The Buddhist View of the Universe Today

In many ways, Buddhism is a unique religion and worldview. Compared with the modern scientific view of the world, the Buddhist perspective is considerably colored by religious and practical concerns: it sees the natural world in terms of its relationship to human destiny. Unlike other religious interpretations—Christianity, for example—Buddhism does not see the hand of God in the existence of the universe, and is pessimistic, believing that suffering is intrinsic to the world. Many authors have already discussed those issues, and readers will reach their own conclusions about them through examining Buddhist cosmological concepts. Here I would like to offer a historical interpretation of Buddhist cosmology’s development, based on the material we have covered so far.

We have seen how the Buddhist conception of the universe underwent numerous changes over time. If we view those shifts as changing responses to the problem of human suffering, we can see a steady progression in one direction: Buddhists gradually ceased to regard life as suffering. Inevitably the Buddhist worldview, originally based on the idea that suffering was inescapable, became increasingly irrelevant and eventually entered the realm of myth. Let us look at these changes in regard to suffering over three stages, following the structure of this book. The first stage corresponds to the first four chapters. It is the classical view of pre-Mahayana Buddhism, from the time of Sakyamuni to Vasubandhu in the fifth century. According to the legend of the departure from the four gates, Sakyamuni left home and embarked on the religious path because of his encounter with the three major expressions of unhappiness: old age, sickness, and death. He came to see that all existence is subject to the repetition of birth and death, and that this is the root of existential suffering. During this period in history, people shared the idea that life itself was suffering, and that Mount Sumeru and Jambudvipa were realms of suffering.

Buddhism taught that existential suffering would continue as long as ignorance reigned. The greatest ignorance is the idea that the self exists absolutely, and this is the source of all suffering. People’s highest concern must therefore be to undertake religious practice in order to overcome that ignorance. Suffering was considered an urgent and personal problem, and the compulsion to escape that suffering urged them toward religious training and practice. The earliest and most important expression of these ideas was the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths: that suffering texists, that it has a cause, that there is a means to annihilate suffering, and that the Eightfold Path is that means. (The Eightfold Path consists of right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, and right; concentration.) Conceptions of the heavens, karma, and transmigration also addressed the issue of suffering.

The second stage corresponds to the discussion of buddha-realms in chapters 5 through 7. The growth of the Buddhist idea of paradise took place around the first and second centuries C.E., with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism. By this time people no longer felt suffering to be so cruel, having discovered the possibility of pleasure even within a life of suffering. Human life, rather than being the painful force that compelled people to religious training, became a powerful temptation holding them back. People suspended attempts to reach enlightenment because, in Shinran’s words, they could not abandon the old home of suffering amid the round of birth and death. The new world of enlightenment, deferred until after death, was paradise, Sukhavati. Even the idea of paradise, Buddha’s pure land, was secularized, and depicted as replete with the joys and adornments of secular life. This was an entirely different spiritual expression than that of the Erst stage, which regarded existence as evil and considered “nothingness” an ideal state.

The third stage corresponds to chapter 8 and its treatment of the idea ofhell. In Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868), when material life became easier and rationalism gained influence, there appeared a completely new understanding of the nature of hell, involving a dilution of its terrors. Suffering was not so much personal as an abstract condition that was the fate of all humankind. A new optimism had arisen, one that did not regard existence as consisting only of suffering. As a result, religious training lost its urgency. Depictions ofhell became mythological and were experienced as literary romanticism rather than as the stark truth of human existence.

As people gradually stopped thinking of suffering as a threat, Buddhist cosmology, which had been constructed on the terror of suffering, steadily lost its connection to everyday reality. What had originally been a living belief turned into myth. This process had already occurred in Greece before the beginning of the common era, with the mythologization of ancient religion.

