As regards the structure of the universe, the theories of the Buddhists, though in a great degree borrowed from the Brahmans, occupy a much less prominent position in their mythology, and are less intimately identified with their system of religion.  Their attention has been directed less to physical than to metaphysical disquisitions, and their views of cosmogony have as little of truth as of imagination in their details.  The basis of the system is a declaration of the eternity of matter, and its submission at remote intervals to decay and re-formation; but this and the organisation of animal life are but the results of spontaneity and procession, not the products of will and design on the part of an all powerful Creator.

Buddhism adopts something approaching to the mundane theory of the Brahmans, in the multiplicity and superposition of worlds and the division of the earth into concentric continents, each separated by oceans of various fabulous liquids.  Its notions of geography are at once fanciful and crude; and again borrowing from the Shastras its chronology, extends over boundless portions of time, but invests with the authority of history only those occurrences which have taken place since the birth of Gotama Buddha.

The Buddhists believe in the existence of lokas, or heavens, each differing in glory, and serving as the temporary residences of demigods and divinities, as well as of men whose etherialisation is but inchoate, and who have yet to visit the earth in farther births and acquire in future transmigrations their complete attainment of Nirwana.  They believe likewise in the existence of hells which are the abodes of demons or tormentors, and in which the wicked undergo a purgatorial imprisonment preparatory to an extended probation upon earth.  Here their torments are in proportion to their crimes, and although not eternal, their duration extends almost to the infinitude of eternity; those who have been guilty of the deadly sins of parricide, sacrilege, and defiance of the faith being doomed to the endurance of excruciating deaths, followed by instant revival and a repetition of their tortures without mitigation and apparently without end.[1]

[Footnote 1:  DAVY’S Account of the Interior of Ceylon, p. 204.]

It is one of the extraordinary anomalies of the system, that combined with these principles of self-reliance and perfectibility, Buddhism has incorporated to a certain extent the doctrine of fate or “necessity,” under which it demonstrates that adverse events are the general results of akusala or moral demerit in some previous stage of existence.  This belief, which lies at the very foundation of their religion, the Buddhists have so adapted to the rest of the structure as to avoid the inconsistency of making this directing power inherent in any Supreme Being, by assigning it as one of the attributes of matter and a law of its perpetual mutations.