the time of the Bhāgavata’s composition (seventh to tenth century C.E.), however, it had become fully integrated into Epic and Purāṇic lore. Whenever it was written or spoken, the Bhāgavata fully participated in traditional notions of cyclical time. This is most overtly articulated in chapter 3 of book 1, where the text offers its own taxonomy of time.
Beginning with the parama-anu, which is said by contemporary commentators to be 54,675,000th of a 48-minute period, it catalogs time through both ascending particles and descending planes of human and celestial existence. Time is stretched out on a vast canvas of space and motion and is ultimately envisioned as the very condition of saṁsāra itself, repeated birth and death—endless, cyclically repetitive, and oppressive. In addition, however, the Bhāgavata repeatedly declares that all the amplitudes of time are subject to Vishnu, who exists as the form of time, while simultaneously standing above and beyond time as its author (mayā kalatmanā dhātra, “by me the creator who’s very Self is time”; BhP 11.24.15).
In book 3, chapter 11, to be more specific, the Purāṇa offers its vision of the scope of time, accepting the general Epic version while adding its own particular emphasis. Time is measured through the “standing together” (saṃsthāna) and motion (bhuktyā) of various material bodies, while Bhagavān (Vishnu), is said to “consume” both the manifest and unmanifest realms. This is congruent with and reflective of the Epic’s ongoing trope of time as a devourer who “cooks” living beings. But even as it may be ascertained from the movement of these bodies in space, there is an unmanifest “supreme time,” standing beyond the fray.
The chapter divides time in terms of gradations of size and measurement of motion, from “atoms,” to double atoms (anu), to trasareṇu (that which is visible in sun rays shining through a lattice window). These durations gradually build up to a nimeṣa, the measure of time associated with the blinking of an eye, and then to a laghu, a daṇḍa, and a muhurta (usually said to equal one eighth of a twelve-hour day). Interestingly enough, the measurement for a daṇḍa is given in terms of the time it takes for a particularly sized pot, with a particularly sized opening, to become fully submerged when placed in water. The Bhāgavata, even in its abstract measurements, envisions time in terms of space. There are four yāmas in a day and four in a night, fifteen days and nights in a fortnight, and so on.
This measurement of earthly objects, however, is just one valence of time in the Purāṇa, for an earthly calendar year is said to equal one day for the celestial Devas, and various planets and stars have their own respective years based on their particular movements.
The chapter then discusses the yuga cycle as equaling twelve thousand years of the celestial beings (Devas), containing the Satya yuga’s 4,800 years, the Treta’s 3,600, the Dvāpara’s 2,400, and the Kali’s 1,200. Since one year of the Devas is 360 human years, the earthly configuration of the yugas is reached by multiplying these numbers by 360. There are also yuga-sandhyās, “twilight periods” before and after every age. The discussion of a gradual decline of virtue from epoch to epoch informs this chapter as well. While this is also congruent with the Epic, the Bhāgavata has its own investment in the loss of dharma, the sacral laws of conduct, through the ages, for this favors its claim to be a remedy for the flaws of the now onset Kali age.
A day of Brahmā is a thousand yugas, as is a night. The day of Brahmā is also said to be subdivided into the governance of fourteen Manus, a measurement that González-Reimann (2002) and other scholars read as having been grafted on from another tradition. Where the Bhāgavata significantly parts from the Epic, however, is in its sustained focus on the descent of an avatāra of Vishnu into each Manu: both as Manu himself and through his forms of incarnation. While the avatāra construct is developed in the Epic, the Bhāgavata builds on it for its polemic of “remembrance of Vishnu” (Vishnu smaraṇa) as the way through the maze of time. Hence, the days and nights of Brahmā are said to be punctuated by periodic devastations of varying degrees, as the Purāṇa is emphatic in its insistence on the temporality of even the longest life of living beings, for the duration of two halves of Brahmā’s life is but the blink of an eye (nimeṣa) for the “unchanging, unlimited, beginningless soul of the universe” (3.11.38).
