Living with the Devil

by Stephen Batchelor

  Freedom consists in being able to do whatever does not harm the other: thus the exercise of the natural rights of man has as its only limits those that assure other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights.

  Each person is free to lead whatever life he chooses provided it does not violate the freedom of others to do likewise. Unless a person’s actions harm others, no one has the right to prevent him from following that course. This notion of personal freedom and rights is so embedded in modern liberal democracies that it appears to us as little more than common sense. It seems so self-evident that we may only become conscious of it when it is threatened.

  Most traditional forms of Buddhism, by contrast, bear the imprint of monarchic and aristocratic societies of the kind overthrown by the American and French revolutions. The transformation of Indian society into a casteless meritocracy of self-creating and self-transcending persons envisioned by Buddha failed to materialize. The system of caste and the power of kings prevailed, and Buddhism died out, prompting many former Buddhists to convert to Islam as a way of preserving their caste-free status. Elsewhere in Asia, Buddhism tended to ally itself with powerful aristocratic patrons, thereby limiting its capacity for initiating radical social change. The detachment of monastic institutions, an inherited wariness of secular politics, and a growing bias toward introspection all contributed to Buddhism’s preference for gently modifying a status quo rather than seeking to overthrow it.

  The liberal democracies of modernity unintentionally realize certain aspects of the kind of society envisioned by Buddha. As the son of a leading elder within the republic of Shakya, Gotama spoke approvingly of the nonautocratic, consultative approach to government, which was best exemplified at his time in the Vajjian Confederacy, and used it as a model for organizing his monastic order. The structure of the sangha reflected republican rather than monarchic values.

  Likewise, in rejecting the notion of caste, Buddha abandoned the idea that a person’s identity or destiny is determined by nature. He declared:

  No one is born a brahmin. A brahmin is a brahmin because of what he does . . . A farmer is a farmer because of what he does and a craftsman a craftsman because of what he does. A merchant, a servant, a thief, a soldier, a priest or a king: each of them is what he is because of what he does.

  This performative conception of self entails each individual’s freedom to pursue the form of life he or she selects. The self is thus neither nonexistent nor eternal but created by one’s acts. A society composed of members who define their own roles within it while respecting the rights of others to do likewise is an open and tolerant one.

  Despite his republican instincts, Gotama did not abandon the idea of nobility. He redefined it as the inherent dignity of a person creating a path to awakening. He called his four truths “ennobling”: to understand anguish, let go of craving, embark on a path, and glimpse nirvana enhance the dignity of the person. Buddha saw that even a killer such as Angulimala possessed the glimmerings of such dignity as well as the capacity to rise above his limitations and break free of Mara’s grip. As would become more explicit as Buddhists worked out the implications of Gotama’s vision, all sentient beings possess the inviolable dignity of their buddhanature.

  The creation of a nonviolent world is founded on an empathetic respect for the inviolable freedoms and rights of others. The oppressed call out to be free to pursue a path, unconstrained by the constraints placed on them by Mara’s latter-day army of governments, religions, superpowers, and market forces. Now that the principalities and the powers stockpile weapons of mass destruction, contaminate the earth with their feverish industry, release floods of images to trigger insatiable desires, treat animals and humans as commodities and functions of a market, the devil must be grinning from ear to ear. As sovereign nation-states behave more and more like personalities (embodied and caricatured in the figure of monarchs, presidents, and dictators), they assume the diabolic features of a disconnected cell of self, blind to their own defects and infatuated by their own image.

  The devil is incarnate today as the structural violence that pervades and ruptures the interconnected world. To demonize parts of this global network as evil while glorifying others as good is to succumb to Mara’s dualistic urge to split things apart. Instead of recognizing how good and evil, God and Satan, Buddha and Mara are inseparable from each other, we divide them into two fundamentally opposed powers. Ignoring what history has repeatedly and bloodily taught, we persist in destroying what we perceive as evil in the hope that one day only good (i.e., ourselves and whatever values we hold) will prevail. Only now much more is at stake than before. The earth has become too small and our capacity for destruction too immense to sustain this kind of conflict forever.

