Buddhism believes that such problems will only arise from binary opposition. The Buddha once refused to comment on fourteen questions. Of course, this is not because the Buddha doesn't know how to answer them. The most fundamental reason is that these problems do not help solve our fundamental problems. Basically, he is just cleverly wasting your time (you may not realize it, but you may think you are pursuing the truth).
From the Buddhist point of view, it is very boring to study when the universe was born, or how many kilometers is the distance from the earth to the moon. Of course, there are more boring questions. Some people spend time calculating how many planes Bill Gates owns, how many Titanic movies he has and how many luxury sports cars he can buy. This will surprise Buddhists because it is an amazing waste of time. Buddhists believe that time is a very precious thing and a non-renewable resource, so we should not waste it.
From the Buddhist point of view, finding the first cause is like running along a circle, hoping to reach the end one day. Unfortunately, you will not live to see this day.
Just like when you get an arrow on your ass, all you have to do is pull it out and go to the nearest hospital for medical treatment, instead of thinking about which direction the arrow came from, who made it, when and where it was made, whether the manufacturing process meets the national testing standards, and whether it belongs to the three-no products. Buddhism thinks it doesn't matter.
In Buddhism's view, thinking about when the universe came into being and how the first karma came into being is just like having an arrow in our ass before we have time to think about whether this arrow meets the national testing standards. Buddhism believes that you can't draw a conclusion about this, so Buddhism doesn't encourage you to spend time on it.
If we think that everything has a cause and effect, we can trace it back to the "first cause", but we forget the limitations of observing the whole world. If we compare a seamless circle to the Buddha's realm of observing cause and effect, then we can only observe an arc.
So we can clearly find that our realm will have two points, a starting point and an end point. But in the realm of Buddha, we can't find the beginning and the end. Therefore, the cause and effect known by the Buddha is not as simple as what we know. In the eyes of Buddha, cause is fruit and fruit is cause, but we mistakenly think that cause is cause and fruit is fruit.
When the Buddha told us about the twelve causes, he told us how cause and effect proceed and how life and death cycle. In our realm, the cycle of cause and effect is like the day and night we perceive. If we are confined to a certain point on the earth, day and night are very different. If we can constantly pursue the speed of the earth's rotation, we can always feel the night or the day. If we are farther away from the solar system and the Milky Way, then the realm of the Buddha has transcended the limitations of time and space and has penetrated the truth of the universe. Where is the realm of Buddhism and Taoism, day and night, life and death?
This is the illusion of explaining the "first cause" from the macro world. If we look at our own thoughts from the microscopic world, we will live and die in an instant. When an idea is born, it will die, and when it dies, it will also be born. Therefore, Buddhism uses "continuation" to describe it. That's the way ordinary people think. There is no beginning or end. You will never find the beginning or the end. Some people may say that when people are born, they will have the first thought. That's what people who don't know what "heart" is say. A life from death to Yin, from conception to birth to death, has never been interrupted. Of course, this concept is difficult for ordinary people to understand.
The reason why we now have an illusion of beginning and ending is because our long-term education has given us the opportunity to study history, starting with the existence of human beings at a certain time and the society at a certain time, and then going all the way to our present life era, so as to know the time when human beings originated. But Buddhism does not think so. Buddhism believes that human history has a process from formation to extinction, which is uninterrupted. In other words, in the long river of time, human history has been changed many times. We have always felt that human beings are moving from primitive to progressive, and will certainly continue to develop and progress in the future. We don't know that human beings will perish sooner or later, and a civilization will also perish, and then a new human being and a new civilization will appear and will continue like this.
Therefore, Buddhist scriptures often say, what happened before a robbery when a Buddha was alive? What happened so long ago is actually not a human history with our present human history, and it is hard to say whether it is the same earth. However, it is still difficult to prove the concept of time and space mentioned by Buddha scientifically, because we know that in the material world, the limit of speed is the speed of light, but the vastness of the universe, if measured by the distance of light years, is still indescribable. What's more, what is the realm of "no beginning and no end"?
If someone wants to pursue the "first cause", I'm afraid they will never understand. In fact, they have been beating around the bush for an endless result.