In modern times, the idea of existential suffering has further weakened. Human life is no longer regarded as a realm of suffering but instead as a setting for the actualization of human happiness. Suffering has even been given a somewhat positive meaning. The words of Kumazawa Banzan (1619-91), a Confucian thinker of Edo-period Japan, “However greatly troubles mount, I will confront them with the limited force of my being,” are those of a modern man who stands up fearlessly to face suffering, rather than the view of a traditional Buddhist, who seeks to escape suffering.1

The modern turnabout in Buddhist values is not limited to the question of suffering. Changes in the meanings of Buddhist terms highlight the trend. For instance, the Japanese word aki-rameru, “to clarify the truth,” was originally the highest religious act in Buddhism, but it is now understood in a negative way, meaning “to abandon” or “to resign oneself to something.” Similarly, gaman, “self-importance,” something which formerly was to be overcome, is now used to mean “patience” or “endurance,” as when parents urge their children to forbear crying. This process of devaluation has been apparent over the last two or three centuries, no doubt linked to changes in Japanese society and lifestyle. The introduction of Western science and firsthand knowledge of India exacerbated this tendency. Thus the authority of Buddhist cosmology gradually lost its force. The nativist (Kokugaku) scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who favored traditional Japanese ways of thinking and living, viewed Buddhism as a foreign religion. They attacked it ruthlessly, realizing that they were provided with a powerful counter-weapon if Buddhist cosmology were taught as doctrine.

Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was such a nativist scholar and a Shinto theologian. He undermined the traditional authority of Tenjiku (India) and laughed away belief in paradise (Sukhavati). Quoting the description in the Smaller Sukhavatl-vyuha that Amitabha’s Pure Land had both night and day, he suggested that paradise seemed to exist within our own world, being blessed with the sun and the moon. Of course no one had ever seen Sukhavati. It might, in fact, very well be Japan itself: because the world is round, if one keeps going farther and farther west one must reach Japan! He also ridiculed Buddhism, saying that a person sitting for a long time on a lotus flower in paradise might fall into the water when yawning as a result of boredom, or when sneezing because someone was talking about him or her back in the land of the living. Therefore, he quipped, people should learn to swim. If someone drowned by falling off a lotus flower, where would he or she be born next? he wondered.

Here we seem to have arrived at the terminus of Buddhist cosmology as a practical philosophy. It is a point all ancient views of the universe have finally reached. As knowledge is disseminated in ever-greater amounts, people have sought out the rational and overturned old dogmas. Yet Buddhist cosmology will not be completely forgotten, for within it reality became one with the realm of religion. Its vast cosmological system and its detailed explanations are unique. Buddhist cosmology is a spiritual legacy of the past, yet it remains a force capable of stirring the imagination of people today. Like old ceremonial garments no longer worn, it retains an attraction for us and can transport our minds to the spiritual world of ancient and medieval people, in the same way that the Greek myths, though they have lost their significance as a religion, continue to maintain their hold on our imagination.

What Buddhist Cosmology

Teaches Us

Can new inspiration spring from Buddhist cosmology’s ashes? Let us look first at the idea of transmigration. Many modern people view it as outmoded, but I believe that it has many points relevant to the world today. The body of a dead worm returns to the earth, and its constituents change and become grass. This grass is eaten and becomes part of a cow, and eventually people eat the cow. Then they, too, return to the earth and become worms. If we pursued a single atom of nitrogen, we would probably find that it circulated among Gosala’s 1,406,600 kinds of living beings. People are born, and people die. They experience a variety of emotions such as anger, love, and hate, and die with their minds unsetded. They are followed, in turn, by others beginning their lives of anger, love, and hate. Human life is thus full of such delusions, which actually have no absolute existence. Transmigration is the intuitive expression of this meaningless round of birth and death.

The quickest way to understand the Buddhist view that human life is delusion is to recognize it in one’s own inner life. As many of us grow to adulthood, our inner hypocrisy and evil reveal their ugly selves. The repeated experience of feelings of confidence followed by subsequent disappointment causes even more suffering than experiencing disappointment alone. As we grow older, our youthful admiration for the nobility of life and for the achievements of human beings may die away. Though we may be moved by expressions of nature or human life, we cannot wholly reject the conviction that life is something like transmigration.

Many people will no doubt judge the idea of transmigration to be gloomy and life-negating. Those who consider the spiritual condition of Japan late in the Heian period (794—1185), when the idea of impermanence dominated thought, may take the position that Buddhism is retrogressive and harmful. Buddhism recognizes the realities of life (even if they are not what one might hope), and does not try to conceal reality that is unpleasant. Furthermore, the idea of transmigration does not necessarily lead to a nihilistic lifestyle.