  23

  The Anarchy of the Gaps

  BUDDHA AND MARA ARE figurative ways of portraying a fundamental opposition within human nature. While “Buddha” stands for a capacity for awareness, openness, and freedom, “Mara” represents a capacity for confusion, closure, and restriction. To live with the devil is to live with the perpetual conflict between one’s buddhanature and one’s maranature. When buddhanature prevails, fixations ease and the world brightens, revealing itself as empty, contingent, and fluid. When maranature dominates, fixations tighten and the world appears opaque, necessary, static. William Blake evokes a similar opposition in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (begun in 1789, the year of the French Revolution): “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

  Buddhanature and maranature are inseparable from each other. Like a valve that can either be open or closed, this organism has the capacity to unfold (buddha) or shut down (mara). The Sanskrit term translated as “nature” is garbha, which means “womb.” Buddhanature is like the empty, warm, fertile space from which I was born. My womblike nature suggests that I am not the necessary, static self I feel myself to be, but a contingent creature with an extraordinary but often untapped capacity for growth and change. My maranature, however, is that side of me that compulsively resists such transformation, refuses to be touched and impregnated with any ideas other than its own certainties, and stubbornly clings to the illusion of being a frozen and isolate self.

  Or think of it like this: “buddhanature” stands for that open perspective whence one is free to respond to the call of others; “maranature” stands for those fixed positions that prompt one to react. While a perspective allows the possibility of pursuing a path into an unknown, a position ensures that you never stray from the territory you have already staked out. Designating that territory as “Buddhist” or “postmodern” does not prevent it from becoming another stronghold of Mara. What was once a perspective can crystallize into a position. Convinced that you were moving ahead, you find that you have only traced another circle.

  Buddha’s perspective is conveyed by the Pali term appamada, which can be translated as “care.” In the Dhammapada, Buddha describes this vigilant care as “the path to the deathless.” “The careful do not die,” he adds, whereas “the careless are like the dead.” By identifying care with the path and opposing it to death, he locates it at the heart of the struggle with Mara. His last words as he lay dying in Kusinara were, “Conditions are subject to decay. Work out your salvation with care.”

  As the perspective of one pursuing a path, care is an existential sensibility rather than a discrete mental act. Buddhist analyses of care describe it as a configuration of different interwoven elements. Such care is grounded in an energetic state of contentment, kindness, and clarity. When this careful caring is activated, greed, hatred, and confusion are (for the time being) suspended. The twelfth-century Tibetan lama Thogmé Zangpo defined care as “a keen concern for engagement and letting go.” Care is that which cherishes and cultivates virtues while also relinquishing compulsive behavior. As an awareness of one’s values and a
diligent commitment to realize them, it deprives Mara of a foothold, thereby guarding one against his attacks.

  Such a path of vigilant care is not an exclusively Buddhist concern. Whatever sheds light on impermanence, suffering, contingency, and emptiness can contribute to a path that inclines toward nirvana, even if it originates in a secular tradition that is skeptical of religion, or in a religion that denies the validity of Buddhism. In recognizing the existence of “solitary buddhas” (paccekabuddha), who gain insight into the nature of contingency independently of a teacher or Buddhist community, Buddhism affirms that the attainment of nirvana can occur outside of a Buddhist context. Job and Jesus, Pascal and Montaigne, evolutionary biology and neuroscience, Roland Barthes and William Blake offer glimpses of self and world that illuminate the path opened up by Buddha.

  Although a devout Buddhist, Shantideva aspires “always to be a student of everyone, respectfully accepting unsolicited words which are of help, openly rejoicing in whatever is well said.” To enclose oneself in the confines of a tradition and community where one feels at home and unthreatened cuts one off from the myriad sources of awakening that are everywhere present, were one only prepared to reach out and embrace them. “There is nothing whatsoever,” affirms Shantideva, “that is not to be learned by one who aspires to awaken.”

