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object:2.05 - Apotheosis
class:chapter
book class:The Hero with a Thousand Faces
author class:Joseph Campbell
subject class:Mythology
subject class:Psychology



5
Apotheosis

One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the
Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus
Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so
called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures
suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfoldrepeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet:
Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go
perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity
known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a
human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last
threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the
void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and
bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before enter
ing the void he would bring all creatures without exception to
enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole tex
ture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence,
so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast
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Hinayana Buddhism (the Buddhism surviving in Ceylon, Burma, and
Siam) reverses the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage.
Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand (the Buddhism of the north), regards
the Enlightened One as a world savior, an incarnation of the universal princi
ple of enlightenment.
A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the
Hinayana view, an adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincar
nation; according to the Mahayana view (as the following paragraphs will
show), a type of world savior, representing particularly the universal principle
of compassion. The word bodhisattva (Sanskrit) means: "whose being or
essence is enlightenment."
Mahayana Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bodhisattvas and
many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the
transcendent, one and only Adi-Buddha ("Primal Buddha") (compare note 51,
p. 81, supra), who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of
all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.
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APOTHEOSIS

spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under
differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and ap
pears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in
human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four
arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one
of his left hands the lotus of the world.
Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the
divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone be
yond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of
consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all
fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential
within us all, and which anyone can attainthrough herohood;
for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and
this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings
are without self."
The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the
Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is
he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not en
close him, he encloses them and with profound repose. And
since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the
mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garl and of eight thousand
rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.
The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed
color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eightyfour thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thou
sand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are
soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these
jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo sur
rounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miracu
lously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas,
who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts
his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels
that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of
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Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra; "Sacred Books of the East," Vol. XLIX,
Part II, p. 148; also, p. 154.
Vajracchedika ("The Diamond Cutter"), 17; ibid., p. 134.
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his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a
Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high."
In China and Japan this sublimely gentle Bodhisattva is rep
resented not only in male form, but also as female. Kwan Yin of
China, Kwannon of Japan the Madonna of the Far Eastis
precisely this benevolent regarder of the world. She will be
found in every Buddhist temple of the farthest Orient. She is
blessed alike to the simple and to the wise; for behind her vow
there lies a profound intuition, world-redeeming, world-sustaining.
The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to forego
until the end of time (which never ends) immersion in the un
troubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the dis
tinction between eternity and time is only apparentmade, per
force, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge
of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is
understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same
experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e.,
the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani
padme hum.
The first wonder to be noted here is the androgynous charac
ter of the Bodhisattva: masculine Avalokiteshvara, feminine Kwan
Yin. Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth.
They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct
the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where
duality is left behind. Awonawilona, chief god of the pueblo of
Zuni, the maker and container of all, is sometimes spoken of as
he, but is actually he-she. The Great Original of the Chinese
chronicles, the holy woman T'ai Yuan, combined in her person the
masculine Yang and the feminine Yin. The cabalistic teachings of
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Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183.
Tang, the light, active, masculine principle, and Yin, the dark, passive, and
feminine, in their interaction underlie and constitute the whole world of forms
("the ten thousand things"). They proceed from and together make manifest
Tao: the source and law of being. Tao means "road," or "way." Tao is the way
or course of nature, destiny, cosmic order; the Absolute made manifest. Tao is
therefore also "truth," "right conduct." Tang and Tin together as Tao are de
picted thus:
Tao underlies the cosmos. Tao inhabits every created thing.
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APOTHEOSIS

