Turn we now to that division of the Buddhist system which concerns itself with the external universe, and seeks to explain its constitution, form, and the various divisions of which it consists.
And here we must be careful to note the peculiar views of Buddhism, notwithstanding the large admixture of Brāhmanical ideas.
For Buddhism has no cosmogony like the Sāṅkhya, Vedānta, and Vaiṡeshika. Nor does it explain the creation of the universe, in our sense. It only concerns itself with cosmology, and it dissents from Brāhmanical cosmology in declining to admit the eternity of anything whatever, except change or revolution or a succession of revolutions. Buddhism has no Creator, no creation, no original germ of all things, no soul of the world, no personal, no impersonal, no supramundane, no antemundane principle.
It might indeed have been supposed that since Gautama denied the eternal existence of either a personal God or of Spirit, he would at least have given eternal existence to matter.
But no; the only eternal things are the Causality of Act-force and the succession of cause and effect—the eternity of ‘Becoming,’ not of ‘Being.’
The Universe around us, with all its visible phenomena, must be recognized as an existing entity, for we see before our eyes evidence of its actual existence. But it is an entity produced out of nonentity, and destined to lapse again into nonentity when its time is fulfilled.
For out of nothingness it came, and into nothingness must it return—to re-appear again, it is true, but as a new Universe brought into being by the accumulated force of its predecessor’s acts, and not evolved out of any eternally existing spiritual or material germ of any kind.
It is thus that Universe after Universe is like a succession of countless bubbles for ever forming, expanding, drifting onwards, bursting and re-forming, each bubble owing its re-formation to the force generated by its vanished predecessor. The poet Shelley might have been called a Buddhist when he wrote:
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay;