With each new advance in theoretical science, physicists and cosmologists inform us that since the beginning of time, nothing in the universe today, including you and me, could have come into existence had not certain condi­tions caused it:  matter created from primordial energy forming patterns of rela­tion­­ship, matter pre­dom­i­nating over anti-matter, elemental particles reaching out to inter­­connect to form webs of rela­tionship—the list goes on.  Reaching back to the first second in which the universe began to form out of the “big bang”—and note, creating time in the process—funda­mental elements which make up all life in the universe, resulted from these and other related conditions.

  Buddha-thought presents a remarkably similar view.  The central doctrine of the Buddha’s teachings, the Law of Causation, states that all phenomena in the universe are produced by causation.  Thus, all things are interrelated.  From Niwano’s Buddhism for Today:

  Shakyamuni Buddha did not regard this universe as God’s creation or his conquest, but as resulting from the relation of cause and effect by which all phenomena are produced. . . . all things exist in relationship with one another and are interdependent.

  All things and forms in the universe, how we view ourselves as human beings, are produced from one void that can neither be seen with the eyes nor felt with the hands.  There is a great invisible life-force of the universe, the working of which produces all things from the void, and all things are produced by virtue of the necessity of their existence.  Humanity is no exception.  We ourselves are brought into being in the forms we take by virtue of the necessity to live in this world.  Think­ing this way, we are bound to feel the worth of being alive as human beings, the wonder of having been brought into this world.

  Buddhism asks, “Is there something which is unchanging and eternal?”  The Lotus Sutra defines this “some­thing” as life itself, the desire to live, originating from primordial energy at the beginning of time—the great life-force of the universe caus­ing every­thing to live.  Primordial energy did not create the universe.  It simply is; it caused the universe to come into existence.  Buddha is not god or creator, but the appearing Buddha, Shakyamuni’s enlightenment that we are all one substance with “Original Buddha”—one substance with nothing other than the great life-force which caused everything to live from the moment of the “big bang” leading to the emergence of humankind.

  Timothy Ferris in his New York Times article, “Beyond Newton and Einstein,” points out that “new theories of physics imply that all the known forces in nature are manifestations of one basic interaction and that once, long ago, all were part of a single universal force or process.”  Physicist Fritjof Capra, as he introduces discoveries in quantum physics in his book The Turning Point,” reminds us that as quantum physics came into play, “the universe is no longer seen as a machine  made up of a multitude of objects but has to be pictured as one indivisi­ble, dynamic whole whose parts essentially are interrelated and can be under­stood only as patterns of a cosmic process.”

  No matter how the universal force or pattern of cosmic process may be defined by physicists, the universe does exist and humanity did emerge from this process after billions of years.  “Mahayana (great vehicle) Buddhism sees all exis­tence as supremely sacred.  It needs no other-worldly validation of this sanctity—no God on High; and, most important of all, it sees the plain and mundane things of daily existence—when viewed from the right perspective—as sanctified as the loftiest ideals.  In short, in this enlightened awareness we can all see the marvelous wonder of our universe, blemishes and all, and find our home and comfort in a cosmos that is magically a part of us, and us a part of it.  This interpenetration of the individual in the universe is what Buddhism is really all about.  This is Buddhism’s scope and majesty.”