The Buddha’s radical breakthrough was to see through all the fantastic panoply of the cosmos, the vertical hierarchy of devalokas and brahmā realms and the horizontal expanse of multiple ten-thousand fold world-systems; to see through all of it and know that in all its fascination and all its terror it is ultimately transient, conditioned, futile and empty. In the Vimānavatthu the laywoman Uttarā says, “The circle of the world is too narrow, the realm of Brahmā is too low,” and this statement is approved by the Buddha (Vv-a 15). Her words are only profound and powerful if we understand just how immensely high the world of Brahmā is, and how very wide the circle of the world. It is not just our immediate, petty human condition which must be abandoned, but all of it. In Tibetan Buddhism there is something called a “mandala offering”: the practitioner folds her hands into a complex mudra representing Mt Meru and the Four Continents and then offers the whole for the liberation of sentient beings. It is a beautiful and powerful image for the relinquishment of conditioned existence which is all the more evocative when we understand just what, and how much, is being offered.
4:5 VIEWS
There is another way to look at the difference between the three cosmologies: that is according to the view (diṭṭhi) that they represent. The Buddha analyzed the possible views, or philosophical positions in great detail in the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1) and listed sixty-two wrong views which represented schools of thought in India at the time. These views fall into two broad categories: the eternalist view (sassatavāda) and the annihilationist view (ucchedavāda). The eternalist view holds that beings are possessed of an eternal essence, a soul, atman or jīva, which survives death in some form or other. This view is usually associated with a belief in a Creator God. The annihilationist view holds that beings are cut off and utterly annihilated at death; it is essentially what in modern terms we would call philosophical materialism. The Buddha took a middle position between these two, which he called the paṭiccasamuppāda (“dependent arising”). Put simply, this is a strong assertion of causality. No thing anywhere, of any kind, exists as an independent entity. Everything that exists is dependent on multiple causes in an interdependent net. There is no inherent substantial self-existent entity anywhere. In Indian philosophical language, there is no svabhāva (“own-essence”). Applied to living beings, this implies the doctrine of not-self (anattā). There is rebirth in a beginningless and endless chain of cause and effect, but there is no thing, no self or atta which transmigrates from body to body.
It seems like a paradox to many that Buddhism teaches no abiding self but does include rebirth in its system. This only seems like a conflict if you implicitly assume a self which continues from moment to moment within this life. Rebirth is nothing more than a continuation of the chain of cause and effect. Not only is it not a contradiction, but it is also a logical requirement of the idea of causation. Each new conscious moment arises with a previous consciousness moment as a proximate cause. This means that the first conscious moment in a new life must have had a predecessor or it would have been a kind of creation ex nihilo. After death, the next consciousness moment will arise in a form, human or otherwise, determined by the kamma of the expiring being.
The small geocentric model of the universe formulated by the Greeks and adopted by the medieval Christians represents a model of the cosmos compatible with the eternalist view. God created this little clockwork universe for the beings he also created. It, and they, have a definite moment of beginning. The realms above the earth are eternal in the forward time direction, as are the beings. Their brief span on earth has significance in that their deeds determine their eternal fate. Likewise, the events on that earth are significant in that history leads up to a pre-ordained final apocalypse. Time is linear, one-way and the events within it have importance.
The vast multi-world cosmos of the modern scientific cosmology is entirely based on observation and is not dependent on any pre-conceived view. However, the tendency is for scientific thinkers to adopt, implicitly or explicitly, the annihilationist view. Philosophical materialism is not made logically necessary by the findings of science, but it does provide a useful practical basis for those whose primary interest is understanding the outer world. Largely this is an historical legacy. The scientific view in its infancy had to fight against the dogmas of the eternalists. It became imperative to explain things without reference to God. Unfortunately, this intellectual tendency went too far and the role of mind as an independent agency was ignored as well.
When applied to human beings, the materialist paradigm holds that mind is a derivative function of matter: neurons firing in the brain. Matter comes first, mind is nothing but matter in motion and human beings are just complex machines made out of meat. To the Buddhist, this is quite literally putting the cart before the horse (or the ox):
Mind is the forerunner of all things
Mind is their chief
They are made by mind
If with a corrupted mind,
One acts with body or speech
Then suffering follows
Like the wheel follows the foot of the ox. (Dhp 1:1)
Consciousness will never be explained solely by reference to the workings of the brain. If it were possible to do so, then consciousness would have to be explicable by an algorithm, at least in theory. This is not possible, not because consciousness is too complex, but because it is so intrinsically simple. It just knows, in the sense of having experience. Many mental processes can be reduced to algorithms. For example, because of the mechanics of vision and pattern recognition, facial recognition software is possible. However, there is an unbridgeable chasm between what happens when a computer programme recognizes a face, and when you or I do it. The algorithmic portion of the process may be analogous, but at the end of the line when a human does it, there is something else: an experience or a subjectivity. The computer just outputs bits of data but the operator at the terminal reading the display knows.
