PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTER ON JUNE 15 AND 18, 2013 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, JULY 13, 2024.
Preamble
During the first rainy season after the Buddha passed, the Buddhist community met to recite the teachings. This was about three months after the Buddha’s passing. The rainy season in India begins at the end of June. This would place the Buddha’s death in late March. According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the Buddha passed while lying between two sal trees. The sal is a common tree of northeast India – tall, with large leathery leaves and yellowish flowers. The discourse says that the sal flowered early. The flowers normally appear at the beginning of summer. This is March to April in northeast India, so the chronology fits perfectly. It seems that the Buddha died in late winter.
According to tradition, the First Buddhist Council formally laid down the rules governing the organization of the Buddhist community, called the Vinaya. Ananda then recited the teachings of the Buddha. Ananda was the Buddha’s personal attendant for the last twenty-five years of his life. Ananda was also famous for his memory in an oral culture where memorization was the main means of passing on tradition. Therefore, every discourse begins with the words, ‘Thus have I heard.” Each discourse included the place, time, participants, and a story explaining the situation and what the Buddha did and said. Ananda’s recitation became the basis of the discourses of the Pali Canon. The second part of the canon, called the Sutta Pitaka, collects these accounts together. ‘Sutta Pitaka’ means a collection of traditional stories. This process took seven months.
There is no reason to doubt this account. Ancient India was still an oral culture. For a thousand years a similar process of memorization and recitation passed down the Vedas. They continued to recite them for another thousand years before finally writing them down.
The community passed the discourses down in this way until the 1st century BCE. This was about the same time that the earliest Mahayana sutras began to appear. The Sri Lankan monastics wrote the discourses on palm leaves during the Fourth Buddhist Council. The Buddha probably passed about 400 BCE. As little as 300 years had passed between the first and fourth councils – as few as three complete human lifespans. During this time, the Pali Canon acquired additional material besides the Vinaya and the discourses. This material included accounts of lives in heavens and hells; poems written by monks and nuns; many mythological birth stories of the Buddha and various associates, drawn largely from Indian folklore; fantastic accounts of previous buddhas and historical ages; and extensive commentaries and interpretations, including the Abhidhamma – the word means ‘metaphysics,’ and summarizes the Theravada interpretation of the discourses.
The Abhidhamma became the third major part of the Pali Canon and the basis of the Theravada sect that survives today. The Theravadins were not the only early Buddhist school, but, until recently, only their version of the canon remained intact, due to their famous conservatism. Bits and pieces of other canons from the same period survived in Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Chinese translations. These translations are like the discourses preserved in the Pali Canon. Most scholars say the discourses are pre-sectarian. The compositions of the Abhidharmas of the various schools were sectarian in intention. The Sarvastivadin Abhidharma differs from the Theravada Abhidhamma. This disproves the claim that the Theravada represents the sole authentic lineage of the Buddha.
Of course, the monastics continuously consolidated the discourses over time. As a result, stock phrases and rote lists recur all through the canon as an aid to memorization. Various elaborations addressed the doctrinal disputes that continued to challenge the unity of the Buddhist community. This conservatism also worked to maintain the integrity of the texts. What one sees today combines these two opposite tendencies – one obsessed with preservation, the other with codification. One sees a similar phenomenon in the early formation of the Christian New Testament.
Modern scholars address the problem of assessing the Pali Canon in two ways. The linguistic school, still popular with some academics, studies the Pali language of the Pali Canon and tries to ferret out the original doctrines of the Buddha by identifying the oldest layers or strata of the Pali Canon through formal linguistic analysis. Similarly, some Christian scholars have tried to identify the original sayings of Jesus. However, whereas the earliest Christian writings are few, the Pali Canon consists of about forty volumes of material. Moreover, the Pali Canon is highly repetitive.
Linguistic analysis can only go so far, however. This line of inquiry is effectively exhausted. Important for translators and historians, it is less interesting to those who seek to understand the teaching in its totality. Of course, this is why they preserved the discourses in the first place. Instead, an increasing number of scholars are looking at the Pali Canon with fresh eyes.
