It is an uncanny coincidence that around two and a half millennia ago, ancients from civilisation apart, unaware of each other, told us remarkably similar things about existence, reality, stuff like that. They relied on nothing more than the power of human perception and contemplation.
The Buddha, aka Siddartha Gautama (c. 563 - c.483 BCE) realised without microscope or telescope that there are tens of thousands of bugs in a single drop of water, and that there are countless worlds out there. These amazing realisations took us another two thousand years to verify. A central tenet of his philosophy is that reality isn’t what it seems to be, and that all dharma is the result of our “heart”, perception, desire. The Buddha taught us repeatedly that there really — or not really — is nothing out there. The concept must have been wildly incredible before quantum mechanics.
His contemporary way over in China Lao Zi (aka Lao Tsu, c. 571 - c.471 BCE) gave a similar worldview in 5000 words — all that he had left in writing. The opening sentence in his Dao De Jing is “The Dao that can be explained is not the real Dao.” Nature’s way, the Dao, absolute reality, is far beyond the paltry capabilities of human languages. Dao just is, but sorry, not necessarily the way we think it is. We might laugh, as he predicted: “On hearing the Dao, a wise man would practice; an average man would be baffled; the idiot would laugh it off.” Ha.
