For
Buddhists, the universe has no beginning. Various world systems
come into existence and eventually cease to be, but other worlds
precede and follow them. The Buddha is said to have discouraged
speculation about the origin of the universe; the question of
whether the world has a beginning is one of fourteen questions that
the Buddha refused to answer. He also remained silent when asked
whether the universe will ever come to an end. Individual worlds
are destroyed, incinerated by the fire of seven suns; but, no
apocalypse, no final end time, is foretold. Individual beings put
an end to their individual existence, one that also has no
beginning, by traversing the path to nirvana.
This does
not mean that Buddhists do not have creation myths. One is offered
in the Agganna Sutta, which describes how beings first
came to populate a newly formed world system and how gender,
sexuality, private property, labor, and government came into
existence. The place that they inhabit—and which we inhabit,
according to the Buddhists—is an island continent called
Jambudvipa, "Rose Apple Island," in a great sea. It is the southern
continent, one of four continents in a flat world, situated in the
four cardinal directions around a central mountain called Mount
Meru. The mountain is in the shape of a great cube, each of its
four faces composed of a different kind of precious stone. The
southern face of the mountain is made of lapis lazuli and so when
the light of the sun reflects off Meru's south face, it turns the
color of our sky blue. Gods live on the slopes of the mountain and
on the summit. It was in the heaven on the summit on Mount Meru
that the Buddha taught the Abhidharma to his mother.
The Buddha,
like other teachers of his day, believed in rebirth—a process of
birth and death called samsara, literally "wandering." According to
the Buddha, this process has no beginning and will not end unless
one brings it to an end. Until then, each being is born in lifetime
after lifetime into one of six, and only six, realms: as a god,
demigod, human, animal, ghost, or denizen of hell. This is not a
process of evolution but rather very much an aimless wandering from
realm to realm, up and down, for aeons, a process that on the
surface appears entirely random. The gods live above our world,
some on the surface of the central mountain, some in the heavens
above it. Their lives there are long but not eternal. For the gods
who live on the summit of Mount Meru, the life span is a thousand
years, and every day of those years is equal in length to one
hundred human years. In the heavens arrayed above the summit of
Mount Meru, the life spans are longer. These heavens as well as the
realms of demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and the denizens of
hell, together constitute what is called the realm of desire,
because the beings there desire the pleasures that derive from the
five senses, constantly seeking beautiful things to see, hear,
smell, taste, and touch. Above the desire realm are the heavens of
the realm of form, where the gods have bodies made of a subtle
matter invisible to humans; having no need for food or drink, these
gods only have the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. The highest
Buddhist heavens are located in what is called the formless realm.
There the gods have no bodies but exist only as consciousness, and
the names of its four heavens are derived from the object in which
the minds of the gods of that heaven are absorbed: infinite space,
infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor
nonperception. But these heavens remain within the cycle of birth
and death, and when the karmic effect has run its course, each
inhabitant is reborn elsewhere.
In general,
it is said that one is reborn as a god as a result of acts of
generosity and charity in a former life; charity directed toward
the community of Buddhist monks and nuns is considered particularly
efficacious. However, one is reborn in these heavens of the
formless realm by achieving their deep levels of concentration in
meditation while a human. Yet even these profound states of bliss,
states that last for millennia, are not eternal. Indeed, Buddhist
texts sometimes consign the saints of other religions to these
heavens, explaining that they have mistaken such states, which lie
within samsara, as liberation from it.
Below the
gods in the hierarchy of beings are the demigods (excluded in some
lists), a kind of catchall category of all manner of spirits and
sprites, some malevolent and some benign; one of the words for
"plant" or "tree," which Buddhists monks are prohibited from
uprooting or cutting down, literally means "abode of being." The
demigods are less potent than the gods but have powers that exceed
those humans and can cause all manner of mischief if not properly
propitiated. In the category of demigod, one finds the
gandharvas, a class of celestial musicians who, according
to their name, subsist on fragrances; a crude translation of that
name would be "odor eaters." One also finds a kind of half-human
half-horse creature called the kimnara, literally, "is
that a man?"
The third
realm is the world of humans, regarded as the ideal state for the
practice of the Buddhist path. The realms of the gods above are too
pleasurable; those of the animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell
below are too painful. The world of humans is said to have
sufficient suffering to cause one to wish to escape from it, but
not so much as to cause paralysis and thereby block such an
attempt. Among the sufferings of humans, the Buddha enumerated
eight: birth, aging, sickness, death, losing friends, gaining
enemies, not getting what you wish for, and getting what you do not
wish for. As we consider, as we always must, the extent to which
the doctrines of a religion reflect, on the one hand, the concerns
of a distant time and place and, on the other hand, more general
elements of the human condition, this list, set forth in ancient
India more than two millennia ago, seems to fall on the universal
side of the spectrum.
