How the Earth was formed

 Apart from our own universe there are other countless universes. It is common to have deities from these other universes visiting us. Physical beings from there cannot reach us because of the distance and time factor.

Chakkavala is a Pali word which means solar system, with one sun. There are about one trillion solar systems around us and that means there are about one trillion suns if you can see them. We call this solar system the Milky Way. What about the huge space beyond the Milky Way? Do you think it is totally empty? Is it surrounded by concrete wall to prevent us from going farther?

Buddhists believe there are about 1000000 planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone that life exists, and that world systems are infinite in numbers, with billions of other worlds where Buddhism is taught. The ten thousand world systems the Buddhists talk about are only a portion of the endless systems. If science cannot proof there are countless other galaxies, it does not mean they do not exist. Our planet earth, which is 4 billion years old now,  is 1.3 million times smaller than the sun. It is also estimated that there are 8.8 billion planets similar in size and temperature to earth. Surely some of these planets must be inhibited by humans? For more information on astronomy, go to the website of Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge.

Once the Buddha was asked regarding the beginning of the world, He said, “It is as if a man had been wounded by a poisoned arrow and when attended to by a physician were to say, ‘I will not allow you to remove this arrow until I have learned the caste, the age, the occupation, the birthplace, and the motivation of the person who wounded me.’ That man would die before having learned all this. In exactly the same way, anyone who should say, ‘I will not follow the teaching of the Blessed One until the Blessed One has explained all the multiform truths of the world’-that person would die before the Buddha had explained all this.”

According to the Aggañña Sutta, found in the Pali Canon, the Buddha was speaking to the monk Vasettha, a former Brahmin, on the formation of the earth:

"There comes a time, Vasettha, when, after the lapse of a long, long period, this world died. And when this happens, beings have mostly been reborn into the Realm of Radiance [as devas]; and there they dwell, made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory; and thus they remain for a long, long period of time. There comes also a time, Vasettha, when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance usually come to life as humans...now at that time, all had become one world of water, dark, and of darkness that make blind. No moon nor sun appeared, no stars were seen, nor constellations, neither was night manifest nor day, neither months nor half-months, neither years nor seasons, neither female nor male. Beings were reckoned just as beings only. And to those beings, Vasettha, sooner or later after a long time, earth with its savours was spread out in the waters, even as a scum forms on the surface of boiled milky rice that is cooling, so did the earth appear."

This description is consistent with the expanding universe model and Big Bang. The Buddha seems to be saying here that the universe expands outward, reaches a stabilizing point, and then reverts  its motion back toward a central point resulting in its destruction, this process again to be repeated infinitely. Throughout this expanding and contracting process, the objects found within the universe undergo periods of development and change over a long stretch of time, according to the environment in which they find themselves. The Buddha goes on to say that the "beings" he described in this paragraph become attached to an earth like planet, get reborn there, and remain there for the duration of the life. As a result, physical characteristics change and evolutionary changes  takes place. This is a very rough theory of evolution. The Aggañña Sutta presents water as pre-existent to earth like planets, with the planet forming with water and the life moving from the water onto the earth. The Buddha was talking about earth like planets in general, and that was also how our ancestors arrived on this planet.