Our Degenerate Age – A Buddhist Prophecy

A man feeling spent after a night of debauchery
Detail from "Marriage a la Mode" by Hogarth (1743)

In many Indo-European religions there is a tradition which predicts the decline of humanity. The Romans spoke of an initial golden age of man, followed by a silver age, bronze age and finally iron age, with each age being less virtuous and less verdant than the last – it was predicted that our kind would finally be wiped out by floods and starvation (see Ovid’s Metamorphoses). In Germanic spirituality there is a tradition that speaks of mankind’s devolution: kinship bonds break down, lasciviousness and violence abound, the weather is harsh and sunbeams turn black (implying volcanic ash clouds?) – this is the age just before the destruction of our world by violence and fire, Ragnarök. It will be followed by the rebirth of a verdurous world when Gods and virtuous folk begin anew (see the Völuspá). In Hinduism it is taught that there are four epochs that characterise the cycle of existence. The first is the most blessed age, with each of the succeeding ages becoming more degenerate than the last, until the cycle begins anew (see the Mahabharata). 

Likewise, in Mahayana Buddhism, which originated in northern India but is now most common in NE Asia, there is a very old and widely accepted prophecy which speaks of the inevitable decline of Buddhism. It describes three ages. The first begins with the life of the Buddha of the Shakya clan, at some point between the 1th-5th century BCE (the exact century of the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha is unknown), and lasted between 500 to 1000 years. This was a golden age of Buddhism, when it was comparatively easy to follow the Buddha’s teachings and achieve enlightenment. The second period represents a time of the weakening of Buddhist spirituality, it also lasts between 500-1000 years. The third age is said to last for 10,000 years. According to Japanese tradition it began in the 11th century CE (which coincides with the Islamic conquest of south Asia; Muslims massacred Buddhist monks and destroyed their monasteries, universities and libraries, thus causing Buddhism to almost disappear from these regions where it had previously flourished: Reat at 76). During this latter age it is said that it will become increasingly difficult for people to follow the Buddha’s teachings, though there will be a period of flourishing before finally becoming obscured and lost. Following this there will be an extremely long period of spiritual darkness, after which a new golden age of Buddhism will eventually emerge, ushered in by the Maitreya Buddha.

The Greco-Roman Cosmos

Illustration from La Sphere du Monde by Oronce Fine (1549)
(the sublunary elements are fire, air, water and earth; above the moon is aether)

In most ancient Greek and Roman minds the distant stars were not thought to be suns capable of supporting a family of orbiting planets, and our own sun was not thought to be the central hearth-fire of our familial solar system. Their view of the cosmos was fundamentally different to our own.

“The Greeks, by about 500 BC, were trying to explain the movements of the planets by first assuming the earth to be the centre of the universe. ( … practically everyone before modern times assumed that it was.) A philosopher named Anaximenes about 550 BC suggested that the stars were fixed in a huge hollow sphere that enclosed the earth, the sun, the moon and the planets … This sphere might be motionless while the earth turned, or vice versa. Later Greeks argued both ways. 

The sun, moon and planets could not be fixed to this sphere of the stars, because they did not move along with the stars at the same speed. They must therefore exist in space between the sphere of the stars and the central earth … each must be fixed in a special sphere of its own [Asimov at 25-27].”

Beggar Spirituality

"A Beggar Girl" by Sargent (c. 1877)

When my husband died nearly two years ago it was as if in a thunderstruck moment I realised that the cosmos was not as I thought it to be – it was so much darker and more painful than I had imagined. I saw that the Gods had not kept me free from misfortune, and that my approach to worship had been absurd. I dismantled my beautiful shrine and even destroyed one of the statues in a state of bitterness and blank despair. But I did not stop believing in the Gods, nor did I hate them. Rather, I saw that on a very fundamental level *I* had got it wrong and that I needed a wiser and more realistic approach to the divine. Answers to difficult questions can never be finite – because the universe and the questions keep changing – but what I see now is that I was more of a spiritual beggar than a spiritual seeker. 

When religious practice revolves around begging for blessings from the Gods why should the Gods not go silent? The best Gods surely don’t wish to surround themselves with emotional paupers, begging for this favour one day and that favour on another? Would they not rather take an interest in those with the fire to go out and seize the day, taking what they want based on their own hard work and determination? What God worth worshipping favours sycophants and beggars? The Gods don’t exist for us so that they can dole out all the things we are too weak to get for ourselves. They exist in their own right, with their own ambitions – just as we do. It may be that they influence events, but their powers are not infinite and they cannot change the fundamental realities of all life in the cosmos – which is that loss and death and the suffering these things bring is inevitable. We ourselves have more power to alleviate our suffering than any God. Even if there were a God or Gods who granted us every wish we would just keep asking for more, and growing evermore spiritually infantalised all the while. When finally those indulgent Gods become bored of their beggar-worshippers what despair and tantrum throwing begins! For some people atheism is the ultimate “f—k you for not answering my prayers!”