Our Immense Universe

In East Asian Buddhism, including Japanese Buddhism, the Lotus Sutra has always been an important part of the culture. However, if you try to read the Lotus Sutra it’s quite difficult because the descriptions are so difficult to comprehend! Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 16 (Reeve’s Translation):

The Buddha: “Suppose someone were to take five hundred thousand billions of myriads of countless three-thousand great thousandfold worlds and grind them into dust. Then, after going east through five hundred thousand billions of myriads of innumerable lands, one of those specks of dust was deposited. And suppose he continued eastward until he had used up all those specks. What do you think, my good sons? Is it possible to imagine or calculate the number of all those worlds?” (pg. 291-292)

It’s phrases like these that make the Lotus Sutra hard to read in modern times. People read the Lotus Sutra and think that the writers¹ of the Lotus Sutra were crazy, or just liked to exaggerate a lot. I think though that the authors were trying to give an impression that the universe is huge, and that all beings in this vast Universe must all be saved. It doesn’t make sense to help only those around us, but the really great Bodhisattvas strive to help all beings in the Universe, and the Lotus Sutra explains that it will take an extremely, incalculable long time to save them all. And yet, it also teaches that all will be inevitably saved in time.

Earlier today, I found this really great article on some new photographs taken in space from the Hubble telescope. It shows a galaxy that is 320 million light-years from Earth. One light-year is about 10 trillion kilometers, so 320 light-years is 3,200,000,000,000 kilometers away!²

Also, here’s a picture of the galaxy mentioned in the article:

Another image, with labels, can be found here.

So, on the photo above, each of those lights is another galaxy. The smallest galaxies have 10,000,000 stars, while the largest have 1,000,000,000,000 stars. So there are millions, billions and trillions of stars just in this photo, and they are millions, billions and trillions of kilometers apart from one another. Some of those probably have planets, and some of those planets may have other people living on them.

The Universe is really, REALLY big!

So, when I read about Astronomy and the Universe, I realize that the ancient Indians did not exaggerate too much when they wrote the Lotus Sutra. Perhaps they didn’t exaggerate enough.

Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu

P.S. I wrote about this a few months back in another post.

¹ Most scholars agree that the Lotus Sutra was much smaller at first, but people would add more chapters over time. So it’s multiple authors, not just one.

² Also, light-year means that the light you’re seeing from this galaxy is actually 320 million years old. That’s how long the galaxy’s light travelled to get to Earth so we could see it. That is a long time! The dinosaurs didn’t even exist yet.