So it came to pass that (other) beings saw them practising sexual intercourse and some threw dirt and some threw ashes and some threw cow dung at them, saying “Perish, unclean ones! Perish, unclean ones! How can one being do that to another?” (DN 27)
The Aggañña Sutta goes on to say that this is the origin of the custom prevalent in some places of throwing ashes at a newly wedded couple. “What was at one time considered unrighteous (adhamma) is now considered righteous (dhamma).” Those beings seen to be engaging in sexual intercourse were banned from entering villages or towns and so they began to construct huts for concealment.
The account in the Visuddhimagga is a little different, and relates the appearance of sexual differentiation directly to the eating of rice.
From the eating of this coarse food, urine and faeces are formed in their bodies. To expel these substances, open wounds appear on their bodies. The males develop the male form, the females develop the female one. (Vism 13:51)
The development of sexuality is a critical transition in the devolution process. By becoming sexual those beings left behind the last vestiges of their primordial brahmā nature and can now be said to be fully human. It is interesting to see that this change was not a smooth one, and was for a time fiercely resisted by those not yet so “advanced” in the process. Sexuality and sexual desire are defining characteristics of the plane of sense-desire (kāmabhūmi) of humans and devas as contrasted with the form plane (rūpabhūmi) of the brahmā beings. These beings are now fully embodied in the coarse materiality of this level.
Some beings become lazy about the daily chore of gathering, and start storing rice for several days. The plants are put under stress by this more intense harvesting and devolve into the modern type of rice which requires much work to plant and harvest. This leads to the institution of private property as each one seeks to work and protect his own field. It is significant that the storing of food stocks is seen as the sixth step in the decline from the state of nature. Storing up goods to enjoy later is said to be one of things an arahant will never do (AN 9:7). Human society as we know it begins now, with the institution of private property.
In the seventh and last stage, theft arises as some beings steal from others’ fields, which leads to the institution of government to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. This is done by choosing one among them to be king, Mahāsammata “The Great Elect,” who is the first among all human kings. There follows the institution of the four castes, and the samaṇas (ascetic wanderers) who are outside the caste system.
We will examine this stage of the process in more detail in Part Three, which deals with the human realm (§ 3:1,5). It is worth noting, however, the underlying political idea which this passage contains. Government and the caste system are not divinely ordained as the brahmins maintained, but are a socially agreed construct. This is a very early precursor of the “social contract” theory of politics elaborated by such thinkers as Locke and Hobbes. It can also be said that in this view government is not a positive good but a necessary evil, made so by the increasingly immoral nature of mankind.
2:6 THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY
The Aggañña account takes us up to a time that may be thought of as the early historical period, with modern humans living in towns and villages, farming and paying taxes to an organized government. Another sutta in the Dīgha Nikāya, the Cakkavatisīhanāda Sutta, (DN 26) carries the story from the distant past to the present to the far future when the Buddha Metteyya will arise in the world.
This begins with the rule of a cakkavatti (“Wheel-Turner”, a universal monarch)156 named Daḷhamemi. This king ruled the world righteously until the day he retired from the world in old age and handed authority over to his son. Six successive monarchs ruled in this manner, fulfilling all the duties of a cakkavatti. But the seventh in the line neglected one of those duties by failing to give wealth to the poor. As a result of this, some of the poor people took to robbery. When one was apprehended and brought before the king he pleaded that he only stole because he had no other means to live, so the king gave him some wealth to start a business.
Obviously, this was an ill-considered procedure and others took to robbery in order to get wealth from the king. To put a stop to it the king now went to the opposite extreme and had the next culprit executed. This caused the desperate people to take up arms and engage in armed robbery. Thus begins a long period of renewed decline in the human race. With each succeeding generation there ensued a decline in life-span, beauty (vaṇṇa) and morality. At the time of the righteous kings the human lifespan was 80,000 years and the process of decline may be summarized as follows:
Each stage represents one generation, for example the people who lived for 10,000 years had children who lived only 5,000 years and so forth.