The Bhāgavata’s representation of time is but one aspect of time in the Purāṇa. One need also consider the text’s historical sense, in terms of its own intrinsic history and in terms of the circumstances that surround its continued retelling. As mentioned earlier, the sages in the Naimiṣa forest are well aware of their place in the Kaliyuga, and the one-thousand-year sacrifice they have been offering “for the sake of the world” has much to do with counteracting the negative influences of the Kali age. Also as mentioned, the Purāṇa situates its telling at the juncture between the epochs and even offers specific narratives that catalog the changing of the ages—one being the disappearance of Krishna and the Vṛṣṇi clan from the earth, and the other being King Parīkṣit’s being cursed to die by a brāhmaṇa boy (who is enraged at the king’s seeming disrespect of his own father, who, deep in meditation, did not respond to the king’s request for water). One common reading of this narrative correlates the onset of the Kali age with the fall of both the brāhmaṇa class and monarchy itself. Hence, the Purāṇa sees itself as appearing in this crucial time, literally being told to King Parīkṣit, who is fasting and awaiting his death from the curse, while listening to the sage Śuka recite the Bhāgavata. The sages at Naimiṣa are hearing the “second rendition” of the narrative from Śaunaka, who was present at Śuka’s telling of the Purāṇa. Thus, the various narratives of the text orbit at their own rates, like the luminaries and heavenly spheres, each offering their particular visions of “days of yore,” with the entire narrative being likened to a ripened fruit passed down from the mouth of Śuka. But Śuka himself will make it clear that he is not the author of the Purāṇa; rather, he is just another narrator, having heard the text from his father, Vyāsa. Like planetary time frames existing within each other, the multinarratives of the Purāṇa contribute to its heavily textured chronological sensibility, one that offers a paradigmatic past and speculations of the future, one that describes multicreations and -destructions in order to ultimately transcend time itself. Let us therefore turn to the qualitative aspects of these narratives and see how they construe time through metaphor and story.
TROPES OF TIME
Certain philosophical dispositions underpin the Bhāgavata’s notion of time. I have discussed them in detail in Tales for the Dying, but I examine them specifically in terms of time (as opposed to death) here (see González-Reimann 2002). I use “philosophical disposition” as opposed to “philosophy” because the Purāṇa offers no systematic philosophical system on, or understanding of, time. Rather, philosophy, like everything else in the Purāṇa, is subordinated to the narrative, hence the word “tropes,” figures of speech (Rocher 1986).
One major construct of time in the Bhāgavata is directly inherited from the Sāṁkhya tradition. Time is said to be correlative with the functioning of the three guṇas (the conditions of nature) and is thus part of the manifestation of the material sphere. The Bhāgavata, in one of its discussions of material manifestation, says that time is the twenty-fifth element, after the twenty-four formal elements of Sāṁkhya, which mixes with the guṇas (3.26.15).5 Here it is also stated that the fear of death, caused by time, who is none other than the Supreme Being, is due to the confusion of the ego in contact with nature (3.26.16). Hence, time is identified with both the supreme creative power—agitating the elements into their myriad of forms, and the supreme destructive power as well—bringing death to all beings who have identified themselves with the guṇas. Likewise, in book 12 of the Bhāgavata, it is stated that the three guṇas—clarity, passion, and ignorance—are set in motion by time (12.3.26). Time is thus depicted as an aspect of divine power, an inevitable force to which all are subjected.