Future generations may regard the contemporary adherence to materialism as a quaint and slightly comic folly, as we do the decants and eccentrics of Ptolemy. Oddly perhaps, it is not the life sciences which are leading the way beyond materialism, but physics. Quantum mechanics makes it impossible to explain the outer world without reference to an observer; until an observation is made reality, only exists as a mathematical abstraction, a field of probabilities. If mind were given its proper place as a causal factor in its own right, then many mysteries might be easier to solve: everything from the way a protein folds in a cell to why the initial symmetry was broken after the Big Bang.
The Big Bang itself presents a problem for a philosophic explanation of the universe. What caused it to happen? What, if anything, can we say about the universe (if that word makes sense in the context) before the Big Bang? The state of things immediately prior to the Big Bang is generally said to be a singularity,846 where the ordinary laws of physics do not apply. Science begins an infinitesimal moment after the Big Bang. It can say nothing about the ultimate origin of things, and the thinking here becomes quasi-theological: the Big Bang is the causeless cause. Western thought has always, or at least since Aristotle, insisted that there must have been a First Cause. With the adoption of Christianity, this of course became identified with God.
Such an explanation is totally unsatisfactory from the point of view of Buddhist philosophy. Causality admits no exceptions. If the Big Bang model is a true expression of reality, which the evidence seems to indicate, then there must have been something prior which caused it to happen. In the ancient Buddhist model, when a new world-system comes into being it is caused by the kamma of the beings who perished in the destruction of the old system. Once again, mind is prior to and takes precedent over form. There is no God acting as creator. There is only kamma (which originates in the mind) acting as a natural law. Beings that die without being fully awakened die with desire and kamma outstanding and by the laws of cause and effect, this means that the next consciousness moment which
arises must arise somewhere else. When the entire world-system is destroyed, the force of kamma generates a new world for the beings to be reborn into.
4:6 MODERN SCIENCE AND ANCIENT WISDOM
We have seen that the Buddhist universe goes through cycles of destruction and re-arising by fire, water and air, each destroying a wider range of world-systems. If the reader will indulge a speculative flight of the imagination, it may be possible to transpose this onto the modern scientific cosmology, if we take “fire,” “air,” and “water” metaphorically. The smallest destruction, that by fire, is the destruction of a single solar system when its star reaches the end of its hydrogen fuel supply and turns into a red giant or explodes in a supernova. In the latter case the stellar material is recycled and becomes the seed for new worlds. An entire galaxy may be destroyed when all the material in it flows, like water down a drain, into the central black hole. The interior of a black hole, like the universe before the Big Bang, is a singularity about which nothing meaningful can be said. It has been speculated that the material is not destroyed but is transposed elsewhere, appearing again through a “white hole”. Finally, if the amount of matter in the universe as a whole is sufficient, it will eventually collapse in on itself into another great singularity, the stars and planets drawn inward or to speak metaphorically, blown by the winds of gravity. Another Big Bang can follow and the whole catastrophe of existence begins anew.
There may be other imaginative ways to reconcile the traditional cosmology with modern scientific understanding. For example, a large portion of the matter and energy comprising the universe is “dark” and unaccounted for. One might imagine that this somehow composes the other realms, even Mount Sineru. Or perhaps these things exist in a higher spatial dimension; if we could perceive the solar system in the fourth or fifth spatial dimension it might include a central mountain which does not impinge on our third dimensional space.847 Modern physics leaves a lot of room for such speculation, in ways that the physics of the nineteenth century did not. In my opinion though, this is not the most fruitful approach since it confines our thinking to the strictly material, and this level was never the prime interest of the ancient Buddhists.
The modern scientific cosmology, if detached from the materialist view, is compatible with Buddhist teachings in a way that the old geocentric model of concentric spheres is not. This was not immediately apparent and the impact of western science on the Buddhist world did cause some intellectual problems.848 But it was fairly quickly resolved and never reached the level of the crisis of faith which occurred in the west when Christianity was confronted with science. For example, in Japan Sato Kaiseki wrote a carefully researched book attempting the impossible task of reconciling the observable facts of astronomy with a Sineru centred cosmological system. His Zen teacher, Ekido took a brief look at it and threw it back at him saying, “How Stupid! Don’t you realize that the basic aim of Buddhism is to shatter the triple world …? Why stick to such worthless things and treasure Mount Sumeru? Blockhead!”849 The precise configuration of the universe is not essential to the Four Noble Truths.
The classical Buddhist model of Mount Sineru and the multiple ten thousand fold world-systems was, as has been said, not developed in order to explain astronomical observations. This was never a primary concern. Instead, the Buddha and his followers, like Buddhaghosa, were much more concerned with understanding the mind and accounting for the various levels of consciousness. Even here, the concern in the end is a practical one. How can a living being enmeshed in the manifold world transcend it all and achieve total liberation?
