There are countless worlds; and as here on our world things may be
destroyed by fire or water, or otherwise, so also with the worlds in
space.
But as the disintegration of anything here on the Earth only means its
reintegration anew in some other place, so also is it with the worlds.
Nothing is destroyed, nothing perishes: it is only that a change
takes place in the centres of tension--nothing more. An Earth, a Sun,
a Jupiter, a Sirius, and so forth, as identities, as corporealities
complete in themselves--these as little exist as there exist identities
as personalities. Even as here, so also in the infinitudes of space,
there are condensations having their foundation in definite energical
tensions which, for the sake of easier comprehension and because
the process runs its course at a rate of speed sufficiently low, we
designate by the names of Earth, Sun, Jupiter Sirius, and so forth.
Like every _I_-process that presents itself to my senses, they possess
significance only as symptoms; they are nothing but forms in which
certain definite energies make themselves manifest.
In the Buddha’s system there are no such things as worlds in
themselves. A world is nothing but the summation of the single
processes of which it is made up, just as a banquet is nothing but the
summation of the guests and the ingredients of the feast. As birds
flock together because there is something present that attracts them
in large numbers; as crows gather round a mango-stone; as a saline
solution from the centre of shock outwards proceeds to crystallize; so
does this unitary experience, whether it manifest itself in organic or
non-organic shape, conglobate into cosmic groups, burst into systems
of worlds. Here one must hold to it firm and fast that “non-organic”
is not the converse of “organic,” but is simply the not organic, and
an indication that energies are here concerned upon which we ourselves
even by analogy can say nothing.[34] For the rest, however, all is
the same--all is the self-interweaving of energy and material--all is
Sankhāra. Whether the processes are of such a nature as in the course
of their development to permit of flowering forth into consciousness
or whether they are not--this makes no essential difference. When
the Buddha says: “The arising of the world will I teach you,” and
then proceeds with his sequence of thought: “Where the eye and forms
are, there arises visual consciousness; the conjunction of the three
results is contact; contact yields feeling,” and so on; or when he
says: “The world is where the six senses are”--this is not meant in the
philosophical idealistic sense. There is no arising of the world other
than that experienced at every moment as a self-interweaving of energy
and material in me, in every being, in every process in the world.
_The summation of this individual experience--that is the world._
Other world there is not. This moment that now says “_I_”--this is the
arising of the world, and never and nowhere in all the universe does it
take place otherwise. As eater, as self-nourisher, I am _world-maker_
in the strictest sense of the word. In this actual world nothing
new arises. Centres of tension, tendencies, shift about hither and
thither, heave up and down like mist-wreaths over the dark depths of
unfathomable abysses--a beginningless coming together, a beginningless
falling asunder, in which nothing persists save the never-sated thirst,
the ever-sleepless lust for food. It is the terrible game “law”
that here is played. Worlds, the arena; fates, the players; and the
prize--nothing!
In connection with such a beginningless integration and disintegration,
to speak of a condition of greater or lesser development is the
notion of a child. As little as the clenched fist is more developed
than the five fingers outspread, just as little is a world in space
peopled with thinking, living beings more developed than one spread
out in masses of nebula; all things are only phases in a beginningless
proceeding here presenting itself to me symptomatically, but of which
I obtain a direct comprehension in consciousness. To ask whether suns
and Milky Ways are without beginning is meaningless; for they are
positively nothing else but the expression of the hither and thither
movement of energies; but that which I now experience in consciousness,
that is--rightly considered--beginninglessness itself; and the
self-integration and self-disintegration of worlds is nothing but the
functional concomitant phenomenon of the beginninglessness of the _I_.
If now such a Lokadhātu (world-system) goes to decay, this, conformable
to its nature, is nothing but a summation of single dyings. The Kamma
of the single things takes fresh hold in the universe there where it
can take hold--and therefore _must_ take hold. Actual energies take
hold immediately, independent of space and time. There is no need to
trace their course from meteorites and cosmic nebulæ, from one heavenly
body to another, somewhat as one might trace a letter from its place
of postage to its destination; but even as our thoughts are immediate,
independent of time and space, as our loves are able to “lay hold” in
the remotest ends of the earth, so do the Kammas lay hold immediately,
independent of time and space, in the most distant abysses of
infinitude, even to where no light-year any more can measure--lay hold
there, whither, in virtue of their propensities, their tendencies, they
reach out.
From the commanding position of such a conception it follows that
Buddhist cosmogony does not fit in with our crude astronomical
ideas. As it is not always the case that “birds of a feather flock
together”--there are solitary denizens of air, noble creatures that
wing their way through the ether alone--so Buddhist cosmogony makes
mention of solitary beings who segregate themselves at the initial
beginnings of a new world.
When, after the break-up of a system of worlds, here and there worlds
again begin to form, to sprout; when again here and there energies take
hold even because they can take hold, then these beings appear as pure
creatures of light, self-luminous, wheeling through boundless space,
through boundless epochs of time, compact all of light, compact all of
bliss, yet even as we, belonging to the world, differing only in the
circumstances and antecedent conditions of their “taking hold.”
One reads of this in the colossal thought-symphony of the Brahmajāla
Sutta of the _Dīgha Nikāya_. It is thus that a spirit speaks who has
burst through the barriers of self-imposed conceptions and unimpeded
launches out into the infinitudes where thought finds never a bound
save that itself enjoins, nor any halt save that it sets itself.