About the doctrine of the 31 realms of existence. I have a few questions, because science, especially the theory of evolution, makes a good argument for categorizing humans as animals.
- Is this list of 31 realms static or can single realms vanish? Because due to science we know that this earth won't last forever. This would mean, that there are no animals or humans anymore, unless a similar species lives on another planet somewhere in this universe (which is very, very, very unlikely if you consider the set of condition it took of several billion years to evolve humans).
- The theory of evolution proofs, that humans have evolved from animals and just use different techniques for surviving as every other species as well. So knowing that there was a time of transition, where there only existed primordial human beings, how could you at that time say if it was a human or an animal? How can you cross that line between one species (humans) and every other one? Because it is sure, that in the next few 100.000 years humans will have evolved to a totally different species according to the conditions in the environment.
So how should you understand this classification of beings. Is it just a provisional and time-dependent concept? Or is it only related to the degree of suffering, which predominate each realm?
I know on this topic are already many questions. But none of these related to this particular question. So please don't tag as duplicate.