According to Wikipedia, various textual sources from ancient India defines Yojana as ranging from 3.5 to 15 km. So if we take a yojana as the average of these 2 extreme we got ~8 km.
Mount Sineru is said to be 84,000 yojana in height, and 84,000 yojana submerged. 84,000 x 2 x 8 km = 1,344,000 km. And the sun diameter is 1.3927 million km. So, I guess, the Sun is the basis for mount Sineru, whether this mountain is visible or not it’s still locate at the Sun in our physical world.
Furthermore, the description of a Cakkavala is that it has a huge iron wall of mountains surrounding the system. The Oort Cloud is the final asteroid cloud surrounding the Solar System, and guess what? Bodies in the Oort Cloud is mostly made of iron and water ice.
Now come back to Earth, Jampudipa is always refer to the whole Earth in the Sutta and Vinaya (I’m not arguing about the shape of the Earth here). The idea that the word only refers to “known world” or “Indian subcontinent” is clearly a later intervention to appease to the Western crowd. The other 3 “islands” is obviously not Earth, where they have entirely different kinds of human and wildly different dynamics and environments.
When I saw the title, I thought that was crazy, but now … I still think it’s crazy, but in a way that makes sense!
I’m not so convinced. We only really have any text on Uttarakuru, and the description, while admittedly wild, is no less exotic than many later depictions of the land “north of Kuru”, for which the most obvious candidate would be Tibet.
But I wonder if the legends of Uttarakuru are, rather, an echo of a memory of the Aryan homeland in central Asia, again, “north of Kuru”, where the people still live according to the primordial values of the Aggannasutta.
The distances cited in Buddhist descriptions of the world do get close to being astronomical. DA 30 has some lengthy descriptions on the topic. I remember when I translated it, I settled on approx. 7-9 miles as the distance of a yojana. Then I converted some common measurements to yojanas: The Earth’s circumference would be about 3,100 yojanas and its radius 500 yojanas. The Moon would be about 30,000 yojanas away from the Earth. Small numbers compared to the measurements of the depth of the earth in DA 30 (168,000 yojanas) or the height of Sumeru rising out of the ocean (84,000 yojanas). I mean, the Moon would collide with the mountain if it were a real thing.
It seems as though the landlocked Buddhists didn’t realize the Earth was a sphere and thought that day and night was the effect of Sumeru casting a shadow over the world as the sun went around it. Ancient Greeks, though, did guess correctly that the Earth is round by observing the curvature of the ocean’s surface, the round shadow cast on the Moon during an eclipse, and even by measure the angle of shadows cast by the sun at different latitudes at the same time of the year. A fellow named Eratosthenes used that last method to calculate the circumference of the earth (assuming it was a perfect sphere, which it isn’t) in 240 BCE. He took as exact distance between two places as he could measure and then measured shadow angles on the same day of the year and calculated what the curvature must be. From that, he could figure the approx size of the Earth. Those pesky Greeks and their maths!
It’s certainly possible that the world can be viewed in a different perspective from beings with extra or other dimensional perceptional characteristics, and that it is largely reflective on how individual karma, mind, and personal emotional dispositions are. I’m just saying that some beings may view the world differently based on certain types of meditation, while all the while the observable world is of a different nature of pure and simple in direct contact with machines like telescopes and computers.
Easiest match is that in the deva world of fine material, then earth is flat, mt. meru is there etc. In this world of gross materiality, we can follow current astrophysics, astronomy, cosmology.
Another relate correlation is the cyclical nature of supercontinent formation. There have been at least 3 to 7 supercontinents throughout the history of the Earth, and one more to come 250 million year from now. Coincide with the number of Buddhas in this eon? And the supposed lifespan of Tusita gods.
Another correlation is between lifespan of the Maha Brahma (is two quinquadecillion years) in SN 6.4, and the age of the universe as current heat death theory consensus. The Maha Brahma is said to have the lifespan equal to that of an eon.
It depends on whether protons decay or not, it’s not yet known, but it can be some where in the vicinity of 2x10^48 years due to all of the heavy particles decay into iron via fission, and all of the lighter particles fuse into iron via cold fusion (with quantum tunneling), all that’s left is irons, and later irons tunneling themselves into black holes, and then blackholes evaporate via Hawking radiation, and in the nothingness of only photon and stuffs, via sheer chance of quantum fluctuation, a new universe could be born.
There are any number of possibilities to correlate numbers to facts. Certain freemasons I know have pulled such interpretations out of any noteable religious text to supposedly prove their own thing. Of course in the most cases, these are nothing but coincidence.
