Most of us—even as Buddhists—live with our minds in the weeds. There is nothing wrong with that, but at a certain point it is useful to get out of the weeds, to soar up to 10,000 feet, and to look at life with the breathtaking, cosmic view of life that the Buddha gave us. It gives us an awe-inspiring perspective on existence. It puts everything into a much larger context. And here it is.
A Life of the Universe
Let’s start with the Sanskrit word “kalpa.” In Pāli the word is “kappa.” The word “kalpa” is usually translated as “eon.” In the modern-day Buddhist understanding, this means a life of the universe.
It is only in recent decades that modern science has come to embrace the notion that there is not a single Big Bang. There is a Big Bang. Then the universe expands, and eventually it contracts. Ajahn Brahmali calls this contraction the “Big Crunch.” Then there is another Big Bang, and the process repeats itself.
This takes a long time. There are estimates that the life of the universe will be between 1 trillion and 100 trillion years.
In this understanding, time is cyclical, and time is infinite. To be sure, these are more modern Buddhist interpretations of time, but I think they reflect language that is more evolved than the Buddha had available to him. In the India of the time, they did not have a word for infinity. He called it “time without discernable beginning.” There is a chapter in the Saṃyutta Nikāya that is devoted to this subject. It is chapter 15, the Anamatagga Saṃyutta, “Connected Discourses on Without Discernable Beginning.”
The Buddha reflected on this in the first watch of the night when he became enlightened:
“When my concentrated mind was thus purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability, I directed it to knowledge of the recollection of past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, ten births, twenty births, thirty births, forty births, fifty births, a hundred births, a thousand births, a hundred thousand births, many eons of world-contraction, many eons of world-expansion, many eons of world-contraction and expansion: ‘There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and there too I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared here.’ Thus with their aspects and particulars I recollected my manifold past lives.”
— [MN 4.2]
This puts our lives into a different perspective. Ajahn Chah once used this simile. He compared our current lives to holding a hand in front of your face. All you can see is the hand. This is how we normally view our lives. All we can see is this life. We can see our jobs and our relationships and our bank accounts.
But if you hold your hand as far away from your face as possible, you can see all sorts of other things. You can see the sky. You can see the mountains and the forest. The hand looks small and everything else dominates your field of vision.
It is not as if these worldly things do not matter. Of course they do. But the reason that they are important is not because they have inherent value. They don’t. They are important because they are the context in which we live. What is important is how we relate to these things and how we interact with them. They are—as they say in Zen—the scenery of our lives. And how we think, speak, and act is what is important. They have consequences. They determine our future.
And that brings us to the second word that we will discuss, sīla.
Virtue
The word “sila” is often translated as “ethics” or “morality.” But I prefer the word “virtue.” In the Noble Eightfold Path, it is right conduct. The reason that I prefer the word “virtue” is because the words “ethics” and “morality” have so much cultural baggage. We think that they are a burden. But in the Buddhist way of thinking, they are the path to happiness.
A simple way to think about this is to remember when you did something nice for someone. How did that make you feel? I am guessing that it made you happy. This is the Buddhist notion of virtue. You not only do something nice, you feel good about it.
In the Buddha’s teaching, a healthy sense of self comes from the practice of virtue. Now you may know that the Buddha taught non-self, which he did. “Non-self” means that there is nothing in you that is permanent and unchanging. There is no soul. You are a process, more like a weather system than a rock. But before you can have any insight into non-self, you must have a healthy sense of self. That comes from virtuous behavior. And virtue is one of the four factors that the Buddha said leads to stream entry, which is the first of the four stages of enlightenment:
“Bhikkhunīs, a noble disciple who possesses four things is a stream-enterer, no longer bound to the nether world, fixed in destiny, with enlightenment as her destination. What four? Here, bhikkhunīs, a noble disciple possesses confirmed confidence in the Buddha thus: ‘The Blessed One is the teacher of devas and humans, the Enlightened One, the Blessed One.’ She possesses confirmed confidence in the Dhamma. She possesses confirmed confidence in the Saṅgha. She possesses the virtues dear to the noble ones, unbroken, untorn, unblemished, unmottled, freeing, praised by the wise, ungrasped, leading to concentration.”
— [SN 55.11]
And then, there is this:
Happiness is virtue lasting through old age.
— [Dhp 303]
Karma
This brings us to the issue of karma.
You may know that the Buddha taught the phenomena of emptiness. Emptiness means that in the physical world, we live in an endless stream of causes and effects. Things only exist if the causes and conditions are in place for their existence. Galaxies merge. Stars are born. Stars explode into supernovas. One day our sun will go supernova. Earth will disintegrate. Such is the cosmic dance of the universe. It has been going on throughout time “without discernable beginning.”
