completely concentrated and absorbed in an object of
meditation, temporarily recovering its natural bright-
ness and purity. The five highest realms of the form
world are known as the pure abodes,and these are oc-
cupied by divinities who are all either nonreturners
(spiritually advanced beings of great wisdom who are
in their last birth and who will reach enlightenment
before they die) or beings who have already gained en-
lightenment. All the beings of the pure abodes are thus
in their last life before their final liberation from the
round of rebirth through the attainment of NIRVANA.
The subtlest and most refined levels of the universe
are the four that comprise “the formless realm.” At this
level of the universe the body with its senses is com-
pletely absent, and existence is characterized by pure
and rarified forms of consciousness, once again corre-
sponding to higher meditative attainments.
World systems
The lower levels of the universe, that is, the realms of
sensuality, arrange themselves into various distinct
world discs (cakravada). At the center of a cakravada
is the great world mountain, Sumeru or Meru. This is
surrounded by seven concentric rings of mountains
and seas. Beyond these mountains and seas, in the four
cardinal directions, are four great continents lying in
the great ocean. The southern continent, Jambudvpa
(the continent of the rose-apple tree), is inhabited by
ordinary human beings; the southern part, below the
towering range of mountains called the abode of snows
(himalaya), is effectively India, the known world and
the land where buddhas arise. At the outer rim of this
world disc is a ring of iron mountains holding in the
ocean. In the spaces between world discs and below are
various hells; in some sources these are given as eight
hot hells and eight cold hells. An early text describes
how in the hell of Hot Embers, for example, beings are
made to climb up and down trees bristling with long,
red hot thorns, never dying until at last their bad karma
is exhausted (Majjhimanikayaiii, 185).
On the slopes of Mount Sumeru itself and rising
above its peak are the six HEAVENSinhabited by the
gods of the sense world. The lowest of these is that of
the Gods of the Four Kings of Heaven, who guard the
four directions. On the peak of Mount Sumeru is the
heaven of the Thirty-Three Gods, which is ruled by its
king, INDRAor S ́akra (Pali, Sakka), while in the shadow
of Mount Sumeru dwell the jealous gods called asuras,
who were expelled from the heaven of the Thirty-Three
by Indra. Above the peak is the Heaven of the Con-
tented Gods or Tusita, where buddhas-to-be, like the
future MAITREYA, are reborn and await the time to take
birth. The highest of the six heavens of the sense world
is that of the Gods who have Power over the Creations
of Others, and it is in a remote part of this heaven that
MARA, the Evil One, lives, wielding his considerable re-
sources in order to prevent the sensual world from los-
ing its hold on its beings. The six heavens of the sense
world are inhabited by gods and goddesses who, like
human beings, reproduce through sexual union,
though some say that in the higher heavens this union
takes the form of an embrace, the holding of hands, a
smile, or a mere look. The young gods and goddesses
are not born from the womb, but arise instantly in the
form of a five-year-old child in the lap of the gods (Ab-
hidharmakos ́aiii, 69–70).
Above these sense-world heavens is the Brahma
World, a world of subtle and refined mind and body.
Strictly, brahmasare neither male nor female, although
it seems that in appearance they resemble men. The
fourteenth-century Thai Buddhist cosmology, the
Three Worlds According to King Ruang,describes how
their faces are smooth and very beautiful, a thousand
times brighter than the moon and sun, and with only
one hand they can illuminate ten thousand world sys-
tems (Reynolds and Reynolds, p. 251). A Great Brah-
maof even the lower brahmaheavens may rule over a
thousand world systems, while brahmasof the higher
levels are said to rule over a hundred thousand. Yet it
would be wrong to conclude that there is any one or
final overarching Great Brahma—God the Creator. It
may be that beings come to take a particular Great
Brahmaas creator of the world, and a Great Brahmamay
himself even form the idea that he is creator, but this
is just the result of delusion on the part of both par-
ties. In fact the universe recedes upwards with one class
of Great Brahmabeing surpassed by a further, higher
class of Great Brahma. Thus the world comprises “its
gods, its Mara and Brahma, this generation with its as-
cetics and brahmins, with its princes and peoples”
(Dlghanikayai, 62).
The overall number of world systems that consti-
tute the universe in its entirety cannot be specified. The
nikaya/agama texts sometimes talk in terms of the
thousandfold world system, the twice-thousandfold
world system, and the thrice-thousandfold world
system or trichilicosm.According to north Indian tra-
ditions, the last of these embraces a total of one billion
world systems, while the southern traditions say a tril-
lion. But even such a vast number cannot define the
full extent of the universe; there is no spatial limit to
the extent of world systems.COSMOLOGY