{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Buddhism","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_bud_bits_bits069_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_bud_bits_bits069_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_bud_bits_bits069_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/bud/bits/bits069.htm","summary":"This is a doctrinal exposition from the *Visuddhi-Magga* (\"Path of Purification\"), a 5th-century Therav\u0101da Buddhist meditation manual by Buddhaghosa, here describing the \"Fourth High Power\" \u2014 the ability to recall past lives. The text presents a hierarchical taxonomy of six classes of beings ranked by the depth and range of this power: from non-Buddhist practitioners (limited to forty world-cycles, dependent on step-by-step mental tracing) up through ordinary disciples, great disciples, chief disciples, Private Buddhas, and finally fully enlightened Buddhas, whose memory is unlimited in scope and direction. A notably distinctive feature is its extended use of sensory and locomotive analogies \u2014 blind men with sticks, glow-worms versus the autumnal sun, lion-strides versus groping \u2014 to make the qualitative differences between these levels vivid and graduated. The text then shifts into a practical meditation manual, giving step-by-step instructions for how a monk should develop this power: emerging from the fourth trance, tracing events backward in time from the present moment through to the moment of death in a previous life. It addresses the psychological obstacle of the gap between existences (described as \"thick darkness\") and counsels persistence through repeated trance-entry, using the analogy of a woodcutter resharpening his axe. The broader cosmological framework \u2014 world-cycles destroyed by fire, water, and wind; Buddha-domains spanning ten thousand to boundless worlds \u2014 situates individual memory practice within an enormous Buddhist cosmology.","tags":["Henry Clarke Warren","Pali Canon Translations","Theravada Buddhism"],"text":null,"title":"Buddhism in Translations - \u00a7 69. World-Cycles.","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Buddhism","translated_text":null,"word_count":5679}