Buddhists believe in outer space: Shaolin abbot

Home Asia Pacific North Asia China

Henan, China -- As China's successful launch of its fifth manned spacecraft marks another step in realizing the country's space dream, Chinese monks regularly ponder how space is related to their own life.

"Buddhism believes there are aliens. They not only exist, but there are many," said Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Shaolin Temple in central China's Henan Province.

Buddhists believe the existence of many different worlds and their end-results do not exclude other celestial bodies, said Shi in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

According to the 48-year-old monk, those who have a good practice of Buddhism can go to other worlds, including outer space.

With a history of more than 1,500 years, the Shaolin Temple is famous for Buddhist teaching and Chinese martial arts, particularly Shaolin kungfu. It was enlisted as a world cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2010.

Shi, the temple's 30th abbot, is known as the "CEO of Shaolin" for his pursuit of commercial development. He became abbot in 1999.

Shi's business moves have sparked controversy, but he maintains the temple's core functions are to organize religious activities.

"The core soul of the Shaolin Temple has always been the cultivation of followers," stressed the abbot. The temple has more than 300 monks, half of whom were born after 1980.

Shi said they had not been to other celestial bodies and did not know whether Buddhist doctrines can be practiced on other planets.

Life is not eternal in the real world, but some other worlds are described to have eternal life with no pains nor troubles, said Shi, adding this is what Buddhists pursue.

The religious meditation of monks is a state of deep calm, active thinking and high concentration of the sober mind, according to studies conducted by Liu Tianjun, a professor of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.

Shi, who is no stranger to modern technologies such as the mobile phone said brain waves of monks with good cultivation are different from those of ordinary people. This seems to indicate modern monks possess qualities of astronauts.

View the original article here

Inner Experience of Space & Time

Home Dharma Dew

Singapore -- Space feeling is first and foremost connected with the movement or possibility of movement of the body, whereas time feeling is connected with the movement or the realization of movement of the mind. Space is externalized time projected outward. Time is the internalized space, the inner transformation of spatial movement into the feeling of duration.

Though space feeling starts with the body, it does not remain at this stage. It gradually changes into a spiritual function independent of the body and eventually culminating in the experience of the infinity of space as describe in the meditative practice of the Four Divine States of consciousness and in the Higher Immaterial States of absorption. It is not a concept, because infinity cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced. Movement, in relation to space and time is also the fundamental quality and characteristic of life itself.

Changes due to movements are not accidental but dependent on laws, such as the laws of periodicity in which change follows a cyclic movement as in the seasons, the hour of the day, etc. It represents the eternality in time, and converts it into a higher space dimension, in which things and events exist simultaneously, though no perceptible to the senses.

They are in a state of potentiality as invisible elements of future events and phenomena that have no yet stepped into actual reality. Time is not merely an experience of the fleeting existence of oneself but also the inherent nature of life and spirit, which is beyond being and non-being, beyond origination and destruction.

Time as a movement, either of oneself or of something within or outside of oneself is a paradox. We would have noticed, that the less we moved, both inwardly and outwardly, the more we are aware of time.

The more we move ourselves, the less we are aware of time. A person who is mentally and bodily inactive feels time as a burden, while one who is active hardly notices the passage of time. When we move and live in perfect harmony with the innermost rhythm of our being, it becomes timeless in the sense that we do not experience time any more.

What we call ‘eternal’ is not an infinite duration of time, which is a thought construction, but the experience of timelessness. Time cannot be reversed, just like life itself, it is an irreversible process. The whole experience of time is due to movement and memory.
The past that is ever growing in oneself as a widening horizon of experience and wisdom will continue to grow until the individual has reached the state in which the universe become conscious in him as one living organism. This is the highest dimension of consciousness.

Dimension is the capacity to extend or move in a certain direction. If we moved outward we do so in a three dimensional aspect. However, the movement which produces and contained these dimensions is felt as time, and as long as the movement is incomplete or the dimensions are in the making, no conceived as a complete whole, the feeling of time is the feeling of incompleteness. There is no time in moments of highest awareness, intuitive vision or perfect realization.

