Story of Chinese Zen. Nan Huai-Chin
transmigration refers to this cyclical movement. Then he set up a doctrinal system of past, present, and future causes and effects, with recurring cycles of the six courses of existence. This is similar to the concept of causes and effects of virtue expressed in the I Ching: "A home that accumulates goodness will surely have abundant felicity," and "If goodness is not accumulated, it is insufficient to establish one's name; if evil is not accumulated, it is insufficient to destroy one's person."
Shakyamuni Pioneered Views of the Universe and the World
Whenever the ancient religions and philosophies of India approached metaphysical problems, they naturally touched on the search for the meeting point of the celestial and the human. Although the ultimate ends of their ideas and doctrines all came down to getting into Heaven, the Heaven worshiped by each individual sect and school was different, with no unity among them, and in addition there existed a clash between ideas of monotheism and pantheism.
The doctrine of Shakyamuni synthesized the borders of the celestial and the human into three zones (the "three realms") called the realms of desire, of form, and the formless realm. The realm of desire stretches from the celestial inhabitants in the heavens of our solar system to the humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and denizens of hell below.
The expression "realm of desire" indicates that the life of the beings in this realm comes from craving (for sex and nourishment). Speaking in a broad sense, craving includes the pleasures of the five desires for form, sound, fragrance, flavor, and feeling. In a narrow sense, it involves the acts of smiling, looking, conversing, embracing, and touching.
The realm of desire has six levels of celestial realms; for instance, the one among them called the Traya-strimsha Heaven contains an array of thirty-three heavens that alternate in prominence according to the time. The human realm within the realm of desire is generally divided into the four sectors—east, west, north, and south. Our human world is in the southern sector known as Jambudvipa. The overall name of this world is Saha, which has a double meaning: endurance and sorrow. This refers to the fact that this world is full of sorrow, with much that is painful and difficult; and yet humans and all living beings not only can endure that sorrow, suffering, and hardship, but can diligently turn toward good, thereby becoming worthy of praise. If there were no sorrow or suffering in the world, we naturally could not distinguish good or bad. Fundamentally, there is no good or bad to speak of, so it should be the completeness of nature that is considered good; then nothing can be totally denied, and nothing can be praised.
Each of the celestial and human worlds in the realm of desire has a ruler. Beyond the realm of desire is the realm of form, where the beings experience only feelings and ideas, without desires. The beings in the realm of form can produce the fruit of life just by looking at each other and smiling in a meeting of minds. In that realm are eighteen levels of heavens corresponding to states of realization produced by beings cultivating the realms of quiet contemplation and meditative concentration. The highest heaven in the realm of form is called the Heaven of the Ultimate of Form, whose ruler is the god Mahesvara.
Beyond the realm of form is the formless realm, which is reckoned to have four levels of heavens. Those who have attained the fruits of practicing meditation are born in the formless realm where they have only mental consciousness; emotional desires do not exist for them. Finally, the one governing this whole domain of three realms is called the great god Brahma.
From this simple explanation it can be seen how Shakyamuni partitioned the spheres of the celestial and human into a general scheme of sixty heavens under the overall rubric of the three realms, all of which are still within the bounds of the recurring cycles of the six courses of existence. This cosmic world of three realms has an individual solar system as its primary unit. And stretching from the human world up to the sun and moon, and the heavens within the three realms, the realities and concepts of time have their own individual differences. For example, a day and night on the moon is equal to a fortnight in the human world; a day and night on the sun is equal to a year in the human world. Differentiated in this way, the time frames of the worlds of the cosmos are so many and so detailed as to be incalculable, but in sum it can be said that Shakyamuni's view of the universe was that of an infinitely vast cosmos.
In his worldview, with one solar system as a basic world system unit, a world system of a thousand solar systems was called a thousand-world system. A group of a thousand thousand-world systems was called a million-world system. A group of a thousand million-world systems was called a billion-world system. Shakyamuni said that in this limitless, boundless cosmos there are innumerably many such billion-world systems, as many as there are grains of sand in the Ganges River. When from this perspective we look back upon the tumultuous agitation of lustful beings in the human world, it appears pathetically small and trivial.
Shakyamuni expounded his view of the cosmos in terms of three realms containing billions of world systems, thus synthesizing the various ancient Indian religious and philosophical concepts of the divine and the human. He also opened up the domain of the heart of human knowledge, reaching worlds inaccessible even to astronomy and mathematics, and in the other direction analyzing matter all the way to the subatomic level, entering so deeply as to reach the ultimately formless and signless subtlety. Thus he made it hard for the contents of the philosophical thought of any school, past or present, to compare with his for richness and completeness.
Shakyamuni Synthesized a Metaphysical Ontology
The controversies of ancient Indian religious philosophies and various sects of philosophical thought with regard to the source of life in the universe are not only a welter of diverse doctrines without a unifying agreement as to what is right, but they also each construct a system of doctrine based on logic. These doctrines, however, never go beyond the bounds of theism and atheism, monism and pluralism, idealism and materialism.
In reality, if we sum up the most basic and fundamental searches of human culture throughout the world and its history, they are still not beyond these few questions. For thousands of years the human race has addressed the question most personal to humankind itself, the question of the source of life: from religion to philosophy and from philosophy to science, humanity has been seeking, wandering in bewilderment, arguing and debating. When you look at it, it is really a great parody of human culture.
In the search for the truth about the universe, human life, and life in general, each ancient Indian religious philosophy had its own views and its own methods of gaining peace of mind and defining its fate, and each thought it had already attained the ultimate way to pure liberation. Some thought the final union of the soul with the great Brahma is the supreme Way; others thought extinction of desires and thoughts is the ultimate. Some considered the Great Way to be maintaining the clarity of the soul without using sense awareness, keeping spiritual awareness without using thought. And then there were also those who believed that when a person dies it is like a lamp going out, so the real truth is just to see to enjoyment of pleasure in the present. Some even considered themselves to already have attained the nirvana that is the realm of ultimately pure liberation. There were so many various opinions that they cannot all be mentioned.
Addressing these problems as he expounded his teaching, Shakyamuni drew his conclusions through a process of synthesizing, harmonizing, and adapting. He considered all phenomena in the cosmos having life to be born of a combination of causes and conditions, without any single ruling function therein: they come into being when the conditions arise, and disappear when the conditions are gone.
So the highest (or ultimate, or primal) function of the life of the cosmos is that in which mind and matter are the same substance. If you look at it from the point of view of religious concepts, or from the angle of the sacred, it could be called Buddha, or God, or Lord, or Spirit, or some other transpersonal spiritual sacred epithet. If you look at it from the angle of reason, it could also be called essence, or mind, or principle, or natural law, or the realm of reality, and so on. If you look at it from the angle of conceptions customary among humankind, you could also call it something like a spiritual body, in the sense of an inexhaustible spiritual body at the root source of life. In sum, speaking in terms of substance, it has emptiness as its substance; speaking in terms of characteristics, the forms of all that exists in the cosmos are its characteristics; speaking in terms of function, all actions of all things and all beings in the cosmos