I have enough from the provided classical materials to write this thoroughly. Here's the interpretation:

去時 (gamyamāna) — "The Moment of Going"

这个概念在说什么

Imagine you're watching someone walk across a room. The walk seems like the most obvious, undeniable fact in the world: *there she is, moving, right now*. Nāgārjuna (龍樹, c. 2nd–3rd century CE) looks at exactly this scene and asks a question that sounds almost childish but turns out to be surgically precise: *where* is the "going" happening?

His answer is a framework called the Three Times of Motion (三時):

- 已去 (gata) — the already-gone: the stretch of path behind the walker. Motion there is finished, spent, no longer occurring. - 未去 (agata) — the not-yet-gone: the stretch of path ahead. Motion there hasn't started; nothing is happening yet. - 去時 (gamyamāna) — the "going-now": defined in the *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* (《中論》, T1564, Nāgārjuna's root text; Pingala/青目 commentary; Kumārajīva/鳩摩羅什 translation) as 「半去半未去，不離已去、未去故」— "half gone, half not-yet-gone, not separable from the already-gone and the not-yet-gone."

That definition is the whole point. 去時 is not a third *thing* sitting alongside the other two. It is the *boundary* between them — the seam. And a seam has no independent width.

The opponent in the text objects with what feels like common sense: 「動處則有去，此中有去時，非已去未去，是故去時去」— "Where there is motion, there is going; that is precisely the going-now; it is neither already-gone nor not-yet-gone; therefore, in the going-now, going really happens." Their evidence is direct perception (現量): *I can see the activity happening right now. In the already-gone, the activity has ceased; in the not-yet-gone, it hasn't arisen. So the only place going can be real is here, in the present moment of motion.*

This is, frankly, what any of us would say. It is also what Nāgārjuna dismantles.

The interdependence refutation (相待破). His reply: 「云何於去時，而當有去法？若離於去法，去時不可得」— "How can there be an act-of-going *within* the going-now? If you separate the act-of-going from the going-now, the going-now cannot be found." The commentary sharpens this: if the going-now existed independently of the act-of-going, it would be like "fruit already inside the vessel" (器中有果) — a container that doesn't need its contents. But that's not how it works. You cannot peel the "now-ness" off the "moving" and have a leftover moment called 去時. The two are mutually constitutive (相待). 「若言去時去，是人則有咎；離去有去時，去時獨去故」— "Whoever says 'the going-now goes' commits a fault: it implies a going-now that exists apart from going, and then goes on its own."

The "two goings" absurdity (二去過). Nāgārjuna presses further: 「若去時有去，則有二種去：一謂為去時，二謂去時去」— "If the going-now *contains* going, then there are two goings: one that constitutes the going-now, and another that occurs *within* it." And if there are two goings, there must be two goers (二去者) — one person would have to be two agents simultaneously. 「一人有二去二去者，此則不然」— "One person with two goings and two goers — that is untenable."

The goer and the going mutually create each other. The chapter's conclusion: 「去者因去法成，去法因去者成」— "The goer is established through the act-of-going; the act-of-going is established through the goer." Neither comes first. The commentary uses the analogy of a person and a city: you can't have "the one who goes to the city" before there is a going, and you can't have a going before there is someone who goes. They arise together, like two sheaves of reeds leaning on each other.

The argument generalizes. Nāgārjuna doesn't stop at locomotion. He extends the same three-times analysis to "setting out" (發, the initiation of motion): 「已去中無發，未去中無發，去時中無發，何處當有發？」— and then to "stopping" or "abiding" (住): 「去未去無住，去時亦無住，所有行止法，皆同於去義」— "All modes of movement and rest follow the same logic as going." The point is not really about walking. It is about whether *any* process — any change, any event, any "happening" — possesses an intrinsic, findable core when you look for it.

Where this sits in the path. The *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* opens with the famous dedication: 「不生亦不滅，不常亦不斷，不一亦不異，不來亦不去」— "Neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanent nor annihilated, neither one nor different, neither coming nor going." 去時 analysis is the working-through of that last pair. The target is not the conventional fact that people walk to the store. The target is the deeply held, usually unconscious conviction that beneath the flow of experience there is a *solid something* — a real moment, a real motion, a real mover — that exists from its own side, independently, findably. Nāgārjuna's conclusion is that there isn't. Motion is dependently originated (緣起); it is empty of intrinsic nature (自性空). This is not nihilism — people still walk — but it is the refusal to reify the walk into a self-sufficient entity.

