Mahāmaudgalyāyana Visits Another Planet
A Selection from the Scripture Which Is a Repository of Great Jewels[1]
Translated by Ron Epstein
Religion East and West, Issue 5, October, 2005
Translator’s Introduction:
The following story is about the Venerable Mahā-maudgalyāyana,[2] an enlightened disciple of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni. Mahā-maudgalyāyana travels to a distant solar system, to a planet which is inhabited by giant people, and on which there is also a Buddha with disciples practicing under his guidance. The story, which brings to mind Swift’s Gulliver in the land of the giants, is remarkable in many respects. The Buddha and Mahā-maudgalyāyana both probably lived during the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. In the European West, until the time of Galileo (1564-1642), most educated people thought the whole cosmos rotated around the earth and consisted of the sun and seven planets. They did not realize that the stars were other suns. This story here related shows that 2,500 years ago, Buddhists were aware of a vast cosmos filled with suns and planets and sentient life. Contemporary, scientifically oriented people often have a tendency to dismiss non-Western cosmologies as limited, primitive, and distorted myths, in the negative sense of that word. In this story we are presented with a cosmology that seems much closer than the Western pre-Galilean view to the contemporary scientific view of the physical universe. Of course the assertions about the spiritual powers of the Buddha and Mahā-maudgalyāyana and the size of the people on the distant planet do not merge so easily with contemporary scientific, materialist mindsets.