Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/112

62 in the many heavens and paradises, and others in the numerous states of purgation called hells. Generalizing, it may be said that when the Brahmanic and Buddhist teachings concerning cosmography are carefully examined from the standpoint of the initiated Oriental, and not from the too-oft prejudiced standpoint of the Christian philologist, it seems to suggest far-reaching knowledge, handed down from very ancient times, of astronomy, of the shape and motion of planetary bodies, and of the interpenetration of worlds and systems of worlds, some solid and visible (such as are alone known to Western Science) and some ethereal and invisible existing in what we may perhaps call a fourth dimension of space.

Esoterically explained, Mt. Meru (Tib. Ri-rab), the central mountain of Hindu and Buddhist cosmography, round which our cosmos is disposed in seven concentric circles of oceans separated by seven intervening concentric circles of golden mountains, is the universal hub, the support of all the worlds. We may possibly regard it, like the Central Sun of Western astronomy, as the gravitational centre of the known universe. Outside the seven circles of oceans and the intervening seven circles of golden mountains lies the circle of continents.

In illustration, an onion of fifteen layers may be taken to represent roughly the lāmaic conception of our universe. The core, to which the fifteen layers cohere, is Mt. Meru. Below, are the various hells; above, supported by Mt. Meru, are the heavens of the gods, the more sensuous, like the thirty-three heavens ruled by Indra, and those under the sway of Mārā, being ranged in their own regular gradation beneath the less sensuous heavens of Brāhma. As apex over all, is the final heaven, called ‘The Supreme’ (Tib. ‘Og-min). Being the last outpost of our universe, ‘Og-min, as the vestibule to Nirvāṇa, is the transitional state leading from the mundane to the supramundane; and thus there presides over it the divine influence of ‘The Best of All’ (Tib. Kuntu-zang-po: Skt. Samanta-Bhadra), the lāmaic personification of Nirvāṇa.

On a level with Indra’s realm dwell, in their own