One possible result of the idea of transmigration’s development in Japan can be found in the contrast between the words pessimism and nihilism. It is difficult to differentiate the two clearly; let us interpret the former as “the rejection of this world as imperfect,” and the latter as “the idea that everything is void.” Pessimism regards this world as imperfect, but it does not deny everything. In these terms, Indian Buddhism is certainly pessimistic, for it denies that the reality of this world is anything more than transmigratory existence. But it has one clear purpose, liberation, and it sets out along a defined road, religious training. Transmigration and liberation from transmigration: these are the two wheels of the chariot of Indian Buddhism, indispensable to its view of human life.

In the Nirvana Sutra (ca. 3d- 2d century B.C.E.), the final words of Sakyamuni were, “All things pass. Strive without ceasing to perfect your religious practice.” Because all things pass, we must try to perfect our religious practice, and thus conquer the imperfect world. For Indian Buddhists, a pessimistic outlook was the force propelling them toward a high purpose. When this pessimistic view of humanity entered Japan, however, it became colored with nihilism. Buddhism, which in the Nara period (710-94) appears to have had ritualistic, political influence, during the Heian period came to imbue the spiritual life of the people. The phrase “the impermanence of all things” symbolizes the Buddhism of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which focused on the pitiful nature of human life. This happened because Buddhism had forgotten its watchword, “strive without ceasing,” and so had lost sight of its purpose. Why this happened is a tricky question.

One reason for the shift from pessimism to nihilism can be found in Mahayana Buddhism’s own philosophy of emptiness (sunyatH). In sunyata nothing was either bad or good. During the Heian period, this philosophy criticized pre-Mahayana Buddhism’s dissatisfaction with the present. In one sense it was an attempt to bring into Buddhism a more optimistic attitude about life, but it turned out to be a paralyzing agent, taking away the certainty of all values. This weakened both the pre-Mahayana negation of the value of human life and Mahayana impulse to undertake religious training.

Another reason was the fact that Mahayana made inroads into Japanese society by attaching itself to the nobility and to literature. This period corresponds to the second of our three stages concerning the consciousness of suffering. While on the one hand the nobility held to the Buddhist teaching that human life is imperfect, they could materially afford to emphasize that which was beautiful and pleasant in life. Forgetting about work, the court nobility tended to separate themselves from real life and frolic in a world of the imagination. The vigorous lifestyle of Sakyamuni’s time had abated, and the nobility held human life in greater esteem. Leisure opened a space in their minds, and in filling up that space they indulged their aesthetic consciousness. They drowned themselves in an atmosphere of aesthetics; to them anything, even death itself, was beautiful. A line from a poem by the Japanese Buddhist priest and poet Saigyo, “Let me die in spring under the blossoming trees, let it be around that full moon of Kisaragi month [the second month of the lunar year],” is an expression of this sentiment.2 In this nihilism, values are uncertain and all is void. The secularized Buddhism of the late Heian period certainly lost the goal of liberation from existence and in particular the path to it. (In this sense we can say that the sect founders of the Kamakura period [1185-1336], such as Shinran [1173-1262], Dogen [1200-1253], and Nichiren [1222-82], reaffirmed the path, that is, religious practice.)

Purpose is meaningless without the path to its achievement. According to Zen, the purpose is liberation, and the path is religious practice (zazen, “sitting meditation”). According to the Pure Land sects, the purpose is salvation (Pure Land rebirth) and the path is recitation of Amitabha’s name (nembutsu). There are other paths in Buddhism, however. Zen says that “the mind of everyday life is in itself the path.” I understand this to mean that rather than actively trying to escape the river of transmigration, one should trust oneself to the flow; in other words, one should rid oneself of ego-attachment. In this way, everyday life takes on a new dimension. Absorbed in daily existence, the mind becomes conscious that somewhere there exists something of higher value. The more we penetrate transmigratory existence (human life), the more brilliantly that beacon shines above us. It is because of that higher existence that we can be of settled mind regarding transmigration and entrust ourselves to it. For those who do not know such a higher existence, the present life is all, and despair forever looms before them. Only those who do not cling to their own existence are able to view the world with equanimity, never finding disappointment. Paradoxically, it is then that the world seems acceptable. This may be a pessimistic oudook, but it is not nihilistic.