4:7 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION
While a strictly literalist interpretation of the texts about cosmology is no longer tenable, we should avoid falling into the opposite extreme, so tempting to the modern mind, of reading it all as simply psychological metaphor. For this to be so, one of two possibilities must apply: Either the compilers of the texts were deliberately and consciously speaking in metaphor, or they were working from some more primitive level of psychological understanding and were externalizing mental states. We can dismiss the latter case rather easily. A tradition that was capable of the profound psychological subtleties of the Abhidhamma could not possibly have fallen into such a primitive error. But when they spoke of the sufferings of niraya or the bliss of the rūpaloka were the Buddha and his later followers deliberately using metaphors to express psychological truths? I do not think so. To begin with there is the statement of the Buddha, made in a context that is quite unequivocal, that “yes, devas do exist.”850 Further, consider that the commentaries were well aware of the possibilities of metaphor. For example, they precisely defined when the concept of Māra referred to an inner state, and when it referred to an actual entity, Māra Devaputta. I think we have to conclude that the texts meant what they said.
The so-called psychological interpretation does a disservice to the tradition. It is rather demeaning to our spiritual ancestors, and one cannot help wondering what the devas themselves make of it. “Do they really imagine we are just their mental states? Silly, arrogant humans.”851 Besides, it doesn’t work very well. There are indeed important parallelisms between the internal and the external, most significantly between the jhānas and the brahmalokas. But there is much more to the worlds of the brahmās than that. Furthermore, much of the cosmological material makes no sense at all when interpreted in psychological terms. The massive central mountain Sineru is a keystone of the whole structure and has no obvious psychological counterpart, nor does the nested system of multiple worlds. The real problem is that the psychological interpretation not only trivializes the whole system but actually obscures the more important lessons we can learn from it. If there are parallels, it is far more illuminating to see our small human psyche as a limited reflection of the greater whole than vice-versa.
Bhikkhu Bodhi has written to this point with his usual lucidity:
… The external universe, according to the Abhidhamma, is an outer refection of the internal cosmos of mind, registering in concrete manifest form the subtle gradation in states of consciousness. This does not mean that the Abhidhamma reduces the outer world to a dimension of mind in the manner of philosophical idealism. The outer world is quite real and possesses objective existence. However, the outer world is always a world apprehended by consciousness, and the type of consciousness determines the nature of the world that appears. Consciousness and the world are mutually dependent and inextricably connected to such an extent that the hierarchical structure of the realms of existence exactly reproduces and corresponds to the hierarchical structure of consciousness.
Because of this correspondence, each of the two—the objective hierarchy of existence and the inner gradation of consciousness—provides the key to understanding the other. The reason why a living being is reborn into a particular realm is because he has generated, in a previous life, the kamma or volitional force of consciousness that leads to rebirth into that realm, and thus in the final analysis all the realms of existence are formed, fashioned, and sustained by the mental activity of living beings. At the same time these realms provide the stage for consciousness to continue its evolution in a new personality and under a fresh set of circumstances.852
In terms of practice also there is a huge problem with the psychological interpretation of the cosmology. The goal of the Buddhist path is the realization of the unconditioned and this requires a transcendence of the self. If the whole cosmos is reduced to a representation of our own internal mental space this only reinforces the image of a self. Meditation becomes psychoanalysis and nothing more. It is essential that the meditator comes to understand that her problems are not uniquely hers but are part of the warp and woof of the great saṃsāra. To realize liberation, it must all be relinquished. A sense of vastness puts it all into the proper perspective. It is not all about you.
When we examine the teachings about the cosmos given by the Buddha, as distinguished from his commentators, we find that they are
always given to teach some specific point bearing on the spiritual project of liberation. The Sattasuriya Sutta (AN 7:66) about the end of the world-system was taught to make a strong point about impermanence. To the ancient Indian nothing could be imagined that seemed more solid and unchanging than Mt Sineru, and yet this too will one day be reduced to ash. One purpose of the Aggañña Sutta (DN 27) about origins is to ridicule and refute the brahminical doctrine of the divine origin of caste; another is to illustrate mythologically how subtle consciousness becomes trapped in coarse materiality through the agency of desire. The stories and teachings about the brahmā worlds, such as the Buddha’s visit to Baka, (MN 49) speak important truths about the subtler levels of mind, both its potential and its limitations. Likewise, Moggallāna’s visit to Sakka in Tāvatiṃsa (MN 37) teaches us about the unsatisfactory and illusory nature of even the most refined sensual existence.
There are many other important spiritual lessons we can learn from a deep contemplation of the manifold levels of existence. We can, for instance, gain a deeper understanding of this sensual realm we live in when we consider it from other positions than just the familiar human one. Because the Buddha warned again and again about the dangers inherent in sensual desire, students can sometimes take an extreme position. Either they become rigidly puritanical justifying the outsider’s criticism that Buddhism is anti-life, or they cannot take on the teaching at all and revert to hedonistic indulgence. The correct way of understanding this teaching is not to see sensuality as immoral per se but as limiting. Sensual desire and indulgence confine us within the bounds of the plane of sense-desire and our consciousness cannot experience the higher levels or liberation. When we look at the worlds of the devas we see that it is not a matter of absolutes. Sensuality becomes more and more refined as we ascend the levels until in the highest deva realms it is just barely what we would consider sensual: the Paranimmitavasavatti devas make love just by looking into one another’s eyes. From there, it is not such an unimaginable step to the realms beyond sensuality altogether.
The Buddhist Cosmos Page 65