Living with the Devil

by Stephen Batchelor

  In order to “read” Mara, Buddhism developed a theory of four maras:

  the devil of psychophysical existence

  the devil of compulsions

  the devil of death

  the devil who is born of a god

  This classification disentangles Mara’s key features: Mara permeates our physical, emotional, and mental life; he animates the compulsive anxieties and fixations that besiege us; he hovers around us as the imminence of death; he breaks into our lives like a capricious and powerful god. Another mara is sometimes added: the devil of conditioning. This is our biological, social, and psychological history—the drives, conventions, patterns, and habits that urge us to follow the most familiar course of action irrespective of how inappropriate or destructive it might be.

  Yet, no matter how carefully Mara is analyzed and classified, the devil eludes precise definition. By trying to define him, one risks losing sight of him. He slips through the bars of the cage in which one seeks to contain him. His polymorphous perversity is most effectively communicated by representing him figuratively. For a personality alone can contain the puzzle of his awkward multiplicity. In the end, we humans are the only adequate metaphor for the devil.

  Words and concepts are indispensable in order to make sense, but there is something devilish about the way we think and speak. Mara’s snares seem built into the structure of language itself. “A picture held us captive,” reflected Wittgenstein. “And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” By abstracting and isolating something from the complex web of relations in which it exists, concepts enable us to develop illuminating and useful theories about it. But they can also trick us into assuming that their definitions are somehow etched into the fabric of life itself. Having defined my sense of self by enclosing it within a picture, I am liable to assume that “I” am as neatly segregated from the world as the picture’s outline suggests. Rather than helping me see how I am contingent on a multitude of shifting conditions, the concept of self tends to reinforce my sense of being necessary and apart.

  In hardening the difference between Buddha and Mara in order to define them, concepts obscure their symbiotic relationship. Isolating Buddha’s shadow in the person of Mara may have served well as a literary and didactic device, but it allowed the possibility of the two figures becoming further split apart. Over the centuries, this culminated in Buddha’s becoming impossibly perfect and good and Mara’s being marginalized as a mere caricature of evil. Yet what seems evident from the exchanges between Buddha and Mara in the early discourses is how awakening, freedom, and sanity are only intelligible in the context of confusion, constriction, violence, and chaos.

  Mara is Buddha’s devilish twin. Buddha needs to let go of Mara in order to be Buddha. And not just once as an episode in the heroic drama of enlightenment. As long as Buddha lives, he is constantly relinquishing Mara. For Mara is the self to Buddha’s selflessness, the fear to Buddha’s fearlessness, the death to Buddha’s deathlessness. The two are inseparable. Buddha has “become invisible” to Mara, yet Mara still stalks him. Mara addresses Buddha as though he were a stranger, but he is really Gotama’s own conflicted humanity.

  4

  Satan—The Adversary

  AS MARA SCRAMBLES to gain a foothold on those who seek to free themselves from his grip, he assumes any tactic to suit his purposes. The figure who tempts Christ in the wilderness plays the same wily game as does Mara against Buddha. While Satan tempts Jesus to “command this stone that it be made bread,” Mara suggests to Gotama that “he need only resolve that the Himalaya . . . should become gold, and it would become gold.” While Satan promises Christ dominion over all the lands of the world if only he will worship him, Mara entreats Buddha to “exercise rulership righteously: without killing and without instigating others to kill, without confiscating and without instigating others to confiscate, without sorrowing and without instigating others to cause sorrow.”

  In the figure of Mara, Buddhism finds common ground with the monotheistic traditions of the Near East and parts company with the indigenous traditions of India. Except in Buddhist texts, the struggle between good and evil in Indian thought is never consolidated into two polarized figures such as Buddha and Mara. Instead, the powers of evil, death, and destruction are distributed among a number of gods: Yama, lord of death; Kamadeva, god of desire; Shiva, destroyer of the world; Kali, devouring mother; Krishna, divine trickster. Although Buddhists occasionally identified Mara with some of these figures, nowhere does Mara himself appear in Hindu mythology.

  The Buddhist and Abrahamic traditions followed a trend that started with Zarathustra, founder of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, which originated between 1000 and 600 BCE in Persia and spread both east and west. Zarathustra taught how Ohrmazd (God) gave birth to twins. While one twin chose to follow truth, the other—Ahriman (the devil)—chose to follow lies. Zoroastrian texts describe Ahriman as “the Destroyer . . . the accursed destructive spirit who is all wickedness and full of death, a liar and a deceiver.” Ahriman’s opposition to Ohrmazd is the reason human existence is rooted in a primordial tension between the opposing forces of light and darkness, good and evil. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote, “Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things.”

  Whether or not they were influenced by Zoroastrian ideas, the figures of Mara and Satan suggest how Buddhism and the monotheistic faiths grasped the crisis of the individual human self in a broadly similar way. Zarathustra may simply have been the first person to articulate the dilemma of a newly emerging sense of self. As increasingly self-aware and autonomous persons evolved, humans found themselves struggling to cope with the unacceptable drives and desires that besieged them from within as well as the ever-present destructive potential of the natural world and other people. The price of becoming self-conscious was an acutely enhanced awareness of internal and external powers that threaten to overwhelm and destroy one. Since coming to terms with such a self entails confronting its diabolic nature, Buddhism and the monotheistic religions can be understood as different ways of living with the devil.

