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All Cosmological Beliefs

Beliefs about the structure and origin of the cosmos held by a tradition or its adherents, as distinct from the cosmology and world-structure subcategory under the doctrine type, which records the same territory once a tradition's authorities have formally systematised it. The line between the two is often a matter of degree rather than kind.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

Statements about the structure and history of the world and its beings - creation, world ages, the shape of the cosmos, the fate of the dead - held as articles of a tradition rather than as speculation. The accounts gathered here answer different questions: an origin of the world and a recurring destruction of it are not the same kind of claim. 2

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category

A standard analytic category in the study of religion 2

A person carries a ka, the vital force needing offerings after death, and a ba, the mobile aspect of self that can leave the tomb and move between the dead and the living.

Cosmological Beliefs

1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree

2. Encyclopedia of Religion

Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. CosmologyView the Source

Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions

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A person carries a ka, the vital force needing offerings after death, and a ba, the mobile aspect of self that can leave the tomb and move between the dead and the living.

Advaita Vedanta (nondualism)

All phenomena lack intrinsic nature (svabhava)

Anatta: no permanent self

Ancestors continue to watch over and can bless or punish their living descendants

Anekantavada (many-sidedness of truth)

Bondye

Conditional immortality (annihilationism)

Dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada)

Do Ut Des: I Give So That You May Give

Emptiness (sunyata)

Eternal progression and exaltation

Fate Binds Even the Gods

Genius and Juno: The Indwelling Spirit of a Person

Hamingja: Luck as an Inheritable Resource

Impermanence (anicca)

Karma: action determines future rebirth

Landvaettir: The Land's Own Spirits

Mappo, the latter age of the decline of the Dharma

Moksha: liberation from rebirth

Nahui Ollin: The Sun Requires Blood to Keep Moving

Naturalist conception of God

Nirvana: the end of suffering

Numen: The Presence and Will of a Power at Work

Other-emptiness (shentong): ultimate reality is empty of what is other than itself

Purgatory

Purusha and Prakriti: Consciousness and Nature Are Two Irreducible Principles

Reincarnate lamas (tulku)

Reincarnation (samsara)

Self-emptiness (rangtong): things are empty of their own inherent existence

Souls Are Eternally Graded and Not All Are Destined for Liberation

The avatars of Vishnu (dashavatara)

The bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth

The cosmic struggle of good and evil

The Creator of This World Is a Lesser Power Beneath the True God

The Fylgja: A Spirit That Follows a Person or Family

The imminent Second Coming of Christ

The inseparability of samsara and nirvana

The Phenomenal World of Illness and Suffering Is Not Ultimately Real

The Soul Passes Through Successive Bodies

The Threefold Law

The Twelve Imams and the occultation of the Mahdi

The universe is natural, with nothing beyond it

The World Is the Free Self-Expression of a Single Consciousness, Not an Illusion

The World's Plurality Is an Appearance Superimposed by Ignorance

This life is the only life there is

Three thousand realms in a single moment of thought (ichinen sanzen)

Wahdat al-Shuhud: The Unity Perceived Is of Witness, Not of Being

Wahdat al-Wujud: All That Exists Is One Reality

Wyrd and Orlog: The Weave of Fate

Yin and yang