The Cakkavāḷa

Each universe is said to comprise a number of world-systems, or cakkavāḷas, and the number of these world-systems contained in the whole cosmos is incalculable. The term universe denotes a particular system, having its own gravitational field and revolving about a centre. Such are the spiral and cloud nebulae and other groups which constitute the island-universes of outer space.

The cakkavāḷas are local world-systems embedded in these, as our own solar system is believed to be. According to the evidence available at present, our solar system is situated in one of the arms of a vast galaxy of the flattened disc type, resembling the great spiral nebulax in

Each universe is said to comprise a number of world-systems, or cakkavāḷas, and the number of these world-systems contained in the whole cosmos is incalculable. The term universe denotes a particular system, having its own gravitational field and revolving about a centre.

Such are the spiral and cloud nebulae and other groups which constitute the island-universes of outer space. The cakkavāḷas are local world-systems embedded in these, as our own solar system is believed to be. According to the evidence available at present, our solar system is situated in one of the arms of a vast galaxy of the flattened disc type, resembling the great spiral nebulax

In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, where it is stated that the Buddha could, had he wished, have lived on to the end of the Kappa, the period there signified is said by some to be the normal duration of a human life, which is taken as being one hundred years. Others consider that it means until the end of a world�period, at which point all material things pass away. 6 Niyāma Dīpanī, by Ledi Sayādaw Mahāthera, transl. by Beni Barua, D. Litt, M.A. and U Nyana Patamagyaw. Rangoon 1921, page 18ff.

Andromeda.

This galaxy is estimated to contain about 150,000 million stars, and the distance between them increases the further they are removed from the centre of concentration around which they all revolve. Our solar system, which is 30,000 light years away from the galactic centre, makes one full revolution around it in approximately 250 million years.

This is known to present-day astronomers as one cosmic year. If we accept that the age of our earth is in the region of 3,500 million years, and that the entire planetary system is as old, the earth is about 15 to 16 cosmic years old. That is to say, our solar system since its inception has made some 15 to 16 revolutions around the centre of the galaxy.7

Most of this is scientific conjecture at present, but it is based on reliable data and must be accepted until or unless future discoveries show it to be inaccurate. I quote it here for the bearing it has upon the older cosmological concepts of Buddhism.

Agreement between them is found in the common hypothesis of a cyclic breaking-up and restoration of the cosmos in accordance with natural law, and in the rejection of any word for a First Cause or creative agency. In both concepts the act of creation is perpetual, and is the outcome of natural necessity —it results from the nature of energy and the laws which govern it.

The second important point of contact is the agreement as to a multiplicity of world-systems, the cakkavāḷas of Buddhism and the solar systems of present-day astronomy. “In our metagalactic system there are hundreds of millions of galaxies and each galaxy may be composed of hundreds of thousands of millions of stars.

Even in our galaxy which numbers approximately 150,000 million stars, there may be hundreds of thousands of planets on which life is likely to originate and develop. Our infinite universe must also contain an infinite number of inhabited planets.8

There are in the texts of both Theravada and Mahāyāna Buddhism innumerable references to the multiplicity of worlds that bear sentient life. But it is only in the Commentaries, not in the words ascribed to the Buddha himself, that any detailed description of them is given. And there, as we should expect, the picture presented has some features in common with other ancient cosmologies: the earth is by implication flat, with a great mountain, Meru, at its centre.

There are seven great oceans encompassed by seven rings of mountains, and four great continents are situated respectively at the four cardinal points of the compass. The southern continent is Jambudīpa, the Land of the Rose Apple, or India. Between the four great land masses there are smaller islands. The sun, moon and planets were supposed to revolve around Mt. Meru, night occurring on Jambudīpa when the mountain obscured the sun, and it was day on the Northern continent, Uttarakuru.

There are two points to be noticed in connection with this peculiar view of the earth. The first is that, if it were indeed the picture currently accepted at the time of the Buddha—and some very ancient texts from the Tipiṭaka tend to show that it was—it would not have been to the purpose of the Buddha, who was a teacher of spiritual truths, to correct it. Had he attempted to do so, his time and efforts would have been wasted. Few would have understood, and the understanding would not have benefited them spiritually.

The majority would have dismissed it as the theory of a lunatic.

Furthermore, Pali is an undeveloped language, in which a vocabulary of relatively few words had to be made to express all ideas. Lacking the necessary terminology, which modern languages have developed and expanded as the growth of thought required, the Buddha would have been handicapped by these limitations of language, even had he wished, to describe the motions of the planets and the physical construction of the solar system. In Pali a word, the primitive meaning of which is very simple, is made to serve for highly complicated ideas, owing to the absence of any borrowings from other sources, or the evolution of new verbal forms.

Thus the word khandha, which philosophically stands for an aggregate of physical and psychological factors, means in its original sense merely a “lump” of something. It is even used physiologically to denote “shoulder.” With such a restricted vocabulary ideas tend to remain rudimentary, or to be misunderstood. We therefore have no means of knowing whether the terms employed to describe a world-system are to be taken literally or as makeshift approximations, analogies or poetic fictions.

However that may be, it is a striking fact that the true picture of the solar system as we now have it, is actually in closer conformity with the Buddha’s teaching of universal principles that is the traditional one held by the Buddhist commentators.

It carries out the principle of uninterrupted revolution denoted by the wheel (cakka) and that of having no point of commencement, of which the physical symbol is the sphere. If, in fact, we would seek for a material illustration of the law of recurrence, of cyclic progression under the domination of incessant change, we should find its perfect expression in the revolving island-universes, the solar systems and the structure of the atom.

In the Saṃyutta Nikāya (II 178), the Buddha speaks of the succession of kappas in the following words: “Undetermined, Bhikkhus, is the beginning of this world. The past extremity (pubba-koṭi) of beings running on in birth after birth bound by ignorance and the bonds of craving is not manifest.”

The Pali word translated here by “undetermined” anamata (a-mata), meaning that which is unknown and unascertained. The sense, therefore, is that the past extremity or ultimate beginning of the cycles is not to be known by calculation. There is no limit by which it can be defined.

“The past extremity … is not manifest” is equivalent to saying that it does not exist. A similar use of the phrase is found in the collection of texts, the Saṃyutta Nikāya (II, 52), here the Buddha asks: “If, Ānanda, there be no birth, can old age and death be manifested?”

To which Ānanda replies: “Truly, they cannot, Lord.” From this is clear that “to be manifest” means to exist, and “not manifest” means not to exist. The proposition contained in the words “The past extremity ಞ is not manifest” can therefore only mean that, although each kappa has its beginning, middle and end, there is no beginning to the succession of great kappas in general.9 The cyclic successions have existed always, the reason being that they do not exist in time, but time, as a progression of events, exists in them.

The time of Bergson, which is absolute duration, not susceptible of measurement other than that which is brought about by cutting into the flow of specific events in these more or less arbitrary divisions that we commonly mean when we speak of time. A beginning of time in the state of timelessness is clearly an impossibility it is only periods of time that can have a beginning an end.

We shall have occasion to deal further with the philosophical difference between time as a symbol of space and time which is absolute duration when we discuss the nature of the flux of becoming, later on.