6 | The Nature of the World according to the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu

cow behind the barn Nov 19, 2024

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective.

If you’ve been following the podcast weekly, you know that what I thought was a simple question, “where and when did I begin”, opened into much bigger questions about space (where) and time (when) and consciousness (I).

Along the way I have been referring to something I call psychic entanglement, which I came up with through reflections on quantum theories of the nature of the universe, and space and time, and several initial samples from religious texts. My understanding of psychic entanglement suggests, among other things, that space and time and consciousness are all entangled, within themselves and between themselves. It is impossible to separate them neatly into Episodes.

Though I have been trying as best I can.

The Nature of the World: What is this Where?

After some autobiographical reflections on my own entanglement with some of my “where’s”, which I hope prompted you as a listener towards insights about your own, I got to a spot near the end of the last Episode at which I said I would begin looking more deeply into what some of the great religious heritages have to say about “space”, the nature of the physical world. And here I am.

The More I Drink the Deeper I Find the Well

However, to be honest, for some reason, I thought summaries from various religious heritages would suffice for my purposes. Like, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic vision of the world could be covered with, “In the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Genesis 1, there are phrases like, ‘in the beginning, God created…And the Qur’an has similar references.”

Or, turning to Buddhism, it would be enough to say, “the only universe compatible with Buddhism is a cyclical one, without beginning or end.”

Then there’s the religious heritage of science that could be covered with something like “there was a big bang 13.7 billion years ago (though now they say 13.82)…”

Little summaries, little 8 oz. drinking glasses. I should have known better. And the more I drank, the more deeply I wanted to drink.

I’ve said frequently that as an artist, I see religions as forms of art, and the founders, and shapers, of religious traditions as “spiritual creatives.” As such I find each of the religious heritages I have been drinking from helps me imagine the world, and in doing so, they help me to see it through rich mythic, epic, archetypal images and themes which conjure profound ways of experiencing the world, not just thinking about it. This applies equally to the scientific imaginative heritage as much as to the others.

All of these heritages can provoke our creative imagination as a way of knowing. And no distilled summary of them, such as I had imagined doing, can do them justice. Therefore since I can’t fit fuller treatments of them all into the size of a single Episode, I am dividing them up chronologically.

In this Episode I begin with the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu. The next Episode I plan to move to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic ways of seeing the world. Then I will turn to what I see as the epic mythology of theories of the universe being explored in recent years in various fields of science.

But before all of that, I want to pause and set my own internal posture, a way to approach everything with my whole soul before turning to more of a “head-space” to describe what the heritages have to say.

So I offer first a “not yet released to the public” instrumental piece I created. I titled it “Lao Tzu’s Theme” because it was my meditations on his poem, the Tao Te Ching, which inspired this.

I invite you to listen in that spirit, as a meditation, perhaps calming your body, being attentive to the pace of your breathing, if possible physically opening your palms as a tangible expression of a willingness to just “be” and receive.

This is Lao Tzu’s Theme…

(instrumental music)

Thank you…and now I proceed to see what the Gita, and Buddha, Lao Tzu might say about what this “where” is in which we live!

The World According to the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu: The Gita

I begin with the Bhagavad Gita, because it comes first chronologically.

In Chapter 7, starting with the 4th verse, Krishna says to Arjuna:

“The eight components of my material energy are earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect, and the surface self.

Besides this material energy, O mighty-armed Arjuna, there is another, superior energy of mine, which comprises the living entities who interact with and make use of the resources of this material world of nature.”

Let me pause a moment and comment on a few terms:

Krishna: Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, is the god of love, compassion, protection, and tenderness.

Material energy: prakriti, which I have referred to in a prior Episode as well, is “nature” as we experience it, a manifestation of Krishna, or “of the divine” if you prefer, though a manifestation we receive incompletely because of our typically inaccurate perceptions of the material world.

Eight components: eight may seem complicated enough though later in the Gita we learn there are twenty-four categories!

“Surface self”: some translations refer to this as ego or false self. I render it this way because this “self” is one of the aspects of nature, so it is natural. It is only a false self if we remain in the illusion that it is our only self, or the only true thing about our “self.” For there is a deeper self in contrast to the surface self.

