The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments, and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the childhood parent images and ideas of “good” and “evil” have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the gods, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world.

  Come [therefore], and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.[121]

  This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are (as phrased in the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad) “two halves of a split pea”;[122] whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the division of sex: the pronoun “He” was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find.

  The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life — which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva’s renunciation of nirvāṇa. Briefly, nirvāṇa means “the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion.” As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree (see above, pp. 24–25) the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally “Desire-Hostility,” or “Love and Death,” the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāṇa.

  “The verb nirvā (Sanskrit) is, literally, ‘to blow out,’ not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw....Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is ‘pacified,’ i.e., quenched, when the mind has been curbed, one attains to the ‘peace of Nirvana,’ ‘despiration in God.’... It is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached, of which it is well said in another tradition that ‘it passeth understanding’”[123]The word “de-spiration” is contrived from a literal Latinization of the Sanskrit nirvāṇa, nir = “out, forth, outward, out of, out from, away, away from”; vāṇa = “blown”; nirvāṇa = “blown out, gone out, extinguished.”

  Having subdued within himself to the critical point of the ultimate ember the Threefold Fire, which is the moving power of the universe, the Savior beheld reflected, as in a mirror all around him, the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings — the will to live according to the normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends, and means. He was assailed by the last fury of the disregarded flesh. And this was the moment on which all depended; for from one coal could arise again the whole conflagration.

  This greatly celebrated legend affords an excellent example of the close relationship maintained in the Orient between myth, psychology, and metaphysics. The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds. No doubt the reader has been struck by a certain resemblance of this ancient mythological doctrine of the dynamics of the psyche to the teachings of the modern Freudian school. According to the latter, the life-wish (eros or libido, corresponding to the Buddhist Kāma, “desire”) and the death-wish (thanatos or destrudo, which is identical with the Buddhist Māra, “hostility or death”) are the two drives that not only move the individual from within but also animate for him the surrounding world.[124] Moreover, the unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidyā). Yet the aims of the two teachings — the traditional and the modern — are not exactly the same.

  Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. But for the one who has deliberately undertaken the difficult and dangerous journey beyond the village compound, these interests, too, are to be regarded as based on error. Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not by readjusting the desire (eros) and hostility (thanatos) — for that would only originate a new context of delusion — but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root, according to the method of the celebrated Buddhist Eightfold Path:

  Right Belief, Right Intentions,

  Right Speech, Right Actions,

  Right Livelihood, Right Endeavoring,

  Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.

  With the final “extirpation of delusion, desire, and hostility” (nirvāṇa) the mind knows that it is not what it thought: thought goes. The mind rests in its true state. And here it may dwell until the body drops away.

  Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble,

  A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud:

  Thus we should look upon all that was made.[125]

  The Bodhisattva, however, does not abandon life. Turning his regard from the inner sphere of thought-transcending truth (which can be described only as “emptiness,” since it surpasses speech) outward again to the phenomenal world, he perceives without the same ocean of being that he found within. “Form is emptiness, emptiness indeed is form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form, that is emptiness; what is emptiness, that is form. And the same applies to perception, name, conception, and knowledge.”[126] Having surpassed the delusions of his formerly self-assertive, self-defensive, self-concerned ego, he knows without and within the same repose. What he beholds without is the visual aspect of the magnitudinous, thought-transcending emptiness on which his own experiences of ego, form, perceptions, speech, conceptions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. And this is his great “compassionate act”; for by it the truth is revealed that in the understanding of one in whom the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion is dead, this world is nirvāṇa. “Gift waves” go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. “This our worldly life is an activity of nirvāṇa itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them.”[127]

  And so it may be said that the modern therapeutic goal of the cure back to life is attained through the ancient religious discipline, after all; only the circle traveled by the Bodhisattva is a large one; and the departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won concerning the deep emptiness of the universal round. Such an ideal
is well known, also, to Hinduism: the one freed in life (jīvan mukta), desireless, compassionate, and wise, “with the heart concentrated by yoga, viewing all things with equal regard, beholds himself in all beings and all beings in himself. In whatever way he leads his life, that one lives in God.”[128]

  Figure 35. Bodhidharma (paint on silk, Japan, sixteenth century a.d.)

  The story is told of a Confucian scholar who besought the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch, Bodhidharma, “to pacify his soul.” Bodhidharma retorted, “Produce it and I will pacify it.” The Confucian replied, “That is my trouble, I cannot find it.” Bodhidharma said, “Your wish is granted.” The Confucian understood and departed in peace.[129]

  Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals. The Taoist landscape paintings of China and Japan depict supremely the heavenliness of this terrestrial state. The four benevolent animals, the phoenix, the unicorn, the tortoise, and the dragon, dwell amongst the willow gardens, the bamboos, and the plums, and amid the mists of sacred mountains, close to the honored spheres. Sages, with craggy bodies but spirits eternally young, meditate among these peaks, or ride curious, symbolic animals across immortal tides, or converse delightfully over teacups to the flute of Lan Ts’ai-ho.

  The mistress of the earthly paradise of the Chinese immortals is the fairy goddess Hsi Wang Mu, “The Golden Mother of the Tortoise.” She dwells in a palace on the K’un-lun Mountain, which is surrounded by fragrant flowers, battlements of jewels and a garden wall of gold.* She is formed of the pure quintessence of the western air. Her quests at her periodical “Feast of the Peaches” (celebrated when the peaches ripen, once in every six thousand years) are served by the Golden Mother’s gracious daughters, in bowers and pavilions by the Lake of Gems. Waters play there from a remarkable fountain. Phoenix marrow, dragon liver, and other meats are tasted; the ­peaches and the wine bestow immortality. Music from invisible instruments is heard, songs that are not from mortal lips; and the dances of the visible damsels are the manifestations of the joy of eternity in time.[130]

  Figure 36. Tea Ceremony: Abode of Vacancy (photograph by Joseph Campbell, Japan, a.d. 1958)

  The tea ceremonies of Japan are conceived in the spirit of the Taoist earthly paradise. The tearoom, called “the abode of fancy,” is an ephemeral structure built to enclose a moment of poetic intuition. Called too “the abode of vacancy,” it is devoid of ornamentation. Temporarily it contains a single picture or flower-arrangement. The teahouse is called “the abode of the unsymmetrical”: the unsymmetrical suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour.

  The guest approaches by the garden path, and must stoop through the low entrance. He makes obeisance to the picture or flower-arrangement, to the singing kettle, and takes his place on the floor. The simplest object, framed by the controlled simplicity of the teahouse, stands out in mysterious beauty, its silence holding the secret of temporal existence. Each guest is permitted to complete the experience in relation to himself. The members of the company thus contemplate the universe in miniature, and become aware of their hidden fellowship with the immortals.

  The great tea masters were concerned to make of the divine wonder an experienced moment; then out of the teahouse the influence was carried into the home; and out of the home distilled into the nation.[131] During the long and peaceful Tokugawa period (1603–1868), before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine. Similarly, throughout the Orient, throughout the ancient world, and in the pre-Columbian Americas, society and nature represented to the mind the inexpressible. “The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protect us,” declared an old Apache storyteller, “and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us.”[132] This is what the Buddhist calls “the sermon of the inanimate.”

  Figure 37. Liṅgam-yonī (carved stone, Vietnam, c. ninth century a.d.)

  A certain Hindu ascetic who lay down to rest beside the holy Ganges placed his feet up on a Śiva-symbol (a “liṅgam-yonī,” a combined phallus and vulva, symbolizing the union of the God with his Spouse). A passing priest observed the man reposing thus and rebuked him. “How can you dare to profane this symbol of God by resting your feet on it?” demanded the priest. The ascetic replied, “Good sir, I am sorry; but will you kindly take my feet and place them where there is no such sacred liṅgam?” The priest seized the ankles of the ascetic and lifted them to the right, but when he set them down a phallus sprang from the ground and they rested as before. He moved them again; another phallus received them. “Ah, I see!” said the priest, humbled; and he made obeisance to the reposing saint and went his way.

  The third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely, the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her darkness and his light.[133] We are conceived in her and dwell removed from the father, but when we pass from the womb of time at death (which is our birth to eternity) we are given into his hands. The wise realize, even within this womb, that they have come from and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.

  Figure 38. Kālī Astride Śiva (gouache on paper, India, date uncertain)

  Comparatively, the Hindu goddess Kālī[134] is shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. What Jung, drawing on the language of alchemy, called the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of the great union, is a standard motif in myths throughout the world, but particularly in the Orient. The Hindu goddess Kālī is frequently shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the devotee that he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it. The gestures of “fear not” and “bestowing boons” teach that she protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal “goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind — as the goddess herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his blissful dream.

  Beneath the goddess of the Island of Jewels[135] two aspects of the god are represented: the one, face upward, in union with her, is the creative, world-enjoying aspect; but the other, turned away, is the deus absconditus, the divine essence in and by itself, beyond event and change, inactive, dormant, void, beyond even the wonder of the hermaphroditic mystery. [136]

  This is the meaning of those Tibetan images of the union of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their own feminine aspects that have seemed so indecent to many Christian critics. According to one of the traditional ways of looking at these supports of meditation, the female form (Tibetan: yum) is to be regarded as time and the male (yab) as eternity. The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female God. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. Or on the other hand, the male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads. But this goal is nirvāṇa (eternity). And so it is that both the male and the female are to be envisioned, alternately, as time and eternity. That is to say, the two are the same, each is both, and the dual form (yab-yum) is only an effect of illusion, which itself, however, is not diff
erent from enlightenment.

  This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created him male and female. In the male’s right hand is held a thunderbolt that is the counterpart of himself, while in his left he holds a bell, symbolizing the goddess. The thunderbolt is both the method and eternity, whereas the bell is “illumined mind”; its note is the beautiful sound of eternity that is heard by the pure mind throughout creation, and therefore within itself.[137]

  Precisely the same bell is rung in the Christian Mass at the moment when God, through the power of the words of the consecration, descends into the bread and wine. And the Christian reading of the meaning also is the same: Et Verbum caro factum est,* i.e., “The Jewel is in the Lotus”: Om mani padme hum.

  Compare the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad, 1:4, describing the hero who has reached the Brahmā-world: “Just as one driving a chariot looks down upon the two chariot wheels, thus he looks down upon day and night, thus upon good deeds and evil deeds, and upon all the pairs of opposites. This one, devoid of good deeds, devoid of evil deeds, a knower of God, unto very God he goes.”

  In this section the following have been equated:

  The Void The World

  Eternity Time

  Nirvāṇa Saṃsāra

  Truth Illusoriness

  Enlightenment Compassion

  The God The Goddess

  The Enemy The Friend

  Death Birth

  The Thunderbolt The Bell

  The Jewel The Lotus

  Subject Object

  Yab Yum

  Yang Yin

  Tao

  Supreme Buddha

  Bodhisattva

  Jīvan Mukta

  The Word Made Flesh

  6. The Ultimate Boon