Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/114

64 this rests ‘the body of the waters’ of the outer Ocean. Each Ocean symbolizes a stratum of air (or ether), and each of the intervening mountains a stratum of congealed air (or ether), that is to say, material substance; or, from a more occult view-point, the Oceans are the Subtle and the Mountains the Gross, the one alternating with the other as Opposites.

Like the Seven Days of the Mosaic version of Creation, the numerical dimensions which the lāmas assign to our universe are more often to be taken as suggestive or symbolical than literal. Mt. Meru, they say, towers 80,000 miles above the Central Enchanted Ocean and extends below the surface of the waters the same distance, the Central Ocean itself being also 80,000 miles deep and 80,000 miles wide. The succeeding girdle of Golden Mountains is just half that number of miles in height and width and depth, and the next Ocean, correspondingly, 40,000 miles deep and 40,000 miles wide. The consecutive circles of alternating pairs composed of Golden Mountains and an Enchanted Ocean gradually diminish as to width, depth, and height, being respectively 20,000, 10,000, 5,000, 2,500, 1,250, and 625 miles. This brings us to the Continents in the Outer Ocean of Space.

Of these Continents, the four chief ones—as described in the Second Book of our Bardo Thödol—are situated in the Four Directions. On either side of each of these Four Continents are smaller or satellite Continents, thus making the total number of Continents twelve, which, again, is a symbolical number, like the number seven of the cosmographical arrangement.

The Eastern Continent is called in Tibetan Lü-pah (Lus-hpags), or ‘Vast Body’ (Skt. Virāt-deha). Its symbolical shape is like that of a crescent moon; and, accordingly, the colour white is assigned to it, and crescentic faces are ascribed to its inhabitants, who are said to be tranquil-minded and virtuous. Its diameter is given as being 9,000 miles.

The Southern Continent is our Planet Earth, called Jambuling (Skt. Jambudvīpa), probably an onomatopoeic word—as the translator held—descriptive of the fruit of a jambu-tree falling into water, ling itself meaning ‘place’, or ‘region’.