A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (19 page)

W
HEN
I was in India, I wanted to meet a real, first-class master, and I didn’t want to hear any more slop about
māyā
and how you’ve got to give up the world and all that kind of thing. I’d had enough of that for about fifteen or twenty years. I was nosing around, listening, and I heard of one master in Trivandrum, in southwest India, and I decided to go see him. His mystic name was “Sri Atmananda.” I’ll call him that. Now when you get close to a master of that kind, you’re bound to meet a lot of nuts. You just are, there’s no doubt about it. But I knew that if I went, and if I was on the beam, I would get to see him.

I went to this funny little hotel called the Mascot Hotel, where all the rooms opened out onto a veranda. It was fiercely hot, and I was seated on the veranda, when this chap comes up to me without any introduction, shows me this great big watch, and says, “See that? I have an hour hand, and I have a minute hand, and I have a second hand. ” Before I can respond, he says, “Men have periods, just as women do, only they don’t know it. But I’ve worked mine out. It’s represented on this watch.” I looked at the watch. On it were two little scales, a red and white one on one side and a black and white one on the other, with little indicators that could go this way or that. He points to the red and white scale and says, “When this hand is over on the red side, I’m in my period. When it is in the white, I’m out.” Then pointing to the other scale, he says, “We have mental periods also, and I have those worked out too. When this hand is on the black and the other is on the red, I stay home.” Imagine what it cost him to have that thing made.

That evening, down in the dining room, I saw a man and woman, who looked like translucent praying mantises. They were seated just across the room, and between them, on the table, was a tall vase, and it was filled with food that they took out and ate with their fingers. Later I met the man and learned that he was president of the International Vegetarian Society. He said he had come to India to reform vegetarianism, that the Indian people didn’t know anything about it! At the next table, two gentlemen were talking, and I heard one of them mention the name “Arthur Gregor.” Now, I knew a young American poet with that name, and I knew that he was in India, so I said, “Pardon me, did I hear you mention Arthur Gregor?” They said, “Yes, he is with Sri Atmananda.” I said, “Would you give him my regards? My name is Joseph Campbell.”

Two days later, I was invited to meet the guru. If you’re on your right track, that’s the way it goes: doors open miraculously. So, I went to a lovely cottage, and at the door was an Indian with a long, white beard. He said, “The master is upstairs.” I went up to an attic that was perfectly naked except for two chairs. Atmananda was seated in one, and I was to sit in the other, facing him. I mean, it was a real confrontation.

He said, “Do you have a question?” I had the good fortune, I later learned, to ask exactly the question that had been his first question to
his
guru, so we had a very good conversation. When we’d concluded, he said he had now to go down to his class. He dismissed me, and I thanked him. Now, I had made arrangements to meet some members of that class in a coffee shop after the class was finished. When I came in, one of them said, “The master said you are on the brink of illumination.” Why? Because of the question I had asked.

My question was this: “Since all is
brahman
, all is the divine radiance, how can we say ‘no’ to ignorance or brutality or anything? His answer was: “For you and me, we say ‘yes.’”

Breaking the ideals of society

is the path of the mystic.

Then he gave me a little meditation: “Where are you between two thoughts?” That is to say, you are thinking all the time, and you have an image of your-self. Well, where are you between two thoughts? Do you ever have a glimpse beyond your thinking of that which transcends anything you can think about your-self?
That’s
the source field out of which all of your energies are coming.

In meditating,

meditate on your own divinity.

The goal of life is to be a vehicle

for something higher.

Keep your eye up there

between the pairs of opposites

watching your
play
in the world.

Let the world be as it is

and learn to rock with the waves.

Remain “radiant,”

as Joyce put it,

in the filth of the world.

A
Buddha image is not a picture of the historical Buddha. We are all Buddha beings, all things are Buddha beings. So, an image of the Buddha is not a graven image to be understood concretely. It is a meditation tool, something to be seen
through
. It is a support for meditation on the Buddhahood within you, not a depiction of any actual Buddha “out there.”

God and Buddhas in the Orient are not final terms like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in experience (not simply as an act of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows.
¹⁰⁴

The entire heavenly realm

is within us, but to find it

we have to relate to what’s outside.

It is in this context that one says, “If you see the Buddha coming down the road, kill him.” That is to say, if your notion of Buddhahood is concretized to that extent, then cancel the concretization. You cannot say that about Jesus, at least not in the orthodoxy.

You must kill your god.

If you are to advance,

all fixed ideas must go.

Most Buddhas that one sees depicted are what are known as “meditation Buddhas,” and they never lived. They represent Buddha powers within all of us, and in contemplating them, you will choose and be guided by your own Buddha—as, in the Catholic tradition, your principle guide is a particular saint, who represents virtues and qualities that are somehow accessible to you. The Buddha image, then, isn’t a picture of the Buddha. It is a tool to help you meditate on the Buddhahood within yourself.

This whole drift of Buddhism comes to a very clean expression in Zen, where there are no images. The only picture in a Zen monastery would be of Bodhidharma, the wall-gazing teacher who came to China from India, and that image would simply be a reminder of how to meditate. Finding the Buddha within yourself is a difficult exercise, and sometimes images help. You have to realize that Buddhism is not only an elite religion, but also a popular religion. A popular religion must provide bases for meditation. As a result, there is a long history in Buddhism of relic worship. All of those great
stūpas
, those monuments of the early Buddhist world, are reliquary mounds. Each one contains a relic, just as every Catholic church is supposed to be built on a relic. It is all a base for meditation.

