Celestial Deities in the Flat-Earth Buddhist Cosmos and Astrology

Buddhist cosmology is comprised of a disc-shaped earth comprised of four separate continents surrounding an enormous Mt. Sumeru that extends upward beyond the altitude of the orbits of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon were treated as divinities in a manner no different from Vedic religion, yet at the same time their movements as seen from the ground were essential for the astrological timing of Buddhist activities. This chapter will first discuss the role of the Sun and the Moon, and later the planets, in physical Buddhist cosmology and link their features to Vedic and larger Indo-European models before delving into their astrological functions. The study will demonstrate that multiple calendrical and astrological systems were embedded within the Buddhist tradition that simultaneously preserved anthropomorphized stellar deities which curiously in practice did not explain or even fit into the Buddhist practice of astrology.