  In such encounters between traditions are the seeds of a contemporary culture of awakening likely to germinate. This culture might already be fermenting in the dialogues and exchanges between declared Buddhists and “solitary buddhas” who, unbeknown to themselves, are gouging pathways to nirvana. It can embrace both secular and religious elements while in itself being neither secular nor religious. Yet a culture of awakening does not rest on the universalist assumption that all “spiritual” paths ultimately lead to the same destination: some may be vicious circles that go nowhere, while others may be in thrall to longings for eternity. As a middle way, such a culture would be rooted in a vigilant care that is constantly on guard against the lures of both the demonic and divine.

  At a time when the all-embracing certainties of closed societies and belief systems no longer convince or reassure us, more and more do we find ourselves in that perplexing middle ground between communities and ideas. Having embraced this homelessness, we are at liberty to weave our way between Buddhism and monotheism, the religious and the secular, science and art, literature and myth. In exploring the fertile spaces between traditions, we open up a path that may be rooted in a specific tradition but has branched out into the no-man’s-land between them all.

  In an open society saturated with information, the gaps between traditions serve as a refreshing but unsettling wilderness. By dwelling in their emptiness, we are able to return to those questions for which each tradition claims to have the answers. The anarchy of the gaps makes it impossible for any ideology or religion to take hold. For the very act of laying claim to that inbetween space would enclose it in boundaries and compromise its openness, thereby turning it into a closed space separated from other closed spaces, thus creating more gaps that are beyond one’s reach.

  To wander along the gaps allows the freedom to ask anew the questions posed by being born and having to die. Humans like ourselves may never have evolved before and may never evolve again in this or any other universe. As far as anyone knows, we are alone in an inconceivably vast cosmos that has no interest at all in our fate. Even if other worlds like this exist elsewhere in the cosmos, they would not be mere repetitions of the awesomely complex configuration of biological, cultural, and psychological conditions that are generating this world now. The path that has led you here and beckons you into an unknown future has likewise never appeared in exactly this way before and will not do so again. You are free to go straight ahead, turn right, or turn left. Nothing is stopping you. Having gained knowledge of good and evil through eating forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were exposed to the anguish and exhilaration of making such choices. “The world was all before them,” says Milton in describing their departure from paradise, while

  They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took their solitary way.

  NOTES

  Throughout this book, I have used Pali spellings of Buddhist terms, the only exceptions being Sanskrit words already incorporated into the English language, e.g., karma, nirvana, dharma. All quoted passages from Baudelaire, Pascal, and Barthes are my own translations from the French. The following classical Buddhist texts are referred to in the notes by these abbreviations:

  BCA Shantideva. The Bodhicaryavatara: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Each verse newly translated from Tibetan by the author. Chapter number, followed by verse number.

  DN Buddha. Digha Nikaya: The Long Discourses of the Buddha. Translated by Maurice Walshe. Discourse number, followed by section number, followed by page number of English translation.

  LC Lin-chi. The Record of Lin-chi. Ruth Fuller Sazaki, translator. Kyoto: Institute for Zen Studies, 1975.

  MMK Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika: The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Each verse newly translated from Tibetan by the author. Chapter number, followed by verse number.

  MN Buddha. Majjhima Nikaya: The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Discourse number, followed by section number, followed by page number of English translation.

  SN Buddha. Samyutta Nikaya: The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Part number, followed by section number, followed by discourse number, followed by page number of English translation.

  Sn Buddha. The Sutta-Nipata. Translated by H. Saddhatissa. Chapter number, followed by discourse number, followed by verse number, followed by page number of English translation.

  Epigraph

  xi “I do not know who put me in the world”: Pascal, Pensées, no. 398, p. 256–7 (English: no. 427, p. 158).

