The Saharan Ant

We grow up, most of us, with somebody to make a fuss about us. Babies need to be cared for, and our first experiences are those of the mother or a substitute taking care of our needs. If we were lucky, there was lots of bonding and tender loving care. These experiences are locked down in the deepest recesses of our minds. We form our first picture of what the world is like from these experiences. They tell us “People care about me” – although not expressed verbally, but totally in terms of emotions and expectations. Babies learn how to interact with their caregivers to get their needs fulfilled, both physical ones and emotional ones.

As we get older, these experiences are buried, but never lose their impact. It seems natural to almost all humans that something, somewhere, loves us and wants to give us TLC. Possibly a sociologist could look at baby care patterns in different cultures and see if it correlates with how the society behaves and with their religious beliefs. For the purpose of this article, I just want to say that what we experience as a baby is a function of the way we have evolved, away from those creatures that deposit eggs somewhere and the young simply start off unnoticed by the genetic parents.

This fact of evolution comes from the need to provide cross-individual information about the local world environment. It’s not possible to code into DNA the details about how to gather food, avoid predators, and interact socially the way mammals, and maybe some lower creatures, do. Thus, if there is social interaction and local environmental habits to be learned, there is a necessity to build in, probably genetically, some care for the young of the species. Likely also, as we go up the evolutionary chain, care for young becomes socially transmitted as well.

The needs of the evolutionary process don’t have anything at all to do with supernatural stuff, but there is obviously an analogy here. In the early days of Buddhism, people expected that there were all manner of supernatural creatures, and put the Buddha among them, who were somehow interested in their lives and going to help them get their needs satisfied. People would make offerings to the statues of Buddha, and still do in great numbers, as they think they will get some magical assistance from outer space or wherever they think the Buddha lives. They beseech the Buddha the same way a baby beseeches his caregiver. It’s simply an irremovable early experience, coming to the surface in an adult in a slightly transformed way.

Nichiren was well past this elementary practice. He was a philosopher as well as a practical theologian. It existed at his time, the thirteenth century, as it does now, but only among those still wrapped up in the earliest versions of Buddhism. He was, as we are now, able to think beyond the repetition of infant experiences transformed into adult modes.

The idea of a monotheism belief, or a small pantheon, is very reminiscent of the infant experiences. Some Buddhist sects believe that the Buddha is the only power around. Others have uncountable minor figures. Nichiren wrote that one of the most important things to do for a good Buddhist was to clean up the religion, in other words, to help those mired in non-consistent and illogical beliefs, no matter how deeply they resonate with the person’s brain from infant experiences, to get to a higher philosophical level. Why that’s important is left for another place and time.

In order to use Sakyamuni’s revelation of the countless worlds beyond our own as a device to help people understand the true framework of the universe, it might be useful to present an example.

There are a trillion worlds out there with life forms, give or take a few zeroes. We have no contact with any of them. The effect of any one of us, no matter what we do, is infinitesimal. To picture that, consider an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert. On the leg of the ant is a virus, one of billions there. That virus is as important to you as you are to the rest of the universe.

The rest of the universe cares about you as much as you do about that virus.