The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The great tea masters were concerned to make of the divine wonder an experienced moment; then out of the teahouse the influence was carried into the home; and out of the home distilled into the nation.^[131] During the long and peaceful Tokugawa period (1603–1868), before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine. Similarly, throughout the Orient, throughout the ancient world, and in the pre-Columbian Americas, society and nature represented to the mind the inexpressible. “The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protect us,” declared an old Apache storyteller, “and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us.”^[132] This is what the Buddhist calls “the sermon of the inanimate.”

Figure 37. Liṅgam-yonī (carved stone, Vietnam, c. ninth century a.d.)

A certain Hindu ascetic who lay down to rest beside the holy Ganges placed his feet up on a Śiva-symbol (a “liṅgam-yonī,” a combined phallus and vulva, symbolizing the union of the God with his Spouse). A passing priest observed the man reposing thus and rebuked him. “How can you dare to profane this symbol of God by resting your feet on it?” demanded the priest. The ascetic replied, “Good sir, I am sorry; but will you kindly take my feet and place them where there is no such sacred liṅgam?” The priest seized the ankles of the ascetic and lifted them to the right, but when he set them down a phallus sprang from the ground and they rested as before. He moved them again; another phallus received them. “Ah, I see!” said the priest, humbled; and he made obeisance to the reposing saint and went his way.

The third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely, the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her darkness and his light.^[133] We are conceived in her and dwell removed from the father, but when we pass from the womb of time at death (which is our birth to eternity) we are given into his hands. The wise realize, even within this womb, that they have come from and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.

Figure 38. Kālī Astride Śiva (gouache on paper, India, date uncertain)

Comparatively, the Hindu goddess Kālī^[134] is shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. What Jung, drawing on the language of alchemy, called the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of the great union, is a standard motif in myths throughout the world, but particularly in the Orient. The Hindu goddess Kālī is frequently shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the devotee that he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it. The gestures of “fear not” and “bestowing boons” teach that she protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal “goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind — as the goddess herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his blissful dream.

Beneath the goddess of the Island of Jewels^[135] two aspects of the god are represented: the one, face upward, in union with her, is the creative, world-enjoying aspect; but the other, turned away, is the deus absconditus, the divine essence in and by itself, beyond event and change, inactive, dormant, void, beyond even the wonder of the hermaphroditic mystery. ^[136]