Form Realm (Rūpadhātu)
The Rūpadhātu (Pāli: Rūpaloka; Tib: gzugs kyi khams) or "Form realm" is, as the name implies, the first of the physical realms;
its inhabitants all have a location and bodies of a sort, though those bodies are composed of a subtle substance which is of itself invisible to the inhabitants of the Kāmadhātu.
According to the Janavasabha Sutta, when a brahma (a being from the Brahma-world of the Rūpadhātu) wishes to visit a deva of the Trāyastriṃ¶a heaven (in the Kāmadhātu), he has to assume a "grosser form" in order to be visible to them.
There are 17-22 Rūpadhātu in Buddhism texts, the most common saying is 18.
The beings of the Form realm are not subject to the extremes of pleasure and pain, or governed by desires for things pleasing to the senses, as the beings of the Kāmadhātu are.
The bodies of Form realm beings do not have sexual distinctions.
Like the beings of the Ārūpyadhātu, the dwellers in the Rūpadhātu have minds corresponding to the dhyānas (Pāli: jhānas) (blissful mental states).
In their case it is the four lower dhyānas or rūpadhyānas.
However, although the beings of the Rūpadhātu can be divided into four broad grades corresponding to these four dhyānas,
each of them is subdivided into further grades, three for each of the four dhyānas
and five for the ¦uddhāvāsa devas, for a total of seventeen grades (the Theravāda tradition counts one less grade in the highest dhyāna for a total of sixteen).
Physically, the Rūpadhātu consists of a series of planes stacked on top of each other, each one in a series of steps half the size of the previous one as one descends.
In part, this reflects the fact that the devas are also thought of as physically larger on the higher planes.
The highest planes are also broader in extent than the ones lower down, as discussed in the section on Sahasra cosmology.
The height of these planes is expressed in yojanas, a measurement of very uncertain length, but sometimes taken to be about 4,000 times the height of a man, and so approximately 4.54 miles (7.31 km) or 7.32 kilometers.
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