  Buddhist emphasis on the doctrines of “no-self” and “emptiness” has obscured the extent to which Buddha acknowledged and encouraged the emergence of such selfhood. Gotama’s critique of caste was a call for each person no longer to define him- or herself in terms of their birth but in terms of what they do with their lives. “No one is born a brahmin,” he said. “A brahmin is a brahmin because of what he does.” For the first time in Indian religious literature, the events around Buddha take place in an historic rather than a mythic setting. This is a world where the gods have been deposed and marginalized, leaving fallible humans to confront the tasks of ordering society and finding salvation through their own efforts.

  The Book of Job (composed around 550 BCE, the time of Buddha’s birth) offers a glimpse into a similar world where an ordinary man who is neither a prophet nor a king struggles to understand his own fate. The text tells of how one day the sons of God came to present themselves to Him. Among them was Satan. Asked by God whence he came, Satan said: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” In the Old Testament, Satan is a function and emissary of God rather than a personification of evil. God is conscious of how Satan moves him needlessly to destroy the “perfect and upright” Job. “Put forth thine hand now,” suggests Satan, “and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.” Dispatched by God to tempt this paragon of integrity, Satan “smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.”

  Job’s tormented account of human life as inexplicably, inescapably, and unpredictably painful evokes the sense of Mara as permeating the very stuff of psychophysical existence. Job likewise is besieged by his devilish God: “His troops come together,” he says, “and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my
tabernacle.” No matter whether we understand the driving force of creation as God, gods, karma, or biochemical reactions, it seems to relish waging war against us. At times life itself seems to militate against the fulfillment of our longings. Job cries in despair: “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?” At times there appears no way out of Mara’s snare.

  Both Buddha and Christ are described as “victors” over the devil. After his awakening, Buddha is called a “Mara Conquering Sage,” while through his death Christ destroys “him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil.” The Buddhist nirvana is likewise called the “deathless.” Though embedded in different cultural traditions, Gotama’s struggle with Mara and Jesus’ with Satan point to a common awareness that to be fully human entails coming to terms with a diabolical power that seems to stand in the way of our realizing meaning, truth, and freedom.

  In the mythic worldviews of both traditions, the devil is portrayed as a god who rules the world. In Buddhism, Mara is identified with Kamadeva, the Indian god of desire, who has dominion over the entire sensual realm inhabited by animals, men, and the lesser gods. As Kamadeva, Mara shares in the majesty and luminosity of these gods, which is reflected in his haughtiness. “You are a human being,” says Mara to Buddha,

  whereas I am a god. You will not escape me. Your body is born of a mother and father, a heap of boiled rice and sour milk . . .; while my body is made of mind.

  The Koran likewise tells of how, when God created Adam, he commanded the angels to bow down before his new creation. Satan alone refused. “I am nobler than he,” he says to God. “You created me from fire, but you created him from clay.” As a result of his pride, he is banished by God from heaven but then reprieved until the day of resurrection. “Lord,” says Satan, “since You have seduced me, I will tempt mankind on earth.” He then proceeds to “cunningly seduce” Adam and Eve in paradise.

  John’s gospel describes the devil as the “ruler of this world.” In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul calls Satan “the god [theos] of this age [aion].” He spells out the implications to his followers in Ephesus:

  We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of the present darkness, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.

  This rich metaphorical language is a way of talking about all the despotic and pervasive forces that constrain our lives. We can understand the devil as those intimidating fiscal, social, political, and religious powers, which we reify into such entities as the Economy, Society, the Government, or the Church, and then treat as though they possessed a personal agency that has the power to condemn or destroy us.

  “For the demonic,” reflects the theologian Paul Tillich, “is the elevation of something conditional to unconditional significance.” Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created. Whether it be an ego, a nation-state, or a religious belief, the result is the same. This distortion severs such things from their embeddedness in the complexities, fluidities, and ambiguities of the world and makes them appear as simple, fixed, and unambiguous entities with the power to condemn or save us. Far from being consciously chosen by individuals, such perceptions seem wired into the structure of our psychological, social, religious, and biological makeup.

  In their own ways, Buddhism and Christianity affirm the extraordinary power and extent of the devil’s reach. Christ’s victory over Satan is all the more moving when understood as the overthrowing of these “principalities and powers” in their totality. In completely surrendering himself with love to the potent and destructive contingencies of his historical existence, Jesus breaks with the demonic and heralds the possibility of a radically new way of being. In accepting his destiny, he knows that he “must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed and after three days rise again.” When Peter tries to dissuade him from this course, he says, “Get behind me, Satan.”

