Time gap between being disciple of Buddha Kassapa, life in Tusita Heaven, and birth of Gotama

I remember I read or was told in a conference in a Buddhist center that the gap between Tathagata Buddhas is always six thousand years in this Eon at least, and thus between Kassapa and Sakiamuni there were 6000 years, the Dharma wheel moves for 5000, Dharma is then forgotten for 1000 and a new Buddha appears, next been Maitreya. However it was a Vajrayana school thus I guess they might have different texts than other schools.

What it’s obvious, for me at least, is that different versions of the time gap exist. But lets assume this text is correct, I think there are two options:

-Whether time in the Tushita heaven is not the same as here, and a few years here are millions of years there, thus the life between Kapassa and Sakiamuni is not that long or
-When Buddhism talks about humans is not always referring to literal homo sapiens, the term is more about “a creature that is able to understand and practice Dharma”, thus, although science have not discover it yet it might be that some life form back then was capable of doing so.

On the other hand the existence of alien life is very clearly confirm on Buddhist texts as they constantly speak of other realms and worlds that are clearly not on Earth.

Following the stance -probably- more than one people could’ve already observed about some of my posts, seeing the discussions taking place here increase my doubts about the way past-lives are explained or described in the suttas and by most fellow buddhists.

Don’t we look exactly like creationist look when discussing the Bible?

Aren’t we trying to fit evidence to our pre-assumed beliefs, instead of questioning whether our beliefs are factual in the first place?

Aren’t we doing what most religious groups do, namely, to assume some corpus of ideas as factual, and them spend our time trying to a) make those ideas internally coherent, and b) adjusting evidence to that belief and discarding what’s inconvenient, regardless of the amount of evidence supporting those inconvenient ideas?

Topics like the one being discussed make more and more uncertain about the criteria we use to categorize some things as allegorical, as mythological, as according to knowledge of the world of the time of the Buddha, or as literal. A lot of times, it seems we discriminate according to our own agendas (and I’m certainly guilty of doing that, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unintentionally).

Wouldn’t a more “neutral” stance be more productive for the development of wisdom and knowledge, i.e. the idea of not considering something to be true or false just based on the texts alone, even when some idea presented in the texts coincides with our beliefs or desires about the world?

I’m not saying that we have to be without commitment or stance to some ideas; rather, I’m just saying that I think the idea of something being factual just because the Buddha -allegedly- said so my not be the most productive position, whatever that could mean.

Please, keep in mind I’ve never said (because I don’t think it) that past-lives are not a actual feature of reality. As I’ve said before, I’m always open to change my mind.

Kind regards!

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Good points. That’s why people like venerable @sujato highlight the importance of understanding mythical narratives and Buddhist mythology as just that, narratives, and knowing what to do with it.

And the more unique or original these narratives are the more likely they can be traced back to the Buddha himself.

And then, given the argument of faith in the founder of the spiritual community we decided to be part of, we should see what from those mythical narratives can be of help understanding our place in the world and the path.

For example, when it comes to the topic of other realms, devas etc. My takeaway is to suspend disbelief in these possible aspects of experience I may still be unaware of.

For whatever reason either the Buddha himself or the early community understood narratives involving these things as relevant.

And they made a massive effort in keeping these stories through time initially via oral transmission and eventually via textual transmission.

And they could have decided otherwise, the materialistic charvakas were already present and were the ones discarding all that in their view of the world.

In the case of the mythical narratives around cycles of the universe and / or likely future state of things (e.g the seven suns story), I am open to the idea that indeed as the Buddha attained to the three knowledges (tevijja) he may have gained some insight on how short /narrow can be the time window for complex and intelligent life to thrive in a planet like ours.

And, as a result, how it is that we make the right choices as individuals, communities and/or species to not spoil things when conditions are pretty much close the most optimal they can be in a good while. :slightly_smiling_face:

:anjal:

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I think it’s close, but one should really have the right attitude when dabbling in Buddhism and Science.

Unfortunately or not, the words of the Buddha are set in stone, cannot be changed as the Buddha’s not around anymore to ask him due to updates in our scientific knowledge. So if we require the following to be true: belief that the Buddha is never wrong, suttas are transmitted faithfully, accurately, and certain words/concepts cannot be misunderstood to be purely metaphors, then some fitting in with science really have to be done.

