The Buddhist Cosmos

by Punnadhammo Mahathero

  But even this concept, vacuous as it may be, is abandoned in the viññāṇañcāyatana, the sphere of boundless consciousness. Here concepts of space no longer apply and perception is solely focussed on the boundless nature of consciousness when space, the last ephemeral referent to the external world, is removed. In the next sphere, that of ākiñcaññāyatana, the sphere of nothingness (lit. “no-thing-ness”) perception removes itself even from the fact of being conscious and rests on nothing at all. However, even this remains a kind of concept and the final sphere, nevasaññānāsaññāyatana, neither perception nor nonperception, abandons the idea of nothingness as well. These beings are said to have the supreme form of existence.833

  The Visuddhimagga explains the name of this sphere thus:

  The perception here is neither perception, since it is incapable of performing the decisive function of perception, not yet non-perception, since it is present in a subtle state as a residual formation.834

  The text goes on to illustrate this with a couple of similes. An iron bowl may be smeared with oil to prevent rust. If someone wants to use it to eat from, he may be told “Sir, there is oil in the bowl.” But if he then asks to fill his oil tube from it, he may be told “Sir, there is no oil.” Similarly, a novice and an elder are walking for alms when the novice sees water on the path and says, “Sir, there is water. Remove your sandals.” But if the elder asks for his bathing cloth he may be told, “Sir, there is no water.” Furthermore, it is not only perception that exists in this subtle residual state but all the mental factors; there is there neither consciousness nor non-consciousness, neither feeling nor non-feeling and so on (Vism 10.50f).

  3:7:4 UNDERSTANDING THE ARŪPA REALMS

  It is truly difficult to imagine formless existence. This is both because of its extreme subtlety and because of the vast difference from our own experience. For the realms of the sensual devas, and even of the brahmās, there is at least some image we can call to mind. Not so here.

  The best way to acquire some idea of the formless is not through examination of the texts and rational thought. Rather, it is to attempt to touch these states directly via meditation. As a practical exercise, we may describe a meditation loosely based on the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121). The meditator begins with what is called “contemplation of village”, that is simple awareness of the ordinary space around one, filled as it is with objects and people. Then, in each successive stage, the meditator removes by non-attention one aspect of the field of reality and pays attention to what remains. Contemplation of village is followed by contemplation of forest, which means removing human constructs such as buildings and roads from awareness and focussing on what remains: the natural world of earth, water and vegetation. Following this, the living world is removed and one focuses only on the underlying earth element: the rocks and soil, hills and valleys and ultimately the mass of the planet itself. When this is removed one becomes aware of the underlying space occupied by the earth. Since there are no boundaries in empty space, this easily becomes boundless. Now there is only the meditator’s consciousness filling boundless space. When attention is withdrawn from space, only boundless consciousness remains. When the meditator ceases to pay attention to this, he focuses his awareness on the underlying nothingness. Finally, attention is withdrawn even from the concept of nothingness and the mind rests in the subtle state of neither perception nor nonperception.835

  CONCLUSION

  As we progress upward through the spheres of existence, from the kāmabhūmi (plane of sense-desire) through the rūpabhūmi (plane of form) to the arūpabhūmi we are moving from complexity and diversity towards subtlety and pristine simplicity.836 The arūpa realms, and the nevasaññānāsaññāyatana in particular, can be called the minimal state of saṃsāra. This is still an existence subject to kamma, craving, dukkha (suffering) and the rest of the package which is manifest existence. But just barely so.

  However, it still remains a quantum step to emerge from the conditioned existence of saṃsāra into the unconditioned state of nibbāna. It is stated in the Abhidharmakośa that no one existing in the formless realms can achieve nibbāna unless they had already attained to one of the states of awakening before arising there (AK 6:6, p 1015). This is because the suffering and impermanence inherent in saṃsāra is so attenuated that no impulse for spiritual progress is present.

  For one who is an arahant or an anāgāmī, the meditative progression explained above contains one additional step. By withdrawing the mind from the most subtle object, that of neither perception nor nonperception, the awakened meditator can enter the state called nirodhasamāpatti (“attainment of cessation”) which is defined as “the non-occurrence of consciousness and its concomitants owing to their progressive cessation,” and of which it is said, “the peace it gives is reckoned as nibbāna here and now.”837

  It is admittedly difficult to understand the arūpa condition, but it is worth the effort to make the attempt. Contemplating what these realms may be like gives us insight into at least two important subjects. They can help us to understand the manifest reality that is saṃsāra by stripping it down to its barest essentials. This is manifest existence at its absolute bare minimum, without the layers of confusion found in those realms “below.” As well, the contemplation of a realm which is mind-only can give us powerful insights into the nature of mind in the abstract. What would it be like without the encumbrance of a body and physical senses?

  PART FOUR—AFTERWORD

  “Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.”

  Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War, p.21.