the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of
the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous-which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, be
fore the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form. And
among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermes
and Aphrodite), but Eros too, the divinity of love (the first of
the gods, according to Plato), were in sex both female and male.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them." The ques
tion may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God;
but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough.
"When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He
created him androgynous." The removal of the feminine into
another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfec
tion into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery
of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God
walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of
Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites," by which
Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision
but even the recollection of the image of God.
This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It
represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of
creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of
the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation
of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image
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"To men I am Hermes; to women I appear as Aphrodite: I bear the em
blems of both my parents" (Anthologia Graeca adFidem Codices, Vol. II).
"One part of him is his sire's, all else he has of his mother" (Martial, Epi
grams, 4, 174; Loeb Library, Vol. II, p. 501).
Ovid's account of Hermaphroditos appears in the Metamorphoses, IV, 288 ff.
Many classical images of Hermaphroditos have come down to us. See Hugh
Hampton Young, Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism, and Related Adrenal
Diseases (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1937), Chapter I, "Hermaphro
ditism in Literature and Art."
Symposium.
Genesis, 1:27.
Midrash, commentary on Genesis, Rabbah 8:1.
Supra, p. 86.
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INITIATION
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stands at the beginning of the cosmogonie cycle, and with equal
propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when
the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and rec
ollected, and wisdom regained.
Tiresias, the blinded seer, was both male and female: his eyes
were closed to the broken forms of the light-world of the pairs of
opposites, yet he saw in his own interior darkness the destiny of
Oedipus. Shiva appears united in a single body with Shakti,
his spouse-he the right side, she the left-in the manifestation
known as Ardhanarisha, "The Half-Woman Lord." The ances
tral images of certain African and Melanesian tribes show on
one being the breasts of the mother and the beard and penis of
the father. And in Australia, about a year following the ordeal
of the circumcision, the candidate for full manhood undergoes a
second ritual operation-that of subincision (a slitting open of the
underside of the penis, to form a permanent cleft into the urethra).
The opening is termed the "penis womb." It is a symbolical male
vagina. The hero has become, by virtue of the ceremonial, more
than man.
The blood for ceremonial painting and for gluing white
bird's-down to the body is derived by the Australian fathers
from their subincision holes. They break open again the old
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Infra, pp. 268-270.
Compare James Joyce: "in the economy of heaven . . . there are no more
marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself"
(Ulysses, Modern Library edition, p. 210).
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus. See also, Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 324 ff.,
511, and 516. For other examples of the hermaphrodite as priest, god, or seer,
see Herodotus, 4, 67 (Rawlinson edition, Vol. Ill, pp. 46-47); Theophrastus,
Characteres, 16.10-11; and J. Pinkerton's Voyage and Travels, chapters 8,
p. 427; "A New Account of the East Indies," by Alexander Hamilton. These
are cited by Young, op. cit., pp. 2 and 9.
See Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Figure 70.
See Plate X.
See B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia
(London, 1899), p. 263; Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, pp. 164-165.
The subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that of a certain
class of hermaphrodites. (See the portrait of the hermaphrodite Marie Ange, in
Young, op. cit., p. 20.)
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APOTHEOSIS

wounds, and let it flow." It symbolizes at once the menstrual
blood of the vagina and the semen of the male, as well as urine,
water, and male milk. The flowing shows that the old men have
the source of life and nourishment within themselves; i.e., that
they and the inexhaustible world fountain are the same.
The call of the Great Father Snake was alarming to the child;
the mother was protection. But the father came. He was the guide
and initiator into the mysteries of the unknown. As the original
intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the fa
ther is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies
are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. "Whatever is
killed becomes the father." Hence the veneration in head
hunting communities (in New Guinea, for example) of the heads
brought home from vendetta raids. Hence, too, the irresistible
compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is
continually transforming itself into public violence. The old men
of the immediate community or race protect themselves from
their growing sons by the psychological magic of their totem
ceremonials. They enact the ogre father, and then reveal them
selves to be the feeding mother too. A new and larger paradise is
thus established. But this paradise does not include the tradi
tional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still
systematically projected. All of the "good" father-mother content
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Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, p. 94.
Ibid., pp. 218-219.
Compare the following view of the Bodhisattva Darmakara: "Out of his
mouth there breathed a sweet and more than heavenly smell of sandal-wood.
From all the pores of his hair there arose the smell of lotus, and he was pleas
ing to everybody, gracious and beautiful; endowed with the fulness of the best
bright color. As his body was adorned with all the good signs and marks, there
arose from the pores of his hair and from the palms of his hands all sorts of
precious ornaments in the shape of all kinds of flowers, incense, scents, gar
lands, ointments, umbrellas, flags, and banners, and in the shape of all kinds of
instrumental music. And there appeared also, streaming forth from the palms
of his hands, all kinds of viands and drink, food, hard and soft, and sweet
meats, and all kinds of enjoyments and pleasures" (The Larger SukhavatiVyuha, 10; "Sacred Books of the East," Vol. XLIX, Part II, pp. 26-27).
Rheim, War, Crime, and the Covenant, p. 57.
Ibid., pp. 48-68.
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INITIATION