An antidotal practice for transmigration, meditation {dhyana), can also teach the modern person much. As we have seen, Buddhism regards the variegated world as a realm of illusion, amplified by the activity of the sense organs. Liberation therefore begins with the control of those organs by means of meditation. Gradually the spirit becomes unified, and a single world comes into being, in which there is no distinction between you and me, good and bad, happy and unhappy.

Advanced Buddhist philosophy was born of the practice of meditation. On occasion it compares favorably even with Western philosophy. Coming to the conclusion that all could be doubted except his own existence, the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) said, “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum). Buddhism goes still further in linking the questions of existence and mind (or consciousness). The existence of the world is identified with ego, “I.” Sum, “I am,” however, is merely one defined stage. Searching for this ego more deeply, seeking the roots of existence, we gradually reach the higher levels of the abode of the infinity of consciousness, the abode of nothingness, and the abode of neither thought nor non-thought. Farther than that is beyond the boundaries of language.

Let us next examine Buddhist cosmology itself in terms of its modern significance. There are a surprising number of similarities between Buddhist cosmology and modern science. We have seen how Buddhism regards the world as a plurality, coming into being and then disintegrating over a long period of time, a process which continues infinitely into the past and the future. Numbers concerning space and time increase in geometric ratio, and the field of vision concerning the universe, in terms of the very small and the very large, expands virtually to infinity. If we remove the graphic, the dogmatic, and the mythological from the expressions of Buddhist cosmologists, we are left with a series of concepts that resemble in no small way the conclusions of modern science. We may include here ideas such as the solar and galactic systems, the birth and extinction of nebulae, the birth of the heavenly bodies from cosmic dust, and the concept of thousands and billions of light years. If we translate the words of two thousand years ago into our modern tongue, it becomes apparent that Buddhist and modern cosmology are not all that far apart. The ideas of hell and paradise can also be explained in terms of Buddhist symbolism. We saw previously how the human realm, as well as the realm of the underworld, is created by the karmic force generated by living beings. In the majority of cases, this karmic force is created blindly; karma breeds karma, and in a mass called “common karma” causes results shared by many, an unpredictable or at least unopposable fate. For all we know, the country we inhabit, or the whole world for that matter, may suddenly turn into hell. Think, for example, how readily we are inclined to describe certain conditions as “hellish”; traffic may be “hell,” or the daily commute, and in Japan the competition engendered by annual examinations to enter high school or university is termed “examination hell.” In the same way we can recover the truth of the Buddhist paradise. Paradise is a place where flowers bloom, birds sing, and the murmuring of a stream can be heard. Though we tend to dismiss paradise as an oversimplified concept, we would do well to consider, now that we are in danger of losing these things through environmental deterioration, that they do indeed represent paradise.

I would like to conclude by considering one further point, the possibility of the unification of science and religion. Though a great deal of time has passed since their separation began to be thought a problem, there seems to be no prospect of their reconciliation in the near future. This has led many people, particularly those speaking for religion, to assert that science and cosmology should deal with different dimensions. I cannot help having the impression that those advocates are acting out of a sense of self-preservation in light of the truths that science is revealing.

Nevertheless, science seems to have been won over by those voices, and has imposed on itself a taboo on discussing the meaning of human life and happiness. Faced with such contradictory (or at the least, disunified) ideas, can human beings attain happiness? The answer is no. To think that science and religion should deal with different dimensions is superstition. People must have only a single, unified understanding of the world if they are to live in faith.

Buddhist cosmology skillfully combines the scientific and the religious, unremittingly concerned with the nature of human suffering and deliverance from that suffering. Modern cosmologies have forgotten about the happiness factor, but Buddhism never has. Of course, many of the scientific elements in Buddhist cosmology have become outdated as a result of scientific progress, and so have lost their usefulness. But its science is not dogma, and it can change at any time according to new knowledge. The religious ideas of karma and rebirth, suffering and deliverance, are completely compatible with the new science. I do not know what new understanding of the world will arise in the future, but the existence of Buddhist cosmology points to the possibility of a new worldview that unites science and religion.