“Accepting the Entire Vedic Cosmology” (SB 3.19.26)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 19, Text 26. “Accepting the Entire Vedic Cosmology.” San Diego – April 3, 1992 / (067)

Introduction:  The following is a lecture given by His Grace Sadaputa Prabhu on Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Third Canto, 19th chapter, text 26. The lecture is given in San Diego on April 3rd, 1992. 

RLT [text 26]:  

Though struck indifferently by the Lord, the conqueror of all, the demon's body began to wheel. His eyeballs bulged out of their sockets. His arms and legs broken and the hair on his head scattered, he fell down dead, like a gigantic tree uprooted by the wind. 

[Purport]:

It does not take even a moment for the Lord to kill any powerful demon, including Hiraṇyākṣa. The Lord could have killed him long before, but he allowed the demon to display the full extent of his magical feats. One may know that by magical feats, by scientific advancement of knowledge, or by material power one cannot become the equal of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. His one signal is sufficient to destroy all our attempts. His inconceivable power, as displayed here, is so strong that the demon, despite all his demoniac maneuvers, was killed by the Lord when the Lord desired, simply by one slap. 

om ajñāna-timirāndhasya

jñānāñjana-śalākayā

cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena

   tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ 

śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale

svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam

Let's see here. So the translation again: 

Though struck indifferently by the Lord, the conqueror of all, the demon's body began to wheel. His eyeballs bulged out of their sockets, his arms and legs broken and the hair on his head scattered, he fell down dead, like a gigantic tree uprooted by the wind.

So, we're going through the description of the killing of Hiraṇyākṣa by Lord Varāha. So, what can one say about that?

I gave a class once on the cosmology that's involved in this story. Of course, Lord Varāha lifted the earth planet from the Garbhodaka Ocean. And the description there is that... Actually there were two incarnations of Lord Varāha, which in one purport Śrīla Prabhupāda says were amalgamated together. These are the red and white incarnations. The first incarnation of Lord Varāha occurred at the beginning of this day of Brahmā. On that occasion, at the dawn of the day of Brahmā, the earth was still in the waters of devastation and Svāyambhuva Manu and his wife, Śatarūpā, had been generated from the mind of Brahmā, and they were intended to create population in the universe. 

So Svāyambhuva Manu noted that the earth, which was the place of habitation for various living beings, was within the waters of devastation. And so he asked Lord Brahmā to do something to get the earth out of the water. So Lord Brahmā then meditated on the Supreme Personality of Godhead and Lord Varāha appeared from his nose like a small insect, expanded to gigantic size, and then lifted the earth from the ocean. So that's the first incarnation. 

Then the second one is the one who killed Hiraṇyākṣa. Now that incarnation of Lord Varāha took place during the Cakṣuṣa Manu period, which is the sixth manvantara. So on that occasion, Hiraṇyākṣa had caused the earth to become inundated within the Garbhodaka Ocean. And so Lord Varāha again appeared, lifted up the earth, and also slew this demon Hiraṇyākṣa as described here. So these are various activities. 

[5:08]

The earth, which was lifted by Lord Varāha, turns out to be the Bhū-maṇḍala. This is described in one purport in the Fifth Canto. Śrīla Prabhupāda cites a section of Sanskrit text, which he doesn't explicitly translate, which is Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura. However, if you do translate that, you'll find that it's a description of the dimensions of Bhū-maṇḍala. 

So basically, Bhū-maṇḍala is a disk-shaped structure, about 2 billion miles in diameter; or to use the term in the Bhāgavatam, it's 500 koti yojanas in diameter. Śrīla Prabhupāda uses 8 miles per yojana, koti is 10 million. So that would be a 500 million yojanas, which if you multiply by 8 would come out to 4 billion. So that is a disk. It's called Bhū-maṇḍala, which would mean: the bhū means the earth and maṇḍala means some circular sort of figure. So basically, it's a flat disk, about 4 billion miles in diameter. That's the description.

It turns out that in the Fifth Canto of the Bhāgavatam it is said that the universe is surrounded by a shell, which is 4 billion miles in diameter. So that's the same diameter as this Bhū-maṇḍala. So the point of this description by Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura is that he revises the figures for the diameter of Bhū-maṇḍala slightly so that it's smaller. In fact, it's 17 times 100,000 yojanas smaller in diameter than the shell of the universe.

So he gives a whole series of figures that add together to give this result. And he points out that this has a number of consequences. One is that, because if the Bhū-maṇḍala were of the same size as the shell of the universe, than it would be connected with it. So it would be rigidly connected and Ananta Śeṣa wouldn't have to do… anything to do in the matter of lifting the earth. So because this gap is there, therefore this gives Ananta Śeṣa something to do. And also it allows the earth to move up and down so that it can fall down into the Garbhodaka Ocean, and so that then Lord Varāha can lift it up. So this is what was stated by Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura. So that would indicate that the earth as lifted by Lord Varāha was the Bhū-maṇḍala. So that's interesting to know. 