is saved for home, while the "bad" is flung abroad and about:
"for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy
the armies of the living G o d ? " "And slacken not in follow
ing up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffer
ing similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they
have none."
Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults rep
resent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of
subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not an
nihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only
of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his
society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far
the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his
sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the pro
tection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic di
vorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of
history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart
the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God
are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or
what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with
good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against
whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, hea then, "native," or alien
people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.
The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands:
totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Chris
tian nations-which are supposed to be following a "World"
Redeemerare better known to history for their colonial barbar
ity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that
unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of
ego, ego's world, and ego's tribal god, which was taught by their
professed supreme Lord: "I say unto you, Love your enemies,
do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and
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I Samuel, 17:26.
Koran 4:104.
106 F hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love,
this is an old rule" (from the Buddhist Dhammapada, 1:5; "Sacred Books of
the East," Vol. X, Part I, p. 5; translation by Max Miiller).
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APOTHEOSIS

pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that
smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that
taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to
every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy
goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do
to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which
love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that
love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you,
what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye
lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye?
for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.
But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for
nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be
the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthank
ful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also
is merciful."
Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the
world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the
supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who
then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense.
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Luke, 6:27-36.
Compare the following Christian letter:
In the Tear of Our Lord 1682
To ye aged and beloved, Mr. John Higginson:
There be now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more
of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief
scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has accordingly given sacred
orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said
Welcome slyly as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said
Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified and not mocked
on the soil of this new country with the hea then worship of these people. Much
spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good
prices in rum and sugar and we shall not only do the Lord great good by pun
ishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His Minister and people.
Yours in the bowels of Christ,
COTTON MATHER

(Reprinted by Professor Robert Phillips, American Government and Its Prob
lems, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941, and by Dr. Karl Menninger, Love
Against Hate, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942, p. 211.)
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INITIATION

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which
so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant,
apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be,
and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his chil
dren. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining de
tails of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of
episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of
Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as
the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares,
unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so
kept, they have a regressive effect: they reduce the father image
back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is
what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would
think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom,
of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much
less flattering: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." The World
Savior's cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is
a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.
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Matthew, 22:37^10; Mark, 12:28-34; Luke, 10:25-37. Jesus is also re
ported 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).
Dr. Karl Menninger has pointed out (op. cit., pp. 195-196) that though
Jewish rabbis, Protestant ministers, and Catholic priests can sometimes be
brought to reconcile, on a broad basis, their theoretical differences, yet when
ever they begin to describe the rules and regulations by which eternal life is to
be achieved, they hopelessly differ. "Up to this point the program is impecca
ble," writes Dr. Menninger. "But if no one knows for certain what the rules
and regulations are, it all becomes an absurdity." The reply to this, of course, is
that given by Ramakrishna: "God has made different religions to suit different
aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a
path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows
any of the paths with whole hearted devotion.... One may eat a cake with
icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way" (The Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna, New York, 1941, p. 559).
Matthew, 7:1.
"And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests mur
der in the way of consent.... They make the king glad with their wickedness,
and the princes with their lies" (Hosea, 6:9; 7:3).
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APOTHEOSIS

The understanding of the final and criticalimplications of the
world-redemptive words and symbols of the tradition of Christen
dom has been so disarranged, during the tumultuous centuries
that have elapsed since St. Augustine's declaration of the holy war
of the Civitas Dei against the Civitas Diaboli, that the modern
thinker wishing to know the meaning of a world religion (i.e., of a
doctrine of universal love) must turn his mind to the other great
(and much older) universal communion: that of the Buddha, where
the primary word still is peace-peace to all beings.
The following Tibetan verses, for example, from two hymns
of the poet-saint Milarepa, were composed about the time that
Pope Urban II was preaching the First Crusade:
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Amid the City of Illusoriness of the Six World-Planes
The chief factor is the sin and obscuration born of evil works;
Therein the being followeth dictates of likes and dislikes,
Andfindeth ne'er the time to know Equality:
Avoid, 0 my son, likes and dislikes.
113