  Far from being God’s agent, as he was for Job, by the time of the New Testament, Satan has become a fallen angel. The Book of Revelation describes how “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” has been cast out of heaven to rule hell. Jesus himself declares that he “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” As Kamadeva, a long-lived but nonetheless mortal god, Mara too will descend to lower realms on account of his evil acts. Such was the fate of a previous Mara, called Dusin, who “fell bodily into the great hell of Avici.” Another myth, reported by the eleventh-century Tibetan Gampopa, tells of how Mara already “dwells five hundred miles below this earth” in the form of Yama, the lord of death.

  In John Milton’s seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost, Satan is presented as the rebel angel who mounts an insurrection against God because he cannot tolerate the idea of being subordinate to Christ. At the root of his rebellion lies the conceit that he is eternal: “We know no time,” he declares to his fellow gods, “when we were not as now.” Instead of being created and contingent, he is convinced they are necessary and autonomous: “self-begot, self-raised / By our own quick’ning power.” As the rebellion gains force, his head bursts into flame and from its left side his daughter Sin is born. Satan falls in love with his “perfect image,” and their incestuous union produces a son called Death, who then rapes his mother to beget a host of “yelling Monsters.” Driven out of heaven by Christ, Satan is banished to hell, where he vows to corrupt humanity, God’s new creation.

  The devil assumes the form of the serpent who tricks Eve into eating the forbidden fruit by persuading her that it will transform her into a god just as it elevated him into an articulate snake. Out of sympathy for Eve, Adam tastes the intoxicating fruit so that both “swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings.” But the self-indulgent ecstasy wears off, and they recognize the tragic condition into which they have fallen.

  They sat them down to weep, nor only Tears

  Rain’d at their Eyes, but high Winds worse within

  Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate,

  Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore

  Their inward state of Mind, calm Region once

  And full of Peace, now tost and turbulent.

  Satan is in perpetual rebellion against God; Mara is in ceaseless struggle with Buddha. The psychological root of this rebellion is the conceit of being a static self, severed from all relationship, that renders intolerable the notion that we might be contingent on anything but our own innate power. This alienation engenders restlessness and strife, in which we lurch from arrogance to despair. Just as Milton’s Satan generates his daughter Sin, so Mara fathers his daughters Craving, Discontent, and Lust. And just as Satan and his daughter gave birth to Death, so Mara and his daughters drive the cycle of existence that repeatedly hurls us into birth only for Yama to cut us down at death.

  The devil is the contradictoriness of our nature. As soon as we make a foolhardy commitment to “enlightenment” or “salvation,” we start being torn apart by diabolic forces we only dimly understand and can scarcely control. For when we choose to follow a path that Buddha described as “going against the stream,” we choose to confront those fears and desires that hitherto we had either repressed or acted out. Like someone who has been swimming downstream with minimal effort only to discover how exhausting, uncomfortable, and unrewarding it is to swim against the current, so one who embarks on such a path will invariably encounter a legion of obstacles.

  The devil extends from that inner enemy who voices our most private doubts, conceits, and loathings to that outer enemy who afflicts us with disease, terrorizes us with real and imagined dangers, and ultimately kills us. Each time we feel ourselves slipping into temptation or paralyzed by the collapse of the stock market, we notice the devil at play. But the devil is never alone. For
just as there can be no shadow without a body to cast it, there can be no devil without a buddha (an awake one) to know him. The destruction of “this last enemy,” writes the Church father Origen of Alexandria, “will not be its nonexistence, but its ceasing to be an enemy and death.”

  5

  Boredom and Violence

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S genius was to recast the Christian myth of the devil in the light of the emerging plight of an alienated and skeptical human consciousness. While mourning the end of the classical age that had nurtured Dante and Milton, Baudelaire anticipated with resignation a modernity that was crystallizing in his own person. He understood the devil as an intrusive, unsettling presence in the heart of a secular, introverted culture. Among the “yapping, yelling, groaning, creeping monsters,” he detects “one more ugly still, more evil, more foul!”

  Who makes no grand gestures or cries,

  He would happily wreck the earth

  And swallow the world in a yawn.

  “It’s Boredom [l’Ennui]!” he declares, “that sensitive monster,” a compound of frustration and annoyance that switches between maudlin self-pity and distracted reverie. This is a modern variant of what Buddha called dukkha: the fearful anguish knit into our mortal condition.

  Baudelaire’s collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857) struck that keynote of contemporary anguish which haunts much of the literature and philosophy written since. In Kafka and Beckett, Kierkegaard and Sartre, we find the same brooding disquiet. Baudelaire’s poems are the first steps on the path that leads to the splintered nihilism of The Waste Land and American Psycho.

  The mid-nineteenth-century concept of evil still carried echoes of the theological distinction between “natural” and “moral” evil. “Natural evil” referred to all the ills and catastrophes that befell you in life, while “moral evil” denoted the thoughts, words, and deeds associated with sin, suffering, and death. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a sense of natural evil has all but been lost. To describe diseases or floods as “evils” sounds strained and archaic. Even in its moral sense, “evil” has mutated into a term of moralistic revulsion, used to condemn those who commit acts we abhor. Baudelaire speaks with such clarity because his verses illuminate that modern conception of evil as a failing of the self rather than a feature of reality itself.