There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare
The key to understanding the Buddhist cosmological scheme lies in the principle of the equivalence of cosmology and psychology.
—Rupert Gethin
Right when you feel like you might possibly be passing your chemistry class is no time to start studying astronomy. Shifting scale like that can be dizzying. In our discussion, though, we have to subject ourselves to this kind of shift, because the original Buddhists lived in such a way that this kind of shift wasn’t jarring. I believe they actually experienced reality simultaneously and seamlessly on a multitude of scales that we tend to separate.
Maybe we could hold an acorn under an oak tree and not be overcome by the miracle of the fact that within that acorn is another oak tree. That’s because we understand and can witness something of that process, and its miracle can at least be explained by language we can use, on a scale we can readily perceive. The early Buddhists performed that same intellectual process with human consciousness and life. Within a moment of consciousness they could see and comprehend the realities beyond our personal lives and deaths. They moved within those scales of experience with a fluidity that we cannot imagine.
In the Abhidhammattha Sangaha, the first four chapters concern consciousness processes. Some of these processes are beyond the sensory reality of our day-to-day lives, but these opening chapters focus on how human mental processes move within a lifetime; every possible action and quality of consciousness is spelled out, detailed, analyzed, and cross-referenced. The next chapter is entitled “Compendium of the Process-Freed,” and it delineates broader realms within which these processes move, as well as the levels of existence that are beyond the processes that make up our constructed, individual senses of consciousness.
Process-free cittas are the underpinnings and linkages of lifetimes and realms. There are only a few specific types of citta that are categorized as process-free, and they are still “naturally occurring types of consciousness that underlie … active processes.”90 But the processes of these cittas determine the placement of a being in a realm of existence, which is a unique function. They work via complex rules of karma and take us beyond most human speculation. A more in-depth discussion of how karma determines realms of existence occurs in Chapter 12.
We have looked at how types of consciousness activities occur in different planes: the sense-sphere, fine material, and immaterial planes. When a citta is categorized by a plane, it is understood as typically, but not necessarily, occurring there. The cittas of each plane also largely define the possibilities of what will be met by perception in that plane. Typically, sense-sphere cittas work to experience sense-sphere phenomena. But sense-sphere beings can be trained to experience fine- and immaterial-sphere cittas; fine-material plane beings are understood as being able to experience, for example, unwholesome cittas.91
We are now directly examining not just consciousness but the background realms of existence, which are delineations of actual types of beings within planes. In the tradition of the Abhidharma, our entire lifetimes are defined by states and actions of consciousness. The realms of existence incorporate levels of consciousness across lifetimes, and time frames of development that are bigger than lifetimes. On our normal day-to-day scale, we can readily delineate developmental stages of an individual human life. Within our life experiences we see people be born and die, and we have a vocabulary for describing development on a personal scale. The realms of existence describe development of consciousness activity, through the scale of billions and billions of lifetimes. The Buddhist cosmology works on that scale as easily as Western science works on the scale of one life. Neither is simple, but each is natural in its own cultural context.
This is usually the point in the story where belief systems clash. I was in a very helpful writing group, in which members managed many sessions of reviewing writing about technical Buddhist philosophy; however, when it came time to look at this section someone said, “If you’re talking about rebirth, I’m out of here.” Buddha did not answer some questions about life after death because he did not feel that resolving that topic for another person helped the person develop. As a living person who has not seen into those depths, I have no idea about life after death and cannot address such issues for that reason. What I can say is that the Buddhist cosmology opens perception and imagination to a vast scale, and on a more basic level, has great psychological, historical, and poetic interest, even beyond its essential religious dimension.
The Buddhist cosmology runs parallel to its psychology, with exponential added dimensions. “In fact Buddhist cosmology is at once a map of different realms of existence and a description of all possible experiences.… The basic structure of this hierarchy of consciousness parallels quite explicitly the basic structure of the cosmos.”92 In Chapter 5, a pathway of development through types of cittas was laid out and the unit of movement was a moment of consciousness meeting an object. In the cosmology, the unit is lifetimes, and what is described as progress is a developmental succession of beings with more and more purified or advanced consciousness processes. A person can meditate and develop specific purified consciousness activities in a lifetime. Lifetimes can then be linked by these more purified cittas and commence in more advanced states. The same factors that mark the development of the person’s cittas mark the qualities of the beings’ ascending planes of existence. This progression is driven by both consciousness events that occur within a lifetime and consciousness events that link lifetimes.
