The cosmography of the Buddhists is even more luxuriant, for it regards the universe as consisting of innumerable spheres (cakkavalas), each of which might seem to a narrower imagination a universe in itself, since it has its own earth, heavenly bodies, paradises and hells.  A sphere is divided into three regions, the lowest of which is the region of desire.  This consists of eleven divisions which, beginning from the lowest, are the hells, and the worlds of animals, Pretas (hungry ghosts), Asuras (Titans)[729] and men.  This last, which we inhabit, consists of a vast circular plain largely covered with water.  In the centre of it is Mount Meru, and it is surrounded by a wall.  Above it rise six devalokas, or heavens of the inferior gods.  Above the realms of desire there follow sixteen worlds in which there is form but no desire.  All are states of bliss one higher than the other and all are attained by the exercise of meditation.  Above these again come four formless worlds, in which there is neither desire nor form.  They correspond to the four stages of Arupa trances and in them the gross and evil elements of existence are reduced to a minimum, but still they are not permanent and cannot be regarded as final salvation.  We naturally think of this series of worlds as so many storeys rising one above the other and they are so depicted[730] but it will be observed that the animal kingdom is placed between the hells and humanity, obviously not as having its local habitation there but as better off than the one, though inferior to the other, and perhaps if we pointed this out to the Hindu artist he would smile and say that his many storeyed picture must not be taken so literally:  all states of being are merely states of mind, hellish, brutish, human and divine.

Grotesque as Hindu notions of the world may seem, they include two great ideas of modern science.  The universe is infinite or at least immeasurable[731].  The vision of the astronomer who sees a solar system in every star of the milky way is not wider than the thought that devised these Cakkavalas or spheres, each with a vista of heavens and a procession of Buddhas, to look after its salvation.  Yet compared with the sum of being a sphere is an atom.  Space is filled by aggregates of them, considered by some as groups of three, by others as clusters of a thousand.  And secondly these world systems, with the living beings and plants in them, are regarded as growing and developing by natural processes, and, equally in virtue of natural processes, as decaying and disintegrating when the time comes.  In the Agganna-Sutta[732] we have a curious account of the evolution of man which, though not the same as Darwin’s, shows the same idea of development or perhaps degeneration and differentiation.  Human beings were originally immaterial, aerial and self-luminous, but as the world gradually assumed its present form they took to eating first of all a fragrant kind of earth and then plants with the result that their bodies became gross and differences of sex and colour were produced.