Back to the Gita, which I am rendering in poetic blank verse:

“I am the womb of the entire creation,

it comes from me and dissolves again in me.

Everything rests in Me,

as pearls strung on a thread.

I am the taste in water.

The radiance of the sun and moon.

I am the sound of the sacred syllable Om in the mantras of the Vedas.

I am the sound in the air,

And the possibility of action in human beings.

I am the pure fragrance of the earth,

The brilliant glow in the fire.

I am the life-force in all beings,

The religious rigor of the ascetics.

I am the eternal seed of all beings.

I am the intellect of the intelligent,

The splendor of the glorious.

I am the strength of the strong,

though without the desire and passion to possess.

I am sexual activity,

in keeping with virtue.”

Now, the above could be read as if Krishna at a single point in time clothed himself in, and now “wears,” the world, and that there is only one world.

In fact, it is more mysterious. First, there are innumerable cycles of creation and dissolution, eternal, without beginning or end. And second, commentaries on the Gita refer to universes, plural, fourteen whole worlds and planetary systems. Universes upon universes in eternal cycles.

Hold that thought…

The World According to the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu: Buddha

The teaching of the Buddha is often passed on through narratives in which he responds to questions. Though there were fourteen questions that he refused to answer, and two of those were the questions, "Is the universe eternal or not eternal, or both?" and "Is the universe infinite in space or not infinite, or both or neither?"

He viewed such questions to be inquiries about things we could not know, and so speculation about them is similar to what we might call fairy tales. He also refused to answer such questions because seeking knowledge about the origins and nature of the world would not lead to liberation from suffering.

So, Buddha had two reasons not to answer: we can’t know, and it doesn’t help us to know! The Buddha was focused on what could be known, and on the discovery of the practical process of liberation.

However, in the Agganna Sutta, Buddha did tell a story of creation in the course of conversation with two of his followers. He had asked how they were doing, and they told him they were being criticized because as higher caste brahmins, “born from Brahma's mouth,” they should not associate with beggars, people of a lower caste, who had been “born from Brahma's feet.”

In response to that question and its clearly mythical elements, Buddha told a story, which is sometimes called a creation myth. In fact, it is less about creation and more about the refutation of castes. I think he uses a mythical tale of his own to counter a mythic tale. He employs an artistic form to describe the truth of the common origins of human beings. Listen to it with your imagination…your senses.

Buddha began, "Brahmins are born of women, like everyone else." That is the fundamental point, the verifiable practical truth typical of Buddha’s observations. But then he continued with a mythical account:

"When a cosmos comes to an end and contracts, and before a new cosmos begins, there are luminous beings who live for a long time, feeding on delight itself. During this state, there are no suns or stars, planets or moons.

"As one such contraction ended, an earth formed, beautiful and fragrant and sweet to taste. Those who tasted the earth began to crave it, gorging themselves, and their luminescence disappeared. The light that left their bodies became the moon and sun (by the way, note the mythical way of referring to what I have been calling entanglement), and in this way, night and day were distinguished, and months, and years, and seasons. Their bodies became coarser. Some of them were handsome, and they despised the ugly ones and became arrogant, and as a result, the sweet earth disappeared.

"Then a mushroom like fungus grew, and it was also sweet. They began stuffing themselves again, and their bodies grew even coarser. The more handsome ones grew arrogant, and the fungus disappeared. Then they found sweet creeping plants, with the same result.

"Then rice appeared in abundance. Whatever rice they took for a meal would replenish itself before the next meal, so there was always food for everyone. During this time their bodies developed sex organs, which led to lust. Those who engaged in sex were despised by the others, and they were driven out of the villages. But then the exiles built their own villages.

"The beings who had given in to lust grew lazy, and they decided to not gather rice at every meal. Instead, they would gather enough rice for two meals, or five, or sixteen. But the rice they were hoarding grew mold, and the rice in the fields stopped growing back as quickly (I am noticing entanglement again: the way human actions affect nature in this case). The rice shortages caused the beings to distrust each other, so they divided up the fields into separate properties.”