Trying to ferret out the “original words” of the Buddha from this mass of texts is like picking individual threads out of a tapestry. It destroys the picture. The inclusive approach is to look at the tapestry as a whole. Of special interest are the five thousand plus discourses preserved in the Sutta Pitaka. The Vinaya is also important, although there are at least six different Vinaya versions. The new scholars search for the large patterns of meaning that emerge out of the whole, not merely a handful of hypothesized “original doctrines.” The core doctrines are only the axioms or building blocks. The results of this comprehensive approach have been incredibly rich and profound. Because one has so much material to work with, one can be confident that this approach accurately reflects the essential meaning of the philosophy of the Buddha, even if the discourses do not incorporate his exact words. Many aspects of his philosophy only become clear when one compares the texts from this higher point of view. Looked at in isolation, many meanings disappear. It is the adage of the forest and the trees.
One conclusion that has emerged from this higher criticism is the realization that the Pali Canon is not just a Theravada or even a Hinayana collection. Rather, all Buddhist schools have drawn their inspiration from this original pre-sectarian matrix. Few people believe that the Mahayana sutras are actual accounts of the sayings and doings of the historical Buddha. Nevertheless, one finds all their essential axioms in the Pali Canon if one chooses to look at it philosophically and not merely from a narrow historical perspective. The Buddha said that he was restoring a primordial doctrine taught by the original seers of the Indian Vedic tradition and their predecessors. The Buddha declared his teaching to be part of a much older and larger tradition, the spiritual fountainhead of humanity. Today one would call this the perennial philosophy. It is the basis of all wisdom traditions.
The division between Hinayana, so-called, and Mahayana is not about historical authenticity. It is about what the teaching of the Buddha means. This is not merely reducible to what the Buddha did and said. The teaching is much more than a system of rules and beliefs. The teaching is the living truth and meaning of reality itself. It is the essential discovery of all of those who seek the spiritual life. As such, it is universal and must include all religions, civilizations, and cultures; science; art; mysticism; and all life and sentience itself, everywhere in the universe and beyond. If one does not understand the teaching in this way, if one reduces it merely to a system of rules, doctrines, or events frozen in the past, one has not even begun to understand the teaching – one has merely constructed a simulacrum, or, worse, a religion. This is clearly not what the Buddha wanted or intended for the Buddhist community, either in his time or our own.
1
The Human Condition
Traditional Indian philosophy begins with metaphysics. The Buddha, however, began with direct observation of the mind. In the West, the early 20th century pioneered this approach to philosophy. The Buddha’s approach to philosophy was a radical break with Indian tradition. It anticipated Husserl’s phenomenology, existentialism, and process philosophy by more than 2,000 years.
Suffering
The essential insight of the Buddha is that the same suffering, without regard to social station or wealth, afflicts everyone. This “dis-ease” is ageing and death. Even the liberated arhant, the Pali word for ‘worthy,’ is subject to this affliction. The cause of ageing and death is birth. Ageing and death are the universal experience of humanity. The Buddha saw that there is no difference between the decay to which a constructed object like a chariot is subject and the body. That they decay the same is a universal law. The universal tendency to disorder interweaves with time. As time passes, disorder increases and objects decay. Even the universe is subject to entropy.
However, entropy is not a problem for chariots or even animals. They have little or no awareness of their own or others’ death. For human beings, however, aware of our mortality, this becomes a problem. The realization of the impermanence of things grips at our heartstrings and destroys our capacity for living. Either one immerses oneself in pleasure or the quest for power or money, one uses alcohol or drugs to try to dull one’s consciousness to approximate the animal state, or one deludes oneself with illusory promises of salvation. If one faces the fact of death squarely, each one will see that it destroys one’s capacity for pleasure, one’s will and one’s effectiveness and thus makes continued living impossible. This is the reason for renunciation.
The situation described above would appear to be insoluble (existentialism). According to the Buddha, there is a solution: dharma. According to the Buddha, “the Dhamma of the good does not decay. So the good proclaim along with the good.” Therefore, one must find out more about this teaching. It is a life raft in a sea of suffering.
Dharma
It is not simple to translate the word dharma. It comes from the Vedic words dharma and dharman. These roots are related to karma, from the root DHR, meaning ‘to hold, to support; that which forms a foundation and upholds; constitution.’ In use, dharma alludes primarily to the universal order of things in their most intimate and ultimate nature. Thus, dharma is reality – being in itself.
Second, dharma refers to the mind that perceives reality. The dharma-mind formulates dharma as knowledge and philosophy. Dharma is the true knowledge of things. Dharma refers to the knower, the knowledge in which knowing expresses itself, and the known. Thus, dharma also means ‘truth.’ It is the truth of things as they are. Dharma is not merely the philosophy of the Buddha. Rather, dharma is the objective truth that the Buddha discovered. That the Buddha’s philosophy expresses this truth is the premise of Buddhism.
