The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s8.81

v2.c40.s8.81

Naturally it might be expected that from an examination of the relation of the Ātman to the questions of time and space some light would be cast on the aspect in which the Ātman was viewed. But unfortunately the account of time in the Upaniṣads is quite valueless from the point of view of philosophy: in the Atharvaveda we have Kāla set forth as the highest principle of the universe, and the waters and even Prajāpati are derived from it.² In the Upaniṣads we have little more than this: an affectedly obscure passage in the later part of the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad³ exalts time as being the Brahman, the highest principle, the source of all that is; the Çvetāçvatara⁴ mentions time, nature, necessity, accident, material, and spirit as various rival theories of being, but declares time as past, present, and future to be inferior to the Brahman; and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad⁵ derives time from the Brahman, and declares it to be lord of the past and the future. In the view of Çaṅkara,⁶ while time is absolutely non-existent in the true sense of existence, since all but the one is illusion, time, space and causality are in themselves on the standpoint of the lower knowledge truly real; but it is perfectly clear that in the case of the Upaniṣads the nature of time has not received any real investigation.