Trikāla

Further information: kāla

trikāla (P. tikāla; T. dus gsum; C. sanshi; J. sanze; K. samse 三世) is translated as "the three times." It refers collectively to the three time periods of "past," "present," and "future."

This term appears in phrases such as buddha trikāla ("buddhas of the three times").

Within Buddhist scholarship, there are a range of views on the nature of existence within the three temporal dimensions of past, present and future.

Donald S. Lopez Jr. states:

As a religion that speaks of lifetimes that extend back into the immeasurable past and a path to enlightenment that unfolds for eons into the future, Buddhism has much to say about time or, in the parlance of Buddhism, the three times: past, present, and future.

To the consternation of the Buddha’s interlocutors and generations of undergraduates, the Buddha refused to say whether time has a beginning. He said it was one of the “questions that tend not toward edification,” in the memorable phrasing of a Victorian translator. Yet it is clear from articulations of Buddhist cosmology that, although individual worlds come into and go out of existence— through four phases called vacuity, creation, abiding, and destruction —there is no beginning to the cycle of rebirth. This doctrine has many implications, including that all sentient beings have been in every possible relationship to all other sentient beings. It is with this in mind that Tibetan lamas use the phrase ma sems can, “sentient beings, our mothers.”

The Buddha also declined to answer the question of whether the cycle of rebirth will ever end. Later Buddhist thinkers say that the cycle of rebirth itself will never end; its limitless population is decreased by one each time someone follows the Buddhist path to nirvana. [...] Much Buddhist practice over the past two-and-a-half millennia has been devoted to the good deeds that produce merit, the good karma, to attain rebirth as a prosperous human or as one of the gods who populate the many Buddhist heavens.

Sources

• Buswell, Robert E.; Lopez, Donald S. (2014), The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Princeton University 
• Lopez, Donald S. Jr. (2018), The Three Times, Rubin Museam of Himalayan Art