ABSTRACT
TACHIBANA NANKEI WROTE how when he looked through a microscope, he found himself inclined to thoughts that shook his every expectation. Nankei’s words, recorded in 1795, were quoted as the epigraph to this book. 1 The doctor had discovered myriad forms of life inhabiting a single drop of water, and in his amazement he went on to wonder whether the converse might not be true, that vastness was also without measure. The proposition itself was not new. Buddhism is nothing if not sophisticated in cosmological span, and it accepts no limitations of scale in that direction. But Nankei went on to putate something more: the existence of a far-off being, located within the boundlessness of space and staring at the universe as if it were a droplet, through a lens of galactic reach.