The moral lapses of the generation whose children lived only 200 or 250 years are given somewhat vague names in the text of the sutta, but these are precisely defined in the commentary. Adhammarāga means literally “unrighteous desire” and is defined in the commentary as referring to incest. Visamalobha means “immoderate greed” and is defined by the commentary as being an excessive desire for material goods. Micchādhamma means something like “wrong ways” which is vague enough to refer to almost anything, but the commentary says it refers to homosexuality, “Men desire men and women desire women.”157
This far into the sutta, we have presumably reached the present time, or at least the time of the Buddha. The span of human life as given in the Pali canon is one hundred years; a common formula is “one lives long who lives for a hundred years or a little more.”158 The sutta passes over the time of the Buddha Gotama in silence and moves on into a future of further decline. The nadir of human existence is reached when the lifespan will have declined to just ten years. This period is described in the text as follows:
There will come a time when the lifespan of humans is just ten years. Amongst these people, girls will reach the age of marriage at five years old. Among the people with a lifespan of ten years the flavours of butter, ghee, oil, honey, treacle and salt will have disappeared. Among them, the kudrūsaka grain will be the chief food, just as rice and meat are today.
Among the people with ten year lifespans, the ten ways of right conduct will have completely disappeared and the ten ways of wrong conduct will prevail. Among them, the word kusala (“moral”, lit. “skillful”) will not exist, so how could moral actions exist? Among the people with ten year lifespans, there will be no (respect for) mother or father or samaṇas or brahmins, nor for the elders of the clan. Now those who do show such respect are considered praiseworthy, in that time it will be considered praiseworthy to lack respect for mother and father etc.
Among the people with ten year lifespans no account will be taken of mother, aunt, mother-in-law, teacher’s wife or other such revered women. The entire world will go together in confusion, like goats or pigs or cocks or dogs or jackals. (The sub-commentary makes the meaning clear; they will take their own mothers and so forth “as if they were their wives”).
Among the people with ten year lifespans fierce animosity, anger and hatred will arise. They will have the minds of killers. Between mother and son, between father and son, between brother and sister, fierce animosity, anger and hatred will arise. Just as when a hunter sees his prey, they will have the minds of killers.
And among those people there will come to be a seven day “sword time” (sattha-antarakappa).159 They will perceive one another as if they were wild beasts. Sharp swords will appear in their hands (the commentary explains that anything they hold in their hands, even a blade of grass, will turn into a weapon). Taking the swords, and crying out, “There is a beast! There is a beast!” they will slay one another. (DN 26)
This is how the devolving process will end in our world, but the commentary goes on to explain that in some cycles it may unfold differently. There are three kinds of antarakappa (“intermediate period”), all of which result in a great destruction of liv
ing beings:
1. A dubbhikkha (“famine”) antarakappa occurs when the chief defilement of the people is excessive greed (lobha). When the great famine is over, most of the people who have died are reborn as petas (hungry ghosts) because of the power of their longing for food.
2. A roga (“disease”) antarakappa occurs when the chief defilement is confusion (moha). After the great plague most of the beings are reborn in the deva realms, because their concern for each other’s suffering, lead them to develop minds filled with loving-kindness (mettā).
3. A sattha (“sword”) antarakappa occurs when hatred (dosa) prevails among the people. Most of the slain are reborn in niraya (the hell realms) because of the many acts of killing they have committed (DN-a 26).
According to the Abhidharmakośa, the two continents of Aparagoyanā and Pubbavideha do not suffer any of these extreme calamities, but when Jambudīpa is going through them, the people of the eastern and western continents do suffer from “wickedness, bad colour, weakness, hunger and thirst” (AK 3:6, p. 490). By inference we can conclude that Uttarakuru does not endure any special sufferings at all at these times.
