Chapter 5, The Buddhist Cosmos, The Thrice-Thousandfold World Summary and Analysis

Buddhists have a cosmology that includes their conception of the problem of life, duhkha, or suffering. Existence is unreliable and this produces duhkha. Buddhists thus often analyze the difference forms of existence which led to a cosmology. Many believe that the universe is eternal; it is also not merely inhabited by humans and animals but by gods in a hierarchy of subtlety and refinement. There are many world-systems as well, some holding that there are thousands, others a billion. Earlier accounts are less specific.

The developed cosmology of the Abhidharma accepted thirty-one levels of existence and associated classes of beings that any being can migrate into. Lower levels of being are arranged as world-systems. The place where a being is born is determined by karma, which is acquired by...