Causal Set Theory, the Growing Block, and the Buddhist Debate on the Three Times: What the Earliest Vibhajjavādin Records Say

An answer to an invitation in causal-set quantum gravity — and why the tradition that calls itself Vibhajjavāda is its foil, not its twin In 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." This 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: - 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. - 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. The 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. So 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. What the Theravāda offers a causal-set physicist is a contrast, and its use is that it locates the disagreement exactly: - 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. - A consciousness can take a past object without being objectless (Kathāvatthu IX.6). This 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. Keywords: causal set theory, sequential growth, growing block, presentism, eternalism, temporal becoming, Buddhist philosophy of time, Kathāvatthu, Abhidharmakośa, Sarvāstivāda, Kāśyapīya, Vibhajjavāda, Theravāda, Sorkin, Dowker. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/the-vibhajjavadin-view-of-time. Its SHA-256 is b57668357f9cf7d8f36fb4911af43bed43e69db1083f026b09ec0e39970c0e54, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.