The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2499 page)

 
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(1886–1965).
Christian Protestant theologian. He was born in Prussia, and after education at Berlin and Tübingen, and ordination in 1912, he served as a chaplain in the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross. He became professor at Union Theological Seminary until he retired in 1955. He then became professor, first at Harvard, then at Chicago. He was a major and innovative theologian, taking his point of departure from Schelling: symbols, as human creations of meaning (participating in the reality to which they point) mediate between bare objects and conventional signs. But humans are always involved existentially in questions (arising from limitation and above all from awareness of the personal ending which is to come) and predicaments (situations which seem to lead to self-defeat). These questions and predicaments have no solution (and are thus empty symbols in quest of meaning) until they are brought into relation with religious symbols which offer the meaning sought. This is the basis for the principle of correlation which led him to explore the theology of culture. In so far as forms of cultural expression set forth something of unconditional importance, they are expressing that which is religious. Unconditional meaning (
Gehalt
) breaks into the form of a cultural work in such a way that the content of the work can be seen to be a matter of indifference in relation to it. Tillich was later to call the unconditional meaning ‘ultimate concern’. Religion then becomes the state of being unconditionally concerned about that which concerns one unconditionally. Thus ‘God’ is in no way a synonym for ‘ultimate concern’. Indeed, that which is truly God, the God above God, cannot be spoken of except as being-itself: ‘God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.’ But ‘God’ enters our vocabulary because the ground of being enters our lives as the answer to the question implied by human finitude. Time is thereby not simply transition but
kairos
, opportunity.
Not surprisingly, Tillich's ideas are communicated, not simply in technical works (e.g.
Systematic Theology
, 3 vols., 1953–63), but also in sermons (e.g.
The Shaking of the Foundations
, 1948;
The Eternal Now
, 1963) and lectures (e.g.
The Courage to Be
, 1952).

 
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(989–1069).
One of the eighty-four
mah
siddhas
of Indian Tantric Buddhism, and the first human teacher in the
mah
mudr
tradition. He passed on his powers and teachings to N
-ro-pa, through whom they were transmitted into the
Kagyü
school in Tibet.

 
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Time
.

Religious understandings of time rest on human awareness of transition in daily activities, in the movement from birth to death, and in the unfailing periodicity of the sun, moon, stars, and seasons. Much of the religious understanding of time seeks to find connections between these, and to interpret their significance. Therefore, a primary source for a religion's perception of time is to be found in its
cosmology
, which is generally replete with time-related characteristics. The cosmology of the natural world is often endowed with a
soteriological
meaning by using it as a metaphorical milieu for the spiritual path through time, leading to an eternal goal of enlightenment or salvation.
Based on common features found in many (but not all) ancient religions throughout the world, a pattern of cyclical religious behaviour has been observed among these traditions in which there is a regularly recurring need to return to some mythical beginning.
M.
Eliade
associated what is termed ‘sacred’ time with such cyclically governed religious times and ‘profane’ time with ordinary daily temporal existence. Sacred time was experienced in a ritualistic yearly repetition of some mythical creation act, often involving an hero-god who brought about creation and order by fighting and overcoming the forces of darkness, evil, and chaos.
This primitive cyclical experience can be compared with that of the early Israelites, suggesting that they began to deal with this terror from a considerably different spiritual viewpoint, namely that of faith. It was this faith that was the undercurrent nourishing the seeds for the gradual growth over many centuries of a sense of time as progressive and non-cyclical, i.e. with events related significantly to each other. The organization of this into the
Deuteronomic history
was an important step in distinguishing ‘times’ as revealing the purposes of God.
This biblical view of time, or ‘times’, was later expressed primarily in terms of two Gk. words,
kairos
and
chronos
, endowing time roughly with quality and extensiveness, respectively.
Kairos
had the general purport of ‘decisive moment’, or ‘opportunity’. On the other hand, chronos could mean time in general, duration, lifetime, or age.
The early Christians quite naturally continued the Israelite tradition of ‘event-oriented’ time. With the Christians, in addition to the biblical events, there were further decisive sacred events, compressed, of course, into a much shorter period of time. By far the most crucial of these were the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, but continuing with ‘the
acts
of the
apostles’
. Although it was not viewed so in biblical times, for Christians in later centuries and today Jesus as
Christ
stands at the centre of history, BC (before Christ) and AD (
anno Domini
, in the year of the Lord) years being numbered from this time. In general, therefore, in the biblical period, time seems to have been experienced and viewed on three different levels. The first is that of human subjectivity, time as realized in the worldly and religious life of persons and communities. The second is the cosmic level based on the understanding of the order of the natural world, which exhibits a manifold diversity of temporal aspects. The third level is that realized by the divine encounter with God; it is God's eternal time.
It is the interplay of these last two levels that provides the fabric of the Judaeo-Christian, as well as the Islamic, cosmologies. They are ‘one-time’ cosmologies characterized by one unrepeatable beginning and evolving redemptively to a specified end, involving an
eschatology
of final salvation and judgement.
In contrast to the Western religious view of sequential and progressive time, set in a cosmology with an unrepeatable beginning and ending, the Eastern view of time exhibits a cohesive interrelation of both cyclical and non-cyclical characteristics. The cyclical is evident in Hinduism in the earliest times when the
Vedic
altar was considered to be time itself, with 360 bricks for the days and 360 stones for the nights. However, the usual diversity of thought in Indian religion is already apparent in the
S
tras
and the religious philosophy of the six major schools (
dar
ana
) of Hindu thought, with major differences in the understanding of time. However, all six schools do adhere to some common time-related views, perhaps because the problem of time was a central concern in the historical development of these positions. Thus the concept of repeated creation and dissolution of the universe is accepted by all schools, except the
P
rva-M
m
s
; and all, with the Upani
ads, maintain that being cannot arise from nothing; it is uncaused, indestructible, beginningless, and endless.
The awesome periodicity of the Indian cosmology is often cited by Western writers as the basis for a general claim that a strictly cyclical view of time characterizes this tradition. This claim has only very limited validity. First, the yugas are not equal in duration, nor in moral content, and even if they were, it is the karmic growth and progression of the soul through this periodicity that is the essential soteriological feature. Secondly, there is a voluminous scriptural literature in the tradition that meticulously expounds an incredibly broad spectrum of time concepts, most of which are not cyclical.
Nevertheless, the concept of rhythmic repetition, but in altered form, also found its way into the cosmologies of most Buddhist schools. Again the cosmologies provide a milieu for the path to salvation. In this case it means transcending the samsaric cycle of births, deaths, and all attendant suffering, and escaping time with achievement of nirv