Emptiness is the principle of cause and effect as it applies to the physical universe. Non-self is the principle of cause and effect coupled with sīla. This applies to us as living beings.
See what a contrast this is to the idea of a creator God. There is no creator because there is no creation. There is no God to make decisions about where you end up when you die, either. There is no Judgment Day because there is no end of time, and there is no one to judge. There is no Rapture. There is not even the notion of death. There is simply the infinite cycle of rebirth. Death is just the next moment. And for what it is worth—and I must get this in here—even if there were a powerful God, that being would not care about your football team. I mean, really? Have you seen the photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope? No one overseeing all that would care who scores next.
To be sure there are some powerful gods in Buddhism. They don’t care about your football team, either. And they are subject to the same laws of rebirth as human beings are. They live their lives as gods, then they, too, are reborn in another realm.
So, in a cosmos of rebirth and infinite time, what determines our rebirth? What determines where we end up next? The answer is karma. And this is why our actions in this existence are so important.
We are constantly creating new karma. All of us have good and bad karma. If we did not, then we would not be reborn, but we will come to that.
So when we do something nice, we create good karma. And when we do something harmful, we create bad karma. When we die, some aspect of our karma manifests. If good karma manifests, we have an auspicious rebirth. If bad karma manifests, we have an inauspicious rebirth.
Karma is not deterministic. A good person can manifest bad karma and vice versa. But the more good karma you have, the more likely it is that you will have a good rebirth. You are playing the lottery with a lot of numbers. And while this is a bit of a technical point, if you die with gratitude and an aspiration to practice the Dharma, you will be in good shape. Your next moment will be sweet.
Dying is suffering. But once you die, if you are a good person, that suffering ends, at least for the moment. Ajahn Brahmali says that for a Buddhist, death is a pleasant experience.
The backdrop to all of this is the Buddhist view of the cosmos. There are what I like to call the six categories of realms. It is more complicated than that, but this explanation will do for our purposes. There are 1) the hell realms, 2) the animal realm, 3) the hungry ghost realm, 4) the human realm, 5) the deva heavenly realms, and 6) the Brahma heavenly realms. The hungry ghost realm is for beings who have insatiable craving, like the billionaires who are always trying to make more money and are never satisfied, no matter how much they have.
According to the Buddha, if we do not become enlightened, we are destined to go up and down through these six realms. No matter how good you think you are now, if you do not become enlightened, inevitably you will fall from grace. You will do bad things. You will cause a lot of suffering. You will even be reborn in one of the hell realms.
I recently saw a YouTube video in which a rock band made fun of going to hell. But if you read the graphic descriptions of hell in the Buddhist texts, you would never make light of that. Think of terrifying torture. Imagine your limbs being cut off with a chainsaw or your eyes being burned out with a torch. Then imagine that this goes on for thousands of years. It is not something to joke about.
And if this sounds too punitive and Christian, then so be it. It is just a description of reality. The good news is that this can all be avoided.
And this is why becoming enlightened is so important. This endless round of rebirths up and down through the realms is saṃsara. This is why if you do not devote yourself to Dharma practice, not only will your life inevitably be miserable, you won’t be doing much good, either. You will be a part of the problem. You will be adding to the suffering.
If you think about this, you will see that this is the problem with the idea of a Boddhisatva. According to the Buddha, you have two choices. One choice is that you become enlightened. Even attaining the first stage of enlightenment means that you will become fully enlightened in no more than seven lifetimes, and you will not be reborn in one of the three lower realms:
“Those who have cognized the noble truths
well taught by the one of deep wisdom,
even if they are extremely heedless,
do not take an eighth existence.
This too is the sublime gem in the Sangha:
by this truth, may there be safety!“Together with one’s achievement of vision
three things are discarded:
the view of the personal entity and doubt,
and whatever good behavior and observances there are.
One is also freed from the four planes of misery
and is incapable of doing six deeds.
This too is the sublime gem in the Sangha:
by this truth, may there be safety!”
— [Sn 2.1.203-204]
(The “four planes of misery” include the three lower realms plus one called the “asuras.” The asuras exist in something of a no-man’s land.)
So if you do not become enlightened, inevitably you will not be a good person. You will be reborn in one of the lower realms. And even if you are born in the human realm, you will suffer and so will those around you.
There is one more important aspect to this cosmology, and that is if you do become enlightened, what happens? Is enlightenment just a selfish way of escaping the rounds of rebirth and suffering? What happens to everyone else?
There are two answers to this question.
The first answer is that pursuing the Dharma is like training to become a mountain guide. Mountain guides have a lot of skills. They know how to fend for themselves. They know how to take care of you. And they know how to get you from one place to another. This takes skill. It takes training, and it takes work.
Becoming a disciple of the Buddha is like that. If you want to help others, you must become more skillful yourself. You must become more kind. You must become more patient. You must know how to think, speak, and act in a beneficial way.
