The Hero with a Thousand Faces

In China and Japan this sublimely gentle Bodhisattva is represented not only in male form, but also as female. Kwan Yin of China, Kannon of Japan — the Madonna of the Far East — is precisely this benevolent regarder of the world. She will be found in every Buddhist temple of the farthest Orient. She is blessed alike to the simple and to the wise; for behind her vow there lies a profound intuition, world-redeeming, world-sustaining. The pause on the threshold of nirvāṇa, the resolution to forego until the end of time (which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent — made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.

The first wonder to be noted here is the androgynous character of the Bodhisattva: masculine Avalokiteśvara, feminine Kwan Yin.

Figure 33. Kwan Yin, the Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva (painted wood, China, eleventh–thirteenth century a.d.)

Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind. Awonawilona, chief god of the pueblo of Zuni, the maker and container of all, is sometimes spoken of as he, but is actually he-she. The Great Original of the Chinese chronicles, the holy woman T’ai Yuan, combined in her person the masculine Yang and the feminine Yin.

Yang, the light, active, masculine principle, and Yin, the dark, passive, and feminine, in their interaction underlie and constitute the whole world of forms (“the ten thousand things”). They proceed from and together make manifest Tao: the source and law of being. Tao means “road,” or “way.” Tao is the way or course of nature, destiny, cosmic order; the Absolute made manifest. Tao is therefore also “truth,” “right conduct.” Yang and Yin together as Tao are depicted thus: ☯. Tao underlies the cosmos. Tao inhabits every created thing.

The kabbalistic teachings of the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous — which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, before the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form. And among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermes and Aphrodite),^[89] but Eros too, the divinity of love (the first of the gods, according to Plato),^[90] were in sex both female and male.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”^[91] The question may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God; but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough. “When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him androgynous.”^[92] The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the Wall of Paradise, constituted of the “coincidence of opposites,”^[93] by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.

This is the biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle,^[94] and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.^[95]

Figure 34. Androgynous Ancestor (carved wood, Mali, twentieth century a.d.)