Monk, monk, do not disbelieve him; for this Brahma is the Great Brahma, the Overlord, the Untranscended, of Infallible Vision, Wielder of Mastery, Lord Maker and Creator, Most High Providence, Master and Father of those that are and ever can be.
Mara warns that Buddha will fall into a deep chasm should he fail to heed the command of such a being. The devil appears as an echo of Gotama’s own doubt that he might suffer divine retribution should he persist in denying the claims of this god. Buddha is unmoved and replies, “I know you, Evil One. You are Mara, and the Brahma and his Assembly . . . have all fallen into your hands, . . . but I have not fallen into your power.” In recognizing how the divine and demonic are intertwined, Buddha rejects Brahma’s boasts with the same insouciance as he dismisses Mara’s threats.
Buddha in his freedom is beyond the reach of either divine or demonic influence, but his incarnation in human history is mediated through gods and devils. Although nirvana may be beyond good and evil, as soon as Buddha stirs from its transcendent ease, he is confronted with the inescapable polarities of moral life. First we find him resting in nirvanic peace; then a “god” intervenes to incite him to compassion; then he decides to head for Benares (Varanasi) to teach his former ascetic companions. Each step takes him further into the ambiguities and vicissitudes of life. His incarnation originates in formlessness, coalesces as polarized images or ideas, then breaks into the sensual world as speech and acts that have repercussions he cannot foresee.
Buddha cannot be adequately understood by describing his state of mind at the moment of awakening any more than Mozart can be understood by describing his state of mind at the moment he is inspired to compose a symphony. To understand either the saint or the artist, that initial, formless moment has to be imaginatively transformed into concrete images or sounds in time and space that are meaningful to others. Mozart first “hears” something in the silence of his own mind, then transcribes it into musical notation so it can be interpreted and played by musicians. Likewise, Buddha undergoes an awakening in silent contemplation beneath a tree, then translates it into ideas so it can be interpreted and practiced by men and women.
The way in which a formless insight achieves abstract and then concrete form is the rhythm of incarnation. Tragically, this rhythm rarely unfolds as freely and luminously as we imagine it did for Buddha and Mozart. When snared by Mara, incarnation is blocked by opaque concepts of self, distorted by compulsive behavior we find hard to resist, shackled by the constraints of a dying body. We rage at our incapacity to express the sublime feelings and intuitions that move us in our wordless depths. The imagery we seek eludes us and we lapse into tired expressions borrowed from others.
The unfolding process of incarnation is captured in Roland Barthes’ comment, “who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.” What we are is mysterious. The peculiar sense of being here at all, of not being dead, is the most intimate, ineffable, universal, and ecstatic experience we know. At best it can be articulated as an astonished “What?” or “Who?” or “Why?” As thinking creatures, we puzzle over our fate and try to make sense of it. We write poems and essays, compose music, paint pictures, take photos, read books, hold earnest conversations, go to art galleries, play violins, listen to Mozart. The one who does these things is a step removed from the one who sits in meditation waiting for the next inbreath. And the one who shaves each morning and berates the cat is a step removed from the one who writes essays on Buddhist theology.
“It’s Borges, the other one,” reflects the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, “that things happen to.” Whereas
I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause—mechanically now perhaps—to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares these preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into accoutrements of an actor.
These parallel beings glide in and out of focus as we pass through the hours and days that make up our lives. Our buddha, gods, and devils rub shoulders with each other. One moment, we are resting in stunned astonishment that there is anything at all; the next, we are composing a line of poetry; and the next, we are tying our shoelaces. Borges concludes his reflection by confessing, “I am not sure which one of us is writing this page.”
20
A Culture of Awakening
WHATEVER RUDIMENTS of a system Gotama may have worked out in his solitude beneath the bodhi tree, how could he have foreseen the questions and objections that his audience would put to him? As soon as he faced others and began speaking, he would have been confronted by a torrent of unpredictable contingencies to which he had to respond in ways that satisfied his listeners’ concerns yet stayed true to the inner compass of his own understanding. Rather than imagining the dharma as a detailed blueprint preformed in Buddha’s mind, waiting to be implanted in the passive minds of disciples, the culture of awakening to which he gave birth arose gradually and haphazardly from the interactions between himself and his world.
Without this interaction, neither Buddha nor his vision would have become incarnate. Gotama would have been just another forgotten Indian sage. One cannot achieve incarnation in a specific time and place without assuming the forms of that time and place. To be intelligible to others, even as one challenges their most cherished beliefs, entails that one speak in terms they understand. Sympathetic empathy required that Buddha operate within the linguistic, cultural, and social paradigms of his time. The price of compassion was to make a pact with the devil: Buddha had to enclose an intuition of what is limitless and signless within conceptual limits and signs, to clothe the “timeless” dharma in the timebound garb of ancient India.
In contrast to popular images of Buddha surrounded by an entourage of monks who hang on his every word, some of the earliest discourses in Pali present him as a solitary figure who wanders from place to place and encourages his followers to be independent of him. Traditionally, a Buddhist monk would spend only five years in the company of his preceptor before going off on his own. “Wander forth, O monks,” said Buddha,
for the welfare of the multitude, for the happiness of the multitude, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans. Let no two go the same way.
