  In the Nyāya-sūtra, Gautama mentions an argument against the possibility of present time remarkably similar to (and perhaps even derived from) Nāgārjuna’s arguments against motion. NS 2.1.39 (paraphrased): There is no such thing as the present time, because, when an object is falling to the ground, each point on its descent belongs either to the already-traversed sector or to the yet-to-be-traversed sector. There is therefore, no point on the trajectory to which the present time can be attributed. The present time is an imaginary point of demarcation between the past and the future. Gautama replies (NS 2.1.40-42) to this by saying (i) that the concepts of ‘past’ and ‘future’ are relative to that of the ‘present’, and not to each other, and (ii) that the denial of the present has an absurd consequence, that nothing can be known perceptually, as perception functions in the present. The point of (i), perhaps, is that even if the present is just a boundary, it is not thereby imaginary.