Our Galaxy

Since I was a kid, I’ve loved astronomy, and recently I found this diagram online in an article of the Milky Way Galaxy:

The full sized picture (very large) can be found here. If you look at the larger picture, you can see the sun is down toward the bottom in the Orion Spur, one of 200 – 400 billion stars spread across 100,000 light years. One-hundred thousand light-years is 946,073,047,258,080,000 kilometers. It’s really, really, REALLY big.

I enjoy these kinds of things in Astronomy because it puts a different perspective on life, and reminds me how stupid and petty a lot of things are.

On another note, I am reading Francis Cook’s little-known but excellent book Hua-Yen: The Jewel Net of Indra, which covers the very profound and difficult to comprehend Huayan¹ school of Buddhism. This is also found in Japan as the Kegon shū school (華厳宗), which was later absorbed by Shingon Buddhism. So, one of the radical ideas behind Huayan is that the entire universe exists as a relationship of everything to every other thing. No more, no less. So, then one can say that the entire galaxy is contained in a single grain of sand, or a cup of coffee.

Something to ponder.

Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo

P.S. Reading that book for the second time actually. Read it almost 3-4 years ago, when I first explored Buddhism and liked it a lot, but couldn’t understand all of it. Much better the second time around.

¹ Hua-yen is the old Wades-Giles system for romanizing the Chinese words. The newer Pinyin version is Huayan. Personally, I prefer pinyin over Wade-Giles.