The story concludes by describing how in that separated, disconnected state, in different villages and separate properties, people formed together around specific areas of specialty and expertise, the castes: warriors and tradespeople etc. But that takes us back to the main point: everyone was born the same way, and the castes resulted from the craving of human beings, not from destiny.

Through his art of storytelling, using images of sweet earth and fungus and mushrooms and luminous beings of light, the Buddha provides a powerful imaginative way of not just telling us but of inviting us to experience imaginatively how deeply woven into human suffering craving is, woven throughout the tale.

What about the nature of the world? The myth above is a narrative way to speak of the interconnection of everything. For example, planets result from the light of people which departs due to their craving…and thus, we are entangled with the planets.

There are other Suttas in which we find more of Buddha’s fundamental concepts, some of which also show up in his narrative way of presenting those truths in the Agganna Sutta. So, Buddha has two ways of presenting his views of the world, a didactic way and a narrative way, making these points among others:

everything is caused by other things, and nothing is created independently by a god, or nature, or fate.
the world is a vast flow of events that are linked together and participate in one another
things exist only in relationship to others, nothing has an independent and autonomous existence
humans depend on nature and nature depends on humans
there is no beginning of everything, if by beginning we mean an independent, autonomous first cause, big bang, or creation ex nihilo, from nothing, of the universe…any version of such concepts would require including some degree of interdependence with something else.

Both the Gita and the Buddha’s teaching agree that there was no single creation or beginning, that the universe is created and destroyed and created and destroyed in a cycle of never-ending cycles. And both are also expressing in different ways something very close to what I have described as both physical and psychic entanglement.

The Gita talks of humans who “make use” of the material energy of the world, engaging it with their minds among other ways, and for the Buddha, things exist only in relationship to other things, and our perception of the world and the world we perceive are impossible to distinguish, or in my own words, our perceptions help create it.

Everything is entangled.

I have selected one more source to turn to in this Episode.

The World According to the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu: Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu lived in China in the 6th century, BCE. He is attributed with being the foundational figure in the formation of Taoism, and author of one of Taoism’s source texts the Tao Te Ching, an eighty-one-stanza poem which describes the nature of the Tao.

This is a term usually translated as “the Way”, but it is a very difficult term to render in English. In fact, the concept was not easy for Lao Tzu to define in his own language!

So, the poem opens with these words from Stanza 1:

“The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

If you can define it, then it isn’t “it!”

What does the Tao have to do with the world? Also from Stanza 1:

“The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;

The Named is the mother of 10,000 things.”

Then Stanza 42 opens with:

“The Tao is the origin of one thing, which is the origin of two, which is the origin of three, and so on, to ten thousand things, which hold and carry the yin (inaction) and the yang (action); And xi (“she”) is the harmony of it all (or, life force, breath, is the harmony of it all)”

The Tao is not a thing or the sum total of things, it is the source, but not a static “source” that we can objectify as if it were merely another type of “thing.” The Tao is the origin of the world we know, an origin which is the process by which things come into “thingness”.

Lao Tzu sees ultimate reality as “process”, not a process, but process itself, a constant generative, creative process, resulting in the world around us which is a constant movement between something and nothing.

As we find in Stanza 40:

“Everything, all things, come from ‘something’ (yu)

But the ‘something’ comes from nothing (wu)”

In Stanza 51, the Tao,

“Is not the result of following a command,

It is simply natural,

For the Tao begets and keeps all things…

It fosters….nurtures…sustains…nourishes…shelters them”.

Although there are expressions in Lao Tzu’s poem which sound as if the Tao is “personal” in some way, the Tao is not a being and so, not a god. Some commentators describe it more as a force (and yes, Star Wars fans, there are a lot of similarities with that force, but also a lot of differences). But again, the Tao is nameless and formless, if you can name or define it, then what you have named or defined is not the Tao.

Neither what I have quoted from the Tao Te Ching nor my attempts to summarize it provide much in the way of content, or details. That is in keeping with the approach of Lao Tzu, who elsewhere says that what really matters is not what is said, but what is not said.

