The Hero with a Thousand Faces

God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole hearted devotion....One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.^[114]

The understanding of the final — and critical — implications of the world-redemptive words and symbols of the tradition of Christendom has been so disarranged, during the tumultuous centuries that have elapsed since St. Augustine’s declaration of the holy war of the Civitas Dei against the Civitas Diaboli, that the modern thinker wishing to know the meaning of a world religion (i.e., of a doctrine of universal love) must turn his mind to the other great (and much older) universal communion: that of the Buddha, where the primary word still is peace — peace to all beings.

I do not mention Islam, because there, too, the doctrine is preached in terms of the holy war and thus obscured. It is certainly true that there, as well as here, many have known that the proper field of battle is not geographical but psychological (compare Rumi: “What is ‘beheading’? Slaying the carnal soul in the holy war.”^[115]); nevertheless, the popular and orthodox expression of both the Mohammedan and the Christian doctrines has been so ferocious that it requires a very sophisticated reading to discern in either mission the operation of love.

The following Tibetan verses, for example, from two hymns of the poet-saint Milarepa, were composed about the time that Pope Urban II was preaching the First Crusade:

Amid the City of Illusoriness of the Six World-Planes

The chief factor is the sin and obscuration born of evil works;

Therein the being followeth dictates of likes and dislikes,

And findeth ne’er the time to know Equality:

Avoid, O my son, likes and dislikes.^[116]

“The Emptiness of All Things” (Sanskrit: śūnyatā, “voidness”) refers, on the one hand, to the illusory nature of the phenomenal world and on the other, to the impropriety of attributing such qualities as we may know from our experience of the phenomenal world to the imperishable.

In the Heavenly Radiance of the Voidness,

There existeth not shadow of thing or concept,

Yet it pervadeth all objects of knowledge;

Obeisance to the Immutable Voidness.^[118]

If ye realize the Emptiness of All Things, Compassion will arise within your hearts;

If ye lose all differentiation between yourselves and others, fit to serve others ye will be;

And when in serving others ye shall win success, then shall ye meet with me;

And finding me, ye shall attain to Buddhahood.^[117]

Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokiteśvara–Kwan Yin, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love, includes, regards, and dwells within (without exception) every sentient being. The perfection of the delicate wings of an insect, broken in the passage of time, he regards — and he himself is both their perfection and their disintegration. The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards — and is. Serene above man, the angels; below man, the demons and unhappy dead: these all are drawn to the Bodhisattva by the rays of his jewel hands, and they are he, as he is they. The bounded, shackled centers of consciousness, myriad-fold, on every plane of existence (not only in this present universe, limited by the Milky Way, but beyond, into the reaches of space), galaxy beyond galaxy, world beyond world of universes, coming into being out of the timeless pool of the void, bursting into life, and like a bubble therewith vanishing: time and time again: lives by the multitude: all suffering: each bounded in the tenuous, tight circle of itself — lashing, killing, hating, and desiring peace beyond victory: these all are the children, the mad figures of the transitory yet inexhaustible, long world dream of the All-Regarding, whose essence is the essence of Emptiness: “The Lord Looking Down in Pity.”