However it unfolds, the antarakappa means that most of the human beings in the world are killed. It marks the end of the declining period of the cycle. There are, however, a few survivors who begin a new ascending period. In the case of a “sword time” as in our sutta, those who survive are the few who hide themselves in the forest to avoid the killing spree. When they emerge and find one another, they mutually agree to take on the precept of not killing. By taking on just this much morality their lifespan doubles to twenty years. In the next phase of the world’s evolution the lifespan doubles in each generation as the people become more ethical in stages, until the peak of 80,000 years is again reached.
The world then will have reached its zenith in a kind of golden age, albeit one that might not appeal to us in all its particulars. The text describes it as follows:
Among those people who will live for 80,000 years only three diseases will be known; desire (icchā), hunger (anasana), and old age (jarā). The island-continent of Jambudīpa will be powerful and wealthy. (The roof eaves of each house will overlap those of its neighbour)160 in the villages, towns and royal cities. Jambudīpa will be so full it will seem to be without any gap,161 just like a thicket of reeds or bamboo. The Bārāṇasī of today will be a royal capital city named Ketumatī, powerful and wealthy, with many people and provisions. In Jambudīpa there will be 84,000 cities with Ketumatī as the chief. (DN 26)
It will be at that time that both a cakkavatti (“wheel-turning”) monarch named Saṅkha, and the future Buddha Metteyya162 will arise, the last Buddha of this mahākappa.
This is as far as the account in the Cakkavatisīhanāda Sutta takes us, and there is no indication in the Pali sources that this cycle of decline and recovery is repeated. However, if we turn to the Abhidharmakośa we find that that text adds some further sub-divisions to the four major divisions of a mahākappa. Each of the major phases of the cycle is divided into twenty antarakappa163 of equal length. In the unfolding aeon it takes one antarakappa for the world to be formed and nineteen for it to be filled with beings descending from the Ābhāsvara realm (Pali = Ābhassara). In the unfolded aeon we are considering here, the first antarakappa begins with the beings arrived from the Ābhāsvara plane who have a potential lifespan of “infinite” length. This really means their lifespan is longer than the antarakappa, but none of them live to see it. That is because during the rest of that first antarakappa, the lifespan of the humans declines as we have seen in the account of the Aggañña Sutta, down to a lower limit of ten years. This is followed by eighteen antarakappas where the lifespan rises up by stages to eighty thousand years and then declines again to ten years. The last antarakappa is one of increase only; the lifespan increases one last time to eighty thousand years before the mahākappa comes to an end.
Although these refinements are not found in the primary Pali sources, a version of this basic structure was known and accepted by the Theravāda Buddhists of Burma, at least.164 The modern work, The Great Chronicle of Buddhas by Mingun Sayadaw, citing the old Burmese chronicles as a source, states that each of the five Buddhas of our mahākappa arise in a different antarakappa, and always during the phase when lifespans are declining.165 This is said to be because during a phase when lifespans are increasing it is difficult for beings to understand the truth of impermanence.
2:7 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE KAPPA
At the end of a cycle the world may be destroyed by fire, by water or by wind. The destruction by fire is the most common type, and the kappa we are presently living in will end this way. The sources give the most attention to this type of ending and we shall follow their lead by first describing destruction by fire in some detail.166
The first sign that the world is coming to an end is the appearance of a great cloud, the kappavināsakamahāmegho (“aeon destruction great cloud”) which extends over one trillion (koṭisatasahassa) cakkavāḷas.167 There follows a great rain which delights the people who eagerly plant their crops, but when the rain stops it stops for good. There follows a drought that lasts for many hundreds of thousands of years.
One hundred thousand years before the final ending, some brahmā beings see the signs and warn the devas of the sense-desire sphere. Some of these in turn take on the role of “world-marshals” (lokabyūha) and descend to earth to warn those in the human realm (Vism-mhṭ 13).
