I don’t understand why Samsara has no beginning but has an end. Why didn’t it end a long time ago or a long time from now, why is it now?
Good question. It seems like samsara has no end, but individuals in Samsara can cease to be separate selves, or at least cease to have that delusion. Thus Samsara can come to an end for an individual yet, still persist.
That said, your point seems valid. How can something with no beginning have an end?
The Buddha also did not answer this question, perhaps it is not necessary for enlightenment and liberation. He only taught: because we do not understand the Four Noble Truths, we have been drifting in Samsara for a long time.
Is it wrong to ask this question in the first place?
If a question cannot be answered, should we set it aside?
Why not now?
It’s like a ray in mathematics: it’s infinite in one direction, but has a definite end point at the other. The position of that point is arbitrary.
For some people, saṃsāra did end long ago. Some people won’t get enlightened until a long time from now. Our Buddha is specifically teaching those “with little dust in their eyes” who are able to develop the path and achieve the fruits now. The other beings, who aren’t ready (such as those currently stuck in hell) aren’t his target demographic, that’s all.
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The number of sentient beings in Samsara is infinite, right? Bhante, if what I just said is correct, then what creates this infinity? Can my question be explained by normal intelligence?
Or does it require a different perspective on life to answer?
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Nothing, it just is. It exists because it can exist. That’s all.
Bhante, thank you for taking the time for me. Is this mentioned by the Buddha somewhere in the EBT? I haven’t seen things like this mentioned, maybe it hasn’t been answered?
Craving: AN 6.61
If you’re looking for the EBT answer
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Samsara will both go on forever, and also eventually Cease, this is a duality perceivable in meditation on Eternity (not eternalism). But after it’s Cessation, I believe there will be a new Samsara and Saha World, created beginningless, also another duality, as the Kalachakra rotates. There are probably infinites of these worlds as it is right now, and much more than that in the Sphere of all things. In fact, there is no end to it all, primarily to give all possible beings a chance at life. So the Buddha developed Nibbana as a means to end our suffering.
Imagine someone who has been walking around in a circle for a long time. When they look back, their footprints stretch out endlessly with no discernible beginning. Yet their path has an end, if they just stop.
IMO, Emptiness… aka Nothing.
One can conceptually understand this as follows. Consider empty space/time represented as [ ]. Within this emptiness, two equal and opposite energy processes can occur [ -1, +1], yet their sum total is still [ ]. Those two processes +1 and -1 can then branch off into an infinite series of cascading processes…[…-2,-1,+1,+2,…] but this will be valid only as long as they dont collapse back to [ ]. Thus infinite Everything comes from Nothing, remaining apparent as long as its still moving, but eventually collapsing back to Nothing when all processes cease.
(For a way to translate this into meditation practice see MN 121)
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Just to avoid some possible misunderstanding, the actual answer is that this life is due to past life, and that past life is due to the life before that and so on. As long as there’s ignorance in the past, it produces rebirth and there’s no discernable beginning whereby there wasn’t an ignorance and suddenly there was ignorance. Ignorance was there in all past lives, to infinity.
Nothing that they answered above doesn’t imply that after parinibbāna, for no reason samsara restarted. It doesn’t imply breakdown of causality to no causation. It’s just that the causation chain goes back all the way to infinity.