Finally, it refers to the right, righteousness, moral quality or action, i.e., ethics. Ethics follows logically from the knowledge of the real. If the goal of ethics is the maximization of the good – however defined – it must be based on the knowledge of the real. The discerning person can rationally apprehend and define the course of action that leads to the good. The Buddha declares in a sermon that everything involves change but also says that something does not decay: the dharma. Impermanence itself, while universal, is also relative. Therefore, change itself posits changelessness. As the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi, put it, opposites interdepend. Laozi was a close contemporary of the Buddha and the author of the famous Tao Te Ching, the Classic of the Way and Its Virtue. The Buddha states that the cause of impermanence is birth. Birth posits death. Death posits birth. This is the cycle of rebirth. Therefore, the dharma does not decay because it is not born. Only one thing is not born. That is reality, the totality, the whole, the absolute, the ultimate, the All – whichever term one prefers, the absolute cannot be subject to decay; if it were, what would it decay into? – then that would become fundamental. This is why the real in Indian philosophy is always permanent and changeless, the ultimate simplicity, Laozi’s “uncarved block.” We do not need to define it right now; we just need to know that it exists (in some sense), that it is real. This is what dharma refers to. Thus, like a finger pointing at the moon, the Buddha progressed from the immediacy of human experience to ultimate understanding.
Four Great Mountains
The Buddha compares the truth of human life to four great mountains bearing down on a powerful king and his kingdom. Despite all his power, he cannot stop it. The mountains will come crashing down and destroy everything. Nothing can escape. This appears to be nihilism. However, it is not, because, out of this utter annihilation, the teaching is indestructible. Thus, he concludes that the pursuit of the teaching is the only proper purpose of the rare and precious thing called human life.
Animals do not have the capacity to pursue the teaching because animals are barely conscious and driven by automatic impulses, immersed in a sea of suffering from which they cannot escape. This is even truer of ghosts and hell-beings. On the other hand, the divine beings of light, commonly badly translated ‘gods’ or ‘deities,’ and even those on the human plane who are rich and powerful enough, can pursue the teaching but do not do so, mostly because of self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction is entirely illusory. Even the richest and most powerful people will suffer, get sick, and die, as will their children and their children’s children, in an ever-recurring cycle. All the wealth that they have accumulated and everything that they have built will turn to dust. All human knowledge will vanish.
Current science is undecided as to whether the universe will freeze to death or perish in a fiery conflagration, but either way, nothing will survive. There is no escape from this fate, not even for those who achieve emancipation, the arhants, not even for the buddhas, whose bodies will also suffer, decay, and die. Even the Buddha suffered. This fact posits the teaching as its necessary alternative. Therefore, the teaching is the most precious jewel of humanity and its one true purpose and goal. Here one sees the basis of an ethical theory of human life and conduct.
Technocracy
Today, many place their hope in science. They think that science will save us. Science will disentangle the intricate veins of cause and effect on the most fundamental levels. This will enable us to build great machines to provide for all our needs and wants. We will all become rich and powerful and want for nothing. Our understanding of the human body will become so deep and penetrating that we will be able to replace our body parts as they wear out. Eventually, we will even be able to replace our brains, thus achieving functional immortality. This has become the scientific mythos of the 21st century, the new religion of industrial man.
The success of science appears to contradict the teachings of the Buddha about change and suffering. In fact, they do not do so, even if they are true. No matter how rich or powerful we become, no matter how much knowledge we acquire, no matter how many planets we colonize, the fundamental fact of impermanence will always catch up with us, eventually. Annihilation threatens us at every turn. The more we have, the more we have to lose. The more powerful we become, the more likely it is that we will turn the power of self-destruction upon each other. Risk is never absent. Accidents are always likely. Eventually, the universe itself will end, one way or another.
How are we going to administer all this power? Are we going to manage it as we have in the past, based on scarcity, competition, and greed? It seems that, if we continue along this path, the very powers we unleash through our knowledge of reality will destroy us because of our own ignorance. Therefore, the teaching and the ethical values of wisdom, loving-kindness, and selflessness that result from its realization, become even more important in the scientific age than in the past. Indeed, without the teaching it seems unlikely that humanity will survive much longer. Certainly, secular materialism has proved incapable of establishing a moral society. Aldous Huxley prophesied this in 1932 in his dystopian novel of a future technocracy, Brave New World. One has only to look around to see that this is true.