In the broader soteriology of the Madhyamaka (中觀) school, this analysis is a training in seeing (正見). The same logic that dissolves the "going-now" applies, mutatis mutandis, to the self: you cannot find a "self" apart from the five aggregates (五蘊), nor aggregates apart from the self; the self is neither identical to nor different from its processes. The *Heart Sūtra* (《心經》) compresses this into 「照見五蘊皆空，度一切苦厄」— "seeing clearly that the five aggregates are empty, one crosses beyond all suffering." 去時 is one small, precise drill in that same seeing.

生活里的走查

Let's walk the concept through a Tuesday morning, step by step, mapping each piece to its classical definition.

Scene: You're late for a meeting, speed-walking down a corridor.

1. 已去 (the already-gone). The ten meters of hallway behind you. Your legs are no longer there. The motion is *finished* — 「作業已滅」, the activity has ceased. You cannot point to that stretch and say "going is happening there." It's a memory, a trace of shoe-rubber on tile. Classical mapping: exact. The already-gone is where going *was* but *is not*.

2. 未去 (the not-yet-gone). The twenty meters ahead, including the glass door you haven't reached. Nothing is happening there yet — 「未有作業」, no activity has arisen. The floor ahead is just floor. You haven't "gone" it. Classical mapping: exact. The not-yet-gone is pure potentiality with zero actual motion in it.

3. 去時 (the going-now). Here's where the drill gets interesting. You feel *certain* there is a "right now" in which your going is solidly occurring. But try to locate it. The sole of your shoe that just left the ground? That's already 已去. The foot swinging forward through the air? Its position is smeared across a span — the front edge is "not yet" at the landing point, the back edge is "already" past the push-off point. The "present moment of going" turns out to be, exactly as Nāgārjuna defines it, 「半去半未去」— half already-gone, half not-yet-gone. There is no residue left over that is *purely* present going.

The most common mis-mapping here: people think Nāgārjuna is denying that they are walking. He isn't. You will still arrive at the meeting, possibly out of breath. What he's denying is that "the present moment of going" is a *self-contained entity* you can isolate, freeze, and point to as "the real going, right here." The going-now is a *boundary*, not a *thing*. It's like the "edge" of a shadow: perfectly real as a feature of the scene, but try to cut it out and hold it — there's nothing there that isn't just "where the lit part meets the dark part."

4. 去法 (the act-of-going) vs. 去時 (the going-now). You might think: "Fine, the *moment* is fuzzy, but the *activity* is real — my legs are pumping!" Nāgārjuna's 相待破 addresses exactly this. The act-of-going and the going-now are mutually dependent. You cannot have "a going-now" with no going in it (an empty container), and you cannot have "a going" that isn't occurring in any time (a free-floating verb with no tense). They arise together. 「若離於去法，去時不可得」. Trying to separate them is like trying to separate "the slope" from "the hill" — you can distinguish them in thought, but there aren't two objects.

5. 去者 (the goer). Now the subtlest layer. *Who* is doing this going? You feel like a solid agent propelling yourself down the corridor. But the text says: 「去者因去法成，去法因去者成」— the goer is constituted by the going (you're "a walker" only while walking; sitting at your desk, you're not a goer), and the going is constituted by the goer (motion doesn't happen ownerlessly; it's *your* legs). Neither is prior. You don't first exist as a goer and then acquire a going; you don't first have a going and then assign it to a goer. They co-arise. The "person" and the "city" in the commentary's analogy: "the one who goes to the city" is unintelligible without the city, and the city-as-destination is unintelligible without someone heading there.

Where people mis-map this in daily life: We tend to think of ourselves as a fixed agent *to whom* motion happens, or a fixed agent *who initiates* motion from a position of prior existence. The text says: no. You are "a goer" only *in the going*. Strip the process away and there is no leftover agent standing there. This is not a metaphysical denial of your body. It's a denial that "the one who acts" is a self-sufficient *thing* separable from the acting.

6. 發 (the initiation). You decided to get up from your chair. When exactly did the going *start*? In the already-gone? It's past. In the not-yet-gone? It hasn't arrived. In the going-now? But we just showed the going-now has no independent location. 「已去中無發，未去中無發，去時中無發，何處當有發？」The "decision to start" dissolves under the same analysis. And yet — you stood up. You walked. The initiation happened; it just doesn't have a findable, punctual, self-sufficient *location*.