Each monk had to make his way through the world on his own, only regrouping with his brethren in shelters during the monsoon period. “The sage who wanders alone,” said Buddha, “is like the wind that is not caught in a net, like the lotus not soiled by water, leading others but not led by them.”
On another occasion, Buddha recalls how he once felt so “hemmed in” by his followers that he found himself “in discomfort and not at ease.” So after taking lunch, he tidied his lodgings and “without informing his attendant or taking leave of the order of monks, he set off alone, without a companion.” Then he settled in a forest at the foot of a sal tree. Not only does he encourage his followers to find their own way in the world, when their company becomes overbearing, he slips off into the woods to escape the pressures of communal life. “To become independent of others” was considered by Buddha to be a characteristic of the person who has gained firsthand understanding of the dharma and thereby entered the path.
Over time, this model of autonomous self-reliance largely gave way to settled monastic institutions. But Buddha’s own preference was clear. He urged his followers to disperse rather than congregate. Communal life was a useful expedient for training and periodic reflection, but only as long as it strengthened each individual’s capacity to be fully in the world but not of it. The responsibility of the itinerant monk was twofold: to realize nirvana in the still depths of his own solitude and to foster a culture of awakening through his interactions with others.
No matter how many safeguards Buddha put
in place to prevent it, nothing seems able to resist life’s diabolic drift toward structures that enclose and limit. What starts out as a liberating vision risks mutating into an ideological force for preserving a status quo or securing the interests of an elite. Therapeutic practices harden into foolproof techniques; loose-knit communities ossify into oppressive institutions. The difference between idea and ideology, practice and technique, community and institution is blurred and organic. The former slide imperceptibly into the latter. In the ideas, practices, and precepts taught by Buddha lie the seeds of subsequent Buddhist ideologies, technologies, and institutions. These enclosing structures start to crystallize whenever a configuration of ideas, practices, and ways of life reaches a critical mass of size and power. They seem as much due to the systemic perversity of samsara as the conscious intentions of any one individual to contrive them.
When Buddha was seventy-two years old, his Judas-like cousin Devadatta rebelled against his authority and attempted to take control of the community of monks. In the figure of Devadatta, Mara becomes incarnate as the ideological and institutional shadow of Buddhism. Having spent the past forty-three years taunting Buddha from within, Mara now tries to destroy him from without.
Having failed to persuade Buddha to retire on grounds of age and hand control of the community over to him, Devadatta ordered his follower King Ajatasattu to “send some men to take the monk Gotama’s life.” When this attempt failed, Devadatta took it upon himself to murder his cousin. He climbed to the top of Vulture’s Peak outside Rajagaha (Rajgir), in whose shade Buddha was walking alone, and hurled a boulder over the edge. Although the rock was deflected, a splinter broke off and struck Buddha’s foot, drawing blood and causing “bodily feelings that were painful, sharp, racking, piercing, harrowing, disagreeable.”
Buddha spread out his robe and lay on the ground to recover from his injuries. Immediately, “Mara came to him and addressed him in verse”:
Do you lie down in a daze or drunk on poetry?
Don’t you have sufficient goals to meet?
Alone in your secluded dwelling place
Why do you dream away intent on sleep?
This mocking voice of self-doubt seeks further to torment an old man whose life’s work is in danger of being usurped and corrupted by someone whom he had earlier dismissed as “a wastrel, a clot of spittle.” But Gotama neither “lies awake in dread” nor is “afraid to sleep.” “Having reached the goal,” he answers Mara, “I lie down out of compassion for beings.” Mara vanished at once.
Devadatta now conspired to create a schism in the community of monks. He demanded that the monastic rule be reformed to accord more strictly with Buddha’s emphasis on detachment and simplicity. Henceforth, he proposed, monks should only live in forests at the feet of trees, only eat alms they have begged for, only wear discarded rags, and only eat vegetarian food. As Devadatta expected, Buddha rejected the proposal on the grounds that monks should be at liberty to choose where they live and whether or not to accept offerings from householders. And as long as the animal was not killed for them personally, they were free to eat meat and fish. Presenting himself as the exemplary renunciant, Devadatta made it known that he would undertake to live by his proposed rules even if Buddha did not. Many younger monks voted to follow his example and left the community with him.
“For where God built a church,” remarked Martin Luther two thousand years later, “there the devil would also build a chapel. . . . In such sort is the devil always God’s ape.” Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in his poem “The Devil’s Thoughts,”
And the devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.
Buddha likewise compared Devadatta to a young calf elephant who imitates the old tusker’s habit of eating lotus stalks but fails to wash them properly, falls ill, and dies. “Through aping me,” said Buddha, Devadatta “will die wretchedly.” On hearing that his idealistic young followers had been persuaded to change their minds and return to Buddha’s fold, “then and there hot blood gushed from Devadatta’s mouth.” Although his rebellion failed, it was an ominous sign of the power struggles and ideological disputes that would bedevil Buddhism after Gotama’s death.
