worlds, and he abides intent on pervading the beings that have
reappeared there. Just as an ornament of finest gold, very
skilfully wrought in the furnace of a clever goldsmith, lying on
red brocade, glows, radiates and shines, so the Hundred‐
thousandfold Brahmā abides intent on pervading a world‐system
of a hundred‐thousand worlds, and he abides intent on
pervading the beings that have reappeared there. The bhikkhu
thinks: ‘Oh, that on the dissolution of the body, after death, I
might reappear in the company of the Hundred‐thousandfold
Brahmā!’ He fixes his mind on that, establishes it, develops it.
These aspirations and this abiding of his, thus developed and
cultivated, lead to his reappearance there.”
A very similar teaching is recounted at §35 of the ‘Book
of the Eights’; the Buddha also stressing there, however, that
“…this is for the virtuous, not for the unvirtuous… for the mental
aspiration of the virtuous prospers because of its freedom from
passion.” (A 8.35).
Incidentally, although our hero and heroine are
obviously not aware of it, according to traditional Buddhist
cosmology there are another seventeen brahmā realms higher
than the one they are aiming for (see Chapter 3, note §8).
5. Page 299, “‘Longings for a future being, filling heart
and mind at death…’ Even though K.G. goes to the trouble
of explicitly ascribing this quotation, a Sanskrit scholar consulted
by the editor was of the opinion that: “This does not sound like
the Bhagavad Gītā!” It bears a close resemblance to some
passages in the Tibetan Book of the Dead but, as W.Y. Evans
Wentz had not yet made his translation in 1906, this cannot have
been K.G.’s source. It may, therefore, like a number of other
poetical passages, simply be a creation of K.G.’s in the spirit of
some of the scriptures that he had read.
6. Page 299, a violent hurricane swept through the groves
and over the lakes… This whole chapter, and particularly the
passages from here to the end, not only reflects the ending of the
life of a deva (they would die singly rather than all at once in the
normal run of things) but it also depicts the symptoms of the ending
of an æon, when the forces of nature rend all things from existence
in all the realms below those of the Ābhassarā brahmā gods.
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Here is a description of the pattern of destruction by the
Four Great Elements, from the Visuddhimagga, XI §102:
The conflagration’s flame bursts up
out of the ground and races higher
and higher, right to the Brahmā heaven,
when the world is burnt up by fire.
A whole world‐system, measuring
one hundred thousand millions wide,
subsides, as with its furious waters
the flood dissolves the world beside.
One hundred thousand million leagues,
a whole world system’s broad extent,
is rent and scattered, when the world
succumbs to the air element.
(Bhikkhu Ñānamoli trans.)
A description of the ending of an æon from the Tibetan
tradition can be found on pp. 39‐40 of ‘The Words of my Perfect
Teacher’, by Patrul Rimpoche (published by HarperCollins).
7. Page 299, But like one who, all but suffocated in the close
and perfume‐laden atmosphere of a room… Tennyson captured
this suffocating quality well in his poem, ‘A spirit haunts the year’s
last hours’:
The air is damp, and hushʹd, and close,
As a sick manʹs room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the yearʹs last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave iʹ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger‐lily.
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CHAPTER 38: IN THE KINGDOM OF THE HUNDRED‐
THOUSANDFOLD BRAHMĀ
1. Page 303, Kāmanīta and Vāsitthī entered again
into existence… as the gods of a double star… As
you, gentle reader, might have suspected when the concept was
first mentioned on page 299, the notion of brahmā gods being
embodied as stars is a fiction of K.G.’s — there is no basis for it
in the Buddhist tradition. He probably acquired the idea,
however, from the Greek and Roman myths.
In these traditions, to ascend after death and to be figured
forever in the stars — as Andromeda, Castor and Pollux, Pegasus
or whoever — was often how mere mortals attained to
immortality.
In respect to this Dante, in his ‘Divina Comedia,’ refers to a
passage from Plato:
He says the soul returns to its own star
believing it to have been severed hence
when nature has bestowed it as a form.
Paradiso, Canto IV 52ss
The reference is to Plato’s Timæus, v. ix. p. 326:
“The Creator, when he had framed the universe, distributed
to the stars an equal number of souls, appointing to each soul its
several star.”
Dante mentions this again in his ‘Convito,’ ‘The Banquet’:
Unlike what here thou seest,
The judgment of Timæus, who affirms
Each soul restored to its particular star;
Believing it to have been taken thence,
When nature gave it to inform her mold.
Convito IV.xxi,
Dante Alighieri
And again in ‘The Divine Comedy, ’when the Four Cardinal
Virtues speak in Purgatory:
Here we are nymphs, and in heaven stars
Purgatorio, XXXI 106
Lastly, John Barth’s novel ‘Chimera’ contains some
interesting explorations of this theme (plus quite a galaxy of
others). Quoted below we have the newly estellated Perseus,
talking to Medusa at the end of Barth’s ‘Perseid’: “what I hold
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