Question asked by Alex
Dear Pastor,
I understand 'things' happen as a result of cause and effect. Things just do not appear out of nowhere, there must be a 'creator'. A house is built because someone has created it, there must be a maker, a designer, a creator which causes the existence of something. What i want to ask is, is there anywhere in the Buddhist scriptures that explained how the earth was created or how humans came into existence? my limited understanding says that it is a result of karma, but how and where did this karma or cause came from in the beginning if there was no earth or humans before the earth or human came to be. Surely the earth or humans could not have appeared out of nowhere (without a cause).
i hope my question makes sense and i look forward to your response.
Dear Alex,
Thank you for your question, which is very philosophical in nature. You are absolutely right in stating that in Buddhist logic, all things must have its causes and conditions to arise. As you say, the earth or even the whole of what we know as the Six Realms (god realm, demi-god realm, human realm, animal realm, hungry-ghost realm and hell realm) came into existence at a long-distant point in the past. This came about from the collective karma of all sentient beings.
Your question is, how did this earth (or existence of the Six Realms) come about, given that it didn’t exist before, therefore humans and other sentient beings would not have been able to create any karma since there was no earth for humans to exist?
Before this current universe of ours, by that I mean the entirety of existence as it stands, there was another universe within which sentient beings created karma. Then the previous universe came to end, which was followed by a long period of ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ in which nothing existed. Due to the latent karmic potentials of unenlightened beings, our current universe came into being. Within this universe, over time the earth was created and the conditions were such that life arose. This is not a one-off process.
Buddhist cosmology states that our universe is not the first, nor will it be the last, there have been many universes in the past and there will continue to be many in the future, as long as sentient beings have karma. That is why in Buddhism we have the term ‘countless lifetimes.’ This is because have had many previous lives, not only in this universe, but previous universes as well. There is no point in time from which we ultimately existed, since there was no beginning point in time. The understanding of this is linked with the understanding of emptiness, as meditation on this is a path that leads us realise we have no inherent existence. Within Buddhism this is achieve through meditation on the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination (https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/buddhas-dharma/53605.html).
Similarly we talk about cyclic rebirth or cyclic existence, but we only think about it in terms of what currently exists in our universe. Buddhism teaches that such cyclic rebirth also occurred in previous universes, and will occur in future universes, so it is termed ‘endless cyclic existence.’ The only possible way to break out of the cycle is to attain the state of a fully-enlightened being, a Buddha. Once this stage is reached, we actually transcend existence altogether. I hope this explanation helps.
Thank you.