If ye realize the Emptiness of All Things, Compassion
will arise within your hearts;
If ye lose all differentiation between yourselves and others, fit
to serve others ye will be;
And when in serving others ye shall win success, then shall ye
meet with me;
And finding me, ye shall attain to Buddhahood.
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I do not mention Islam, because there, too, the doctrine is preached in
terms of the holy war and thus obscured. It is certainly true that there, as well
as here, many have known that the proper field of battle is not geographical
but psychological (compare Rumi, Mathnawi, 2. 2525: "What is 'beheading'?
Slaying the carnal soul in the holy war."); nevertheless, the popular and ortho
dox expression of both the Mohammedan and the Christian doctrines has been
so ferocious that it requires a very sophisticated reading to discern in either
mission the operation of love.
113 The Hymn of the Final Precepts of the Great Saint and Bodhisattva
Milarepa" (ca. 1051-1135 A.D.), from the Jetsun-Kahbum, or Biographical His
tory of Jetsiin-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.
"The Hymn of the Yogic Precepts of Milarepa," ibid., p. 273.
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INITIATION

Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokiteshvara-Kwannon, 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
regardsand he himself is both their perfection and their disinte
gration. The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tan
gled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having
within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of re
lease: this too he regardsand is. Serene above man, the angels;
below man, the demons and unhappy dead: these all are drawn to
the Bodhisattva by the rays of his jewel hands, and they are he, as
he is they. The bounded, shackled centers of consciousness, myriadfold, on every plane of existence (not only in this present universe,
limited by the Milky Way, but beyond, into the reaches of space),
galaxy beyond galaxy, world beyond world of universes, coming
into being out of the timeless pool of the void, bursting into life, and
like a bubble therewith vanishing: time and time again: lives by the
multitude: all suffering: each bounded in the tenuous, tight circle of
itselflashing, killing, hating, and desiring peace beyond victory:
these all are the children, the mad figures of the transitory yet inex
haustible, long world dream of the All-Regarding, whose essence is
the essence of Emptiness: "The Lord Looking Down in Pity."
But the name means also: "The Lord Who is Seen Within."
We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer
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"The Emptiness of All Things" (Sanskrit: sunyat, "voidness") refers, on the
one hand, to the illusory nature of the phenomenal world, and on the other, to the
impropriety of attri buting such qualities as we may know from our experience of
the phenomenal world to the Imperishable.
In the Heavenly Radiance of the Voidness,
There existeth not shadow of thing or concept,
Tet It pervadeth all objects of knowledge;
Obeisance to the Immutable Voidness.
("Hymn of Milarepa in praise of his teacher," ibid. p. 137.)
115

Avalokita (Sanskrit) = "looking down," but also, "seen"; isvara = "Lord";
hence, both "The Lord Looking Down [in Pity]," and "The Lord Seen
[Within]" (a and i combine into e in Sanskrit; hence Avalokitesvara). See
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Toga and Secret Doctrine (Oxford University
Press, 1935), p. 233, note 2.
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APOTHEOSIS

within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are
one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is
every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this
ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard it
self as threatened by some other the enemy that one too is
the God. The ogre breaks us, but the hero, the fit candidate, un
dergoes the initiation "like a man"; and behold, it was the fa
ther: we in Him and He in us. The dear, protecting mother of
our body could not defend us from the Great Father Serpent;
the mortal, tangible body that she gave us was delivered into his
frightening power. But death was not the end. New life, new
birth, new knowledge of existence (so that we live not in this
physique only, but in all bodies, all physiques of the world, as
the Bodhisattva) was given us. That father was himself the
womb, the mother, of a second birth.
This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is
the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the
mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the worldannihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms
and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously
reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial,
national, or sectarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause;
but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as
knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the
childhood parent images and ideas of "good" and "evil" have
been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was
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The same idea is frequently expressed in the Upanishads; 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; for '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).
"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.).
117

149


INITIATION

desired and feared. All the gods, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas
have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of
the lotus of the world.
"Come," therefore, "and let us return unto the Lord: for he
hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind
us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will
raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if
we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as
the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter
and former rain unto the earth."
This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the
androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two ap
parently opposite mythological adventures come together: the
Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.
For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are (as
phrased in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) "two halves of a split
pea"; whereas in the second, the Father is found to be an
tecedent to the division of sex: the pronoun "He" was a manner
of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And
in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero
himself is that which he had come to find.
The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its
annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life
which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's
renunciation of Nirvana. Briefly, Nirvana means "the Extinguish
ing, of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion."
118

