Is There a Beginning?

Buddhism does not so much deny the theory of a Creator-God as make the hypothesis not onlyunnecessary, but actually incompatible with the known facts. If, in order to exist, the worldmust have had a pre-existent Creator, how did this Creator himself come into existence, and bywhat laws was his own nature governed? If such a being was able to exist without a creator, thesole reason for assuming his own existence is removed, because the world itself can equally wellexist without a prior cause. Can it indeed be said that the universe and the life process had anybeginning, or are we constrained to think in the terms of beginnings only because of thelimitations of our own mind?

A beginning is an event which has to take place at a specific point of space and time. It cannotoccur in timeless void because the three conditions of time—past, present and future—whichare necessary for the occurrence of any event, cannot obtain in a timeless state. For any event totake place, there must be the time before its occurrence (past), the time of its occurrence(present) and the time after its occurrence (future). But time is an altogether relative concept:there must be events taking place to enable time to exist, and it is only by the regular occurrenceof certain events, such as the diurnal rotation of the earth and the seasonal changes, that can beknown and measured.

The occurrence of events necessitates the existence of things. By things we mean objects thatoccupy space, and which by their movements in relation to one another mark not only divisionsin time, but also measurable areas in space. Space and time, therefore, are a unity; a qualitativewhole with quantitative parts, or relationships. We may consider them separately, but wecannot make any statements concerning the ones which do not in some way involve the other.

This, stated broadly, is the basis of the theory of relativity. The knowledge of space and timedepends upon consciousness and position without any fixed point of observation. Spatial andtemporal movement is common to both the observer and the object observed, so that what canbe known is not a “thing” but merely a relationship.

When this is understood it follows that there could never have been a beginning—an originout of nothingness of the universe or the life process. It is true that the universe as we know itevolved out of the dispersed matter of a previous universe, and when it passes away itsremains, in the form of active forces, will in time give rise to another universe in exactly thesame way. The process is cyclic and continuous. The space-time complex is curved, and in acurved construction of inter-relationships there can be no point of origin or departure, so that inthis series of related causes it is useless to look for any First Cause. We tend to look for firstcauses and think them to be necessary only because our minds are conditioned to spatial andtemporal relativity; the mind, by its very nature, must operate within the mechanism of which itis itself a part; it can deal only in relationships.

This is why it is said in Buddhist texts: “the origin of phenomena is not discoverable, and the beginning of beings obstructed by ignoranceand ensnared by craving is not to be found.”to another through the residual energy which iscontinually renewing itself—that is, through the principal of the indestructibility of matter—sothe life of one being gives rise to another being which is not the same in identity and withoutinvolving an unchanging, permanent self. That which links them is called in Buddhism“kamma”, or volitional activity; the continuation of the causal process is called “saṃsāra,” orthe cycles of rebirth; the actuality of rebirth and of existence without any unchanging principleof identity or self is called “anattā.”

When it is said that world cycles or world periods, known in Buddhism as kappas, are ofimmeasurable duration, it must be remembered that all time concepts are relative; we measurethem from our own standpoint. In an immeasurably vaster space context, the time context iscorrespondingly enlarged, so that events covering millions of years by our calculations can bemeasurable in terms of seconds. The brain may reel at the concept of an infinite of space-timeconstructions fitting into or impregnating one another endlessly in all directions, but it is notentirely outside the scope of human imagination.

It figures quite largely in Buddhist thought; there are an infinite number (conventionally expressed as “ten thousand”, or “incalculable”)world-systems and thirty-one planes of existence having vast differences in time measurement.

What is unthinkable is a state of non-causality where neither space, time nor events have anyexistence. This has to be understood by direct perception, which means bursting the bonds ofrelativity and its concepts and processes, and contacting within oneself the asaṅkhata orunconditioned element. The thinking, reasoning and discursive mind, having exhausted itsexploration of phenomena and discovered them to be all impermanent and void of essentialreality, must transcend this mechanism, call a halt to the generative impulses, and thus bringabout final liberation from all processes. This final liberation is called Nibbāna.