Sakyamuni, the Astronomer

The Lotus Sutra has a surprise for anyone who has looked up in the sky. Unlike every other religion on Earth, Buddhism does not have astronomical errors in it. We all know how every other religious leader failed to understand that the points of light in the sky were simply other suns, like ours. Sakyamuni did understand this, and the importance of this should not be underestimated. It is huge.

The Lotus Sutra talks about the millions of millions of worlds besides our, inhabited with millions of life-forms. This is one reason Buddhism is a religion of humility, not of arrogance. Other religions talk about the Earth as the center of the universe, a scientifically ridiculous concept. Sociologically, believing in this planet-centrism makes the believer think he is something special. On the scale of the universe, we have a very ordinary star, surrounded by some ordinary planets, upon which some ordinary evolution has taken place. We are nothing special. Other religions state we, or some subset of humans, are special.

If you grow up hearing you are special, you become concerned that this belief be recognized, so your good feelings, that arise from the self-congratulations, don’t stop. You are vehemently opposed to the concept of equality, and most regrettably, this probably carries over to everything from the individual scale (I’m a special person) to the subset you belong to (we’re special). The Buddhist alternative is that we’re all pretty ordinary, but all pretty special too, just like the trillions of life forms on the other planets mentioned in the Lotus Sutra. It is an egalitarian religion. If you feel special, you don’t mind trashing other people as much as if you identified with them as your approximate equals. This explains the Buddhism aversion to war. It is a much deeper-seated aversion than those of other religions, where a we-them dichotomy can be maintained.