 How so? Let us start with the most comprehensive of these categories, as applied to these single whole moments: are these moments “the same as” or “different from” one another? Considered purely as moments, the answer is “neither.” For it must be noted that the conception of a series of moments laid out in a neutral timeline, seen as a set of derivative entities called moments which are somehow laid out in a more basic element (“time,” perhaps, or “nature”) which is not itself a moment, is no longer possible here. If there is no other substratum in which anything can exist besides moments of experience, this applies to the apprehension of “other” moments as well: these apprehensions of other moments can only exist in some moment. So we now must slightly amend the above claim about the basic constituents, and say instead that the most basic elements are not moments, plural, as if these were an array of genuinely distinct entities that could somehow be viewed from outside, but simply speak of “this one moment.” Their plurality exists only from within some specific single moment. This is why moments cannot be said to simply “different” from one another. Yet this impermanent moment is not the same as anything else either; it is of the essence of being a present moment qua moment to be non-identical to other moments, i.e., to not-be the past and future moments, and it is the essence of experiencable contents to require contrast to what they are not. Indeed, for me to experience the moment as presently occurring at all, I must also be experiencing the difference between present and not-present in the present; the pastness and futureness to which it has to be contrasted to have the quality of being present must in some manner also be present to me. So because we have no durational things, we are radicalizing impermanence, the absolute transitoriness of moments, which points to an absolute difference between them; but because moments are not like mutually exclusive objects laid side by side in a neutral medium, we have no plurality of moments; their alleged difference is really only each moment reappearing in a new form as a component in all other moments, which might be described as each moment’s unceasing transforming continuance, its radical permanence. Moments are neither the same nor different from one another, and thus neither impermanent nor permanent, or if we prefer, both impermanent and permanent. It is this paradoxical nature of every possible moment of experience that is the “the inconceivable” to be directly realized in Tiantai contemplation.