Like all the other problems of science, this too is of a dialectical
nature. One is operating with one identity “world” and another
identity “life,” and afterwards strives in vain to bring the two into
comprehensible association. In the simple entertaining of such ideas
one has cut oneself off from every possibility of a solution. There
is no identity “world,” no identity “life.” There are nothing but
self-sustaining, _i.e._ beginningless processes which here and there
group themselves into systems of worlds. If one has comprehended the
whole world as Sankhāra, there is no cosmological problem. World and
life are there as the beginningless unity of “processioning.”
As a working hypothesis, what service is here rendered by the
Buddha-thought?
The Buddha-thought explains how it comes to seem as if life had a
first beginning upon a world. For as a matter of fact there is such
a first beginning, and it permits of being proven historically and
geologically. All this is beyond possibility of dispute: it is only
the interpretation that is mistaken. This first beginning is such,
much in the same way that the spring welling from the rock is the
first beginning of the river. It is the first beginning only where
one objectifies the river as an identity. If science seeks to explain
the first beginning of life by spontaneous generation, she resembles
a man who should derive the spring from the rock itself. If she seeks
to derive the first beginning of life from other worlds, she then is
like a man who would fain derive the spring as such, as an abstract
objectified something, from one or another of various localities. Only
in the Buddha-thought is the first beginning of life conceived of in
a genuinely cosmogonical manner, as form of the play of world-events.
It is no migration of duly shaped and formed “spring”-elements, which
out of atmospherical vapour and the waters of the sea fashion a spring,
but a self-displacement of centres of energy. In the selfsame way
it is no migration of life-elements hither out of other worlds, but
a self-displacement of centres of energy, which makes it that life
“sprouts” anew upon a world. Here, to speak about a first beginning as
such, and consequently of a condition of greater or lesser development,
has about as much meaning as if one should speak of a condition of
greater or lesser development in the case of the waters of the ocean,
the vapour of the atmosphere, the fountain on the hill. What is true
with reference to science’s problem of heredity is even more true of
her cosmological problem: it is wholly Hebraic.