Giordano Bruno motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis; he also preserved the notion of an immobile center, but it was the Sun rather than the Earth. Copernicus also argued the Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun once every year. However he maintained the Ptolemaic hypothesis that the orbits of the planets were composed of perfect circles—deferents and epicycles—and that the stars were fixed on a stationary outer sphere. Despite the widespread publication of Copernicus' work "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium", during Bruno's time most educated Catholics subscribed to the Aristotelian
Bodhisattvas of the Earth more references to the Lotus Sutra in his commentaries than any other sutras. His commentaries focused primarily on the 15th (Emerging from the Earth) and 16th (Life Span) Chapters of the Lotus Sutra. Dōgen made numerous speculations about the significance of the bodhisattvas who emerged from the underground. As conceived by Dōgen, the stories of the underground bodhisattvas and the Buddha's inconceivable life-span serve as a fundamental shift in the development of East Asian Mahayana understanding of Buddhahood, an immediate attainment based on fundamental awakening rather than an achievement based on lifetimes of arduous practice. This can be conceived as