In the Buddhist cosmology, all the complexity and drama occurs in the kāmabhūmi, the plane of sense desire. This realm is vast and vastly differentiated, from the torments of niraya and the miseries of the petas to the colourful world of animals and humans, through the six levels of sensual heaven. The world of the senses encompasses all of it: pain, pleasure, compassion, and conflict. It is so vivid and overwhelming within that realm that it is hard to imagine any other mode of being. If, however, we were situated in the lowest level of the brahmā worlds, all this would seem very far away. From the perspective of the brahmās, a panorama of one thousand world systems lies at a vast distance below. As one ascends through the brahmā levels, the view becomes ever more expansive, encompassing at last one trillion world systems. How subtle, simple and purified is their existence! They cannot even imagine wanting to enter into the turmoil and suffering below them. It is the same for the jhānic mind in regard to the experience of the senses.
Buddhist cosmology, viewed as an analogue to our mental states, can help us understand the development of deep meditation. For example, there is, in my opinion, a problem with the translation of samādhi as “concentration.” Meditators think they need to narrow the mind onto the object, and this is exactly the wrong way to go. The mind with strong samādhi is an expansive one. The mind of a brahmā encompasses a trillion worlds! Samādhi is explained in the old texts as “non-wandering,”853 which has a different feel altogether. The world of the brahmā beings is calm and peaceful but it is certainly not constricted. Instead of “placing awareness on the object,” we should think in terms of opening the mind to the object: non-wavering in a great vastness.
There are other ways that the study of the brahmā realms can help us understand the nuances of the teachings about jhāna. For example, it might help clarify the distinction between pīti (“rapture”) and sukha (“bliss”) to contemplate part of a list in the Aṅguttara (AN 5: 170) that describes “the best of” in various categories. The best sound in the universe is the cry of the Ābhassara brahmās, those of the second tier, the level of jhāna where pīti predominates. These gods continually cry out, Aho sukho! “Oh, the happiness!” However, the best joy in the universe is experienced by the Subhakiṇha brahmas of the third tier, corresponding to the jhāna marked by sukha. These gods “rejoice in silence.”
Then there is the Ārupa realm, those beings who are pure mind without any trace of physicality. The inclusion of this realm certainly demonstrates that Buddhist thought is non-materialist; it allows that beings can exist with a mind but without any kind of physical substrate. It is very useful to think about and attempt to imagine what the existence of these beings might be like. Discerning the difference between mind and matter is a vital question and one that is not so easy for us who are bound up in a physical body.
4:8 PERCEPTION
Once we transcend naive realism and materialism and allow the mental factors back into the equation, we can think about these issues in an entirely new way. This from the thirteenth century Zen Master Dōgen:
All beings do not see mountains and water in the same way. Some beings see water as a jeweled ornament, but they do not regard jeweled ornaments as water. What in the human realm corresponds to their water? We only see their jeweled ornaments as water.
Some beings see water as wondrous blossoms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or as the form of body and the essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on causes and conditions.
Thus the views of all beings are not the same. You should question this matter now. Are there many ways to see one thing, or is it a mistake to see many forms for one thing? You should pursue this beyond the limit of pursuit. Accordingly, endeavours in practice-realization of the way are not limited to one or two kinds. The ultimate realm has one thousand kinds and ten thousand ways.
For this reason, it is difficult to say who is creating this land and palace right now or how such things are being created. To say that the world is resting on the wheel of space or on the wheel of wind is not the truth of the self or the truth of others. Such a statement is based only on a small view. People speak this way because they think that it must be impossible to exist without having a place on which to rest.854
Dōgen is speaking about the way perception shapes the actual experiential world. Consider the world experienced by a bat, which is blind, or nearly so, and constructs its model of reality by echo location, a sensory world we can barely imagine. Or try and imagine the world inhabited by an earthworm, a fish or a mosquito. Perhaps the best way to think of the cosmology of the texts is to think of it as the way you would perceive the world if you were a deva.
I would like to suggest one even more speculative idea. Perhaps the Mount Sineru cosmology was actually “real” to our ancestors, in the sense that their perception was closer to the level of devas than ours. There does seem to have been a major shift in human consciousness at some point in early modern times. When we became more cognizant of the material world, allowing the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century for example, did we lose some other subtle level of perception as a trade off?
The Christian writer Robert D. Romanyshyn has suggested something like this in regard to why the vision of angels does not come so easily to moderns:
The invention of this way of seeing (the “linear perspective vision in fifteenth century Italian art”), as if you were staring one-eyed through a window at a world receding toward a vanishing point, or as if you have a camera eye on the world, has become a cultural convention, a habit of mind, a disposition of the soul. Through its development and under its influence we have become spectators of a world, which has become primarily a spectacle, a matter of light, inhabiting a body which has become primarily a specimen. Of the many values which this vision has inscribed upon the soul of modernity not the least of which is the hegemony of vision or the rule of the “despotic eye,” the one which surprisingly and unexpectedly touched upon the angel was the transformation of depth which this vision achieved.
