Ten Billion Years Ago

Is there something which is unchanging and eternal?

  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 exist and live. Primordial energy did not create the universe—the unchanging and eternal life-force caused the universe to come into existence. The Buddha is not god or creator, but first, as the appearing Buddha—the “enlightened one of Shakya clan who would declare in the Lotus Sutra’s chapter 16, that he was, as we all are, one substance with “Original Buddha”—nothing other than the all pervading great life-force which caused everything to come into existence from the moment of the “big bang,” eventually 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.”