So, if I have understood correctly, what you are saying is that both DN 14 and MN 123 consistently use the aorist and the present tense: the first one historically, in relation to specific individuals and events; and the second one mythologically, in relation to general or archetypal individuals and events. That’s indeed a great find, thank you very much for the explanation, Sujato.
Which seems to be confirmed by Dhammanando’s remark that “the same verb in the same tense” --although the aorist is not properly a tense but an aspect-- is applied to the rebirth all kinds of particular people. Thank you too, Dhammanando.
For my part, it has taken me some time to put in order the varied, confusing and not always concurrent grammatical information about the aorist, its meaning and use(s), at least in Greek, although it probably applies to Pali as well. Let me share my finds in a summarized form 
:
First, I must say that the etymology of the word confused me a lot.
The word ‘aorist’, comes from the Greek, ‘aóristos’ (‘ἀόριστος’ ), ‘indeterminate’, ‘indefinite’, ‘unlimited’. It is formed by the negative prefix ‘a-’ (‘α-’), ‘no’, ’in-’, ‘without’, plus ‘horistos’ ((‘όριστος’ )), the participle of the verb ‘horizo’ (‘ὁρίζω’), ‘I determine’, ‘I delimit’, from where the English word ‘horizon’ derives as well.
Interestingly enough, the Greek god name ‘Uranus’ (gr., ‘Ouranós’, ’Οὐρανός’) is a compound formed by ‘ouros’ (‘ὅρος’), ‘limit’, ‘boundary’, and ‘nóos’ (‘νόος’), ‘mind’, its literal meaning being ‘limit-mind’, in the sense of ‘the mind that reaches the horizon’ and, figuratively, ‘sky’, ‘heaven’, ‘firmament’. The myth of Uranus —who didn’t allow his offspring to see the light of the world and thrive— being castrated by his own son, the titan Cronus [gr., Krónos, Κρόνος, from ‘krouoh’ (‘κρούω’), ‘I hit’, ‘I bit’, maybe ‘I cut’, and ‘nóos’ (‘νόος’), ‘mind’, literally ‘I-hit-mind’ or ‘I-cut-mind’, ‘He who cuts (through the limit of) the mind’], and the relatively early confusion of Cronus with Chronus (gr., Khrónos, Χρόνος), the personification of time, god of the ages, also called ‘Eón’ or ‘Aión’ (‘Αίών’), invites in principle to a suggestive understanding of the aorist as a temporal indetermination, “a time before time” or a mythical time. [1]
Thereupon, identifying the aorist with the mythical time myself, I was shocked when I read Sujato’s message saying:
there are two types of time: mythical, represented by the present tense in the sense of a “timeless truth”, and historical, a personal fact about someone’s life, which uses the aorist
(rendered as the simple past). I had taken it the other way around!
Fortunately, I found a neat clarification by a grammarian [2] who acknowledges:
The term ‘aorist’ is one of those whose use creates more confusion than anything else. It is a term that we inherited from the ancient Greeks and that it has been used among us in very different ways. It does not seem that the creation of the term was very lucky, in fact. ‘Aorist’ meant ‘indeterminate’ in Greek, and everything indicates that not even in Ancient Greek there was a clear justification for that denomination. The Greek aorist (without going into many details), in the indicative, basically was a perfective past (Comrie 1976:12) [3]. That is, the equivalent English, “I ate” [simple plast]. […] Nonetheless, there has also been among some the idea that the aorist (actually the “category” of aspect) was something exotic, belonging [only] to some ancient languages like the Greek, that not even Latin, much less the modern Romance languages knew.
Nothing is further from reality. The perfective/imperfective opposition in past tense is very common in the modern languages of the world and, without going any further in the actual Spanish and Basque. ’Aorist’, then, is a term that we should abandon, and replace it by ‘perfective’, which is the one used in its place in all currents of modern linguistics.
Perfective (Comrie 1976:16) is the aspect that contemplates the action or state (“situation”) of the verb as a whole. While the imperfective devotes special attention to the internal structure of the situation.
