Ancient Indian Cosmology & Other Baggage

Once a month we meet to talk about our readings of selected Pali texts. Last Thursday the topic was How to Get Ahead on the Wheel of Life. The discussion was wide-ranging, as befits the subject. The Buddha’s vision of a just universe opens up vast panoramas of space, time, and imagination. It is a springboard for Big Ideas and ample nourishment for loving kindness and compassion.

At the same time, samasāra in the fullness of the traditional description is bound to provoke a measure of skepticism. That all of us are not prepared to embrace a worldview that includes multiple levels of heaven and hell was evident in the way some members of the community spoke of “cultural stuff”—meaning Buddhist cosmology—as if nothing could be more obvious than that the belief in gods, heavens, hells, and rebirth in various unseen realms of existence was extraneous to the main thrust of the Awakened One’s teachings. Perhaps he’d offered them as a sop to popular superstition, or because he was afraid his words wouldn’t be heeded if he left them out. We can’t be sure.

But even if we can convince ourselves that samsāra is merely an ad-on to the authentic core of the Buddha’s teachings, a cluster of assertions about the world that the Awakened One employed with the aim of selling his product, although he didn’t really believe in them, we are still left with the problem what to do with them. It is claimed that distress over the prospect of samsāra is the moral lynchpin of Buddha-Dharma. In that case, are the various realms of existence to be understood as metaphor for psychological conditions or states of consciousness within the span of this life?

I am still looking for the line that clearly demarcates what is relevant or true in the Buddha’s Dharma from what is not. Indeed, I do not always know what to take seriously and what not amidst the colossal treasury of our own “cultural stuff.” Should I invest in scientific method, for instance, rationality, free enterprise, multiculturalism, democracy, the Bible, tolerance of lifestyle differences, nationalism, twelve-step programs, gun control?

Many of us well-educated, “middle class” Westerners have been marinated since childhood in a broth comprising equal parts of naturalism, social Darwinism, rugged individualism, and a strong dose of advertising intended to maintain covetousness at a fever pitch. We have ravaged the planet, we are drowning in possessions, and we show precious little interest in letting up. We are therefore predisposed to disregard moral blandishments that rub us the wrong way or cause us inconvenience. It is my guess that we do not find much to like in a crucial message of Buddha-Dharma, namely, that the world is a flood of dis-ease that must be crossed in order to attain a liberation that is, to put it charitably, not very sexy.