In the Abhidharma, consciousness actions move between lifetimes and between realms, linked by one special moment of citta called rebirth-linking citta. This particular action of consciousness carries karma or intent from one lifetime to the next and carries the background object held by the bhavanga, the “inert consciousness,” of a lifetime. The object of the new life’s bhavanga is the object of the last citta of the preceding life (technically, the last javana process). The quality or type of citta that performs the function of rebirth-linking defines some parameters of the new life that is arising. It is not that a person reappears in another life, but that a particular type of consciousness process ties together lifetimes that may move between realms.
There are thirty-one realms of existence, grouped as Sense Sphere (or Plane), Fine Material Sphere, and Immaterial Sphere. The Sense Sphere is divided into the Woeful Realms and the Blissful Realms. In the fine-material plane, the realm levels move according to jhanas, or accomplishments of meditative absorption. Within the fine-material realms are special non-returner planes, holding advanced beings who are one step away from total cessation of life and death cycles. These realms are the five abodes of wonderful qualities, in ascending order: durable, serene, beautiful, clear-sighted, and highest.
The levels that accompany the meditation training of the jhanas have beautiful titles like “splendor” and “radiance.” The radiance level breaks into three degrees: lesser, immeasurable, and “covered in radiance,” which is described as streaming out like lightning from a cloud. The highest splendor level appears as a mass of light. These are levels of consciousness actions developed through extensive training of highly advanced beings.
Finally, the Immaterial Sphere breaks into four levels, representing planes for beings existing beyond all dimensions of space, time, or perception that we can imagine. The realms are called Infinite Space, Infinite Consciousness, Nothingness, and Neither Perception nor Non-Perception. You may recognize these categories from the breakdown of types of cittas in Chapter Five. This is an example of the parallel between the scale of personal consciousness and realms of existence. It’s possible to experience an instant of touching into the reality of this realm where some beings pass their existence. These beings are not bodily existences. Maybe they are just presences that we can’t conceptualize and only rarely can detect or cue into.
On the bottom of the thirty-one realms is a realm simply called Hell, and it’s very much like hell in any other religion in that it’s fiery and constantly tormented. There are eight great hells, and the worst is called Avici. Each of the eight great hells is a square, with five minor hells on each of the four sides. That gives us 168 forms of hell, which is a concept unlike any other religion’s notion of hell.
The next realm is the animal realm, and while Buddhists are very protective of animals as a whole, this realm is considered lower, because animals, unlike humans, don’t have access to the mental processes that can reduce suffering.
The next woeful realm, the petas or “hungry ghosts,” rings true psychologically. These beings are intensely hungry and thirsty but can’t take in what they need. In illustrations of the Wheel of Life and Death, they have long necks, thinner than straws, and horrible distended bellies. They represent a human force that’s rampant and evident in our culture, where so many of us suffer more from our convoluted and misplaced longings than from our deprivations.
The next realm, called the titan realm, includes a wide range of fighting, failed titans, and overstrivers. It is similar to the hungry ghost realm in the way its aggressive inhabitants suffer from their own misperceptions and productions.
The regular human realm that we all inhabit is only number five on the list of thirty-one, but we’ve crossed the line into the blissful planes because we have a shot at improvement. We have the materials to develop ourselves and address our own suffering, and that important fact is vital but easy to take for granted.
The higher beings who are still in the sense realms are called minor gods and, surprisingly, are described in imagery similar to Western fairy tales. There are the four great kings, who rule their subjects in each direction. To the east are celestial musicians; to the south, gnomes who take care of forests, mountains, and hidden treasures; to the west, dragons; and to the north, spirits. Then there are higher and higher levels of gods with wonderful powers, such as the ability to create an object just by thinking of it.
This variety of thirty-one realms collapses into six basic realms in the Wheel of Life and Death. They are between what look like spokes in the middle of the wheel and represent the basic potential for awakening in existence. The six summarized in the Wheel are the heavenly realm, the human realm, the animal realm, the realm of the titans, the realm of the hungry ghosts, and the hell realm. Each realm interacts with the inner hub as well as the twelve links outside of them on the wheel, in a constant, kaleidoscopic interpenetration.
