The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This greatly celebrated legend affords an excellent example of the close relationship maintained in the Orient between myth, psychology, and metaphysics. The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds. No doubt the reader has been struck by a certain resemblance of this ancient mythological doctrine of the dynamics of the psyche to the teachings of the modern Freudian school. According to the latter, the life-wish (eros or libido, corresponding to the Buddhist Kāma, “desire”) and the death-wish (thanatos or destrudo, which is identical with the Buddhist Māra, “hostility or death”) are the two drives that not only move the individual from within but also animate for him the surrounding world.^[124] Moreover, the unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidyā). Yet the aims of the two teachings — the traditional and the modern — are not exactly the same.

Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. But for the one who has deliberately undertaken the difficult and dangerous journey beyond the village compound, these interests, too, are to be regarded as based on error. Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not by readjusting the desire (eros) and hostility (thanatos) — for that would only originate a new context of delusion — but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root, according to the method of the celebrated Buddhist Eightfold Path:

Right Belief, Right Intentions,

Right Speech, Right Actions,

Right Livelihood, Right Endeavoring,

Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.

With the final “extirpation of delusion, desire, and hostility” (nirvāṇa) the mind knows that it is not what it thought: thought goes. The mind rests in its true state. And here it may dwell until the body drops away.

Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble,

A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud:

Thus we should look upon all that was made.^[125]

The Bodhisattva, however, does not abandon life. Turning his regard from the inner sphere of thought-transcending truth (which can be described only as “emptiness,” since it surpasses speech) outward again to the phenomenal world, he perceives without the same ocean of being that he found within. “Form is emptiness, emptiness indeed is form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form, that is emptiness; what is emptiness, that is form. And the same applies to perception, name, conception, and knowledge.”^[126] Having surpassed the delusions of his formerly self-assertive, self-defensive, self-concerned ego, he knows without and within the same repose. What he beholds without is the visual aspect of the magnitudinous, thought-transcending emptiness on which his own experiences of ego, form, perceptions, speech, conceptions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. And this is his great “compassionate act”; for by it the truth is revealed that in the understanding of one in whom the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion is dead, this world is nirvāṇa. “Gift waves” go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. “This our worldly life is an activity of nirvāṇa itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them.”^[127]