When the Buddha Met the Devil
Why change comes through emotional content: the spiritual, psychological, and mythological.
After years spent searching for the answer that would save the people from their suffering, the Siddhartha Gautama took his seat under a Bodhi tree and committed to not moving from the spot until he attained enlightenment. At that moment came a special visitor. He appeared as the magnificent ruler of all humanity. The very king Siddhartha could have been, had he not taken the spiritual path. Known to the Indians as Mara, he had many names. The Prince of the Earth, king of demons, lord of lies, had one final temptation left…
Wait, what? What’s the devil doing in my biography of the Buddha?
Actually, supernatural elements make appearances in the canonical story of Buddha’s life all the time. There are gods, demons, miracles, and even the earth talks as a witness to Buddha’s self-restraint. Many who come to Buddhism through meditation or more New Age sources might not have any idea how wild and fantastical the Buddha’s story could actually be.
Raised by Buddhist parents, I had the opposite experience.
I was taught since as far back as I can remember to chant the names of various Bodhisattvas to ward off evil spirits. I believed good deeds were rewarded in the next life. And my dad still has a shrine in his house to a Bodhisattva’s statue whom he invited into the home through an elaborate ritual involving priests, incense, and lots of chanting. (I’m still not clear if the Bodhisattva actually dwells in the clay figurine my dad offers fruits and orchids to every day, or if the figurine is just a device through which a devotee can reach the divinity.)
Then I started reading works by Buddhist thinkers popular in the West, and my whole understanding changed. Nirvana isn’t just some Buddhist heaven, but a state of mind that can be glimpsed at, even achieved, during our lifetimes. And nobody’s keeping score of your cosmic net worth through an accounting of positive or negative deeds that add up to your “karma”. Instead, we suffer or benefit from our actions as they reverberate through time. Children become parents, winners become losers, and the healthy become ill. Without compassion, we don’t feel the effects our actions have on others until time puts us in their position. Emotional equilibrium thus comes from practicing not getting attached to things. As for the ultimate liberation, it’s the embodied realization that we are not our things, our emotions, even our identities, so we can change how we relate to the world at any moment.
Which is the “true” Buddhism? Both.
Here’s the thing about religion: it’s meant to explain what logic cannot. The Greeks understood this, as did many pre-modern civilizations. Mythos and the logos were ways of equally important ways of acquiring truth.
The mythological covers our subconscious, the logical is about our waking reality. However, the two are inextricably linked. This is why you have both versions of the story of the Buddha, aka The Awakened One. One about a man who became a monk and then came to an ultimate realization that benefited all those who followed his example. Another about the same man who was prophesied to save mankind, received divine aid, faced down demons, and ultimately left the endless cycle of death, rebirth, and suffering that is our reality.
The ancients felt there were truths which words and logic simply couldn’t convey. For example, words might describe emotions, but music produces them.
The myths are these truths encoded into stories. The unreal elements not only help us remember the stories, but they heighten our experience of them. Our ancestors didn’t just act them out in rituals and plays because they couldn’t read, or because it was good bonding for the community (community being the last reason left to “reasonable” churchgoers today). They performed the ceremonies to feel what it was like to become better people.
The statues, the stories, the rituals, are all part of an exercise of transformation.
Without the fantastic, things just don’t shake us to our core. Fascination happens on a subconscious level. Joseph Campbell’s work on myth made him a household name. George Lucas proved its efficacy when he built his Sci-Fi epic around The Hero’s Journey. People then made a religion out of Star Wars, not because they actually believe in a galaxy far, far away full of muppets and space wizards, but because they understand the lessons underpinning the stories are true.
To achieve our dreams, we must first dream.
We look to epic heroes, historical and fictional, for cues on how we should act in the face of life’s troubles and sufferings. And we venture out not into literal mazes built by evil tyrants and sorcerers, but into the labyrinths of our own minds. There we find our shadow in the form of our deepest, darkest desires. The more we set ourselves to achieving something noble, the more dangerous and difficult-to-resist these desires become.
While it’s hard to imagine how Mara and the devil are the same guy when the two get depicted so differently, on an archetypal level they are. They are both the embodiment of evil, and the two are both defeated in the same way. By recognizing that what they offer is just smoke and mirrors.
One version of events states that after overcoming the demon king, the Buddha attained enlightenment and extinguished all of his desires. Another suggests that he continued to have desires. He continued to feel hunger, thirst, pain, etc., but would no longer succumb to them nor torture himself for resisting them because he had trained his entire being to recognize desires as illusory.
Not only are both versions true, but they are also the same truth.
Thanks for grappling with a difficult subject. I think we all have to reconcile the religious beliefs of our upbringings with the very educational thinking our parents urged us to acquire. Yes, both ways are true and we have to be clear about that.