Three Divine Messengers
The Buddha refers to three divine messengers that appear to humanity to teach us dharma. He is not referring to gods, angels, saviours, or even great teachers of the past or present as taught by other religions. Rather, he refers to an old woman, a hundred years old, frail, bent, crooked, leaning on a stick, shaking, sick, with broken teeth, and grey dry hair and blotchy skin. He refers to an old man, sick, in pain, lying in his own filth, who cannot take care of himself; others must care for him. He refers to a swollen, discoloured, and festering corpse. Therefore, the Buddha prescribed meditating in cemeteries, surrounded by the rotting bodies, soiled clothing, and filth of the dead.
Humanity learns the reality of its own state through these divine messengers. He who learns their lesson well turns to the teaching with faith. He who ignores them, losing himself in the deluded paths of money, power, sex, alcohol, or drugs, will learn their lesson when he himself suffers, becomes sick, and dies except in our society; we drug the dying into unconsciousness. He, who, despite the vain deluded pursuits of life, learns the lesson of the divine messengers, turns to the teaching. Through the teaching, he will become one with the Deathless, experiencing beneficial effects in this life and in the next.
The Worldlings
The Buddha makes a fundamental social distinction between two human types: the worldling and the student. Puthujjana comes from puthu, ‘numerous,’ + jana, ‘people.’ The puthujjana are the ‘many-folk’; ‘ordinary, average people’; ‘worldlings.’ The worldlings are the people that the Buddha hesitated to teach when he became enlightened, fearing that they would not understand him. A student is one who listens to the teaching.
Today, many Buddhists think in terms of a primary division between lay and monastic. In fact, the fundamental social distinction made by the Buddha is between the worldling and the student. However, the worldlings are not necessarily non-Buddhists. The Buddha taught two spiritual paths, one for the worldling, based on moral causality, and one for the student, based on the Noble Truths.
A worldling is not necessarily a lay Buddhist and a student a monastic Buddhist. The Pali Canon cites examples of ordained monastics who were worldlings and householders who were or became students. Being a monastic is not a requirement of attaining emancipation. Rather, a worldling is lost in the mirage of involuntary rebirth. This is characteristic of most of us. A student is the rare being who has heard and understood the teaching. He has achieved Right View, the first step in the Eightfold Path. When we say, “heard and understood,” we do not mean merely that a student has adhered to teaching in a formal sense, as one who converts to a religion, for example. Rather, we mean one who has heard and understood “the view” and thus “taken it into themselves,” as it were, perfectly. They have taken the decisive first step on the Buddhist path of wisdom.
The worldling experiences suffering on physical and mental levels. The Buddha likens this to two darts. In response to suffering, the worldling turns toward pleasure as an antidote. He does not understand that pleasure is the same as suffering. The more he suffers, the more he turns to pleasure; the more he turns to pleasure, the more he suffers. In the famous simile of the Buddha, a man covered with boils scratches, and the more he scratches the more his boils fester and itch. Cybernetics calls this a “positive feedback loop.” In fact, this is the essential nature of addiction. The more he struggles, the more attached he becomes. The more attached he becomes, the more he struggles. Life and addiction are the same.
One sees this clearly in the world today. Nations struggle against nations; billions live in misery, while a few million live in unimaginable luxury, the wealth of the world controlled by the one percent. Despite all this wealth and luxury, the rich are never satisfied and the poor never have enough. The most corrupt societies are the richest. In the process, we are destroying our planet through pollution, resource depletion, and climate change, but no one seems able or willing to do anything about it. Many more prefer to pretend that this is not happening at all. We live in a state of willful ignorance, seeking endless self-gratification, never satisfied and always hungry. The power elites keep the people ignorant while they gorge themselves on the wealth that the people create.
He Who Hears the Dharma
Thus, the worldling perpetuates his own suffering. According to the Buddha, the student does not experience suffering like this. When he feels physical pain, he has a sensation of pain, but there is no correlative mental suffering, no second “dart.” He simply feels pain as pain, without attachment. As the Buddha put it, “he does not sorrow, grieve, or lament; he does not weep beating his breast and become distraught. He feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one.” Imagine the benefits to our overburdened health care system if this attitude were commonplace. Without attachment, the student neither avoids pain nor seeks pleasure.