119

120

118

Hosea, 6: 1-3.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1. 4. 3. Cf. infra, p. 257.
120 The
] 3 T^ny (Sanskrit) is, literally, 'to blow out,' not transitively, but
as a fire ceases to draw. . . . Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified,' i.e.,
quenched, when the mind has been curbed, one attains to the 'peace of Nirvana,'
'despiration in God.' . . . It is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is
reached, of which it is well said in another tradition that 'it passeth under
standing' " (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism; New York:
The Philosophical Library, no date, p. 63). The word "de-spiration" is con
trived from a literal Latinization of the Sanskrit "mnyna"; nir = "out, forth,
outward, out of, out from, away, away from"; vna = "blown"; nirvana =
"blown out, gone out, extinguished."
119

V E R

150


APOTHEOSIS

As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under
the Bo Tree (supra, pp. 31-32) the antagonist of the Future
Buddha was Kama-Mara, literally "DesireHostility," or "Love
and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification
of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final
threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his
supreme adventure to Nirvana. Having subdued within himself
to the critical point of the ultimate ember the Threefold Fire,
which is the moving power of the universe, the Savior beheld
reflected, as in a mirror all around him, the last projected fan
tasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human be
ings the will to live according to the normal motives of desire
and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends,
and means. He was assailed by the last fury of the disregarded
flesh. And this was the moment on which all depended; for from
one coal could arise again the whole conflagration.
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, cor
responding to the Buddhist Kama, "desire") and the death-wish
(thanatos or destrudo, which is identical with the Buddhist Mara,
"hostility or death") are the two drives that not only move the
individual from within but also animate for him the surrounding
world. Moreover, the unconsciously grounded delusions from
which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled
by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination
(Sanskrit: vidua). Yet the aims of the two teachings-the tradi
tional and the modern-are not exactly the same.
121

121

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.

151


INITIATION

Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering in
dividuals 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 be
yond the village compound, these interests, too, are to be re
garded 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 ex
tinguishing 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"
(Nirvana) 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.
122

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
122

Vajracchedika, 32; "Sacred Books of the East," op. cit., p. 144.
152


APOTHEOSIS

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."
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, concep
tions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for
the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own night
mare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an ego
less center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made
manifest in its own simplicity. And this is his great "compas
sionate act"; for by it the truth is revealed that in the under
standing of one in whom the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility,
and Delusion is dead, this world is Nirvana. "Gift waves" go out
from such a one for the liberation of us all. "This our worldly life
is an activity of Nirvana itself, not the slightest distinction exists
between them."
And so it may be said that the modern therapeutic goal of the
cure back to life is attained through the ancient religious disci
pline, after all; only the circle traveled by the Bodhisattva is a
large one; and the departure from the world is regarded not as a
fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest
turn of which illumination is to be won concerning the deep
emptiness of the universal round. Such an ideal is well known,
123

124

123

The smaller Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra; ibid., p. 153.
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, Tas klsas so bodhi, yas samsras tat
nirvnam, '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).
1 2 4

153


INITIATION

also, to Hinduism: the one freed in life (j'ivan mukta), desireless,
compassionate, and wise, "with the heart concentrated by yoga,
viewing all things with equal regard, beholds himself in all be
ings and all beings in himself. In whatever way he leads his life,
that one lives in God."
The story is told of a Confucian scholar who besought the
twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch, Bodhidharma, "to pacify his
soul." Bodhidharma retorted, "Produce it and I will pacify it."
The Confucian replied, "That is my trouble, I cannot find it."
Bodhidharma said, "Your wish is granted." The Confucian un
derstood and departed in peace.
Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them,
but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting,
dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of
immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal
concord. These are the immortals. The Taoist landscape paintings
of China and Japan depict supremely the heavenliness of this
terrestrial state. The four benevolent animals, the phoenix, the
unicorn, the tortoise, and the dragon, dwell amongst the willow
gardens, the bamboos, and the plums, and amid the mists of sa
cred mountains, close to the honored spheres. Sages, with
craggy bodies but spirits eternally young, meditate among these
peaks, or ride curious, symbolic animals across immortal tides,
or converse delightfully over teacups to the flute of Lan Ts'ai-ho.
The mistress of the earthly paradise of the Chinese immortals
is the fairy goddess Hsi Wang Mu, "The Golden Mother of the
Tortoise." She dwells in a palace on the K'un-lun Mountain,
which is surrounded by fragrant flowers, battlements of jewels,
125