According to the Buddha, the problem isn’t “out there.” It is “in here.” You cannot manipulate the world to become perfect. Now of course, when we can, we do what we can to make the world a better place. Certainly. That is part of being a virtuous person. But the world is a big place, and it is going to be the way it is. As I write this, there are 6.5 billion people in the world. Imagine how many beings there are in the entire cosmos. Now think about the worst people you know. Politicians are a good place to start. There are nazis. There are violent, misguided people everywhere.
And even if we could somehow manipulate the world to be the way we want, what does that even mean? Do we have the skill to make the world perfect? We would be in conflict even with people with whom we largely agree, much less those who hate us.
So we turn our attention inwards. We become the best people we can. We become beacons in dark places. We become mountain guides of goodness. We become compassionate, loving, and—this is the big one—wise. We know how to get people through the mountains, especially those around us who are going through a tough time.
Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell this story. In an incident that has been somewhat lost to history, in 1976 and 1977 many refugees fled the tyranny of the political regime in Cambodia. They left in overloaded, flimsy, rotting boats, many of which sank, and many thousands of people died.
However, some boats survived, and afterward someone studied why certain boats made it and some did not. There was one common denominator, and that was if there was just one person on a boat who did not panic, that boat had a very high chance of success.
I think that one reason that people shrink from this perspective is that it puts the responsibility squarely on our shoulders. This seems daunting. It is easier to blame everyone else. It is easy to blame what is going on “out there.” To be sure, virtue is enormously rewarding, but it may take some time to see the happiness that comes from simply being a good person. Do something nice for someone and see how that makes you feel. Now, keep doing that. This is karma manifesting not in some future life, but here and now. Good deeds bring good results.
To be sure, things don’t always work out. You will do something nice for someone with the best of intentions, and the result will not be great. Of course. This is not some sugar-coated version of reality. Things did not always work out for the Buddha, either. So keep your expectations in check, and go easy on yourself.
So that is the first response to those who think that this is a selfish path.
The other answer is something that I have only heard referenced a few times in my decades of Buddhist practice. I think that there are subjects that many advanced disciples of the Buddha avoid because they seem too exotic. To be sure, I have discussed some of them here. But I have noticed in recent years that some of these formerly taboo subjects are now being taught more frequently.
I have heard both Ayya Khema and Ajahn Brahmali talk about this, and that is that when we become enlightened, we become part of a fabric of goodness in the universe. It is the cosmic ether. This is nirvāṇa. Evil rises and falls. But evil is like blips on the radar screen. Goodness is what is permanent and constant. It is always there, and it is always available. It is also—in the classic teachings of the Buddha—unconditioned. In a universe of emptiness and impermanence, it is the one thing that is always there.
You will hear that nirvāṇa and saṃsara are the same thing. But that is not what the Buddha taught. Saṃsara is conditioned. Its root cause is ignorance, especially of what we have been discussing here. If everyone knew the consequences of their actions, the world would be a different place. And no one would make light of being reborn in hell.
But Nirvāṇa is unconditioned:
“There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore you do know an escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned.”
— [Ud 8.3]
When we awaken, we contribute to the cosmic ether in a way that benefits all beings. We make the whole of existence better. This is the ultimate way to be of service and to make things better. This is the final answer to why enlightenment is far from being selfish. You cannot do anything better. It is perfection.
If all this blows your mind, you are in good company. It blows my mind, too. It is a lot to digest. But it is a valuable thing on which to reflect. The stakes are high. Of course. But they could not be more rewarding. The happiness and joy that the Dharma promises is beyond compare:
“Bhikkhus, suppose there were a man with a life span of a hundred years, who could live a hundred years. Someone would say to him: ‘Come, good man, in the morning they will strike you with a hundred spears; at noon they will strike you with a hundred spears; in the evening they will strike you with a hundred spears. And you, good man, being struck day after day by three hundred spears will have a life span of a hundred years, will live a hundred years; and then, after a hundred years have passed, you will make the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths, to which you had not broken through earlier.’
“It is fitting, bhikkhus, for a clansman intent on his good to accept the offer. For what reason? Because this saṃsāra is without discoverable beginning; a first point cannot be discerned of blows by spears, blows by swords, blows by axes. And even though this may be so, bhikkhus, I do not say that the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths is accompanied by suffering or displeasure. Rather, the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths is accompanied only by happiness and joy. What four? The noble truth of suffering, the noble truth of the origin of suffering, the noble truth of the cessation of suffering, and the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering.
“Therefore, bhikkhus, an exertion should be made to understand: ‘This is suffering, this is the origin of suffering, this is the cessation of suffering, and this is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’”
— [SN 56.35]Wishing you peace, joy, and happiness.