cittas arise and pass away billions per instant

[Sanjay PS]

Hello all,

cittas arise and pass away billions per instant

To say that the problem (dukkha) is made of billions of tiny problems (dukkhas) does not solve the problem, it doesn't even address the problem. One pile of excrement or billions of it - it's all the same: excrement. You have to look for the excrement in the pile, not for the pile(s) or their distribution in time and space. If you cannot see the excrement in a single pile, you are not going to see it in billions either. The time factor has nothing to do with the recognition of excrement as excrement, i.e. with the recognition of experience as dukkha. Remember: It's about suffering and the cessation of suffering, not about putting the excrement under the microscope. Impermanence must be seen through suffering, not in isolation from it. What does your suffering stand for? Why are things other than you want ("impermanent")? See this, repeat seeing this, and be free from it.

An excellent , excellent post , most insightful and useful . May we all not digress from what has been mentioned . Thank you.

sanjay

[Thule]

The Sarvāstivādins use the term “moment” (kṣaṇa) in a highly technical sense as the smallest, definite unit of time that cannot be subdivided, the length of which came to be equated with the duration of mental events as the briefest conceivable entities. There is no Sarvāstivādin consensus on the length of a moment, but the texts indicate figures between 0.13 and 13 milliseconds in modern terms (Gethin 1998, 221; von Rospatt 1995, 94–110).

Not much to do with Buddha Dhamma, but I was curious how they ended up with that specific number:

von Rospatt p. 99, note 218:
Vi 701b8-12: "120 ksanas (0.014 seconds, more precisely: 0.013 period) make up one tatksana
(1.6 seconds). 60 tatksanas make up one lava (1.6 minutes), which [thus] has 7200 ksanas. 30 lavas
make up one muhurta (48 minutes), which [thus] has 216.000 ksanas. 30 muhurtas make up one day and
night (i.e. 24 hours), which [thus] has 6.480.000 ksanas."

24 h/day * 60 min/h * 60 s/min = 86,400 s/day
30 muhurta/day * 30 lava/muhurta * 60 tatksana/lava * 120 ksana/tatksana = 6,480,000 ksana/day
=> 1 ksana = 86,400/6,480,000 = 0.013 seconds

So it seems that 13 milliseconds mentioned in the first quote is based just on the way they divided a day into smaller units of time.