Easing Suffering—No Creation Story Needed

In Buddhism, "world" often refers not just to the physical universe but to the mental and experiential realms created by the mind through ignorance, attachment, and karma. As to how it all began, the Buddha never identified a single creation story. Existence is an ongoing process of arising and ceasing, causes and conditions, without a beginning or end that can be pinpointed.

Why get stuck in questions that can't be answered when the goal is eliminating dukkha now? The second and third waves of Buddhism expand on cyclical universes and multiple worlds but maintain the absence of a definitive creation.

In first-wave teachings, the Buddha emphasized practical wisdom, ethics, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path. He explicitly refused to answer speculative questions about the cosmos, including its origins, because they do not lead to liberation. In fact, he had little patience for metaphysics. In the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, the Buddha addresses a monk named Malunkyaputta who demands answers to 10 philosophical questions, four of which relate directly to the nature and origin of the world:

• Is the cosmos eternal?

• Is the cosmos not eternal?

• Is the cosmos finite

• Is the cosmos infinite?

The Buddha calls these questions "undeclared" or unanswerable, explaining:

They are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding.

He illustrates this with the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow:

Imagine a man wounded by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows the archer's caste, name, height, and so on. The man would die before getting answers, just as speculating on unanswerable questions hinders addressing suffering in the here and now.

The Buddha's focus remains on what is practical: understanding dukkha, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its end. The universe is cyclical and without a definitive beginning, arising and dissolving, endlessly through natural processes governed by karma and dependent origination—the principle that all phenomena arise interdependently from causes and conditions, not from a divine will.

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