  ONE: THE GOD OF THIS AGE

  1. Parallel Mythologies

  7 “the abode of a great person”: MN 151.2, p. 1143.

  7 “Buddhas say emptiness”: MMK 13.8.

  9 “self-begot, self-raised / By our own quick’ning power”: Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V, lines 860–1.

  2. This Need Not Have Happened

  13 Or had the policeman’s gun that fired the bullet: Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris, Vol. I, p. 211.

  15 When Dante enters hell’s ninth and final circle: Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 34.

  15 “the king of the vast kingdom of all grief”: Ibid., line 28.

  16 “I yearn to be free of pain”: BCA 1.28.

  16 “we desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty”: Pascal, Pensées, no. 380, p. 240 (English: no. 401, p. 398).

  3. Mara—The Killer

  18 “I was living on the bank of the Neranjara River”: Sn 3.2.425–8, p. 48. The Striving (Padhana Sutta) is one of the texts collected in the Sutta-Nipata.

  18 “I see your troops all around me”: Sn 3.2.442–3, p. 49.

  18 “any power so hard to conquer”: DN 26.28, p. 405.

  19 He enumerates the armies: Sn 3.2.436–8, pp. 48–9.

  19 “I remember once seeing a crow”: Sn 3.2.447–8, p. 49.

  20 “whom Mara cannot overcome, any more than the winds”: Mahavastu, II, 241; quoted in Boyd, Satan and Mara, p. 98.

  20 “has deprived Mara’s eye of its opportunity . . . blindfolded Mara . . . invisible”: MN 26.34, p. 267.

  20 “All those distortions, manoeuvres, and contortions”: SN 1.4.24, p. 216.

  21 “It makes no difference what you grasp”: Sn 5.12.1103, p. 127.

  21 “one who withholds the waters”: Ling, Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil, p. 55.

  21 “I know you, evil one”: This occurs, for example, as a refrain in MN 49.6, p. 425ff. seq. Alternately, as a refrain throughout SN 1.4, Mara acknowledges his failure to influence Buddha by saying, “The Blessed One knows me, the Fortu
nate One knows me.”

  22 “Mara was so upset by his failure”: Sn 3.2.449, p. 49.

  22 “Mara shook his head, lolled his tongue”: SN 1.4.21, p. 211.

  22 “went away from that spot”: SN 1.4.25, p. 217.

  22 “a farmer, carrying a large plough”: SN 1.4.19, p. 208.

  22 “with a large matted topknot, clad in an antelope hide”: SN 1.4.21, pp. 210–1.

  23 “The eyes are mine. Shapes and colors are mine”: SN 1.4.19, p. 208.

  23 “Where there are no eyes, no shapes or colors”: Ibid.

  23 “arouse fear, trepidation and terror”: A refrain that occurs at the opening of several discourses in SN 1.4.

  23 “as though the earth were splitting open”: SN 1.4.17, p. 206.

  23 He shatters boulders near Buddha, he appears as a giant elephant . . . : These appear, respectively, in SN 1.4.11, p. 202; SN 1.4.2, p. 196; SN 1.4.6, p. 199; SN 1.4.16, p. 205.

  24 Mara means “the killer”: Cf. John 8.44—“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.”

  24 “You have accomplished everything . . . You need not worry, evil one”: DN 16.3.7, pp. 246, 247.

  24 Buddha calls Mara the Antaka: This epithet occurs repeatedly throughout SN 1.4; see, for example, SN 1.4.1, p. 196.

  25 “catch Buddha with the snare of lust”: SN 1.4.25, p. 217. Mara’s daughters are called Tanha, Arati, and Raga, which mean Craving, Discontent, and Lust.

  25 While Buddha remains alert to the urges of his biology: The text alludes to impotence metaphorically: “or else he would have dried up and withered away and become shriveled, just as a green reed that has been mowed down would dry up and wither away and become shriveled,” ibid., p. 218.