IB World Religions 2.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: the Cycle of Existence, Other Realms and the 31 Lokas Notes

2.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: The Cycle of Existence, Other Realms and the 31 Lokas

Cosmology without a creator

1. Buddhist texts describe an enormous, crowded universe, and they do not begin it with a creator. Theravada teaching holds that no being made the world, and that hunting for the one who did leads nowhere useful.
2. The Buddha is presented as setting certain questions aside. The avyakata (Sanskrit avyakrta: undeclared questions) include whether the world is eternal and whether it has an edge, and the texts say answers would not reduce dukkha.
3. The Culamalunkyaputta Sutta gives the reason as an image. A man shot with an arrow who refuses treatment until he learns who fired it will die long before the answers arrive.
4. Where a creator does appear in the texts, he is corrected rather than worshipped. In the Brahmajala Sutta the god Brahma believes he made the beings who appear after him, and the sutta explains that he merely arrived in the new world first.
5. The Agganna Sutta then offers a story of decline in place of a creation. Luminous beings taste a savoury earth, grow coarse, divide the fields and appoint a first king, so that society and even social rank are traced back to craving.
6. Buddhists therefore read cosmology as a map of where kamma (Sanskrit karma) sends beings, not as an account of an origin. Every realm on that map lies inside samsara, and none of them is a way out of it.

Kalpas and world systems

1. In place of a first moment, Buddhist texts measure time in kappas (Sanskrit kalpas: world-ages), stretches in which a world system forms, lasts, dissolves and stays dissolved before forming again.
2. The Buddha's similes for a kappa are deliberately unmanageable. One imagines a mountain seven miles high brushed once a century with a silk cloth, and says the mountain would wear away before the kappa ended.
3. A second simile fills a city with mustard seeds and takes one seed away every hundred years. The city empties first.
4. The unit of space is the cakkavala (Sanskrit cakravala: world system), a disc of continents and ocean ringed around the central mountain Sineru (Sanskrit Sumeru), with the higher planes rising above it.
5. Texts speak of thousands of such systems, and Mahayana sutras multiply them further still, so the human world is one address among an uncountable number.
6. Buddhists draw a moral rather than an astronomical conclusion from the scale. If beings have been circling this long, the sheer length of samsara is itself a reason to want out.

The three realms

1. The planes are grouped in three tiers, the tiloka (Sanskrit triloka: three realms), and beings are sorted between them by the kind of craving and the kind of consciousness that holds them there.
2. The kamaloka (Sanskrit kamadhatu: realm of desire) is the lowest tier and the most crowded. It holds beings driven by the five senses, and the human world sits inside it.
3. The rupaloka (Sanskrit rupadhatu: realm of form) is reached by minds steadied in jhana (Sanskrit dhyana: meditative absorption). Its inhabitants are described as having subtle bodies and as being free of sense craving.
4. The arupaloka (Sanskrit arupyadhatu: formless realm) is subtler again, and its beings are pictured as pure mental states with no body at all.
5. Each tier is treated as a consequence of mental training or its absence. A meditator who dies while absorbed is said to be reborn at the level his mind had reached.
6. The tiers do not solve the problem they organise. Buddhists hold that lifespans higher up are vast but still finite, so a being falls back when the kamma that lifted it runs out.

The thirty-one planes

1. Theravada sources count thirty-one planes in all: eleven in the kamaloka, sixteen in the rupaloka and four in the arupaloka.
2. Within the kamaloka the texts name six gatis (destinations) that beings are reborn into: hell beings, animals, hungry ghosts, asuras, humans and devas. Some lists give five by counting the asuras with another group.
3. The four lowest destinations are the apayas (states of loss). Niraya (Sanskrit naraka: hell) is the most painful, and the petas (Sanskrit pretas: hungry ghosts) are pictured with huge bellies and needle throats, always hungry and unable to swallow.
4. The asuras are jealous titans who fight the devas over the fruit of a tree rooted on their own side of the mountain. Their trouble is envy rather than pain.
5. Six deva planes crown the kamaloka, among them Tavatimsa, where the god Sakka rules, and Tusita (Sanskrit Tushita), where a Buddha-to-be waits for his final birth.
6. Buddhists rate the human plane the most useful of the thirty-one rather than the most comfortable. It is said to mix enough dukkha to prompt practice with enough ease to make practice possible.
7. Above the rupaloka sit the five Suddhavasa (Pure Abodes), where non-returners finish the path, and the arupaloka tops out in the plane of neither perception nor non-perception.

Buddhas in other realms

1. Mahayana sutras populate the wider cosmos with Buddhas other than the historical one. Each is said to preside over a buddhakshetra (buddha-field), a world system shaped by the vows he made before his awakening.
2. The best known field is Sukhavati, the Pure Land in the west, presided over by Amitabha (Japanese Amida). The Sukhavati Sutras describe conditions there as perfectly suited to practice.
3. The Lotus Sutra widens the picture again, presenting the Buddha's death as a teaching device and his actual lifespan as immeasurable.
4. Pure Land Buddhism turns this cosmology into a daily practice. Devotees recite the Buddha's name, in Japanese the nembutsu, trusting Amida's vow to bring them to Sukhavati.
5. Rebirth in a Pure Land is not presented as enlightenment itself. Mahayana teachers describe it as the place where enlightenment finally becomes reachable.
6. Other Buddhas hold other fields, among them Akshobhya in the eastern world of Abhirati, while Maitreya (Pali Metteyya), the Buddha still to come, waits in the Tusita heaven of the older cosmology.

The wheel of life

1. Vajrayana traditions compress the whole cosmology into one picture, the bhavacakka (Sanskrit bhavachakra: wheel of becoming), painted at the entrance of Tibetan monasteries so that everyone arriving reads it first.
2. Six segments hold six realms: devas, asuras, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. A viewer can locate any possible rebirth on a single disc.
3. Three animals chase each other at the hub, a cock, a snake and a pig, standing for the greed, hatred and ignorance that keep the wheel turning.
4. Yama, the lord of death, grips the whole wheel in his claws and jaws. The image says that every realm shown is mortal, the deva heavens included.
5. Around the rim run the twelve links of dependent origination, so the painting states the mechanism alongside the map.
6. A Buddha stands outside the wheel, usually pointing. Buddhists read that small figure as the one thing in the picture that is not another destination.