Nonetheless, given that for most of the time Buddhism is around, the people then might really have a difficult time believing the Buddha before we understood modern cosmology, that spacetime is dynamic, the sun and earth has a finite lifespan etc.

Nowadays, I find that overall, there’s more agreement between science and Buddhism than not. I have faith that those areas which are not might be cleared up as science updates itself. Anyway, do refer to these sites where I assumed both physics and buddhism are true and see the parallels.

r/physicsandbuddhism in reddit, and physicsandbuddhism.blogspot

The only possible way to investigate the words of the Buddha scientifically is to develop the tools to investigate them. Most of them involves the development of divine eye and recollection of past lives. Unfortunately or not, monks who has them cannot tell lay people. Also unfortunately or not, those who has them in general are not very well verse in science, so they cannot tell us which part science got wrong and why. Or which part the scriptures are not to be read literally and it actually meant this scientific concept and why it was corrupted in passing down to us (cause the ancients have no such scientific terminology).

Even for the few people I had met who has some form of supernatural eye power, interviews with them doesn’t give me much data on how to fit them in with scientific understanding of the world.

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I agree with a lot of what you’ve said.

What I still is hard for me to understand is why is it almost universally -inside the buddhist circles I participate in- agreed upon that science will be the one catching up what the suttas have been saying, and not the other way around (with this I don’t mean the suttas “following” science, but buddhist practitioners changing their beliefs for ideas supported by lots of evidence).

Under this behavior, I still see the underlying assumption that the Buddha -of the earliest strata of the suttas- was unequivocally right, and that sooner or later science will have to recognize that.

As I’m open to change my views about rebirth/past-lives, I’m also open to the possibility of the Buddha not really having a privileged view on the mechanisms and laws that govern the world. Although he could’ve actually had some inusual experiences, probably due to his “experimentations” with his own mind and body (and I have no doubts about that fact), maybe he thought that he saw past-lives and that he visited some othe realms, assuming that the experience he had was showing him the mechanisms and laws governing nature. But there’s a chance that there was no such connection between his experience and the actual laws of the nature.

I’m currently getting acquainted with the Jewish Kabbalah, mainly for intellectual curiosity (rather than “faith”). And I see the same trend that you present here: there are a lot of physisist insisting on how much parallels between current understading of the world and what the Tanakh and the main works of the Kabbalist tell us. I attribute this coincidence of general statements (between science and the sacred corpus of texts of religions) to a mix of ingenuity from the spiritual thinkers and of the huge amount of diversity in ideas (in other words, there are so many general ideas about the world that eventually some of those ideas will show some similarities to what science will show us).

It’s not surprising for me that there’s a considerable amount of things that the Buddha could’ve said that coincide with what we currently know about the world. It’s not surprising considering how critical was the Buddha with the ideas of its time, how developed his critical thinking skills were, how creative and perceptive he was, and how much he leaned towards empiricism. But I do not assume that such skills and features made him inmune to mistakes and biases; it could be the case, but I don’t assume it a priori.

Kind regards!

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I’m inclined to believe in the Mulitverse theory (and I use the term theory here literally, as in something that hasn’t been proven). If this theory is correct, then rather than thinking about the events being discussed in this thread as supposedly happening over vast times scales within our universe (and trying to reconcile the carbon explosion with the era of Buddha Kassapa, for example), we can think of them as happening in different universes. Tushita could also be seen as another universe. Hell, even Sukhavati, Amitabha’s Pure Land, could be another universe.

That’s a bit… well, intellectually not so neat once you get to read the different types of multiverses (Brian Greene’s book The Hidden Reality).

Many different types of multiverses has their own rules and some can present a lot of headaches to the buddhist viewpoint. Such as quantum many worlds, assuming that splitting happens for every single quantum event which has different outcomes.

If the ancient sages develop psychic powers, divine eye etc, likely they are like blind men touching elephant, as seen in DN 1, where their different prior views leads each of them to assume the truth of their particular religion, even with their limited divine eye.

