by Tang Huyen

In May 2008, Tang Huyen posted to talk.religion.buddhism a response to a poster defending the literal truth of the Buddha's teachings on karma and rebirth. The essay examines the Buddha's cosmology and karma theory with fresh eyes and identifies what Tang Huyen claims is a previously unnoticed internal contradiction.

The argument turns on the mechanics of world-dissolution in Buddhist cosmology: when a world-cycle ends, the desire realm is burnt up by fire, and all beings there are reborn in the heaven of the first form meditation. But in the same teaching, beings can only attain the form-meditation heavens through meditation — not through non-meditative karma. The desire-realm beings who haven't been meditating should have nowhere to go. The Buddha, Tang Huyen argues, simply slaps his cosmological and karmic theories together without reconciling them, because the cosmology is a "necessary evil" for founding an institution — not a truth claim he takes seriously.

The essay concludes with a reminder: the only knowledge that defines an awakened person is the knowledge of the ending of the cankers (khīṇāsava). All other powers — including knowledge of previous and future lives — are superfluous to awakening. Awakening can exist without them, and they can exist without awakening.

On Deed and Its Return

On deed (karman) and its return, the Buddha teaches awakening in order to end deed and its return, so that the awakened has destroyed his deed and does not create new deed, though he still draws the results of old deed. That single act makes the theory of deed and its return not universal. On top of that, the Buddha declares that deed and its return forms an inconceivable issue. He also forbids the monks and nuns from chasing the prior limit (the beginning of the world) and the posterior limit (the ending of the world) and teaches them to pay attention to the present. As to his explanation of his story of Brahma being born first (after a fall from the first form meditation) and thereby taking himself to be the creator of the world, it is pure mythology that contradicts his other theories, like the theory of deed and its return, and his fanciful cosmology.

Buddhist Cosmology

In his cosmology, people who meditate in the first form meditation get reborn in the heaven of the first form meditation (dhyāna, jhāna), and so on, through the remaining three form meditations and through the four formless attainments, up to the fourth and highest formless attainment, which is the acme of existence (bhava-agga). Below them (below the heaven of the first and lowest form meditation) is the desire realm (kāma-dhātu), which includes the desire heavens, our human and animal world, and the hell realms. Beings take rebirth in the desire realm by non-meditative deed and its return, and in the meditative realms (the form realm and the formless realm) by meditation. (Above the fourth and highest formless attainment, which is the acme of existence, there is the attainment of cessation, which confers awakening [arhat-ship] if not already attained, and it is not a place for rebirth, meaning that nobody can be reborn there.)

A Previously Unnoticed Contradiction

I have never seen anybody point out the following contradiction.

To the Buddha, the world goes through cycles of development and dissolution, and when the cycle of dissolution is complete, all the desire realm is burnt up by fire and all beings in it take rebirth in the heaven of the first and lowest form meditation, and when the world goes into the cycle of development again, the beings there fall (get reborn) to the desire heavens, and Brahma happens to be the first being who falls to the desire heavens and therefore thinks that he creates the world, because there was nobody else before him in the desire heavens.

The Buddha contradicts himself there, in that at the completion of the cycle of world dissolution, the desire realm is completely burnt up and all beings there are reborn in the heaven of the first form meditation, because — as stated above — beings take rebirth by non-meditative deed and its return only in the desire realm and they take rebirth in the form and formless realms only by meditation, not by non-meditative deed. The Buddha invents the cosmology of world development and world dissolution as a teaching device, a very profound one, but can't reconcile it with his theory of deed and its return, and simply slaps the two theories together, even if they are contradictory. He is quite self-complacent and cavalier about the various contradictions in this explaining scheme.

The Explaining Scheme as Necessary Evil

If he took his explaining scheme seriously, he would have to make it air-tight, in coherence and consistency, but it is only a necessary evil to him, which he needs because he wants to leave an establishment behind. If he wanted to not teach, or only to teach a handful of disciples, he would not need an explaining scheme, but he wants to leave an establishment behind, and so he needs to have a big (for that time) following, with lay people supporting the monks and nuns, and such an arrangement needs to have an explaining scheme to tie it together — the lay people have to have a reason to support the monks and nuns.

The value of his explaining scheme is relative and its validity from the outside is not rock-hard. It is only a means to an end, not the end in and of itself (in contradistinction to theistic religions, where the history of salvation is real and true, and real and true forever, even after the end of the world).

The Only Knowledge That Matters

Let us recall that the only knowledge that defines an awakened is the knowledge of the ending of the cankers or outflows or inflows, and that the other knowledges or powers, like the knowledge of previous and future lives, are superfluous to awakening. If they are true (which they may or may not be), they can exist without awakening, and awakening can exist without them. To judge awakening by, say, the knowledge of previous and future lives is at best irrelevant. The two have no intersection.

Colophon

Originally posted to talk.religion.buddhism, alt.zen, alt.philosophy.zen, and alt.buddha.short.fat.guy by Tang Huyen, May 28, 2008. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

This compact essay makes a significant scholarly observation: the Buddha's teaching that all desire-realm beings are reborn in the first form-meditation heaven at world-dissolution contradicts his own teaching that form-realm rebirth requires meditative attainment. Tang Huyen presents this as evidence that the Buddha's cosmological scheme is instrumentally motivated — provisional scaffolding for building and sustaining an institutional community, not a coherent metaphysics he defends on its own terms. The closing distinction — that the knowledge of previous and future lives has no intersection with the awakening-defining knowledge of the ending of the cankers — cleanly separates what the Buddha himself identifies as essential from what his later tradition made central.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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