These sense-sphere devas, with top-knots loosed,168 with hair disheveled, with sorrowful faces, wiping the tears away with their hands, wearing dyed cloth all awry,169 travel about the human realm making this announcement:
“In one hundred thousand years the end of the kappa (kappuṭṭhāna) will come. This world will perish. The great ocean will dry up and this great earth together with Mt Sineru will be burnt up and destroyed. The world will be destroyed as far as the brahmaloka. Develop loving-kindness, my dears, develop compassion, develop sympathetic joy, develop equanimity my dears. Honour your mother, honour your father and pay respect to the elders of your clan. Be wakeful, be not heedless.”
So they go about the paths of men, making this announcement. This is the great uproar at the end of a kappa.170
A hundred thousand years may seem like a long time ahead for such an announcement to raise much concern, but it should be recalled that, according to the Abhidharmakośa scheme, these humans living near the end of the final antarakappa will have lifespans measured in tens of thousands of years. The admonition to the people is to develop the four brahmavihāras, meditations that when perfected will ensure rebirth into the brahmaloka. This will be necessary, because all the abodes of the sense-desire sphere will soon be destroyed. There will be no place for these beings to be reborn except in the upper reaches of the rūpaloka.
The living beings all die out during the great drought. This great emptying begins from the bottom up and the nethermost niraya, Āvici, is the first to become empty.171 No more beings are reborn there as those in the human realm develop minds full of mettā (“loving-kindness”), spurred on by a sense of urgency. Even the animals develop mettā toward their children and their siblings and take either human or deva birth (AN-a 7:66). The migration of beings is gradually upward as the realms empty out and most are eventually reborn in the Ābhassara realm, the realm of the second jhāna brahmā beings which is the lowest realm that will remain after the flames consume everything below.
The sources are cognizant of the theoretical problems posed by this process. Buddhaghosa, in the Visuddhimagga, says, “There is no rebirth in the brahmā world without jhāna, so how do those, being obsessed with the scarcity of food, manage to be reborn there?” The answer is that by practising morality and developing mettā they can at least take rebirth in one of the sensual sphere saggas, and there attain jhāna before those worlds too are destroyed. Others are reborn upward simply on the strength of kamma made in previous lifetimes, because in the vast time s
cale of saṃsāra it is impossible that a being might be without some superior kamma (Vism 13: 33–35). After all, the beings living in all of these realms must be reborn somewhere: “There comes a time when this great earth burns up, but there is no ending of the suffering of those beings wandering on fettered by ignorance and craving” (SN 22:99).
The Abhidharmakośa too discusses this problem and also suggests that beings unable to attain jhāna are at first reborn in one of the sensual deva realms, and attain jhāna there. That text includes all the human inhabitants of the island-continent of Uttarakuru in this category, “because they are unable to leave the kāmadhātu (sensual desire sphere).” The Abhidharmakośa also suggests that some beings in niraya do not escape but are reborn into the niraya realm of some cakkavāḷa outside the range of destruction (AK 3:6. p.476). This view is also supported by the Pali sub-commentaries.172 During this process of dying out, no beings are reborn into the lower levels of the cakkavāḷa, before the great fire begins there is no one left alive below the Ābhassara level. The Abhidharmakośa says this process takes nineteen antarakappas to complete, leaving one antarakappa for the process of physical destruction (AK 3:6. p. 479).
After all the living beings have died and been reborn into the brahmā worlds the process of physical destruction of the multiple world-systems begins with the appearance in the sky of a second sun, the kappavināsakasūriya (“aeon destroying sun”). This sun rises when the original sun is setting and vice versa, so that the whole world is always in daylight. This sun is unlike the original sun in that it is not the abode of any devas but is a purely physical phenomenon. The sky is now completely clear of any clouds or mist, and the heat of the two suns dries up all the streams and lesser rivers of the world, excepting only the five great rivers: the Gaṅgā, the Yamunā, the Aciravatī, the Sarabhū, and the Mahī.
The Buddhist Cosmos Page 11