from The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation
of Joseph Campbell (Celestial Arts, 1990)
This article has 4 parts. This is
the
second
part
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and
the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The Bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus and the
Resurrection
Part 4: A Course in
Miracles
The heroes of
Mahayana
Buddhism are Siddhartha Gautama, who entered nirvana and became the
Lord Buddha, and the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, who renounced
nirvana to save all sentient beings. Compared to early Buddhism,
which taught that life was all suffering and that each individual had
to work to escape from life into a nirvana that was simply
extinction, as we have observed earlier, the Mahayanist
reinterpretation of the Buddha's teachings several hundred years
after his death was relatively life-affirming.
Mahayana sages, like Nagarjuna, taught
that the
world arises through a process of "mutual coorigination" in which
nothing is known individually or independently but only relatively in
its interacting with everything else in a great cosmic unity. Since
nothing is absolute, nothing can be known of Absolute Truth. All
knowledge is empty. Even the teachings of the Buddha are not
absolute, but only hints at a greater, unknowable, ineffable Truth.
The denial of all absolute distinctions implies that there is no
ascertainable difference between samsara, the world of change and
apparent suffering, and nirvana, the state beyond change and
suffering. Samsara is nirvana The world is no different from heaven.
They taught a radical monism in which all beings are manifestations
of the One Being. The illusion from which all must be saved is that
individual existence is real. The Mahayanists recommended compassion
for others as the "skillful means" of attaining enlightenment and
escaping rebirth. They accepted life in the world, not just in the
monastery, as an exercise in gaining enlightenment.
To communicate the emptiness of Absolute
Truth,
radical monism, and compassion as the means to salvation, the
Mahayanists told the story of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. The
myth tells that the lovely, androgynous saint, Avalokitesvara, was on
the verge of entering into nirvana, thus leaving behind forever the
world of samsara. Just as his meditation was deepening and his
insight into the transience of all phenomena growing, he was
distracted by a great groaning, rising up all about him in the world.
He came out of his trance and, looking around him, asked: What is
this groaning I hear? All the birds and trees and grass and all
sentient beings replied to him: O Avalokitesvara, our lives are times
of suffering and pain; we live in a delusion from which we cannot
seem to escape. You are so beautiful and so kind. Your presence here
among us has given us joy and a reason for living. We all love you
so, and we are saddened by the prospect of your leaving us. And so we
groan.
At that the young saint was filled with
compassion and chose not to enter nirvana, but to remain in the cycle
of birth and death so that the others would not have to suffer. And
he vowed to renounce nirvana until all sentient beings were equally
enlightened. He saw that it was better that one should suffer than
that all should. And he took upon himself their suffering, so that he
alone would wander the cycles of karma, far from the homeland.
Avalokitesvara,
whose
name means "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," agreed to take upon
himself the suffering of the world. And he willed that the merit for
this selfless act should go out from him to all beings, so that all
should be saved. I will not enter nirvana, he vowed, until all beings
have entered nirvana. By the generosity of Avalokitesvara all the
rest have already gone home.
The Bodhisattva's vow is expressed
ritually in
a litany all Mahayanists are urged to repeat:
However
innumerable
beings are,
I vow to save them;
however inexhaustible the passions
are,
I vow to extinguish them;
however immeasurable the Dharmas are,
I vow to master them;
however incomparable the Buddha-truth
is,
I vow to attain it. (For
a more modern version)
His name also means "The Lord Who is Seen
Within." For, of course, what the myth means is that at the essence
of every person is the Lord Savior. Salvation comes from recognizing
who we really are. And from that perspective then everything that
happens to us is but an experience of our true essence.
In the Japanese story of the bodhisattva
Amida
there is a variation on Avalokitesvara's vow. As Amida was about to
enter nirvana, he too felt compassion for all beings. He declared
that he would not complete his entry into nirvana unless it were
guaranteed that all beings who had called upon his help, saying his
name as few as ten times in their lives, would at death gain
immediate admission to the Pure Land. He subsequently entered
nirvana, becoming Amida, the Sun Buddha.
To followers of Shin Buddhism, called the
Pure
Land Sect, his departure was a sure sign that salvation awaits those
who honor the name of Amida and reverently chant his mantra: Namo
Amida Butsu (Honor to the Buddha Amida). Perhaps soon after dawn on
the sixth of August 1945, when citizens of Hiroshima observed the
noonday sun descending upon them several hours early, some of them
saw not the wrath of America annihilating them in an act of war but
the face of Amida the Sun Buddha welcoming them into the Pure Land,
making them one with the sun.
At any rate, in spite of the horrors--or,
indeed, because of them--Avalokitesvara alone remains, though he soon
will follow. And when he does, when, after experiencing all the
suffering in every world system whatsoever, he turns to enter the
gates of nirvana, he will discover that there is no nirvana and no
samsara, that there have never been sentient beings, and there has
never been a bodhisattva who has suffered, and that all is empty and
has been so from the beginning.
Avalokitesvara is
portrayed as bisexual, both male and female, uniting the opposites.
In this androgyny he personifies the principle of emptiness: samsara
is nirvana, nirvana is samsara: there are no exclusive categories.
Today "bisexual" has also come to mean being both heterosexual and
homosexual, uniting the opposites.
When I first learned about
Avalokitesvara, I
was not worldly enough to distinguish between these two meanings of
bisexual. Learning of bisexual gods (of which Avalokitesvara is but
one in a crowded pantheon) helped me to reevaluate deeply
ingrained--and personally destructive--prejudices about
homosexuality. For the myths tell us that from the mystical
perspective the distinctions between male and female and between
homosexual and heterosexual--as between time and eternity, pluralism
and monism--are meaningless.
Even Saint Paul declared that in Christ
there
is neither male nor female. And the Jesus of the Gnostic Gospel of
Thomas declared that until one had made the male as female and the
female as male, one could not enter the kingdom. Like the myth of the
androgynous bodhisattva, this suggests that one has to overcome the
tendency of the mind to differentiate and value before one can
perceive the unity of life. For what Jesus called the Kingdom was
probably not an afterlife, but a mystical realization of the ultimate
unity of all beings. In the canonical, but only slightly less
gnostic, Gospel of John, Jesus prayed that all may be one, even as he
had realized he was one with the Father. ln Buddhist terms, Jesus was
a bodhisattva, for he took upon himself the sin--the pain, the
brokenness, the blindness, the stupidity and apparent failure--of the
world.
Go to the next
page
This article has 4 parts. This is
the
second
part
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and
the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The Bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus and the
Resurrection
Part 4: A Course in
Miracles
See also Toby Johnson's story of
Meeting Avalokiteshvara at the
21st
Street Baths
"Kuan
Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ"
Here's an essay by gay spirituality activist Patrick Cheng on the story
of the bodhisattva. The article
tells several wonderful stories about the bodhisattva appearing in what
we'd think of today as gay/queer incarnations.
Also links to Patrick and Harry
Faddis's Podcast course on Gay Spirituality.
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