However, like many spiritual heritages, in some streams of Taoism there are more explicit stories about how the world as we perceive it comes into existence. Here is one such story, in summary form, and I think you will notice how elements from the Tao Te Ching, show up here:

In the beginning, there was an endless void, known as Wu Chi (woo-she), combining a word sometimes rendered as “nothing” and a word sometimes rendered as breath or “life force”. It came to mean the "primordial universe", and equivalent with the un-manifest Tao.

As Wu Chi manifests in the world, it divides into two: the Yin and the Yang, which are complementary conditions of action (Yang) and inaction (Yin). This stage represents the emergence of duality/polarity out of the Unity of Tao. The “dance”, the continual transformations of Yin and Yang, fuels the flow of Chi (she), that is, life force or breath. This life force or energy or principle is in a constant transformation between its material, manifest state and its energetic, unmanifest state (some thing or no thing, in the poem).

From this dance of Yin and Yang emerges the five elements of things, of the world: wood, fire, metal, water, and earth. From those elements come the “ten-thousand things,” representing all of manifest existence, all of the objects, inhabitants, and phenomena of the world that we experience.

We human beings are among those ten thousand things, not something separate from the natural world, but another manifestation of it.

This is all foundational to the idea that the Tao is also the natural flow of the world, we might say “it is the way of things”, and so in Taoism the aim of life is to live in keeping with the Tao, the way things work.

The dance of opposites (action and inaction, nothing and something, opposition and unification, etc) creates a dynamic balance between manifest and unmanifest, known and unknown, seen and unseen. The Tao and the “ten-thousand things” arise in perpetual interdependence.

Or, to use the term I have coined, in Lao Tzu the world and all that is in it can be described as a universal cosmic form of entanglement.

What is the world?

Let me try to summarize what all this says about the nature of “the where” where we live.

In the Gita: the world, or worlds, is (or are) eternal and cyclical, entangled with Self (and all selves). And to note for later, the Self is in many places “personal” or “supra-personal.

From the Buddha: the world, or worlds, is (or are) eternal and cyclical, entangled with “selves”, via perceptions and experiences of it. In Buddha’s teaching either there is no personal Self or selves, or what we know of them is enmeshed in delusion and illusion and this we can’t say anything certain about them, or, it is purely speculative and thus beyond Buddha’s much more existential and practical primary focus.

According to Lao Tzu?

I am not sure if Lao Tzu would say that the world is eternal or if it had a definite beginning in time, but the nature of the reality which is the source of all things is “generative process.” Things, places, the world as we know it, all of it, is a result of that generative process, all is sustained by it, all things are part of the dance between “no thing” and “some thing”. Is the Tao personal? Lao Tzu speaks of the Tao as mother in places, but I would say based on everything else in the Tao Te Ching that he does so only in a metaphorical sense.

Summarizing and Staying Focused

There are differences between the three heritages I have been exploring here, but what they share in common is what I have described as entanglement.

In the course of the Episode other themes have been sneaking in. For example, to say that the material world is eternal is introducing the idea of time. To say it is cyclical, entangled, enmeshed, interconnected with itself and with “mind” and human perception and in the case of the Gita with the Self, is taking us into the arena of consciousness. And I am trying not to go there yet, but it seems fitting to make mention of it.

One thing that is clear is that these three heritages share a very different view of the physical world than the Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritages, and also different than what western science has assumed until much more recently. In fact, these three spiritual creatives (the Gita, Buddha, Lao Tzu) share a great deal with what developments in quantum physics and astrophysics suggest about the world we live in.

Before leaping to that conversation, I have some other religious traditions to visit.

As I prepare to wrap up this Episode, I want to pause again, and return to the same music I shared in the opening portion. Sort of like participating in the cyclical nature of reality I suppose? But this time not just as a general invitation to receptivity, but now, having heard all that we have about the nature of the world around us through the imaginative ways of seeing inspired in us by the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu, while hearing and experiencing the music, allow yourself to imagine the world, or if you are outside, see it and be attentive to it. Either way, enter the world and the music together. And experience this “where” which is our world.

Here is Lao Tzu’s Theme again: