Very Buddhist, RightWhale: It postulates an eternal universe (a universe that did not have a beginning), that just always is, waxing and waning forever.
But my point would be this: Everything that we know about in a scientific way, that is, what we can observe, demonstrate, falsify, is an existent of the space-time continuum. As Jeff Barbour writes:
Cosmologists tell us that at one time there was no universe as we know it. Whatever existed before that time was null and void -- beyond all conception. Why? Well there are a couple answers to that question -- the philosophic answer for instance: Because before the universe took form there was nothing to conceive of, with, or even about. But there's also a scientific answer and that answer comes down to this: Before the Big Bang there was no space-time continuum -- the immaterial medium through which all things energy and matter move.
To assert there was some sort of entity (i.e., the universal vacuum) that we associate with existence in space-time existing "prior" to the Big Bang (an event that has been well validated by studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation) effectively boils down to a "faith statement" -- for there is simply no way the statement can be falsified.
What we know about the evolution of the universe we know by "reversing the arrow of time" and going back and back, as close as we can get to the event of the Big Bang itself, and applying the physical laws to explain what we observe in this sort-of "reverse-engineering" process. And what we find is that the physical laws "break down" in the first moment of Planck time immediately following the Big Bang. Thus we have no tools to tell us anything, really, about the exact nature of the Big Bang, e.g., of what it consisted, etc., let alone its source. At best all we can have is a conjecture -- but there would be no way to qualify it as factually true.
To put it another way, the Big Bang is at "time-zero," T0; from T0 to T1 is the "Planck era" -- that first infinitessimally teensy "moment" of spacetime.
Your "Buddhist model" wants to say that there was a T-0 in which the Big Bang was "set up." And then time began to run (to to speak), from T-0 to T0 to T1 to Tn.... But our scientific tools only kick in at T1 and following Ts.
FBO our Lurkers, the Planck length is roughly equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m or about 10-20 times the size of a proton.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to travel a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the ‘quantum of time’, the smallest measurement of time equal to 10-43 seconds.
No smaller division of time has any meaning. Within the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10-43 seconds.
And so we don't know -- and can't find out -- anything about the "before" Big Bang scenario in principle.
We may conjecture away to our heart's content; but we'd be unable to scientifically demonstrate that conjecture.
Which is why I said earlier that such a conjecture actually does have the character of a "faith statement," every bit as much as "divine creation ex nihilo" has the character of a "faith statement."
It is likely that one or the other is actually true. But science has no way to tell us which.
Well, FWIW. Thanks so much for writing, RightWhale! Neither statement is falsifiable, demonstrable.
This, according to theoretical physicist Kaku is what has been happening since 1968. The string theory was intuited then {at CERN} from the Euler Beta function, born fully grown in all its 10 or 26 dimensions and perfect, and since then the theory has been back-filled. This the reverse of the way science is supposed to be done and is why it took so long for string theory to get rolling. Now, of course, every academic institution is fully mobilized with young string theorists. Now there are millions of good solutions of which our universe bubble is one.
The smallest length possible. There is nothing smaller.
Or, the physics of lengths greater than the Planck length is matched perfectly by the physics of inverses {1 over} of lengths. Our entire universe might be an inverse and be contained inside a single Planck length. This would encode the entire universe {a google of information bits} in a single Planck length, which we might then play back on a cosmic CD at will.
Indeed, even a pre-Big Bang vaccum cannot exist absent a space/time structure, a geometry. The same is true of all fields - which are defined as existing at all points in space/time. Ditto for strings which current theory suggests may emerge from geometry (Geometry and String Theory).
Likewise, in all multi-verse, cyclic, ekpyrotic (or other branes) and imaginary time models - geometry must precede all else. Thus there is always a beginning! That is the most theological statement ever to come out of science (Jastrow) and the implication of it (IMHO) is why scientists such as Steinhardt consider it to be a failing of all such models.
The only parallel universe model which is closed is the Level IV model proposed by Max Tegmark. It is closed because all existents in four dimensional space/time are actually mathematical structures in higher dimensionality (non spatial, non temporal, non corporeal). It is a radical Platonist view - but it fits the evidence best. All other theories fail to address the unreasonable effectiveness of math (Wigner, Vafa).