7. 住 (stopping, abiding). You arrive at the meeting room and stand still. Is *that* solid? 「去未去無住，去時亦無住，所有行止法，皆同於去義。」Stopping is just as dependently originated as going. "Standing still" is defined relative to the corridor, the building, the rotating Earth. There is no absolute rest, no self-sufficient "abiding." All modes of movement and stillness (行止法) follow the same logic.

A second scene, for texture: scrolling your phone on the subway.

Your thumb swipes. Content flows. There seems to be a "now" in which the scrolling is happening. But the frame your thumb just left is 已去; the frame not yet rendered is 未去; the "current frame" is a composite of pixels still being refreshed (half-old, half-new) — 半去半未去. The "you" scrolling is constituted by the scrolling (you're "a scroller" only while doing it; the moment you pocket the phone, that agent vanishes). The app's algorithm treats you as a stable user-profile, a fixed 去者 to whom content is delivered. Nāgārjuna would say the algorithm is committing exactly the 「二去者」 error: reifying a goer who exists prior to and independent of the going. You are not a fixed self *having* a scrolling-experience. You are a dependently-arising event that *is* the scrolling, the seeing, the swiping, the wanting-to-see-the-next-thing — none of which has a findable core.

当代人为什么需要它

1. The tyranny of the "right now." Contemporary life is organized around an idolized present moment: the notification that demands immediate response, the live feed that insists *this* is happening *now*, the productivity framework that slices your day into discrete "focus blocks." All of this assumes the present is a solid, isolable unit — a 去時 with genuine, independent content. Nāgārjuna's analysis gently pries that assumption apart. The "now" you're trying to optimize is a boundary, not a brick. You can't stockpile it, freeze it, or own it. Recognizing this doesn't make you less effective; it loosens the anxious grip that treats each moment as a possession you're failing to use well enough.

2. The self as process, not substance. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience increasingly describe the self as a narrative construction, a "bundle" of processes without a central homunculus. (This is a rough parallel, not an equivalence — neuroscience has not "proven" anattā, and the hard problem of consciousness remains wide open; brain-imaging studies show correlates of self-referential processing but cannot settle whether there is or isn't an intrinsic self.) Nāgārjuna arrived at a structurally similar insight by pure analysis two millennia ago: the goer is constituted by the going; strip the processes and no agent remains. For anyone who feels the pressure of "finding yourself" or "being authentic" — as though there were a fixed core self waiting under the layers — the 去時 analysis offers a different frame: you are not a noun that occasionally verbs. You are a verb that occasionally looks like a noun. The relief in that reframe is considerable.

3. Against reification in algorithmic life. Recommendation engines, credit scores, personality assessments — all of these work by freezing a flowing process into a static profile. You *are* your click-history. You *are* your score. This is the 「離去法有去者」 error industrialized: the assumption that the agent exists independently of the activity, and can therefore be captured, stored, and predicted apart from it. Nāgārjuna's insistence that goer and going are mutually constitutive (互成) is a philosophical antidote to being flattened into a data-point. You are not your last thousand clicks. You are not separable from what you're doing, but you are also not *reducible* to it, because "it" has no fixed essence either.

4. The liberation angle — why this isn't just philosophy. In the Buddhist path, the reason to analyze motion is not to win an argument. It is to erode the habit of *grasping* (執取). We suffer because we treat flowing, dependently-arisen events as solid things we can possess, control, or be threatened by. The 去時 analysis is a precision tool for that erosion: you look at the most undeniable, visible, "obviously real" process — a body moving through space — and you discover it won't hold still under scrutiny. Not because it's an illusion, but because "holding still" was never what it was. If even *this* can't be pinned down, what exactly were you clinging to when you clenched around your career, your relationship, your self-image? The letting-go that follows is not nihilistic. It's the relaxation of a grip that was never holding anything solid anyway.

This is the connection to the *Heart Sūtra*'s (《心經》) 「照見五蘊皆空，度一切苦厄」— "seeing clearly that the five aggregates are empty, one crosses beyond all suffering." The five aggregates (五蘊: form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, consciousness) are the full inventory of what we call "a person." Nāgārjuna's 去時 analysis is one focused drill on one slice of that inventory (the "form" aggregate's most visible behavior: locomotion). Master the drill, and the same move generalizes: 「所有行止法，皆同於去義」— all movement and stillness follow the same logic. And from there, the generalization to feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness is a matter of applying the same three-times scrutiny.