He goes on to explain the principles of perspective in painting. The key point is that the vision of the world is reduced to a linear grid where horizontal distance replaces the older idea of vertical levels.
The world explained, the world within which all levels of existence are reduced to the same plane, is inhospitable to beings who belong to other levels … The window through which the detached spectator observes the world … which was actually a grid, projects an objective landscape of evenly paced grid coordinates, and from that space beings like angels are destined to be banished and to become mere mental phenomena, mere subjective realities.855
It is impossible to speak meaningfully about the reality (or otherwise) of any part of the Buddhist cosmology without at least attempting a discussion of what “reality” means. The Buddha, in his teaching, refrained from purely metaphysical definitions. There was, at that time, a sort of standard questionnaire which was put to philosophers and mystics:
Is the world eternal? (sassato loko)
Is the world not eternal?
Is the world infinite? (anantavā loko)
Is the world finite?
Is the soul (jīva) the same as the body?
Is the soul one thing and the body another?
Does the Tathāgata exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata not exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata both exist and not exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata neither exist nor not exist after death?856
The Buddha categorically refused to answer such questions, saying instead that his teaching was about suffering and the end of suffering only. Someone who demands an answer to such questions is like a man pierced by an arrow who refuses to have the doc
tors remove it and treat his wound until he learns the answers to such questions as: of what wood is the shaft made? Of what kind of bird was the feather taken? Was the man who shot me tall or short, fair or dark? He would die from his wounds before he learnt all this (MN 63).
The Buddha’s teaching is always first and foremost a practical one. The emphasis is not on metaphysical determinations about ultimate reality, but about how we can liberate ourselves from the suffering of the conditioned world. This means that the subjective side of the question must take priority. Ultimate reality may be an undecidable issue but we can ask, what is real for the observer?
It is useful, indeed necessary, to consider the creative role of perception (sañña) in constructing reality; if not some unknowable ultimate metaphysical reality, but at least the immediate practical reality in which we actually live. Without exception, everything we know about the outer world is mediated through the five physical senses. Even when these are enhanced technologically, it is still a human eye that peers through the microscope and human eye-consciousness which sees the forms and human perception which determines them to be a bacterium or a crystal fragment. We never can experience the outer world directly. Instead, what we experience is a simulation or model of that world generated by the mind based on signals received by the senses. Any such perception must be incomplete due to limitations in the sense organs. Dogs can hear sounds which we cannot, just as we can see colours they cannot.
It can be said that we dream the world into being. However, the difference between waking consciousness and dreaming during sleep is that in waking life the dream-world we create for ourselves is tightly constrained by the signals coming in from the outer world in the form of light waves, sound waves etc. When we are asleep, our perception is not so tightly bound and is free to create images and sounds from fragments of thought and memory. The world we dream when we are awake is a mostly reliable model of whatever is actually out there; it can never be perfect but it is close enough for us to live in and manipulate the world. When we are asleep, the world we live in is an entirely mind created one: a world of nimittas.
As an aside, we may note with interest that this way of understanding things is not so far off the quantum mechanical one of modern physics.857 The world out there is nothing more than a mathematical field of probabilities which can be expressed as a “wave function.” This function collapses into a definite reality only when the observer takes a reading of it. An electron has an equal chance of being at point A or point B and in “reality” exists only as a fuzzy field of possibility spread out between the two until the physicist takes a measurement after which it is definitely located at one or the other. Schrödinger’s poor little kitty only becomes alive or dead when we open the box.
Returning to our consideration of perception and its role in creating our actual experienced reality: we have looked at the difference between waking and dreaming and seen that it is a matter of more or less constraint by the incoming signals. What if the realms of the devas are somewhere between the two? Their world, like ours, is generated for them by the faculty of perception based on incoming signals from some hypothetical outer world but the creative constraint is less than that of our waking consciousness and more than that of a sleeping dreamer. We have had occasion to note the often dreamlike quality of the various realms. We have seen, for example, how, for an evil person brought to the nāga realm, the wonderful crystal palace was perceived as a dark prison and the lovely nāga maidens as horrible yakkhinīs.
As we move upward through the deva realms, we find subtler and more sublime realities. The signal constraint is becoming less and less and the dreaming more fluid. In the realm of the Nimmānarati devas, those “who delight in creation” who can create any desired reality at will, the experience must be like a many million yearslong lucid dream. Niraya, at the other extreme, is a terrible nightmare from which one cannot awake.