126

125

Bhagavad Gita, 6:29, 31.
This represents the perfect fulfillment of what Miss Evelyn Underhill
termed "the goal of the Mystic Way: the True Unitive Life: the state of Divine
Fecundity: Deification" (op. cit., passim). Miss Underhill, however, like Pro
fessor Toynbee (supra, p. 16, note 17), make 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).
Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 74.
1 2 6

154


APOTHEOSIS
127

and a garden wall of gold. She is formed of the pure quintes
sence of the western air. Her guests at her periodical "Feast of
the Peaches" (celebrated when the peaches ripen, once in every
six thousand years) are served by the Golden Mother s gracious
daughters, in bowers and pavilions by the Lake of Gems. Waters
play there from a remarkable fountain. Phoenix marrow, dragon
liver, and other meats are tasted; the peaches and the wine be
stow immortality. Music from invisible instruments is heard,
songs that are not from mortal lips; and the dances of the visible
damsels are the manifestations of the joy of eternity in time.
The tea ceremonies of Japan are conceived in the spirit of
the Taoist earthly paradise. The tearoom, called "the abode of
fancy," is an ephemeral structure built to enclose a moment of po
etic intuition. Called too "the abode of vacancy," it is devoid of
ornamentation. Temporarily it contains a single picture or
flower-arrangement. The teahouse is called "the abode of the unsymmetrical": the unsymmetrical suggests movement; the pur
posely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of
the beholder can pour.
The guest approaches by the garden path, and must stoop
through the low entrance. He makes obeisance to the picture or
flower-arrangement, to the singing kettle, and takes his place on
the floor. The simplest object, framed by the controlled simplic
ity of the tea house, stands out in mysterious beauty, its silence
holding the secret of temporal existence. Each guest is permitted
to complete the experience in relation to himself. The members
of the company thus contemplate the universe in miniature, and
become aware of their hidden fellowship with the immortals.
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
128

127

This is the wall of Paradise, see supra, pp. 82 and 141. We are now in
side. Hsi Wang Mu is the feminine aspect of the Lord who walks in the Gar
den, who created man in his own image, male and female (Genesis, 1:27).
Cf. E. T. C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai,
1932), p. 163.
128

155


INITIATION
129

into the nation. During the long and peaceful Tokugawa pe
riod (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."
This is what the Buddhist calls "the sermon of the inanimate."
A certain Hindu ascetic who lay down to rest beside the holy
Ganges, placed his feet up on a Shiva-symbol (a "lingam," 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 sym
bol 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 lingam?"
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 di
vine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The
life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her dark
ness and his light. W e are conceived in her and dwell removed
130

131

129

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).
Morris Edward Opler, Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians
(Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. XXXI, 1938), p. 110.
Compare supra, p. 143, note 101.
1 3 0

131

156


APOTHEOSIS

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.
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. Accord
ing 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 pro
ductive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal
and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing malefemale God. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recol
lection 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 de
notes the goal to which initiation leads. But this goal is Nirvana
(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.
132

1 3 2

Comparatively, the Hindu goddess Kali (supra, p. 105) is shown standing
on the prostrate form of the god Shiva, 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 mindas the goddess herself, though apparently trampling
down the god, is actually his blissful dream.
Beneath the goddess of the Island of Jewels (see supra, pp. 103-104) 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. (See Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization,
pp. 210-214.)

157


INITIATION

This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the
wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate ad
mitted 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.
Precisely the same bell is rung in the Christian Mass at the
moment when God, through the power of the words of the con
secration, 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 manipadme hum.
133

134

135

133

Compare the drum of creation in the hand of the Hindu Dancing Shiva,
supra, p. 118, note 46.
134 A j the Word was made flesh"; verse of the Angelus, celebrating the
conception of Jesus in Mary's womb.
the following have been equated:
The Void
The World
Eternity
Time
Nirvana
Samsara
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
n(

Tao
Supreme Buddha
Bodhisattva
Jivan Mukta
The Word Made Flesh
Compare the Kaushitaki Upanishad, 1:4, describing the hero who has reached
the Brahma-world: "Just as one driving a chariot looks down upon the

158



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