It’s one of the core faiths of Buddhism in believing in the values of Buddha that he’s the highest. Perhaps a “mistake” of the Buddha might be when he went for a 14 day self retreat, and the monks around then got too much into seeing the impurities of the body that they committed suicide, killed each other, hired an assassin to kill them.

After the Buddha emerged, that story became the basis for the laying down of the parajika 3 rule of no killing humans for monks.

But on considering that the Buddha on many occasions lay down rules of the long term welfare and benefit of many, it’s unlikely that he would speak of a sutta which is not factual, least it causes people to lose faith due to future discoveries. He apparently is not afraid to say things which are outside of the scope of scientific knowledge then. Like the fate of universe expanding and contracting, 7 suns appearing in the future of the earth, burning the earth.

It is only natural for many Buddhists to see that science that is to say cosmology which only in the last 100 years is catching up to realize that spacetime is dynamic, and the earth indeed will be burned up by the sun that it’s more likely that science will catch up with Buddhism. If science can be extended to investigate kamma, rebirth etc, then it might be better, but currently many people are ignoring rebirth evidences, even most Buddhists.

On Buddhism giving way, I think Dalai Lama does promote this. That if anything in Buddhism is shown conclusively by science to be false, Buddhism should change. In that definition of buddhism, the dalai Lama is including the various commentaries and later contributions. So on the early Buddhist texts, it’s still relatively safe. For example, flat earth is from commentaries, sutta just mentioned mt. sumeru and 4 continents around it, sutta didn’t explicitly say earth is flat. So flat earth commentaries has to give way to known facts.

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Every universe doesn’t need to be inhabitable, or have people living in it, and the sentient life there doesn’t need to resemble us. Given the environments of the different heaven realms, or even some of the lower realms, we already have examples of forms of existence quite different from the human realm.

I remember that the Dalai Lama said that whenever Science and Buddhism enter in conflict is the duty of the Buddhists to accept Science, but of course the Dalai lama is only a reference for Tibetan Buddhism. Similarly there are in the Mahayana and Vajrarayana traditions what is considered to be Boddhisatvas still active and who can clairifed or give opinions on Dharma, but only the followers of such schools would take them as authorities.

Regarding the existence of different universe with different laws of pyhisics that is also a possible explanation too.

As mentioned in Visakhuposatha Sutta

That which among men is four hundred years, Visakha, is one night and day of the Tusita devas, their month has thirty of those days, their year twelve of those months; the lifespan of the Tusita devas is four thousand of those heavenly years.

That for me kind of means that time there is different than here and that days here are centuries there.

The issue is more of even for the inhabitable universes, there’s likely to be infinitely many of them.

Which, to my way of thinking, is what makes the idea work. This is all just wild speculation on my part, but the idea of rebirth and kamma potentially spanning universes makes as much sense as the traditional representation.

It paints a bleak outlook on people who had vowed: sentient beings are infinite, we vow to liberate them all.

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Haha, I guess. I mean there really isn’t much difference an infinite number of sentient beings in one universe and an infinite number of sentient beings in infinite universes. Infinite is infinite, right?

Haha. Yes. Actually if one universe needs to accommodate infinite beings, then it has to be infinite in space, thus giving rise to the quilted multiverse (due to infinity in space, but finite arrangements of matter, we get repeated arrangements of matter after a finite distance away).

So infinite beings requires some sort of infinite multiverse to accommodate them.

To be a bit nerdy, at least in Python:

Python 3.7.2 (default, Jan 19 2021, 19:10:16) 
[GCC 7.5.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> float('inf') == float('inf')
True

We discussed this a bit already in this thread

Actually this was the same earth as lord Gautama Buddha tells this account at the place which was used by lord kassapa buddha. I think earth did not origin 4.3 billion years ago…I think that’s just time when certain big catastrophic event happened but it wasn’t the start of earth as it existed way before that.
So lord kassapa was on this same earth and earth is way older than we think bro.
I would love to discuss more on these matters as I am so much intrigued with these 3 jewels.

I can answer that if you reply me brother as I don’t know If my explanation will reach to you or not.

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A kalpa is around 16 million years.so kakusanda Buddha lived that years ago.so human origin should be that long.we have to look for more evidence.origin of earth is around 4billion years ago.