Galaxy Cluster / six billion years ago

The World of Learning

and the World of Compassion

Responding to a Friend

A friend commenting on his past, not too happy experiences with religion: “This is the topic I’d like to learn! Cosmology & religion. I was literally attacked by a pastor when I told him I believed the big bang actually happened. He never let me go until I said, God created the universe as it is written in Genesis, so Buddha's teaching and his points of view of the universe are an eye-opener to me. I was forced to study apologetics, they practically brain-washed me. Reading and pondering your Ancestral Well blogs is helping me wash off their dangerous doctrines.”

Response: The important thing to keep in mind is that conditions surrounding these encounters don’t exist in your world anymore. Even more significantly, you show an eagerness to learn, to gain knowledge—this eagerness evident not only here at Ancestral Well, but in your correspondence with JJ and Fanvid buddies (to which we both happily belong), relating your knowledge and experiences to JJ’ and other’s of the many wonderful posts and discussions. As result, I don’t need to tell you you’ve become, as I have, part of a larger family who seek to discover and learn new things about the world and each other, and ain’t it grand? I can attest this is happening every day of my life.

The Seventh World of Learning within the Ten Worlds

  In his earlier “tactful” teachings, and again in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha points out that experiencing the world of learning, the 7^th world of the shravaka, is gaining knowledge, discovering larger perspectives on how to live life, how to respond to others, and plays a pivotal role in entering the Buddha-path leading to enlightenment—the eighth, ninth, and tenth worlds.

  Briefly, the ten worlds describe the lower worlds of “hells and angry spirits,” anger, covetous­ness, ignorance, contention; the fifth world of humanity; the sixth, the world of temporary enlightenment from which we too often don’t prevent us from returning to the lower worlds of experience. The key or “gateway” to reaching beyond these lower worlds is to enter the world of learning.

  From Sutra of Innumerable Meanings – “Many living beings discriminate falsely—it is this or it is that, either advantageous or disadvantageous. They entertain confused and evil thoughts, make various evil choices (causes), and thus transmigrate within the six realms of existence, the six lower worlds, in lifetime after lifetime  and cannot escape from there during infinite countless kalpas, suffering all manner of miseries.”

  This may seem judgmental, but significantly the Buddha continues, “Bodhisattva-mahasattvas, observing rightly like this, should raise the mind of compassion, display the great mercy desiring to relieve others of suffering, and once again penetrate deeply into all laws.” Pass no judgments—show compassion.

  Thus, in one fell swoop, the Buddha dismisses all judgments and discriminations, and does so repeatedly in the Lotus Sutra, always responding to his observations of human suffering with compassion: “Beholding this my heart is stirred with great pity . . . I behold all living beings sunk in the sea of suffering, hence I do not reveal myself (reveal my teachings) but set them all aspiring, till their hearts are long, I appear to preach the law . . . Ever making this my thought, how can I cause all the living to enter the Way supreme and speedily accomplish their enlightenment?”

  Entering the world of learning is to take us out of the six lower worlds on a path leading to enlightenment—to reach the eighth world and the mindfulness of self-attained enlightenment; the ninth, dwelling in and experiencing the world of the bodhisattvas who seek to gain enlightenment, first for others, even though their own enlightenment will be delayed. The tenth world, the world of Perfect Enlightenment.

  So, as I see it (from afar, it’s true) you find yourself very much in the 7^th world of learning these days, and it’s a really good place to be. The past can be done away with. It doesn’t exist anymore.

  Study will from time to time introduce thrilling surprises as one learns to discover the beauty and probability that knowledge enhances our beliefs and encourages and motivates us to expand our beliefs, leading to productive and compassionate relationships with others. It’s important, most of all, not to shut one’s self off from the ever-existing possibility that there is something new to learn and discover. The thrill of learning and discovering must be nourished, never impeded; keeping one’s mind in the world of learn­ing is not a bad thing. Residing there one continues to gain new perspectives, and the process seems never ending.