T
wo great divisions of Buddhist thinking are distinguished. The first was dedicated to the ideal of individ-ual salvation and represented the way to this end as monastic self-discipline. The second, which seems to have matured in northern India during and following the first and second centuries
A.D.
(long after the other had been disseminated as far southward as the island of Ceylon), proposed the ideal of salvation for all and developed disciplines of popular devotion and universal secular service. The earlier is known as the  Hīnayāna, “the lesser or little (
h
īna
) boat or vehicle (
yāna
),” while the second is Mahāyāna, “the great (
mahat
) boat or vehicle,” the boat in which all can ride.
¹⁰⁵

Before the period of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddha was never depicted. Hence, in the illustration of the Buddha’s life on the early
st
ū
pas
, there are only symbols of the Buddha—his footprints, an umbrella, a sun disk—because the Buddha is one who is identified no longer with his ego but with total consciousness, and consequently, cannot be depicted. He’s like the sun that has set, and you don’t depict what is not. As a result, in early depictions of the Temptation of the Buddha, the temptation is rendered—on one side of the throne are the posturing daughters of
K
āma,
Lord Desire, and on the other, the ogres of
M
āra
, King Death—but nobody is in the throne. Well, there
was
nobody there. He was not identified with this personality.

With the arrival of Mahāyāna, however, comes the idea that the distinction between 
nirvāṇa
and  
saṁsāra
 
—“the round of being,” the round of rebirth—is a dualism, and the two are, in fact, one:
nirvāṇa
is here, this is it. There is a total transformation of consciousness, and images of the Buddha appear. Images of everything appear, because they are all Buddha things.

The word  
saṁsāra
 refers to the torrent of time, to our participation in the Dionysian passage of time with all things coming and going. Time explodes forms and brings out new ones, and you are one of those forms. In so far as you identify with your body, you think, “Oh, my God, here I go!” You live in life; you die; and, depending on your life, you go either to a hell or a heaven, and from there you come back to the next life. In the Oriental system, this is all  
saṁsāra,
the round of being.
nirvāṇa
goes past that. We are but reflections on the wall of the cave. From where do they come?

The word
nirvāṇa
means “blown out,” the breath that enlivens the world has been blown out of you. In Jainism, another Indian philosophy,
nirvāṇa
is thought of as death. But in Indian there is reincarnation, so you cannot truly die until you’ve achieved release from life.

The Buddha is the one who stresses the psycholog-ical aspect of this “dying.” You can stay alive, in action, but be disengaged from desire for, and fear of, the fruits of your actions. This psychological disengagement of your passions from the events of your life is
nirvāṇa
.

With the Mahāyāna, then, comes the simultaneous experience of these two attitudes toward the one thing which is life. So, you can be alive, in
sa
m
s
a
ra
, but acting without passion—that’s
nirvāṇa
. That’s also the idea in the post-Buddhistic
Bhagavad Gītā
, 563–483
B.C.

The
Bhagavad Gītā
says:

“Get in there and do your thing.

Don’t worry about the outcome.”

Recognize sorrow as of the essence.

When there is time, there is sorrow.

We can’t rid the world of sorrow,

but we can choose to live in joy.

T
he term
bodhisattva
, “one whose being (
sattva
) is enlightenment (
bodhi
),” had been employed in the earlier vocabulary…to designate one on the way to realization but not yet arrived: a Buddha in his earlier lives, a Future Buddha. In the new vocabulary…the term was used to represent the sage who, while living in the world, has refused the boon of cessation yet achieved realization, and so remains a perfect knower in the world as a beacon, guide, and compassionate savior of all beings.
¹⁰⁶

The Bodhisattva voluntarily

comes back into the world

knowing that it’s a mess.

He doesn’t come back

“only if it’s sweet for me.”

The Bodhisattva

participates joyfully

in the sorrows of the world.

”The great Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara is a personification of the highest ideal of the Mahāyāna Buddhist career. His legend recounts that when, following a series of eminently virtuous incarnations, he was about to enter into the surcease of nirvāṇa, an uproar, like the sound of a general thunder, rose in all the worlds. The great being knew that this was a wail of lament uttered by all created things—the rocks and stones as well as the trees, insects, gods, animals, demons, and human beings of all the spheres of the universe—at the prospect of his imminent departure from the realms of birth. And so, in his compassion, he renounced for himself the boon of nirvāṇa until all beings without exception should be prepared to enter in before him—like the good shepherd who permits his flock to pass first through the gate and then goes through himself, closing it behind him.”
—Zimmer
¹⁰⁷

 The Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, with a woman’s earring in one ear and a man’s in the other, represents mercy, or compassion. The name Avalokiteśvara is a difficult word to translate, but the sense of it is “he who looks down on the world with mercy.” Avalokiteśvara is frequently pictured as a male flanked by two female figures called “Tārās,” personifications of the tears of mercy that flow from the Bodhisattva’s eyes: one from the right eye, the other from the left. The word
tārā
is related to our word “star” and to the verb “to strew.” The Tārās strew out mercy to the world, which is, to me, one of the most darling notions.

When this tradition went to the Far East, to China and Japan, Avalokiteśvara’s feminine aspects were accented and this Bodhisattva became female, represented in the character of Kuan-yin, Kannon in Japanese, for the female form was thought to be a more appropriate manifestation of the fostering of self-giving compassion than the male, which usually represents discipline.

Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokiteśvara-Kannon, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love, includes, regards, and dwells within (without exception) every sentient being. The perfection of the delicate wings of an insect, broken in the passage of time, he regards—and he himself is both their perfection and their disintegration.
¹⁰⁸