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AN INDIAN BUDDHIST
EVOLUTION MYTH
In the `Dialogues', the Buddha is represented in
several places as telling stories of `beginnings'
(Pali aganna), as he calls them. His
listeners must have been highly amused by his
tongue-in-cheek explanations of the origins of
various current customs, sayings, and phrases.
The intention seems in part to have been to
satirise the solemn creation stories of
contemporary Indian religious traditions,
especially those involving a creator god or
justifying the pretensions of the Brahmin
priesthood. The longest text has a more explicit
message; the Buddha is linking unethical
behaviour with degeneration, and ethical
behaviour with further evolution, both in the
cultural sphere and in the spiritual life of the
individual disciple.
The overall framework is similar to the cyclic
Hindu myths mentioned above: an unimaginably
protracted cycle of alternate involution and
evolution of the cosmos and consciousness. At the
limit of involution, says the myth, beings were
reborn in an immaterial heaven world called
Streaming Radiance. After ages, they were reborn
on the youthful earth, but were still
non-material; they were androgynous, dwelling in
the sky, needing no food but rapture, and they
shone brightly, immersed in their own radiance.
The world was then `just one mass of water', and
dark so that sun, moon, and stars were not
visible.
After a very long period, mighty winds whipped up
and evaporated the water, and a rich, creamy
essence solidified on its surface. One of the
beings was of a curious or exploratory nature
(alternatively translated as `greedy'); he dipped
his finger in the essence and tasted it. He found
it delicious and very sweet, like pure wild
honey, and others followed his example. Craving
grew in them, until they were breaking off lumps
of the stuff to eat. Consequently their radiance
dimmed, and the sun and moon could be seen, and
so the days, months, and seasons came into being.
At the same time, the world's land-masses arose
from the oceans: mountains growing like swelling
bubbles on porridge as it cooks.
As the beings feasted, their bodies gradually
coarsened, those that ate most becoming
noticeably uglier than the norm. This induced
conceit in the rest, who despised the ugly ones.
As a result, the creamy essence disappeared, much
to the dismay of all, and in its place a sort of
fungus grew, also delicious (bitter according to
one account), which became the beings' food. The
coarsening of body and disparity of beauty
increased further, giving rise to more conceit
and spite, so that the fungus, too, vanished,
being replaced by a fast-growing creeper, and
then rice. The rice could be eaten straight off
the plant, and always grew again in time for the
next meal.
For the first time excretion was necessary, and
coarsening and distinctions increased further,
until the sexes could be distinguished in some,
`and the women became extremely preoccupied with
the men, and the men with the women'. Thus they
desired each other, and later had sex, first in
public, but later in private because of the
disapproval of the beings who were still
androgynous, who threw cow dung at anyone seen in
flagrante delicto. Hence the invention of
huts!
(Continued on
page 27)
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