The early Indians and Greeks speculated about the nature, origin and extent of the universe. Anaximander, a Greek thinker of the 6th century B.C. is supposed to have contemplated the possibility of “innumerable worlds” successively coming out of (and passing away) into an indefinite substance. About a century later, the Greek atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, who postulated the existence of innumerable atoms and an infinite void, conceived of worlds coming-to-be and passing away throughout the void. These speculations were the product of imagination and reason and the “worlds” they talked of were mere reproductions of the earth and the heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon and the stars.
The early Buddhist texts summarise their views according to the Buddhist logic of four alternatives. With regard to the extent of the universe, the following four types of views were current: (1) Those who held that the universe was finite in all dimensions, (2) those who held that the universe was infinite in all dimensions, (3) those who held that the universe was finite in some dimensions and infinite in others and (4) those who rejected all the above three views and held that the universe was neither finite nor infinite.
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