It is true, we should concede at the outset, that Buddhism is not a “historical religion” in the sense that applies to the monotheistic faiths of the Semitic world. What the Buddha discovered in his experience of enlightenment, so the Buddhist scriptures tell us, was not any new revelation irrupting into the world for the first time, but a timeless truth about the nature of reality, identical to the truth discovered by all other enlightened sages before him. Thus, even the central event of Buddhist mythology —the Buddha’s experience of illumination under the Bodhi tree —is not viewed as a decisive historical event in the sense that Jews, Christians, or Muslims might use to speak of the receipt of the ten commandments by Moses, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus, or the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad. Indeed, it is a central contention of virtually all schools of Buddhism that the Buddha’s experience is by definition repeatable and is accessible (at least in theory) to all human beings.

The agenda in the present study, then—for to raise such a question without facing it oneself would be illegitimate —has been to demonstrate that we will miss (and misunderstand) a great deal of what has gone on in Buddhist history if we assume that this tradition has been indifferent to historical change. On the contrary, it is my contention that the question of “what time it is” has mattered, and at times has mattered very much, to a substantial proportion of Buddhist believers. A major objective of this study has been to demonstrate that there is considerable evidence in the Buddhist canonical literature itself that, far from being concerned only with “timeless realities,” the Buddhist tradition has often paid careful attention to the transitory realities of this earth.