The realm descriptions are in fanciful language from the people who brought us seventeen steps of perception and 121 types of consciousness. Buddhism, however, did begin in the context of both Brahmanism and a religion in India that could be described as a “magico-mystical realism.”93 In the village life of the Indian subcontinent at that time, local religious practice was often based on sacrifices and offerings to gods to maintain the breath of life and fire of the soul.94 The evolution to Buddhism and the idea that existence was maintained and operating on its own laws of cause and effect did not entirely belie some derived cultural qualities. The realms of existence have elements of both the Buddhist conceptual sophistication and the poetry of its historical base.
The sense of time running through the chart of the thirty-one Realms of Existence is both very specific and mind-boggling in its immensity. Each realm specifies a particular life span for its beings. No realm of beings is an infinite dwelling, as the cycles of life and death continue to revolve. In the ancient Buddhist philosophy, it was believed that the average life span of a human changes very gradually, from ten to many thousands of years. I am guessing that the idea was that no individual human could observe time for long enough to be aware of the scope of the gradual change in the scale of humans’ lifetimes.
We are aware from the history we can survey that the average life span of a human has changed over time and also varies by location. “According to historical mortality levels from the Encyclopaedia of Population, average life expectancy for prehistoric humans was estimated at just 20–35 years; in Sweden in the 1750s it was 36 years; it hit 48 years by the 1900s in the USA; and in 2007 in Japan, average life expectancy was 83 years.”95 There are many discussions about why this has happened, and the difference between average and expectable life spans, but the Abhidharma doesn’t go into those issues. It just specifies that the average life span changes very gradually.
The Abhidharma uses the term interim aeon to describe the time frame in which the average human life span goes from ten years to many thousand and then decreases back to an average of ten years. Twenty of these interim aeons equal one incalculable aeon, and four of those equal one mahakalpa, or “great aeon.” Another way to describe the great aeon is found in the sutras. Buddha described a great aeon as longer than the time it would take for a person to wear away a mountain of solid granite about seven miles high and wide by stroking it once every hundred years with a silk cloth.96 As long as we are this far out there, I might as well mention that the Sangaha describes immaterial beings in the highest of the thirty-one realms of existence who exist beyond perception and nonperception. This means that these beings are beyond even our capacity to make a distinction between what is perceivable and what is not. These beings exist for 84,000 great aeons. The mountain has to wear down to a grain of sand 84,000 times.
These descriptions take the concretely oriented, sensory human mind on a wild ride. What color is the cloth that is being swiped at the granite mountain? We can imagine this crazy gesture and get a bodily sense that opens the guts of our time imagination. The same people who could conceive of this great aeon could also detect the seventeen steps of perception that occur in about a fourth of a second. Their range of time perception was clearly far beyond how most people can experience time now. They could see time microscopically and astronomically, compared to many of us who see it mostly in little rectangles of appointments that last an hour.
We tend to treat time as a commodity, but experiencing time on different scales opens possibilities for experience, and can actually make time feel less pressured. When we travel somewhere with a favorable currency exchange rate, we feel like we have so much more money. If we appreciate both time’s tiny events and its vast reach, sometimes a day feels full and complete in a new way. Sometimes absorption takes us out of time’s bind. Sometimes pain magnifies its measurements. The early Buddhists could manipulate the subjective aspect of time.
Some people have argued that a description of the Abhidharma cosmology doesn’t add to its powerful message about the dynamic composition of human states. They feel that a strictly psychological look at the Abhidharma doesn’t necessitate understanding the planes of existence and the outrageous time structure of the system. This overview of the cosmology is a very rough sketch, but I feel it is a necessary component to even an introduction to the Abhidharma. The planes of existence shift dimensions on us. They remind us that the universe of human possibilities is just one universe of possibilities. This may be the main point to take from studying the Abhidharma cosmology. Just allowing for unknown possibilities can open time and perception into a radial framework, instead of following it in a rote or linear way.
The ancient Buddhist cosmology gives us more than rich poetry and conceptual finery. The release of some customary constraints of experience reminds us that we might have more access to consciousness experiences in different realms than we know, even within our lifetime. As Bhikkhu Bodhi put it, “In the final analysis all the realms of existence are formed, fashioned, and sustained by the mental activity of living beings. At the same time these realms provide the stage for consciousness to continue its evolution in a new personality and under a fresh set of circumstances.”97 All that we’ve learned about cittas and cetasikas, bases and objects, wholesomeness and feeling interacts with material and cosmic potential. This is a way of talking about rebirth that doesn’t presume knowledge we cannot have. There are more possibilities than we imagine, and more imagination available than we usually know.