Rather, the Buddha says, he knows an exit. He is detached, and through detachment, he frees himself from the positive feedback cycle of pain and pleasure. He can do this because he understands the teaching, especially the Four Truths. The student is not merely one who believes in the teaching. He is not even one who knows the teaching as a matter of intellectual or academic reflection. Rather, through believing and knowing the teaching, he realizes the truth of the teaching in and for himself and lives it. Thus, he experiences the effect thereof as a matter of direct realization. Only such a one is on the path of the teaching. He awakes to the truth of the world.
The Four Truths that underlie the realization of the student are:
(1) The truth of suffering;
(2) The truth of the origin of suffering;
(3) The truth of the passing away of suffering; and
(4) The truth of the way of escape from suffering.
The word here translated as ‘suffering’ is dukkha. Dukkha derives from the Sanskrit, DU, meaning ‘opposite’ or ‘wrong.’ The English slang expression, ‘duh,’ meaning ‘bad’ or ‘woeful,’ derives from this word. The word also means ‘two.’ It is the complement of sukkah, ‘agreeable’ or ‘pleasant.’ Suffering does not refer exclusively or even primarily to physical pain. It refers to the mental anguish to which physical pain gives rise. Suffering is the ontological or existential dissatisfaction with life expressed in English by words like ‘angst,’ ‘ennui,’ and existential dread. Thus, the Buddha anticipated existentialism by thousands of years.
The First Truth of the Buddha is that suffering penetrates all life, turtles all the way down. There is no escape. The Buddha does not deny that pleasure occurs, only that it is permanent or enduring. Therefore, pleasure turns into pain and pain turns into pleasure in an endless repetitive cycle. The core of both is fundamental dissatisfaction. The more aware that one becomes, the more acutely one feels this. Thus, suffering, pleasure, and pain all come together in the unity of fundamental ignorance.
The Second Truth is that the cause of suffering is desirous attachment. The Second Truth is the doctrine of moral causality. The doctrine of moral causality states that every cause has its effect, and every effect has its cause. Universal causality is a Buddhist axiom shared by science. Dharma, reality, is the sole exception, but dharma is not a “phenomenon.”
Thus, there must also be a cause of suffering. The word translated as ‘desire’ is tanha. It means ‘dryness’ and ‘thirst.’ It signifies craving, hunger for excitement, and the fever of unsatisfied longing. Westerners are so addicted to desire that they identify it with life itself. They cannot conceive of any other kind of happiness. They declare, erroneously, that Buddhism is “against life.” Some misunderstand the Second Truth as referring to vitality, despite the Buddha’s repeated admonitions to develop energy.
The Third Truth follows logically from the first and second truths as the logical antithesis of the second. The Pali word is nirodha, which means ‘destruction,’ ‘cessation,’ ‘annihilation,’ i.e., of tanha, desirous attachment. To a Westerner this sounds like nihilism. In fact, tanha is illusory. The destruction of illusion is not a real annihilation, but rather the opposite, an awakening. It is a “cutting through” illusion to the reality of suffering itself, thence to the reality of bliss. It is synonymous with realization and with emancipation.
Finally, the Fourth Truth refers to the way or path. This Eightfold Path leads to complete emancipation. The realization of the path is synonymous with enlightenment itself.
The fundamental root of the anxiety and agitation that arises due to desirous attachment is the belief in the reality of a self. The belief in a self has four aspects – form is the self, the self has form, form is in the self, or the self is in form. Because form is changeable, this creates confusion, anxiety, and agitation in the mind of the sufferer who is addicted to the notion of a self. This also applies to feelings, perceptions, volitional formations, and consciousness – all the psychological qualities that one typically takes to be the self. All of these are impermanent. He who believes that they are inextricably involved with the self, or the self with them, experiences the suffering resulting from desirous attachment. Similarly, the student does not experience desirous attachment to any of these things. He frees himself from anxiety, agitation, and suffering because he realizes that the self is empty.
