Dependent Origination and Impermanence in Buddhism 1 question: I just started learning about Buddhism and I read about the 3 marks of existence. When Buddhism speaks about impermanence does impermanence only refer to our experience (the 5 skhandas) or is outisde world phenomena included and considered impermanent. As I understood it impermanence is a key Buddhist principle. How does Buddhism describe time according to this impermanence doctrine and what is impermanence relationship and connection with time. I have seen a few answers here on a similar question/topic but not really this one so I hope I will get a few answers that can help me understand it.

2 question: Is a dependently arising cycle considered happening in a split second or how fast is it considered happening and what is its relationship and connection with time ??
Impermanence includes everything. For the record, Buddhism only uses the references like inside and outside as compromises with unenlightened way of thinking. In the strict sense, these notions of Inner and Outer arise as result of Dependent Origination. When you go out of subjective frame of reference and speak about Mind Processes at large, everything is unfolding all the time, with some patterns emerging as seeming Inner and Outer.


Technically, this Unfolding IS Being IS Time, as explained by Dogen in his famous lecture on the topic. In other words, it's not that Time is a container for Everything. It is identical with Being or Unfolding, but we sentient beings like to delineate certain aspects, because our minds are reification machines that work in terms of entities and their background. So for us it's only natural to think of time as background or container of events.


Dependent Origination unfolds over time, just like everything else. However, it would be incorrect to talk about concrete time scale, because DO talks about high-level principles in terms of functional relationship. Yes, the seedling comes from the seed and this happens over time, but we don't have to talk about a specific seed, we talk about the principle at large.