  4:1 THREE COSMOLOGIES

  Every human culture has wondered about the greater world in which we find ourselves, and asked questions about space and time and the beings that exist in the universe. People in every time and place have attempted to answer these questions by developing cosmological models, conceptual worlds in which to live. An interesting topic for contemplation is how living in each of these universes affects the lives and thoughts of the inhabitants. It could be argued that it wouldn’t have made much difference. People in all cultures go about their business of making love, war and money without much concern about cosmological questions; but this is to take a very superficial view. The higher life of philosophy and spiritual development is inevitably shaped by the background of the culture’s worldview. The cosmological background must affect any thought beyond the immediate concerns of daily living and have subtle and not so subtle influences on art, literature, religion, philosophy and ethics. To take one obvious example: whereas the Western sense of time and history has always been linear, India has seen it as cyclical. One implication is that, to the Indian mind, history didn’t really matter. It is very difficult for modern scholars to determine a chronology for ancient India because the ancient Indians were never very much interested in keeping the kind of dated annals which serve as the raw material of history in the West. Our first precise date in Indian history is the invasion of Alexander in 327 B.C., which we have from Greek sources.

  It would take a book much larger than this one to adequately explore this theme across a representative span of cultures. Here I propose something much more modest – to present a few preliminary considerations about just three cosmologies: the ancient Indian one, the Buddhist articulation of which has been the theme of this book, the pre-modern European model and the modern scientific one. These three are likely those of most interest to the readers of this book, and they provide some suggestive points of comparison.

  4:2 MEDIEVAL EUROPE

  In premodern Europe, the accepted model of the universe was the geocentric one inherited from the Greek and Hellenistic periods, often called the Ptolemaic model after the second century A.D. astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, usually called just Ptolemy. The earth in this system is by far the largest solid object in the universe and is located at the centre. Arrayed around it are successive crystalline spheres in which the sun, moon and planets travel and the who
le is bounded by a sphere of the “fixed stars.” This model was developed as an attempt to account for the observed movements of the heavenly bodies. However, beginning with Plato, one assumption was made for entirely philosophical reasons: the objects beyond the orbit of the moon being in the celestial realm must be perfect and therefore must move in perfect circles.

  This assumption made it difficult to reconcile the model with increasingly accurate observation, so various additions were concocted to “save the appearances.” The planets do not move directly on the surface of their spheres but on smaller spheres called epicycles which move on the main spheres. This explained retrograde motion, when a planet as viewed from earth appears for a time to change direction. However, to make the model work while maintaining the principle of uniform circular motion required additional complications. The spheres were centred not at the centre of the earth but at a hypothetical point some distance away called the eccentric. Additionally, a more complicated mathematical kludge called the equant was added which was yet another point, different for each planet, from which uniform circular motion could be observed, even if it was not uniform when viewed from the earth. The whole system became so complicated that King Alfonso X of Castile, after studying Ptolemy, was reputed to have said, “Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.”838

  The complexities of this model can seem absurd to the modern reader, but it did fit the available data quite well. The heliocentric system proposed by Copernicus was slow to catch on, not just because of religious obscurantism, but because as a newly developed model it did not always fit the data as well as the thoroughly worked out geocentric one. The really big conceptual breakthrough came with Kepler, who was the first thinker in two thousand years to abandon the fixed idea of uniform circular motion and correctly see the planets’ orbits as ellipses.

  Two features of this cosmology are important for our purposes. First, it placed humanity at the very centre of things on the immobile earth around which the whole clockwork revolved. Second, the whole structure was very limited in size and definitely bounded. Roger Bacon calculated the distance to the outermost sphere, that of the fixed stars, at 65,357,700 miles,839 which would fit the entire universe within the orbit of Venus according to modern scientific reckoning. Furthermore, this was the entire universe. There was no conception in European thought of any physical worlds beyond this one.840 There seem to have been various opinions about the locations of heaven and hell (the Christian equivalents of the devalokas and niraya) but if we can take Dante as a source, the heavens were located within the spheres and associated with the various planets and hell was under the earth,841 thus again limiting the cosmos to one fixed structure.

  This structure was limited in time as well. Although the geocentric system was first developed by the Greeks in pre-Christian times, it became a fixed part of Christian belief in the Middle Ages and the eschatological view of time having a definite first and last point, creation and final destruction, became another pillar of the premodern European worldview. The time scale involved was as limited as the spatial one. Archbishop Ussher famously calculated the very day on which God finished his act of creation: October 22, 4004 B.C. Furthermore, it was widely believed the world would end sometime around 2000 A.D. (The idea was that six millennia of existence corresponded to the six active days of creation). The history of the universe was conceived as a cosmic drama with a beginning a middle and an end, and the concept of time was not only limited but linear. History mattered because it was part of a cosmic drama leading to a final resolution. Some Christians held the doctrine of predestination, that God had pre-ordained every detail of the history of the world at the moment of creation.842

  4:3 MODERN SCIENCE

  The tiny clockwork geocentric universe in which western man lived for more than a thousand years became subject to serious doubt before the end of the sixteenth century with the heliocentric speculations of Copernicus. It did not go away all at once, or easily. The new model was fiercely resisted by the established power of the Catholic Church; Galileo was put under house arrest and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake. For a while the genius of Tycho Brahe gave the geocentric model new life in a modified form: the sun and moon orbited the earth and the remaining planets orbited the sun. But in the long run the simplicity and clarity of the heliocentric system won out, especially after Kepler removed the last mathematical objections by postulating elliptical orbits for the planets and Isaac Newton explained the mechanics of their movements with his theory of gravitation.

