Question asked by Kelvin Wong
In responding to a query if all Buddhas were humans before, the Pastor answered as follows:
"Dear Jay-r,
Rinpoche did explain once that the Buddha at some point before he became enlightened, was just like us, having to go through the human experience and thus creating various forms of karmas. The karmas led him to go through countless rebirths encompassing all 6 realms of existences, of deva (god realm), asura (demi-god realm), human, animal, spirit and hell realms.
For the Buddha, it took him 3 aeons of practicing virtues that eventually took him to collect the necessary merit to traverse the finals stage as a bodhisattva prince who eventually became the Buddha that we know today."
From my understanding, an aeon (or kalpa) is around 16 million years long. According to science, modern humans are believed to originate about 200,000 years ago in the Middle Paleolithic period in southern Africa. How then can the Buddha exist and practiced as a human for 3 eons?
Dear Kelvin Wong,
Some sources say that a kalpa or cosmic cycle is 336,000,000 years. According to Shakyamuni Buddha, a kalpa is longer than the amount of time it would take a cube of solid granite to be worn away by being stroked lightly with a piece of fine silk once every hundred years. In theory, kalpas succeed one another ad infinitum. Buddhists believe that the beginning of the universe and of life is inconceivable since they have no beginning nor end. We always talk in terms of “beginningless time”. So since beginningless time, we have had countless rebirths, and not as humans only.
Attaining Buddhahood is the hardest thing for a person to do. It takes innumerable births to purify oneself in order to become a Buddha. It took the Buddha three aeons of practice of self-discipline, effort and determination to purify his mind. If you read the Jataka tales, you will find that he had numerous previous births and in many of those births he sacrificed himself for the sake of others.