There're a number of interesting points here. This description of the universe is a bit hard to comprehend in many ways for people of modern education. So there's some things you can observe, though. This Bhū-maṇḍala disk, the diameter of 4 billion miles makes it so that it would go out to about three times the radius of the orbit of Saturn in modern terms. So, in one sense that's quite large, but at the same time, it's rather small from our point of view. There is some... and the idea that there's a shell of the universe at that distance also is a little bit hard to reconcile with modern ideas.

There are indications though that the radius is much larger. Śrīla Prabhupāda has mentioned, for example, in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta, there's one verse in which, actually, Kṛṣṇa is speaking to Brahmā and He says the universe has a diameter of 4 billion miles, therefore you have only four heads and this is the smallest universe. So he makes that statement. 

[10:08]

In the purport. Śrīla Prabhupāda says that according to Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, the diameter or the circumference of the universe is... Well he gives a figure which has about 18 digits in it, yojanas. So a much bigger number is given. If you... actually, you can take that number and find out what the radius of the universe would be in light years according to that. A light year, by the way, is the unit of distance that astronomers use. It's the distance that light would travel in one year, going 186,000 miles in an hour. So… a second. Yeah, 186,000 miles in a second. So, that comes out to about 5,000 or so light years if you take the radius of the universe according to that. So in the purport to the verse that says the radius is about 2 billion miles, the statement is made essentially that the radius is about 5,000 light years.

Śrīla Prabhupāda doesn't offer any further comment. He just... the only other comment is that some say this is half the circumference of the universe. The explanation of that turns out to be that, that radius refers possibly also to the circumference of the Lokāloka Mountain, which is halfway out on Bhū-maṇḍala. So, in any case, you have two different sizes given for the diameter of the universe. 

So, there are other statements by Śrīla Prabhupāda also, which would suggest that the universe is extremely large. For example, he said that, at one point, if you could travel – I think it was for 40,000 years at the speed of light – you'd never reach the higher planets. And you might wonder, well, why not? If the radius is 2 billion miles? So it would seem that there are different scales of size within the universe. At least that's the most obvious interpretation that you can give to this particular description. 

So I'm bringing all this up because after all, we're reading the passage of the killing of Hiraṇyākṣa in which the Supreme Personality of Godhead in the form of the boar lifts the earth from an ocean. So it's good to look at the larger context of cosmology in which this is being presented. Many will say that this is mythological, but actually the larger cosmological framework, if you can understand it, you can begin to see how this could possibly correspond to reality. 

Śrīla Prabhupāda, of course, said that this is reality. And in fact, he wanted us to present this to the world to the extent that he even wanted the main temple built in Mayapur to be a Vedic planetarium. Actually, his original plan for that was that it wouldn't exactly so much be a temple as a planetarium. It was supposed to be a model of the universe according to the Fifth Canto. I should note, by the way, that there's a long history behind making such models. This was by no means a new idea. Many temples in India already are models of the universe. And in fact, in Cambodia, it's interesting, there are these ruins of a place called Angkor Wat, which are out in the jungle in Cambodia. It's mainly a complex of temples to Lord Viṣṇu. Cambodia used to be part of India. That's why they call that Indochina, that region. And if you look at the layout of those temples, you'll see that it's a map of the universe according to the Fifth Canto. 

[15:00] 

There's a central, very large dome, which corresponds to Mount Meru and a series of surrounding spires, sikaras they're called, which would correspond to different mountains around Meru. Then there's a series of canals or moats that are concentric. These are square, but they would correspond to the different oceans and dvīpas in Bhū-maṇḍala. All those are round. But the only difference is that they're made square there in Angkor Wat. So it's actually a map of the universe. Likewise, if you look at, say, Rangaksetra Temple in South India, you'll see carvings on a series of layers going up and these correspond to the beings in different planetary systems within the universe. 

So the purpose of this kind of model of the universe was to show how we are situated relative to the whole cosmic situation in which, at the top there's the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So that puts us in a meaningful universe. This word “cosmos'' is interesting. That's from Greek ultimately, but it means an organized universe as opposed to a chaos. So modern science has given us a picture of the universe as basically a chaos. Everything is just random. And the whole thing just happened by natural forces. Somehow life arose on one little spec, which is this earth, and so on and so forth. All you have is dust and gas and so forth floating through a vast void of space. 

So the Vedic concept of the universe, however, was quite different, namely that this was a meaningful system which had a hierarchical structure. So there's the earth planet; beyond that there's the region of the heavens. There's what is called Devī-dhāma, which is the region of the 14 worlds predominated by the demigods. Therefore, it's called Devī-dhāma, devi meaning the demigods – actually devi refers specifically to the goddess Durga. Then beyond that, there's Maheśa-dhāma, or the region of Lord Śiva.  Then beyond that, there's Hari-dhāma, or Vaikuṇṭha, and finally, there's Goloka-Vṛindāvana. 