  In the nineteenth century stellar parallax was measured for the first time,843 proving that the “fixed stars” were very much further away than previously thought possible and discoveries in the field of geology opened up the time dimension expanding the age of the earth from a few thousand years to hundreds of millions (now thought to be 13.8 billion). In the early twentieth century Einstein’s theory of relativity undermined the idea of absolute time, and the discovery of the red shift indicated an expanding universe with its origins in a Big Bang and what were previously thought to be nearby gaseous nebulae were shown to be very distant galaxies,844 each composed of many millions of stars. The opening years of the twenty-first century have shown that these stars are commonly surrounded by a retinue of planets.

  In short, the universe has become very much bigger, very much older and a lot stranger than anyone had previously imagined. Scientific cosmology is still full of unanswered questions about the origin, shape and final fate of the universe. These questions may very well never be definitively answered, as indeed the Buddha intimated.

  4:4 THE BUDDHIST COSMOS

  The ancient Indian cosmology, including the Buddhist version of it, and the modern scientific model resemble each other far more than either one resembles the premodern European cosmology. Both the Buddhist and the scientific models place the abode of human beings in a peripheral and minor locale within a greater whole. Both of them postulate a vast, possibly infinite, number of worlds. Both of them see the universe as existing within a very vast span of time. In the Buddhist model this is infinite in both directions having no beginning and no ending. Some modern theories suggest a cyclic nature for the universe on very long time scales: if the amount of matter in the universe is sufficient, gravity will eventually slow down and reverse the expansion causing in the end a Big Crunch when everything is annihilated in a singularity, possibly followed by another Big Bang.

  Of course, we must not push the analogy too far. The cakkavāḷas are not solar systems. The ten-thousand fold world-system is not a galaxy. The multiple worlds of ancient India are never associated with the stars. The resemblance is more in the nature of underlying spirit than in any catalogue of details. It would be anachronistic to force one model upon another. We should try and appreciate the Buddhist system on its own terms.

  Nevertheless, it is hard to resist the idea that living in an insignificant corner of an open ended, vast universe places us moderns more in sympathy with ancient Indian modes of thought than it does with medieval Europeans who lived at the centre of a small, short-lived cosmos. The essentials of Buddhist philosophy work very well in either the cosmos of countless cakkavāḷas or that of countless galaxies. It does not fit so well into the clockwork of crystalline spheres. It may not be entirely coincidental that Buddhism began to be seriously studied and practiced in the West around the same time as the discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics.

  All this being said, there are nonetheless important differences between the modern and the ancient world-systems. These stem from their entirely different motivations. In the West, beginning with the classical Greeks, the purpose of the cosmology was to explain the observed phenomena. The geocentric model developed by Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy was a reasoned attempt to account for what could actually be seen in the sky. It was not their intention that during a long age it became enshrined as religious dogma. The system was dismantle
d the same way it was created, by looking at the sky, taking measurements and carefully thinking it through. This process continues today, technologically enhanced, but essentially the same. The emphasis is on what is “out there” without regard to human concerns or consciousness.

  We have already seen that the Sineru-centric Indian-Buddhist system does not account for the observed motions of the heavenly bodies at all well. Although surprising to anyone more familiar with the history of science in the West, it would be a mistake to assume that this is simply due to a primitive level of scientific understanding. India was not behind the Greeks in the development of math and science, including astronomy; in some respects they were well ahead, as in the invention of the zero.845 Neither does the Sineru-centric model represent merely a very early stage of thought, it continued to be elaborated down to the time of Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu, by which time Indian science had advanced considerably not least because it was now in contact with the science of the Greek world. Moreover, the Sineru cosmology was adhered to in Buddhist countries well into modern times.

  The model of the cakkavāḷa was not developed to explain the movements of the heavens at all; at best these were a very minor afterthought. It was developed to explain something very different: the workings of saṃsāra. This hinges on a key difference between those two great and precocious civilizations: the Greeks were primarily extroverts and the Indians introverts. From well before the Buddha’s time the greatest minds in India were devoted to unravelling the mysteries of the mind, of existence and of finding the means to liberate oneself. The Greeks wanted to understand how the world worked, the Indians wanted to learn how to transcend it. The Indian-Buddhist cosmological model may not account for the movements of the sun and the planets but it does account very well for the multiple levels of consciousness known to exist by the inward going explorers who ventured into the forest from time immemorial.