The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This is the meaning of those Tibetan images of the union of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their own feminine aspects that have seemed so indecent to many Christian critics. According to one of the traditional ways of looking at these supports of meditation, the female form (Tibetan: yum) is to be regarded as time and the male (yab) as eternity. The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female God. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. Or on the other hand, the male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads. But this goal is nirvāṇa (eternity). And so it is that both the male and the female are to be envisioned, alternately, as time and eternity. That is to say, the two are the same, each is both, and the dual form (yab-yum) is only an effect of illusion, which itself, however, is not different from enlightenment.

This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created him male and female. In the male’s right hand is held a thunderbolt that is the counterpart of himself, while in his left he holds a bell, symbolizing the goddess. The thunderbolt is both the method and eternity, whereas the bell is “illumined mind”; its note is the beautiful sound of eternity that is heard by the pure mind throughout creation, and therefore within itself.^[137]

Precisely the same bell is rung in the Christian Mass at the moment when God, through the power of the words of the consecration, descends into the bread and wine. And the Christian reading of the meaning also is the same: Et Verbum caro factum est,* i.e., “The Jewel is in the Lotus”: Om mani padme hum.

Compare the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad, 1:4, describing the hero who has reached the Brahmā-world: “Just as one driving a chariot looks down upon the two chariot wheels, thus he looks down upon day and night, thus upon good deeds and evil deeds, and upon all the pairs of opposites. This one, devoid of good deeds, devoid of evil deeds, a knower of God, unto very God he goes.”

In this section the following have been equated: The Void The World Eternity Time Nirvāṇa Saṃsāra Truth Illusoriness Enlightenment Compassion The God The Goddess The Enemy The Friend Death Birth The Thunderbolt The Bell The Jewel The Lotus Subject Object Yab Yum Yang Yin Tao Supreme Buddha Bodhisattva Jīvan Mukta The Word Made Flesh 6. The Ultimate Boon

When the Prince of the Lonesome Island had remained six nights and days on the golden couch with the sleeping Queen of Tubber Tintye, the couch resting on wheels of gold and the wheels turning continually — the couch going round and round, never stopping night or day — on the seventh morning he said, “It is time for me now to leave this place.” So he came down and filled the three bottles with water from the flaming well. In the golden chamber was a table of gold, and on the table a leg of mutton with a loaf of bread; and if all the men of Erin were to eat for a twelvemonth from the table, the mutton and the bread would be in the same form after the eating as before.

The Prince sat down, ate his fill of the loaf and the leg of mutton, and left them as he had found them. Then he rose up, took his three bottles, put them in his wallet, and was leaving the chamber, when he said to himself: “It would be a shame to go away without leaving something by which the Queen may know who was here while she slept.” So he wrote a letter, saying that the son of the King of Erin and the Queen of the Lonesome Island had spent six days and nights in the golden chamber of Tubber Tintye, had taken away three bottles of water from the flaming well, and had eaten from the table of gold. Putting his letter under the pillow of the Queen, he went out, stood in the open window, sprang on the back of the lean and shaggy little horse, and passed the trees and the river unharmed.^[138]