There is no time for the Enlightened Ones. However for the Enlightened Ones, it does not mean the past has been extinguished or memory blotted out. On the contrary, the past ceases to be a quality of time and becomes a new order of space, in which things and events which we have experienced piecemeal can be seen simultaneously, in their entirety, and in the present.

The Buddha in the process of his enlightenment surveyed innumerable previous lives in ever widening extending view, until his vision encompassed the entire universe. Only if we recognize the past as a true dimension of ourselves in whose womb we dream until we are awakened into the freedom of enlightenment, shall we be able to see ourselves in proper perspective to the universe.

View the original article here

The Unreality of Time, Space, Duration and Extension

Home Dharma Dew

Singapore -- The Buddhist Theory of Universal Flux explained the world process represented as a motion that is discontinuous, although a compact one.

It is consist of an infinite number of discrete moments following one another almost without intervals. There is no matter at all, just flashes of energy following one another and producing the illusion of stabilized phenomena.

This Universal Momentariness also implies that every duration in time is consist of point-instants following one another, every extension in space is also consists of these point instants arising in close proximity to each other and simultaneously and every motion consists of these point-instants arising in close proximity and in succession.

It is just like a roll of negatives in our cinemas of old, where when set in motion at a certain speed, eventually products the stability of the pictures we see on the screen. There is therefore no Time, no Space and no Motion over and above the point instants of which these imagined entities are constructed by our imagination.

When we look at the Indian Realist interpretation, Time is a substance, eternal and all pervading. Its existence is inferred from the fact on the sequence of events occurring between phenomena. Space is likewise a substance which is eternal and all embracing. It is inferred from the fact that all extended body processes impenetrability and they are beside each other in space. According to them, different times are parts of one and the same time.

When Time and Space are represented as divided in many spaces and different times, it is a metaphor. The objects situated in them, but not Space and Time itself, are divided. They are not general concepts but proper names. They are representation produced by a single object only. To the Realist, Time and Space are two all embracing receptacles contain each of them the entire Universe.

The Buddhist denies the separate reality of these two realities. Real is a thing possessing a separate efficiency of its own. The receptacles of the things have no separate efficiency. Time and Space cannot be separate from the things that exist in them. They are not separate entities.

Every point instants may be viewed as a particle of Time, as a particle of Space and as a sensible quality, but this is only a difference of our mental attitude toward that point-instants. The point instant itself, the ultimate reality cut loose from all imagination is without quality, timeless and indivisible. Only subtle time, the moment, the point instant of efficiency is considered as real.

The notion of substantial Space and Time were not highlighted as it can be deducted by reasoning and where its empirical original is impossible to conceive, but they can be destroyed dialectically on the score that the notions of duration and extension contain
contradictions and cannot be accepted as objectively real.

If we look at reality as a point instant of efficiency, and if we are to said that it possesses extension and duration we will be landed in a contradiction, as each real point instant cannot exist at the same time in many places, neither can the same reality be real at different times. To the realists, empirical things have a limited real duration. They are produced by the creative power of nature or by human will or by the will of God.

For the Buddhist, if a thing exists at moment A, it cannot also exist at some moment B, for to exist at moment A means not to have any real existence at moment B or at any other moment, keeping in mind the reality of a point instant of efficiency. If a thing could have any real duration through several moments, it would represent a real unity existing at once at different times.

It would be either that the enduring unity is a fiction and real is only the moments, or the moments are fiction and real is only duration. For the Buddhist the moments alone are real, duration is a fiction, for if duration is a reality, it would be a reality existing at different time at once, i.e., existing and at the same time non-existing at a given moment.

Thus Ultimate Reality for the Buddhist is timeless, space-less and motionless. But it is not timeless in the sense of eternal being, space-less not in the sense of an ubiquitous being, motionless not in the sense of an all embracing motionless whole, but timeless, space-less and motionless in the sense of having no duration, extension or movement. It is just the mathematical point instant, the moment of an action’s efficiency.

View the original article here