The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[109] Reprinted by Professor Robert Phillips, American Government and Its Problems, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941, and by Dr. Karl Menninger, Love Against Hate, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942, p. 211.

[110] Gospel According to Matthew, 22:37–40; Mark, 12:28–34; Luke, 10:25–37. Jesus is also reported to have commissioned his apostles to “teach all nations” (Matthew, 28:19), but not to persecute and pillage, or turn over to the “secular arm” those who would not hear. “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (ibid., 10:16).

[111] Gospel According to Matthew, 7:1.

[112] “And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way of consent....They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies” (Hosea, 6:9; 7:3).

[113] Menninger, op cit., pp. 195–196.

[114] Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, New York, 1941, p. 559.

[115] Rumi, Mathnawi, 2. 2525.

[116] “The Hymn of the Final Precepts of the Great Saint and Bodhisattva Milarepa” (c. a.d. 1051–1135), from the Jetsün-Kahbum, or Biographical History of Jetsün-Milarepa, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English rendering, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa (Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 285.

[117] “The Hymn of the Yogic Precepts of Milarepa,” Ibid., p. 273.

[118] Evans-Wentz, “Hymn of Milarepa in praise of his teacher,” p. 137.

[119] The same idea is frequently expressed in the Upaniṣads: viz., “This self gives itself to that self, that self gives itself to this self. Thus they gain each other. In this form he gains yonder world, in that form he experiences this world” (Aitareya Aranyaka, 2. 3. 7). It is known also to the mystics of Islam: “Thirty years the transcendent God was my mirror, now I am my own mirror; i.e., that which I was I am no more, the transcendent God is his own mirror. I say that I am my own mirror; ’tis God that speaks with my tongue, and I have vanished” (Bayazid, as cited in The Legacy of Islam, T.W. Arnold and A. Guillaume, editors, Oxford Press, 1931, p. 216).

[120] “I came forth from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin. Then I looked. I saw that lover, beloved, and love are one, for in the world of unity all can be one” (Bayazid, loc. cit.).

[121] Book of Hosea, 6:1–3.

[122] Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, 1. 4. 3. See below.

[123] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: The Philosophical Library, no date), p. 63.

[124] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (translated by James Strachey; Standard Edition, XVIII; London: The Hogarth Press, 1955). See also Karl Menninger, Love against Hate, p. 262.

[125] Vajracchedikā Sūtra, 32; see “Sacred Books of the East,” op cit., p. 144.

[126] The smaller Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdāya Sūtra; Ibid., p. 153.

[127] Nagarjuna, Madhyamika Shastra.

“What is immortal and what is mortal are harmoniously blended, for they are not one, nor are they separate” (Ashvaghosha).

“This view,” writes Dr. Coomaraswamy, citing these texts, “is expressed with dramatic force in the aphorism Yas klésas so bodhi, yas samsāras tat nirvānum, ‘That which is sin is also Wisdom, the realm of Becoming is also Nirvana’” (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916, p. 245).

[128] Bhagavad Gītā, 6:29, 6:31.

This represents the perfect fulfillment of what Evelyn Underhill termed “the goal of the Mystic Way: the True Unitive Life: the state of Divine Fecundity: Deification” (op. cit., passim). Underhill, however, like Professor Toynbee, makes the popular mistake of supposing that this ideal is peculiar to Christianity. “It is safe to say,” writes Professor Salmony, “that Occidental judgment has been falsified, up to the present, by the need for self-assertion” (Alfred Salmony, “Die Rassenfrage in der Indienforschung,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, 8, Berlin, 1926, p. 534).

[129] Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 74.

[130] See E.T.C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai, 1932), p. 163.

[131] See Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (New York, 1906). See also Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (London, 1927), and Lafcadio Hearn, Japan (New York, 1904). [See also Campbell’s exploration of the symbolism of the tea ceremony in Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, edited by David Kudler (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), pp. 133–36. — Ed.]