The subtlety of the unit of time is explained in the scripture Anuyogadvāra and other works, by the examples of a strong young tailor tearing up a piece of cloth and of an effort to make a hole in the leaves of a lotus[101] e.g. suppose 100 petals of lotus are kept one over another and if one is to pierce a needle so as to penetrate all the petals, it may appear that all of them have been penetrated simultaneously. But this is not so. Every petal is pierced successively within the smallest fraction of time.
Similarly, as a strong man tears a piece of cloth at once it may sound that the whole piece is torn out in a moment. But this is not true. Because a piece of cloth is woven out of a large number of threads and each thread is made of infinite points of cotton. When the piece of cloth is torn every thread of the cloth and every point of thread needs to be torn separately and each requires an indivisible and smallest fraction of time. A time unit, however, is subtler than the subtlest moment arrived at in these abovesaid processes.