LIFE IN THE HEAVENS

Buddhist Cosmology

It is easy to overlook the Buddhist heavens. Textbook depictions of Buddhism often reduce them to an incidental diversion, something like a pleasant vacation separate from the hard work of the Path to nirvana. From a certain kind of abstract, doctrinal point of view this is understandable, and it is certainly characteristic of Buddhist modernism; but it seriously distorts the place of the heavens in the premodern Pali imaginaire. In fact a great deal of attention is paid to them in numerous texts, and the spectrum of felicities they offer is depicted at length and with care. Their place in the Buddhist universe of evaluative discourse is determined by the conceptual opposition between desire (kāma) and its gradual renunciation, which is constitutive both of the temporally extended dynamic of the individual path from samsāra to nirvana, and also of the spatially extended hierarchy of the cosmos. Buddhist cosmology postulates three Spheres (avacara) or Levels (bhūmi), each of which contain thirty or thirty-one worlds (lokā), ordered hierarchically. In Table 4.1 these are numbered 1, 2, and 3. They are:

1. the Formless Sphere (arūpāvacara): 16 worlds = Meditation Levels 5–8;

2. the Sphere of (refined) Form (rūpāvacara): 16 worlds in 4 groups = Meditation Levels 1–4, and

3. the Sphere of Desire (kāmāvacara): 10 or 11 worlds (see n. 4 on the asura-s), which are the six heavens of the gods (devā), the Human World, and 3 or 4 Subhuman Worlds.[…]