astrology

astrology. In India, Buddhism adopted the Hindu scheme of astronomy but rejected the latter's preoccupation with astrology. The position and movement of the celestial bodies was of interest to Buddhists only for pragmatic purposes such as calculating the time of day, the length of the lunar month and its holy days, and the period of retreat during the rainy season. Such skills were especially important in the case of forest-dwelling monks who were cut off from society. Such monks were to learn ‘the positions of the constellations, either the whole or one section, and to know the cardinal points’. Astrology as we know it probably did not exist at the time of the Buddha—it is largely a Greek synthesis of Fertile Crescent star-lore, created around the 3rd or 4th centuries bce. Nevertheless, early sources such as the Brahmajāla Sutta of the Pāli Canon describe numerous techniques of divination including predicting eclipses of the sun, moon, and stars, and forecasting the events they were believed to herald. The Buddha is singled out for praise as one not devoting himself to such ‘low arts’ (tiracchāna-vijjā). Despite this, in practically all Buddhist cultures, monks officiate as advisers to the laity and employ techniques of divination. In south-east Asia the use of horoscopes is widespread among Buddhists, and they are known in Burma as sadā, and as cata in northern Thailand. In the Buddhism of Tibet and central Asia, indigenous shamanistic practices were incorporated with only superficial modifications, and in China a complete system of astrology and divination based on the Book of Changes (I-ching) found an accommodation within Buddhism.