The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Thou didst reign, Thou reignest, and Thou wilt reign.

Thine is Heaven, Thine is Earth.

Thou fillest the high regions,

And Thou fillest the low regions.

Wheresoever I turn, Thou, oh Thou, art there.^[84]

Figure 32. Bodhisattva (temple banner, Tibet, nineteenth century a.d.)5. Apotheosis

One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahāyāna Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteśvara, “The Lord Looking Down in Pity,” so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold-repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, “The jewel is in the lotus.” To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.

Hīnayāna or Theravada Buddhism (the Buddhism surviving in Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand) reveres the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage. Mahāyāna Buddhism, on the other hand (the Buddhism of the north), regards the Enlightened One as a world savior, an incarnation of the universal principle of enlightenment.

A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the Hīnayāna view, an adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincarnation; according to the Mahāyāna view (as the following paragraphs will show), a type of world savior, representing particularly the universal principle of compassion. The word bodhisattva (Sanskrit) means: “whose being or essence is enlightenment.”

Mahāyāna Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bodhisattvas and many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the transcendent, one and only Ādi-Buddha (“Primal Buddha”),^[87] who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.

Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. “When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change.”^[85] This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain — through herohood; for, as we read: “All things are Buddha-things”;^[86] or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement): “All beings are without self.”

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (“he whose being is enlightenment”); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them — and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.

He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty. The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high.^[88]