Worldly conflict is the result of attachment to sensuality. Spiritual conflict is the result of attachment to beliefs, especially beliefs “infected” by subjectivity, craving, ego-conceit, and distorted perceptions. Worldly and spiritual conflicts undermine the innate desire of all beings to live in peace and harmony. This concept of spiritual conflict being due to attachment to beliefs is the basis of the sectarianism that one finds in all religions today, including Buddhism. It follows that the cure to such a distorted concept of beliefs is non-sectarianism. One achieves non-sectarianism by the practice of universalism and by the reconciliation of contrary beliefs through the practice of logical syncretism. Similarly, sectarianism is one of the eighteen root downfalls of a bodhisattva. Geshe Tashi Tsering of the Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London comments on this:
The sixth one [referring to the root downfalls] is referring to stopping or abandoning the practice of Buddhadharma, either completely or partly, due to misinformation. For example, for people who are practising the Mahayana path, there is such a strong emphasis on the Mahayana teachings that there is a risk of saying the Theravada teachings are not important. Conversely, if one puts the emphasis very strongly on the Theravadin teachings, there is a risk of thinking that the Mahayana teachings are not relevant. Of course, there are different emphases but that does not mean that we should abandon one teaching or the other. They are there purely due to an individual’s interest and mental dispositions.
Lama Tsong Khapa said very clearly in his Lam-rim Chen-mo, The Great Exposition of the Gradual Path to Enlightenment, that a unique feature of the lam-rim is that through studying it the entire Buddhadharma can be understood as a spiritual path to achieve Buddhahood. In the earlier stage, the middle and small scope teaching, there is a strong emphasis on the law of karma and the Four Noble Truths, whereas in the great scope there is much more emphasis on bodhicitta or Mahayana teachings. The entire teaching shows a practitioner where to start and where to end. Like the analogy I often use, if you pull one corner of the cloth, the whole cloth moves. To understand bodhicitta, we must understand emptiness and cause-and-effect. It is so important not to abandon one part of Buddhadharma just because that is not our main emphasis or because we are following a particular tradition. Of course, different traditions suit different mental dispositions.
The Buddha exemplified this practice in his own discussions with the adherents of other sects. The Buddha recommended finding common ground with others, especially those holding different beliefs. Then he based discussion on this, identifying axioms and implications and following them out, rather than focusing on differences.
Samsara
When the Buddha refers to the eight worldly conditions that keep the “world turning around,” he is referring to involuntary rebirth. Often one sees samsara mistranslated as ‘existence.’ The literal meaning of the word is ‘faring on.’ It refers specifically to transmigration through time. The cyclical nature of existence is its essence. Thus, the word does not refer to a “thing” at all. Rather, it refers to a process universally inherent in all phenomena.
All phenomena, including living beings, are born (i.e., caused), endure for a time (though this too is illusory, because everything changes continuously), and then cease to exist (i.e., they die). This cyclical process is the essential nature of all phenomena, from the infinitesimal (i.e., the subatomic level) to the universe and beyond. Thus, the world itself is synonymous with time. Time is the great mystery. There is no quantum variable for time. The experience of the self imposes the “arrow of time” on reality. Quantum physics calls this the “act of observation.” In string theory, time is one-dimensional, whereas space is multi-dimensional.
The eight conditions referred to by the Buddha are gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. One may generalize these as property, society, and physicality. The elements of rebirth are not things in themselves. They are not absolutes. They are conditional. If one abolishes attachment to property, social relations, and the body, one abolishes rebirth. This is the essence of renunciation. The negative implications of the English word are misleading. Renouncing an illusion is not renunciation; it is liberation. The teachings of the Buddha only are negative from the perspective of the relative, contingent, and illusory. From the perspective of the absolute and the real, they are not negative at all. They are positive.
What is the origin of involuntary rebirth? The Buddha says that, because of the law of causality, rebirth is without beginning; to posit a beginning posits an uncaused cause. Thus, Buddhism rejects theism. Theism asserts that God is the uncaused cause. The question arises that if God, the First Cause, is uncaused, why posit a creator at all? There is no need. Just say that reality is uncaused.
Buddhism is singularly scientific in positing both the beginninglessness of rebirth and the sheer enormity of the cycles that constitute its “faring on.” In a famous simile, the Buddha compares the enormity of the macrocosmic cycles to the time that it would take for a person to wipe away a mountain with a rag. This duration, while finite, is unimaginably long. Compared with the traditional Judaic notion that creation is about 6,000 years old, the Buddhist model approximates the current scientific understanding of astronomical cycles. The Buddha says that the number of cycles is like the length of the Ganges expressed in terms of the number of grains of sand between its source and the sea. I will not even attempt to quantify this.
Notes:
[1] Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chap. 2.
[2] Geshe Tashi, The Bodhisattva Vows (London, Feb.-March 2001), http://www.bodhicitta.net/BODHISATTVAVOWS.htm
Further Study
Dharmata 