The inevitability of time’s effects is constantly harped on in the Purāṇa, as when the dying Epic hero Bhīṣma attributes the entire Mahābhārata war and its catastrophic consequences to “time, under whose control the entire world and its guardian deities are carried like clouds by the wind” (1.9.14). Time is “a forceful current” eroding the lives of living beings (12.4.36) and is said to be the “ruler of all rulers” who devours living beings through other living beings. Time can act as a “noose” dragging people out of their bodies (3.30.17), and it is said to revolve like a very sharp wheel driving the world (6.5.19). In book 5 of the Bhāgavata, it is even said to be the personal disc weapon of Vishnu, ever revolving and taking the lives of all living beings from the god Brahmā down to a blade of grass. The inexorable nature of time’s movement is often highlighted as a foil for self-interested activities, which are seen as useless in face of time’s constant and ultimate power. “All this,” says the Purāṇa, “is under the ropes of time” (tad idam kāla-raśanam; 8.11.8).
Time continues to take on threatening images in the text, often compared to a serpent that seizes one (grastaṃ kālāhinātmanam; 11.8.41) or a “black snake” that “arrives at wild speed like a serpent approaching a rat” (5.8.27). The daughter of Time is said to marry Fear, bringing death to living beings.
Time is never far from fate or death in the Purāṇa, as in the Bhāgavata’s story of Nārada, who becomes a sage, striking out on his own, when his mother is bitten by a serpent, attributed to the force of “supreme time.” In book 3 (3.29.37), the narrator Kapila states that time is the divine cause of the transformation of forms and is a source of terror for those with “separate vision.” Hence, time is associated with creation, destruction, fate, and ultimate agency, as its movements perpetually impinge upon, or determine, human plans.
There is another major trope about time in the Purāṇa, however, that is not threatening, at least not in the same sense. It is the trope of “time transcended,” through the act of listening to the narratives of Vishnu/ Krishna, or through the descent and divine activities of the Supreme Person (puruṣottama). While the Purāṇa promulgates a sense of vast eons of time, these eons are punctuated by the avatāras of Vishnu, as the timeless one periodically descends into time to bear witness or to exhibit that which is beyond the purview of mundane time. On another level, however, for those who experience time in a certain way, it too is a līlā of Vishnu, for example in book 3 (11.1), where the characteristics of time are described as “a form of the wonderful Lord.” Still, the incarnations of the Lord are said to be a delight for even liberated souls, as if to prove that they are not merely composed of the mundane three guṇas. Living beings who realize the reality of the self (ātma), or who ascend to the divine abode, are also said to transcend time, for in the divine abode there is no passage of time (na ca kālavikramaḥ; 2.9.10), and those who are “rid of delusion” begin to revel in the glory of the self beyond time and illusion (2.9.3).
NARRATIVE TIME
If the Bhāgavata Purāṇa was but an encyclopedic compendium of Epic lore, or a Vaiṣṇava exegesis of Epic and philosophical discourse, one could clinically examine its concepts of, and perspectives on, time and be done with it. From its very beginning, however, the text presents itself as an “aesthetic Purāṇa” and engages in what I have labeled a “narrative of aesthetics” versus a narrative of representation. The chief metaphors of the aesthetic tradition from the Nāṭyaśāstra on down are gustatory. The purpose of the narrative arrangement is to exude a specific taste, not to offer a chronicle of “what happened” (itihāsa).
Numerous traditional Sanskrit commentaries on the narrative, therefore, envision the Bhāgavata’s various books as containing complimentary narratives, each exhibiting its own particular flavor. The appropriate mixing of such flavors sets the scene for the culminating rāsa-līlā—the celebrated divine dance between Krishna and the cowherd women—where time is completely obliterated. In this and other ways, the narrative of the Bhāgavata continually plays with time, moving back through the hoary past, coming up to the present, envisioning the future, and always returning to the ritual of recitation, the “base camp narrative,” so to speak, through which the texts weaves various stories, teachings, histories, ritual prescriptions, different forms of yoga, and the like.
