The Hero with a Thousand Faces

But the name means also: “The Lord Who Is Seen Within.”* We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other — the enemy — that one too is the God. The ogre breaks us, but the hero, the fit candidate, undergoes the initiation “like a man”; and behold, it was the father: we in Him and He in us.^[119] The dear, protecting mother of our body could not defend us from the Great Father Serpent; the mortal, tangible body that she gave us was delivered into his frightening power. But death was not the end. New life, new birth, new knowledge of existence (so that we live not in this physique only, but in all bodies, all physiques of the world, as the Bodhisattva) was given us. That father was himself the womb, the mother, of a second birth.^[120]

This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments, and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the childhood parent images and ideas of “good” and “evil” have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the gods, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world.

Come [therefore], and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.^[121]

This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are (as phrased in the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad) “two halves of a split pea”;^[122] whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the division of sex: the pronoun “He” was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find.

The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life — which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva’s renunciation of nirvāṇa. Briefly, nirvāṇa means “the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion.” As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree (see above, pp. 24–25) the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally “Desire-Hostility,” or “Love and Death,” the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāṇa.

“The verb nirvā (Sanskrit) is, literally, ‘to blow out,’ not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw....Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is ‘pacified,’ i.e., quenched, when the mind has been curbed, one attains to the ‘peace of Nirvana,’ ‘despiration in God.’... It is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached, of which it is well said in another tradition that ‘it passeth understanding’”^[123]The word “de-spiration” is contrived from a literal Latinization of the Sanskrit nirvāṇa, nir = “out, forth, outward, out of, out from, away, away from”; vāṇa = “blown”; nirvāṇa = “blown out, gone out, extinguished.”

Having subdued within himself to the critical point of the ultimate ember the Threefold Fire, which is the moving power of the universe, the Savior beheld reflected, as in a mirror all around him, the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings — the will to live according to the normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends, and means. He was assailed by the last fury of the disregarded flesh. And this was the moment on which all depended; for from one coal could arise again the whole conflagration.