DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.45392#0167
Buddhist Heavens & How to Reach Them
M. Poincard writes of the mathematician Hermite:
“ Jamais il n'&voquait une image sensible, et pourtant
vous vous aperceviez bienttit que les entitts les phis abstraites
ttaient pour lui comme des etres vivants. Il ne les voyait
pas, mais il sentait qu'elles ne sont pas un assemblage
artificiel, et qu'elles ont je ne sais quel principe d’unitt
interne."1 Does not Keats, moreover, refer to the
Brahma Plane unconditioned by Form, when he writes
in one of his letters : “There will be no space, and conse-
quently the only commerce between spirits will be by
their intelligence of each other—when they will completely
understand each other, while we, in this world, merely
comprehend each other in different degrees ” ? If it
be true that he who does not attain to Nibbana here and
now is reborn in some other world—and this is taken for
granted in early Buddhism—then what is more reasonable
than to suppose that those who cultivate here on earth
those states of mind which we have indicated, viz. the
states of self-absorption in the contemplation of beauty or
of ideal form, or in the most abstract thought, are reborn
in those worlds which they have so often visited ? This
consideration is maintained as follows in the Tevijja
Sutta:
1 La Valeur de la Science. Mrs Rhys Davids notices the apparent
absence of music in the higher Buddhist heavens (Buddhist Psychology,
p. xlv); but where form must be replaced by ‘ high fetches of abstract
thought,’ there also music may be silent, and may not need those
articulated instruments which are used in the lower heavens of sense.
“Pythagoras . . . did not say that the movements of the heavenly
bodies made an audible music, but that it was itself a music . . . supra-
sensible”—(Schelling); “ There the whole sky is filled with sound, and
there that music is made without fingers and without strings”—(Kabir).
There also, and in the same way, exists eternally the Veda or Dhamma
which is only ‘ heard ’ in lower worlds.
H 113
M. Poincard writes of the mathematician Hermite:
“ Jamais il n'&voquait une image sensible, et pourtant
vous vous aperceviez bienttit que les entitts les phis abstraites
ttaient pour lui comme des etres vivants. Il ne les voyait
pas, mais il sentait qu'elles ne sont pas un assemblage
artificiel, et qu'elles ont je ne sais quel principe d’unitt
interne."1 Does not Keats, moreover, refer to the
Brahma Plane unconditioned by Form, when he writes
in one of his letters : “There will be no space, and conse-
quently the only commerce between spirits will be by
their intelligence of each other—when they will completely
understand each other, while we, in this world, merely
comprehend each other in different degrees ” ? If it
be true that he who does not attain to Nibbana here and
now is reborn in some other world—and this is taken for
granted in early Buddhism—then what is more reasonable
than to suppose that those who cultivate here on earth
those states of mind which we have indicated, viz. the
states of self-absorption in the contemplation of beauty or
of ideal form, or in the most abstract thought, are reborn
in those worlds which they have so often visited ? This
consideration is maintained as follows in the Tevijja
Sutta:
1 La Valeur de la Science. Mrs Rhys Davids notices the apparent
absence of music in the higher Buddhist heavens (Buddhist Psychology,
p. xlv); but where form must be replaced by ‘ high fetches of abstract
thought,’ there also music may be silent, and may not need those
articulated instruments which are used in the lower heavens of sense.
“Pythagoras . . . did not say that the movements of the heavenly
bodies made an audible music, but that it was itself a music . . . supra-
sensible”—(Schelling); “ There the whole sky is filled with sound, and
there that music is made without fingers and without strings”—(Kabir).
There also, and in the same way, exists eternally the Veda or Dhamma
which is only ‘ heard ’ in lower worlds.
H 113