One of the most significant characteristics of this narrative is that it is “de-centered.” There is no master narrative or narrator who can tell you what time it is. Rather, the text keeps switching from one narrative scenario to another. The fact that the narratives are generally set up as guru-śiṣya (student) dialogues insures the continual interaction of the story with a particular time frame. If every word in the Purāṇa is being spoken by someone to someone else, somewhere, about something (to paraphrase J. L. Mehta 1987), then narrative time is always correlative with a particular (one might say imagined) place and event. As each body has its own orbital configuration, each narrative moment has its own space-time continuum. As with the cosmograph, however, this construct sports certain dominant and complimentary patterns.
The first major pattern in the Bhāgavata’s narrative of time is its sense of transmission. The Purāṇa is passed down and its transmission contains its own “myth of historicity.” In true Purāṇic fashion, however, there are a number of myths of transmission that appear throughout the text. The major motif of transmission, however, begins with Śaunaka speaking to the sages at the Naimiṣa forest, where he refers to the previous dialogue between Śuka and Parīkṣit. Śuka is said to have received it from his father, Vyāsa, who receives the charge to transmit the Bhāgavata from his preceptor Nārada. Nārada has received the “text” from his father, Brahmā, and Brahmā has received the Purāṇa in “four verses” from Vishnu, who is the ultimate source of all manifestation. Whereas on one hand the myth of historicity is a tale of a text’s transmission through time, on the other it is also a tale of incarnation, of Vishnu entering time through the heart of the meditating Brahmā (1.1.1).
While the Epic narrative is generated through and dependent upon genealogy, the Bhāgavata sidesteps this somewhat by offering multinarratives of transmission (in book 3, chapter 8, it is passed from Saṅkarṣaṇa, the divine Vishnu, to Sanatkumāra, to Sāṁkhyāyana, to Pulastya, to Maitreya, to Vidura) and by having Nārada instruct Vyāsa to improve upon his vast literary output by “creating” the Bhāgavata as the apotheosis of both śruti (revealed-Vedic) and smṛti (transmitted-Epic) literatures. Ultimately, as I have argued, tradition itself is the ongoing narrator of the text, and tradition, ostensibly based on the past, is constantly renewing itself through transmission and reviewing its origins with retelling (Jarow 2003).
Along with myths of direct transmission, the Bhāgavata offers another sense of time through the oblique associations of its varied narratives. There is a metaquality to this narrative style. As opposed to characters moving in a framed flow of time, there are visionary recollections of paradigmatic events and characters, as well as a number of repeating themes: the illusion and futility of worldliness, the inevitable loss of all that is dear, and devotion to Bhagavān as a way through the temporal. The various recollections skip past entire eras, organizing material thematically through a sort of dreamtime association. Temporal events tend to pass into oblivion, but smṛti, what is remembered, grants them extra—what might be called paradigmatic—life. “What is remembered” in the Bhãgavata is remembered in clumps; one dynastic story gives way to philosophical musing and then to didactic discourse. While there are supposedly five specific qualities or lakṣaṇas in official Purāṇic discourse (although the Bhãgavata speaks of ten), these are never adhered to in any systematic way. Rather, “dreamtime,” or “heroic time” as Alex Wayman (1969) called it, devalues the linear and teleological and opens to the seemingly randomly associative. Hence, it is mythic discourse, but not in an Eliadian sense of a primordial beginning, nor is it the amplification of a seminal, overarching narrative: the narrators as well as the narratives jump around like quarks, and the imaginative memory of events deepens and amplifies the fabric of narrative in this thematically associative form.
In terms of the Eliadian categories elaborated upon by Wayman in his Buddhist context of “no time,” “great time,” and “profane time,” the Bhāgavata narrative would seem to be largely that of “great time,” the time of legend and hyperbole. But just as with Buddhist notions of emptiness interpenetrating form, the narratives of Vishnu pervade all arenas of time, even as they stretch beyond mythic-heroic time and into the timeless, while simultaneously interspersing bits of Epic history (i.e., “profane time”) in their pastiche. This interweaving of profane (i.e., supposedly historic) narrative and “deep legend” (occurrences from past millennia and the like) is subsumed under the notion of līlā, the free play of divinity that arguably characterizes the Purāṇic narrative.
