previous note, 05.01. The ‘Dominant Western Worldview’
There are obviously many features of the Buddhist worldview that seem alien to the average Western materialist, especially the cosmology and mythology: in the Marks of a Great Man, the Buddha is said to have webbed feet and eyes in his hands, etc. When Buddha descended from the Tusita heaven the devas caused an earthquake, etc. And there is an increasing tendency to take a lot of this stuff with a grain of salt, chalking it up as Secular Buddhism. I get it, but I want to make sure I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It may be, as one respected teacher suggested, that all the fantastical mythology and cosmology is found in suttas that don’t deal with the pragmatic aspects of the teaching, so the method can be taken separately from the full-blown mythological aspects of the suttas. This would mean we could take much of the cosmological or mythological stuff “with a grain of salt”.
This is a view I will hold lightly and consider, as the view of a respected teacher, but I will obviously need to explore this myself. The Net of Views, for example, seems to be borderline - holding certain views impacts our practice. I guess it will be a matter of separating the pragmatic from the purely mythological, straddling the line between psychological and literal interpretations.
However, there are limitations to sitting on the fence. Arguing against the view that we can discount cosmological facets such like rebirth as “religious trappings of an ancient culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age”, Bhikkhu Bodhi writes in his short piece “Dhamma Without Rebirth” that when we
downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness [we] deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy. panoramic-persepective
Multiverse
Belief in a multiverse of ever-evolving consciousness is a choice that feels fictional because it is metaphysical, but such a view might be supported by Sheldrake’s morphic-resonance theory, and also Buddha taught that we devolved from light beings (DN 27), and are evolving back into light beings (DN 1).1
The cosmology of Buddhism suggests that the one-world we know (this Earth, on this current timeline, with all its history and evolution) is just one-world-of-many among innumerable and beginningless world-systems in boundless space. It could be said, from this panoramic perspective, that we do in fact have a planet B - or, rather, we have so many planets that no alphabet could contain a representation of their abundance.
The Hindu Yuga System
Capriles describes the Buddhist view of a ‘degenerative philosophy of history’ that characterises some ‘“higher” forms of Buddhism’ and claims it is the Buddhist view, but as far as I know the Buddha didn’t talk much about it. It was picked up again later and elaborated by Buddhists when Buddhism merged with other belief systems already extant in their culture.
That said, there are suttas about the devolution (DN 27) and evolution of beings (DN 1), including in DN 26 where the king neglects the people and their lifespan reduces to 10 years. There is a general reduction in skilfulness and increase in suffering, before the cycle returns and beings evolve to lifespans lasting 80,000 years. So the Buddha may have held such a cosmological view, and I suppose the question is how does one’s faith in this impact their practice?#SkillfulEffort
Footnotes
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It feels glib to just drop this here, but I don’t have the bandwidth to parse this right now. ↩