Mount Meru and the world-system

Mount Meru (Pali Sineru, Sanskrit Sumeru) is the cosmic mountain that traditional Indian thought placed at the very center of the world. This picture is not uniquely Buddhist: Hindus and Jains describe their own versions of it, all three traditions inheriting it from the same ancient Indian matrix, so each speaks of a towering axis around which the universe is arranged. In the Buddhist version, Meru rises from a great ocean, is encircled by rings of seas and golden mountains, and is flanked by four continents in the four cardinal directions. Our human world is the southern continent, Jambudvīpa ("the rose-apple land").

Stacked up the slopes and above the summit are the heavens where long-lived gods (devas) dwell, and below are lower, darker rebirth-states. So Meru is less a piece of geography than a map of the whole rebirth-cosmos: a vertical ladder of better and worse places one can be reborn into, all shaped by the moral weight of one's past actions (karma).

It helps to read this map for what it meant rather than as a claim about a physical mountain. Even the high heavenly stations on Meru are still inside the wheel of birth and death; the gods there enjoy enormously long lives, but they too eventually die and are reborn elsewhere. The point of the image is that no spot on the cosmic mountain, however exalted, is a final refuge. Genuine freedom lies not in climbing higher within the system but in stepping off the wheel altogether through awakening.