THE TIMELESS
Within the Purāṇic narrative, there are ongoing allusions to a timeless dimension. Unlike abstract and abstruse philosophical speculations, these dimensions are very real and are spoken of (in 2.6.3) as the living being giving up misconceptions and living beyond time, and, in book 2’s description of the Absolute worlds, the influence of time is said to be absent (2.9.10).
Ultimately it is līlā, the divine-ludic dimension, that distinguishes the Bhāgavata’s sense of time from its predecessor. Not that the Epic is unaware of the playful nature of seemingly serious events, as the narrative of the great war itself demonstrates, but in the Epic, līlā exists as a backdrop to the harsh realities of dynasties, their conflicted histories, and the slow machinations of their being ground down by time. The Bhāgavata, on the contrary, moves toward ramaṇīyatā, “delight,” as opposed to a liberated acceptance of the loss of everything. The event of the avatāra interrupts time, descends into the cosmograph, and affirms Bādarāyana’s aphorism (Vedānta Sūtras 2.1.33) that the Supreme Lord creates the world merely to play. As Clifford Hospital (1976–1977 and 1980) notes in this regard, the līlās in the Bhāgavata are not associated with the business of time—creation, preservation, and destruction—but rather with the purposeless activity of loving exchange. The Lord does not descend into the world to directly redeem the world, but rather to demonstrate the qualities of loving exchange, which have redemption as their “side effects.” Hence, the avatāra may or may not interrupt the mundane flow of time. In book 11 it is stated that even though the Lord had the capacity to reverse the curse placed upon his own Yadu clan, he sanctioned it in his “form of time” (11.1.24). Much like the spheres that appear in the linear world of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the avatāra is almost incomprehensible to the time-ridden world, but the Bhāgavata’s narrative purportedly allows access to this dimension of līlā.
Rather than an apocalyptic notion of a fall into time and resurrection, where the focus is on atonement and repentance, the Bhāgavata offers a narrative of celebration and a ritual repetition of memory that opens a portal onto an endless flow of events that distill specific notions from both the past and future and also point to possibilities outside the past and future. The sign is not seen as hopelessly cleft from its referent here because the sign, like all discourse, is an aspect of Vishnu, and hence the objective analytical position is seen as a conceit, as Yaśodā finds out when she looks in the mouth of Krishna and sees all the planetary realms (10.8), or as Uddhava understands when he goes to preach the “truth” of nonduality to the cowherd women devotees of Bhagavān and winds up praying to be born as a blade of grass under their feet (10.46). Ever touting itself as the Purāṇa of the “Spirit” told in supremely beautiful verse (1.3.40), the Bhāgavata weaves time and timelessness as inconceivably and simultaneously one and different aspects of the Supreme.
Ultimately, the complexities of time are best understood through devotion as surrender, as the subdued serpent Kāliya realizes after Krishna has danced on his head and exclaims: “Homage to thee who is time, who is the core of time, who is the witness of the permutations of time, to that form of the universe who is its observer, creator, and ultimate cause” (10.16.41).
NOTES
1. See Jacques Barzun’s discussion of Henry James’s “Sense of the Past” in The House of the Intellect (1959).
2. See my discussion of the Bhāgavata as the “aesthetic Purāṇa” in Tales for the Dying: The Death Narrative of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
3. The aesthetics of the Bhāgavata combine the absolute principle of Vishnu, Bhagavān, and Krishna with the classical rasa aesthetics of the Nāṭyaśāstra. See Jarow 2003: 35–36.
4. The other initiating factor would be the glance of Vishnu, which is said to impregnate matter with living entities and thus begin the process of time.
5. The Sāṁkhya Kārikas speak of twenty-four elements, with puruṣa listed as the twenty-fifth. The Bhāgavata’s substituting kāla for puruṣa serves its polemic of equating time with Bhagavān.