This parallel with the dream state applies only to the sense-desire realm. In the realms of form and the formless it is quite otherwise. There, the human level analogue is not dreaming, but the meditative absorption of jhāna. This is a level of consciousness unlike either ordinary waking consciousness or the dream state, both of which are within the plane of sense-desire. In these higher planes, signals from the senses become increasingly irrelevant as we ascend. We are told that the bodies of the brahmā beings are “mind-made” (manomaya). In the formless realm the physical senses, and indeed the physical sense organs, are entirely absent. The physical laws as we understand them simply do not apply at these levels.
So, are the other realms “real?” We may not be able to assert that with absolute certainty, at least without the possession of the dibbacakkhu (“divine eye”). But neither can we answer the question with a definite negative without taking on a naive realist position about this experienced human realm. All we can know with complete certainty is our own conscious mind; and we know that consciousness occurs in different levels. The untrained person experiences at least three: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. With the development of meditation one can experience the jhānas of form and the formless as well. There is no good reason to doubt that these levels can also occur as states of existence.
Beyond all these states of attainment and of existence there remains the ineffable state of the unconditioned, nibbāna. All the panoply of saṃsāra with all its wonderful and terrifying manifestations is, when all is said and done, nothing more than a shadow play, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,”858 when contrasted with nibbāna. When contemplating the cosmos, it is essential to remember that the purpose of understanding it is to transcend it.
PART FIVE—APPENDICES
5:1 UNITS OF MEASURE
YOJANA – a measure of distance, approximately 12 km.
The yojana is a very important unit of length, often used in this book. There is considerable uncertainty about its exact length but it is definitely several kilometres. Thanissaro Bhikkhu gives it as 16 km,859 the Pali-English Dictionary defines it as “a distance of about 7 miles” (11.3 km)860 Monier-Williams gives various possibilities, ranging from 2 ½ miles to 9 miles (4 km- 11.5 km).861 The word yojana also means a yoke for oxen and the unit of length originally derived from the distance an ox-cart could travel in a day.862 Since that would obviously vary greatly with terrain, it may account for the vagaries inherent in the measurement at least in the earliest period under consideration. It is, however, highly likely that by the time the commentaries were written the value of the yojana had been standardized.
T. W. Rhys Davids did a careful enquiry into the length of a yojana, tabulating all references in the literature where distances are given between known points and came to this conclusion: “We have no data as yet for determining the sense in which the word yojana is used in the Three Piṭakas … (but) in the fifth-century Pali literature (i.e. the commentarial period) it means between seven and eight miles.”863 This seems to be the best estimate available and this book has used the estimate of 7.5 miles or 12 km throughout.
Other Units of Length
gāvuta = ¼ of a yojana.
hattha = a “cubit”, the length between the finger-tips and the elbow, about 46 cm.
aṅgula = an “inch”, the length of one finger joint, about 2.5 cm.
KAHĀPAṆA—a unit of coinage representing approximately US $50–$100 in modern money.
It is notoriously difficult to ascertain equivalent values for ancient money in modern terms. There are essentially two methods to arrive at an approximation. Either estimate the value by finding examples of prices for various commodities or determine the value by finding the weight of a coin in gold or other precious metals. Both of these methods are problematic. Comparing prices for commodities is often misleading because intrinsic values of things change. In ancient India, for example, goods made of cotton were much rarer and more valuable than they are today. Using the precious metal weight has its own problems. It assumes that t
he value of gold is a fixed standard, which the historical data doesn’t support. Furthermore, coins are often given a fiat value higher than the metal weight would warrant.
the kahāpaṇa we have the additional problem of limited data to work with, so any conclusion should be regarded as tentative. There are not nearly enough examples of prices given to even attempt any conclusions using that method. Fixing the value by the weight of gold has only a little more chance of success. One late source fixes the value of a māsaka (1/20 of a kahāpaṇa) at the weight in gold of four rice grains.864 This raises the further issue of how much a grain of rice weighs, which is highly variable. Taking a value of 29 milligrams865 for the weight of a rice grain, we arrive at a value for the kahāpaṇa of about 1/10 of a troy ounce of gold. The market price of gold as of the middle of 2016 is about $1200 per troy ounce, which would make the kahāpaṇa worth about $120. We should adjust this downward because gold in 2016 was at an historic high.
Some oblique support for this general range of value can be had by comparing the kahāpaṇa to the Greek drachma, which served a comparable purpose in a society of about the same cultural and technical level. Greek sources say that one drachma was the usual daily wage for a skilled workman. This would make a dollar value of about one hundred not unreasonable.866
The Buddhist Cosmos Page 66