Devadatta wanted to control Buddhism by enclosing it within tighter limits. He did not dispute the truth of the dharma, but sought to replace Buddha’s liberal guidance with his own autocratic leadership. When Devadatta asked to be put in charge of the community of monks, Buddha did not refuse him because he had someone better qualified in mind. He refused because he had no intention that anyone should lead the community after his death. The dharma alone, he said, would suffice as one’s guide. Each practitioner should be independent, “like an island.” In rejecting Devadatta’s reformed rule, Buddha did not disapprove of the practices themselves but of the restrictions the rule would have placed on the monks’ liberty and social mobility.
In breaking with the Indian system of caste, Buddha freed his followers from the tyranny of a social order founded on the contingencies of birth. By creating an order of nuns, he liberated women from the tyranny of domestic servitude. In resisting Devadatta, he protected his community against the tyranny of repressive and autocratic leadership. In his conquest of Mara, he gained victory over the tyrannies of compulsion and biology. The common thread that unites these social, gendered, communal, and spiritual dimensions of life was Buddha’s commitment to freedom. The task of a contemporary culture of awakening is not to imitate an historical religious form but to practice and extend these liberties while safeguarding them against the threat of their respective tyrannies.
Buddha compared the ideas and practices he taught to a raft made of “grass, twigs, branches and leaves” tied together “for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.” Once the raft has enabled one to cross that “great expanse of water, whose near shore is dangerous and fearful and whose further shore is safe and free from fear,” then it should be discarded. Otherwise it risks crystallizing into a sanctified version of the repetitive, restrictive, and frustrating behavior one seeks to overcome. One settles into comfortable spiritual routines, becomes fixated with correct interpretations of doctrine, and judges with self-righteous indignation anyone who corrupts the purity of the tradition.
The metaphor of the raft highlights the pragmatic and therapeutic nature of what Buddha taught. Rather than preaching an ideology, Gotama presented a range of ideas to be examined, tested, and applied in the light of experience. Instead of a calibrated sequence of spiritual techniques leading inexorably from one stage of the path to the next, he offered a range of practices suited to the lifestyles, temperaments, and predispositions of his audience. Rather than establish monastic institutions, he created a homeless community of renunciants, where each individual was encouraged to wander forth on his own for the welfare of others.
Over the centuries, Buddhism has repeatedly veered away from this founding vision. As with Christianity, a pattern of institutionalization recurred each time it became an established religion in a new land. For to succeed as a power in the world, a church needs to maintain an internally consistent ideology that grounds its institutions and hierarchies in infallible claims to truth. It has to insist on the efficacy of a precise spiritual technology in order to assure its followers that it can lead them step by step from despair to salvation. It requires elaborate lineages that can trace the authority of its priests through an unbroken succession back to the historical founder.
Institutions survive by repeating doctrines and techniques irrespective of whatever else is changing around them. A tradition will nonetheless survive the collapse of its institutions if it persists as a living community of practices and ideas. History has borne witness to the rise and fall of numerous Buddhist churches, each with its own distinctive ideology and techniques. Yet the tradition has managed to survive as a culture of awakening. Each time it has had to adapt to an unprecedented situation, this has stimulate
d a creative reimagining of itself. But once established in the new environment, a culture of awakening will tend toward stable and predictable patterns. This diabolic drift to ideologically based institutions is, to paraphrase Max Weber, the routinization of awakening.
Now that the Buddhist traditions of premodern Asia find themselves face to face with the liberal traditions of modernity, each challenges the other to look afresh at its understanding and practice of freedom. Just as Buddhism provides psychological insights and contemplative practices to free people from their inner demons, so the liberal philosophies of Europe and America provide social insights and political practices to free people from governments and religions that restrict their liberty to live as they choose. We thus come to appreciate the full extent of Mara’s reach: intense private hatreds share with complex societal structures of repression the same capacity to block paths and limit freedom.
21
The Kingdom of Mara
NOT ONLY DID BUDDHA have to contend with rebellions within his own community, to achieve his goals he had to operate within a world of social change and political upheaval. In the prosperous Gangetic basin of North India, power was shifting from republican confederacies of clans to autocratic monarchies with imperial ambitions. Contrary to legend, Gotama was not a prince of even a minor kingdom but the son of a leading elder within the oligarchic republic of Shakya. Although he had renounced his own role as a political leader upon becoming a wandering ascetic, after his awakening he required the patronage and protection of the political powers of his time in order that his community and teachings could survive.
He found much of this patronage and protection where wealth and power were most concentrated: in the kingdoms of Magadha and Kosala. His major training and teaching centers were duly established in Rajagaha, capital of Magadha, and Savatthi (Sravasti), capital of Kosala. To a lesser extent, he stayed and taught at Vesali, capital of the Vajjian Confederacy, the largest surviving republic. As Gotama’s prestige grew and his order of monks expanded, his fate became unavoidably tied to the political ambitions and fortunes of these states.
Living with the Devil Page 11