(My translation.)
Furthermore, although in the indicative the aorist or perfective is usually rendered as simple past, it is also important to distinguish properly between perfect tense and perfective aspect.
The ancient Greek grammar featured the following distinctions for the present and past tenses of the indicative:
- Present (I eat)
- Imperfect (I was eating, I used to eat)
- Perfective or aorist = simple past (I ate)
- Perfect = present perfect (I have eaten)
- Pluperfect = past perfect (I had eaten)
In a shorter more general version, Proto-Indo-European had a three-way aspectual opposition, traditionally called ‘infectum’ (= ‘present’), ‘aorist’, and ‘perfectum’ (= ‘perfect’), which are thought to have been, respectively, modern day imperfective, perfective, and stative (resultant state) grammatical aspects, respectively. [4]
Tense is a grammatical category that points out the time of the action, event, or state, denoted by the verb, in relation to the time of speech, regarded as the present. Thus, we have past, present and future tenses depending the action happens before, during, or after the moment of speech. So tense has to do with a time that is “external” to the time of the action, event or state itself, denoted by a verb.
Aspect, on the other hand, is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time —its own “internal” time and beyond. At this regard, we must clearly distinguish two different ‘aspect polarities’ here: perfect-imperfect and perfective-imperfective.
Perfect aspect indicates the relevance, continuity or bond of a previous [finished] action (Comrie 1976: 56). Thus, the present perfect is used to speak about actions that still are relevant to the present moment even though finished (I have eaten by the time he phone). Likewise, the past perfect is used to speak about a still earlier action that is relevant to another past action which is taken as a reference point (I had eaten when he phoned me).
Conversely, imperfect aspect indicates the irrelevance, discontinuity or lack of bond whatsoever of a previous action with another one (I used to eat by the time he phone, I was eating when he phone). Thus, the imperfect is used to speak about actions, events, or states regardless of a reference point, that is, referred to an ongoing or repeated situation. Notice that, by definition, perfection and imperfection require two non-simultaneous actions.
Perfective aspect (Comrie 1976: 16) indicates that the action, event or state, denoted by a verb, is to be contemplated as a whole, with no consideration to its eventual interior composition or development (I ate); whereas the imperfective aspect lends special attention to the inner structure of the action, event, or state because of its simultaneity (He phoned while I was eating) or progression (I eat). So the present tense is basically imperfective whereas the past tense is perfective or aorist.
All in all, the aorist or perfective, rather than some kind of timeless (mythological) verbal aspect is one that —at least, formally— describes an action, event or state viewed as a simple whole —a unit without interior composition or structure, such as being continuous, repetitive, habitual or in progress.
I have gone longer than expected, sorry. Finishing, just add that during my research I’ve come to an unexpected question: Do we live in a historical time or in a mythological time? —which would remit us back to Sujato’s classification of time in those two types. I’m getting into this “revisionism” in my next post. Thank you!
References:
[1] “Uranus,” URL: http://www.hellenicgods.org/ouranos—ouranos & “Krónos,” URL: http://www.hellenicgods.org/kronos—kronos, in Hellenic Gods, Web: http://www.hellenicgods.org, 2010 (last access, 16 Aug 2018).
[2] Aldai Garai, Gontzal (1998) “A propósito del aoristo vasco,” in Fontes linguae vasconum: Studia et documenta, ISSN 0046-435X, Año nº 30, Nº 79, pp. 377-386. URL: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/26285.pdf (last access, 16 Aug 2018) (In Spanish).
[3] Comrie, Bernard (1976) Aspect: An Introduction to Study of Verbal Aspect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited in [1]. Google Books URL (last access, 16 Aug 2018).
[4] “Aorist,” in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Web: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2018, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorist (last access, 16 Aug 2018).
After correcting and saving my previous post for several times, I had the strong feeling that I was missing something or even making some gross mistake(s). For example, when I asserted “we do indeed live in a mythical time not in a historical time” in such a disjunctively extreme way, I would have had to realize that I was going astray the Middle Way.