History of the center of the Universe the center of a spherical, stationary Earth, around which the sun, moon, planets, and stars rotate. With the development of the heliocentric model by Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century, the sun was believed to be the center of the Universe, with the planets (including Earth) and stars orbiting it. In the early 20th century, the discovery of other galaxies and the development of the Big Bang theory led to the development of cosmological models of a homogeneous, isotropic Universe (which lacks a central point) that is expanding at all points. In religion or mythology, the "axis mundi" (also cosmic
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