常见误读与澄清

Misreading 1: "Nāgārjuna says motion doesn't exist."

He doesn't. The *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* is not denying that people walk, that arrows fly, that rivers flow. Conventional, dependently-arisen motion is everywhere and is not the target. The target is *svabhāva* (自性) — intrinsic, independent, findable existence. The claim is: motion exists, but not *from its own side*. It exists dependently — on the goer, the path, the already-gone, the not-yet-gone, the conventions of language that carve "a walk" out of the undivided flow. Denying intrinsic existence is not denying existence. This is the Middle Way (中道) between eternalism (things are solid and permanent) and nihilism (nothing is real).

Misreading 2: "The going-now is just a mathematical instant, like a derivative."

It's tempting to map 去時 onto the calculus notion of an instantaneous velocity — the limit of Δx/Δt as Δt→0. But Nāgārjuna's point is not that the instant is *infinitely small*; it's that the instant is *not self-sufficient*. A derivative is still a well-defined mathematical object. Nāgārjuna is saying the "going-now" is not a well-defined object at all — it's a relational boundary (半去半未去) that has no content apart from the two stretches it separates. The analogy to calculus can be a helpful entry point, but it breaks down precisely where Nāgārjuna's argument gets going: the derivative *exists* as a mathematical entity; 去時, under analysis, does not.

Misreading 3: "This is just Zeno's paradoxes in Buddhist clothing."

Zeno (Achilles, the arrow, the dichotomy) and Nāgārjuna share a surface resemblance: both use the infinite divisibility of space and time to generate puzzles about motion. But their projects differ fundamentally. Zeno's paradoxes are typically read as *reductios* against the reality of motion, in service of Parmenidean monism (motion is illusion; Being is one and unchanging). Nāgārjuna is not arguing that motion is illusion. He is arguing that motion is *empty of intrinsic nature* — which is a positive claim about dependent origination (緣起), not a denial of conventional reality. Also, Zeno targets the *continuity* of motion; Nāgārjuna targets the *self-sufficiency* of its temporal phases. The "two goings" argument (二去過) and the mutual-constitution argument (去者去法互成) have no real parallel in Zeno.

Misreading 4: "If the goer and the going are mutually dependent, that's just a boring circular definition."

It's not a definition; it's an ontological claim. The point is not that the *words* "goer" and "going" are interdefined in a dictionary. The point is that the *things themselves* — the agent and the action — arise together and cannot be separated in reality. You cannot find a goer who existed before any going (a soul that chose a body), nor a going that belongs to no one (an ownerless process). This rules out both substance-metaphysics (a permanent self that "has" experiences) and process-nihilism (impersonal flux with no continuity). The mutual constitution is the Middle Way applied to agency.

Misreading 5: "This is purely intellectual; it has no meditation or practice relevance."

In the Madhyamaka contemplative tradition, this analysis is not armchair philosophy. It is a *vipaśyanā* (觀) object. You watch your own experience — a thought arising, an emotion shifting, a body moving — and you apply the three-times scrutiny: where did it come from (已去中無發)? Where is it going (未去)? Where is it *right now* (去時中無住)? You find no punctual, solid "happening." What you find is a flowing, dependently-arisen display that resists being pinned to any location. The relaxation that follows — the unclenching around a "self" that was trying to stand on a "moment" that was never there — is the soteriological payoff. The text's final generalization (「所有行止法，皆同於去義」) is an invitation to extend this seeing to everything: sitting, standing, thinking, feeling, dying. All of it follows the same logic. None of it has a findable core. And none of it needs one to function.

*One last note on the famous verse that frames all of this.* The *Mūlamadhyamakakārikā* opens with the 「八不」— the eight negations: neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanent nor annihilated, neither one nor different, neither coming nor going (不來亦不去). The entire second chapter, the 觀去來品 (Examination of Going and Coming), is the working-out of that last pair. 去時 is where the argument bites hardest, because it is where our intuition is strongest: *surely, right now, something is really happening*. Nāgārjuna's genius is to show that even *here* — at the very point of maximum phenomenological vividness — there is no self-sufficient entity to be found. Only a half-gone, half-not-yet-gone, mutually-dependent, ungraspable flow. Which is to say: only life, as it actually is, before we freeze it into a thing.