So it's a hierarchical system. So, this is a meaningful universe in which we have our place. So the whole point of showing this model of the universe in a planetarium is to show how the universe is meaningful. And at the very top of the whole meaningful system, there's the Supreme Personality of Godhead; and we're part of that, in contrast to the modern picture of the universe. If you think about it, there's no place for Kṛṣṇa within the modern picture of the universe. For example, where would you put Lord Brahmā, first of all, in the modern conception? There's stars and galaxies and so forth, but there's no place for this whole Vedic scheme of things. So that was, as I understand it, the purpose Śrīla Prabhupāda had in asking us to do that.

So it's important to understand the cosmological context within which the different events in the Bhāgavatam are taking place. If you can understand that cosmological context, then you can see how the whole thing can be real, that these events described in the Bhāgavatam actually are part of reality, which is very important. Whereas if you try and take them piecemeal and insert them into the modern framework of thought, you'll find that they don't fit. And that means it's very hard to understand how they could be real, especially for very large numbers of people. So, concerning this question of distances and the earth... Let's see, what time is it? I don't want to…

[20:02]

Speaker:  It's 20 after.

RLT:  It's 20 after. Let's see, we go into 7:30. I was just about to get into a whole other line of thought. Yeah…

Question:  I have a question.

Answer:  Yeah, sure. Maybe we, yeah, go ahead. 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, if you look at… you mentioned the Catholics or in general mainline Christian denominations. Yes, they recognize that there's a problem in reconciling religion and modern science. Basically they've completely given into the modern scientific picture. So for them, God in effect becomes a metaphor for the intellectually sophisticated people. The common people who don't know much about science can still think of God in personal terms as, you know, ordaining things and all powerful and all that sort of thing. But for those who are sophisticated, they must realize that, well, God has no role at all to play within the universe. You can't have miracles because that would go against the laws of physics. 

There's this one, yeah... Ernan McMullin is an interesting example of this. He's a professor of philosophy, I think, at Notre Dame University or some Catholic university like that. He's also a priest. He's a physicist. He did his PhD thesis on interpretations of quantum mechanics. So he's concerned with how you reconcile Catholic doctrine with science. And basically he's a very tortured man. He wrote this article in which he... Actually, I had occasion to read several drafts of the article before the final article came out. And basically he was saying: Well, we have to accept this aspect of modern science and cosmology, and we have to accept that aspect, and certainly no rational person can avoid accepting this aspect and so forth. And this means we have to eliminate basically the idea that God was like this, and we certainly can't allow God to be like that. And so, in the end he said: Actually if we look at this subjectively, it brings us to the point of questioning the basis for introducing God in any way whatsoever. But since I'm a Catholic priest, I can't really present things quite that way. So let's see, what can we do? 

And then he was saying: And certainly for a Christian, we can't deny the miracles of Jesus Christ, you know, walking on water and rising from the dead after the third day and so on and so forth. But these things are of course, physically impossible and we're rejecting all things of that nature for times other than this specific occasion when Jesus Christ did these things. Maybe we can just make an exception for him. So the result was a totally incoherent picture. Either you accept total atheism and just leave it at that, or you try and somehow insert miracles of Jesus Christ into this world picture in which they just don't fit. And maybe you can have faith in that if you're really desperate. So, that's the picture he was left with. 

So the same thing can happen as far as Kṛṣṇa consciousness is concerned. Especially if you don't want to really confront the cosmology presented in the Bhāgavatam and recognize that Śrīla Prabhupāda took the whole thing very seriously. So, actually in order to understand how fantastic things could be true, you have to look at the larger fantastic picture and see how it all fits together. 

[24:58] 

Comprehensibility is really a matter of consistency. That is, if the thing fits together in a consistent way, then you can understand it. That's what understanding really amounts to, seeing how things fit together in a consistent picture. So that means to understand the Vedic cosmology, you have to look at the whole picture; and if you can see how it all fits together, then you can understand it. It becomes understandable and believable. Whereas if you don't look at the whole picture and you just take little parts and try to understand them separately, then since they don't fit into the picture of things that you already have based on modern thought, then it'll never be comprehensible because it's not coherent. It's contradictory. 

So, that I would suggest is the reason Śrīla Prabhupāda had, actually, for saying you should present the entire universe in this gigantic structure in Mayapur, because that would force us to confront the entire cosmological situation presented in Vedic literature and understand it as a consistent picture. So it's probably getting even later at this point. Are there any other questions? Yeah…

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Well, I was going to go into a whole discussion of that. The remarks I made were just sort of the introduction to that discussion. There are a lot of things that can be said there concerning varying scales of size in Vedic literature. It's a whole theme that you can discuss. I guess I don't have time to get into it though, at this point. You had... Yeah. 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, you see, Ernan McMullin was certainly not willing to do that because… and he would have a problem doing it because what is he going to put in the place of modern science? You have to have something reasonably impressive to put in the place of modern science if you want to kick that out. And in fact, he doesn't have anything. We actually do, but we have to understand it. And that takes a lot of work. You have to see how all the pieces fit together. Of course I'm not, I shouldn't pretend to be any expert on Christianity and the Bible and all that, but as far as I can see, they don't really have an alternative picture that's going to be very satisfactory. One... Here goes the conch shell, all glory to Śrīla Prabhupāda.