It is said
that one is reborn as a human as a result of being an ethical
person, generally understood as keeping vows. As mentioned above,
for the Buddhist laity, there are five traditional vows: to abstain
from killing humans, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from
lying, and from intoxicants. Laypeople could take any one, two,
three, four, or all five of these vows, whether for life or for a
more limited period. The vows kept by monks and nuns number in the
hundreds. They govern all elements of monastic life, including
possessions (especially robes), hygiene, and general comportment.
The vows are categorized by the weight of the infraction they seek
to prevent. Four transgressions result in permanent expulsion from
the order: murder, sexual intercourse, theft (of anything above a
specified value), and lying about spiritual attainments. Lesser
infractions may require probation, confession, or simply a verbal
acknowledgment.
Vows play a
central role in Buddhist practice. They are not commandments from
God, nor do they represent a covenant, but instead are a mechanism
for making merit, the good karma that leads to happiness in this
life and the next. It is sometimes said that one of the Buddhist
innovations in Indian karma theory was to introduce the element of
intention. A misdeed was no longer a ritual mistake, a sacrifice
poorly performed, as it was in Vedic times, but an intentional
action—whether physical, verbal, or mental—motivated by desire,
hatred, or ignorance. A vow represented not a situational decision
for good over evil but a lifetime commitment to refrain from a
particular negative act. It was said that one accrued a greater
good karma by taking a vow not to kill humans than by simply
happening not to commit murder over the course of one's life.
Conversely, one accrued greater negative karma if one took and then
broke a vow to avoid a particular misdeed than if one simply
happened to commit that misdeed. The scholastic tradition would
later explain why this was the case. In the act of taking a vow, a
kind of "subtle matter" was created in one's body. As long as the
vow was kept, this subtle matter caused good karma to accrue in
every moment throughout one's life. For this reason, taking a vow
was a much more efficient means to generate the seeds of future
happiness than simply being occasionally ethical.
The realms
of gods and humans are considered the "good" or "fortunate" realms
within the cycle of rebirth, because rebirth there is the result of
virtuous actions and because the sufferings undergone by the beings
in these realms are far less horrific than those of the beings
reborn in the three lower realms.
The realm
of animals (which includes all birds, mammals, amphibians, fish,
and insects, but not plants) is familiar enough, as are the various
sufferings. Buddhist texts say that the particular suffering of
animals is that they always must go in search of food while
avoiding themselves becoming food; unlike humans, animals are
killed not because of something that they did or said, but because
of the taste of their flesh or the texture of their skin. One is
said to be reborn as an animal as a result of past actions that
were motivated by ignorance.
The next
realm is that of the ghosts—often called "hungry ghosts," the
translation of the Chinese term for the denizens of this realm.
Their primary form of suffering is indeed hunger and thirst, and
they are constantly seeking to fill their bellies. As they do so,
they encounter all manner of obstacles. In Buddhist iconography,
ghosts are depicted as baleful beings with huge distended bellies
and emaciated limbs, not unlike the victims of famine. But beyond
this affliction so familiar in human history, the other sufferings
of ghosts are more fantastic. Some have knots in their throats,
making it impossible for food or drink to pass. For others, who are
able to swallow, the food they eat is transformed into sharp
weapons and molten lead when it reaches their stomach. Still others
find that when they finally come upon a stream of flowing water, it
turns into blood and pus as they kneel down to drink. Ghosts live
in a world located five hundred leagues beneath the surface of the
earth, but they sometimes venture into the human world, where they
can be seen by monks with supernormal powers. Indeed, the feeding
of ghosts is a special responsibility of Buddhist monks. The
Sanskrit term translated as "ghost" is preta, which means
"departed" or "deceased," suggesting that they are the spirits of
the dead who have not received the proper ritual offerings from
their families and thus are doomed to starvation. Buddhist monks
and nuns, who also have left family life behind, have a special
responsibility to feed the hungry ghosts, who appear often in
Buddhist stories. It is said that one is reborn as a ghost as a
result of actions motivated by greed in a former life.
In the
Buddhist cosmology, the most elaborate of the realms are the most
desired—the heavens—and the most feared—the hells. There are eight
hot hells and eight cold hells, four neighboring hells, and a
number of trifling hells. They are stacked beneath the surface of
the earth—the deeper below, the greater the intensity and duration
of the suffering. The cold hells are desolate lands of ice where
snow is always falling, without a sun or moon, or any source of
light and heat. The beings there are naked, and the names of some
of the hells describe the shape of the blisters that form on their
bodies: for example, "Split Like a Blue Lotus." The hot hells are
lands of burning iron where beings undergo various forms of torture
during lifetimes that last for millions of years, but not forever.
Beings are reborn in hell as a result of actions motivated by
hatred. There are said to be five deeds that result in immediate
rebirth in the most torturous of the hot hells. The first of the
four of these seems particularly heinous, the last less obviously
so: killing one's father, killing one's mother, killing an arhat
(someone who has achieved liberation and will enter nirvana at
death), wounding the Buddha, and causing dissension in the
community of monks and nuns.