Shi 時 is commonly translated into English as “time.” Time is an intellectual concept that requires a metaphoric model since time has no concrete reality. “Before 1915 space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it.” “[S]pace and time are now dynamic quantities”; “space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe,” Stephen Hawking remarks, and on the personal level, “it was natural to think that space and time went on forever.”[1] Most of us conceptualize time, and conceive time as something we can spend, save, invest, or borrow, even win or lose.

There are essentially two “root metaphors” used to establish the Western conceptual schemes of time. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the mortal world at a particular time and it will come to an end one day. In this scheme, God's eternal time contrasts with the bounded time of the mortal world. In other words, people conceive the lives of individuals as discrete corps with a beginning (birth) and an end (death). In this duration, each person is morally responsible for one's acts before the God who made him/her. The God will judge each individual according to one's acts at the end of this time span. On the other hand, in the traditional Western philosophical-scientific tradition, both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. Moments of absolute time are understood as analogous to the continuous sequence of points on a line. Such a model is associated with a progressive idea of history in which time moves forward without repeating itself.

There is no classical Chinese word equivalent in meaning to the English word time. The original meaning of shi 時 is “timeliness” or “seasonality,” in which both time and space are affected. In The Analects, Confucius spoke by a river: “It is what passes like that, indeed, not ceasing day or night.”[2] Here, the term shi 逝 denotes “what passes” or “passes by”; what we call time is absent. Confucius simply contrasts the passing river with “passing.” What “passes” is both that which we call time and life. “Passing,” associated with the ultimate reality, is one of the names of Tao, or the ultimate but nameless reality in Tao Te Ching: “I do not know its name, so style it Tao. Forced to utter it a name I call it the Great. Great means passing by, passing by means going far away, and going far away means returning.”[3]

In other words, the Chinese idea of time is understood within the specific space. According to Yuelin 月令, or the Monthly Order, written no later than the third century B.C., spring affects the cardinal point east, and is dominated by the agent of wood; summer affects south, and is dominated by the fire agent; autumn affects west, and is dominated by the metal agent; winter affects north, and is dominated by the water agent. The earth agent affects the central location of the intersections of the four cardinal directions, and dominates the four seasons.[4] By extension, shi, seasonality or timeliness, refers to doing something at the appropriate time (which is determined by harmonious associations with the theory of the Five Agents), and at which time an action can succeed.

Unlike the Western conceptual schemes of time, there is no story that describes the creation of the world out of nothingness and marks the beginning of time in the early Chinese texts. In Chinese chronologies, time is not counted from a single date, such as the birth of Christ, but from repeated historical beginnings, or the foundation of a dynasty, or a human royal family. On the personal level, individual lives are certainly bound by birth and death, but each person's life is regarded as a link within the continuum of the ancestral lineage, which includes both the living and the dead.

However, the ancestral spirits related directly to the living through rituals such as food offering, etc. These spirits were not gods like those of ancient Greece, nor were they souls who stood before an almighty God to be judged. As sinologist Sarah Allan at London University indicates: “The spirits were only important as they related to the living; they had no life of their own after death. There was no ‘other,’ supernatural world of gods who were different in kind from human beings and interacted with one another, like Mount Olympus of the ancient Greeks where the gods ate ambrosia, drank nectar and enacted the dramas of their own relationships, occasionally dallying in human affairs and falling in love with mortals. Nor was there an earlier era, at least in the textual tradition, before the beginning of time, when gods inhabited the earth. Gods, when they come to be distinguished from ancestors, were simply other mortals who continued to exercise power after death over people who were not their descendants and to receive offerings from them.”[5]

The approach of describing the Chinese idea of time as cyclical, or sometimes as a spiral, deriving from a play on the Western geometrical metaphor for time, is the alternative to a straight line for sinologists. It is helpful as a means of differentiating the Chinese concept from the Western metaphor of a straight line, but not as a Chinese metaphor for time.