The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  This composite character is revealed in the very name of the Buddha. For buddha (past participle of Sanskrit buddh, to awaken or to know) is not a personal name but a term of praise, like messiah or christ (the anointed one). The proper name of the founder was Gautama. In his time he was known as Sakyamuni, the Sage from the tribe of the Sakyas. Unlike the founder of Christianity or of Islam, the Gautama Buddha was not thought to be unique. He represented a kind of person who recurred, but only rarely, over the aeons. The Gautama Buddha was not the first nor would he be the last. He was another in an endless series of Enlightened Ones. For us the historical Sakyamuni is lost in the historic Buddha.

  He had not appeared on earth first as Gautama. For his perfect enlightenment could not have been attained in only one life. It must have been the result of his repeated earlier efforts in numerous incarnations. Only then had he become a Bodhisattva, a Bodhi-being in the person of the Prince Siddhartha. The explanation in the Buddhist scriptures of how this came about directs us to the Buddhist view of history. And their endless cycles of time also help us understand why the mystery of creation did not trouble them.

  Someone is called a Bodhisattva if he is certain to become a Buddha, a “Buddha” being a man who has first enlightened himself and will thereafter enlighten others.… This change from an ordinary being to a Bodhi-being takes place when his mind has reached the stage when it can no longer turn back on enlightenment. Also he has by then gained five advantages; he is no more reborn in the states of woe, but always among gods and man; he is never again born in poor or low-class families; he is always male, and never a woman; he is always well-built, and free from physical defects; he can remember his past lives, and no more forgets them again.

  (Translated by Edward Conze)

  This full enlightenment was reached gradually, during three “incalculable aeons.” “In the first incalculable aeon he does not yet know whether he will become a Buddha or not; in the second he knows he will be a Buddha, but does not dare to say so openly; in the third he knows for certain that one day he will be a Buddha, and fearlessly proclaims that fact to the world.” With charming inconsistency, the same Buddhists who admired the Lord Buddha for his commonsense refusal to answer the fourteen unanswerable questions could not resist a temptation to calculate the “incalculable.” Some figured it as a vast number increased by multiples, others by squares. One of the more precise scholars offered a number designated by 1 followed by 352 septillions of kilometers of zeros, allowing that one zero occupies a length of 0.001 meter.

  In the endless cycles of the World, in each Great Period, or Kalpa, there were four Ages, comparable to the four ages of the Greeks and the Hindus. Each Great Period began with an Age of Destruction by fire, wind, and water, followed by a gradual re-formation and re-population of the world. In none of these did a Creator appear nor were His works required. The Great Periods were not all the same. In some no Buddha would appear and these are called “void.” In others one or many Buddhas might appear. In each cycle of recovery the primordial water slowly receded and a solid world of dry land emerged. Where the sacred tree of the Buddha would be, a lotus appeared. There were as many lotuses as there would be Buddhas in the Period.

  During each Great Period, life carried on by transmigration (samsara) of souls from one creature to another. Schools of Buddhism disagreed on points of doctrine, but they agreed that there was no beginning to the process of transmigrations. And there would surely be no end. Since there were an infinite number of souls, how could there ever be a time when they all would have attained Nirvana?

  Attaining Nirvana was, of course, everyone’s hope. For the transmigrations of a soul finally dissolved the self, and so ended the suffering that came with all existence. The arrival of the Gautama Buddha on earth as Prince Siddhartha about 561 B.C. was just another stage in the countless processes of his reincarnation. And his previous lives provided some of the most appealing passages in the Buddhist scriptures. They chronicle how his soul had stored up merit toward his reward of ever-higher incarnations and final fulfillment in Buddhahood and Nirvana.

  The tale of the hungry tigress told how Gautama, in an earlier incarnation as Prince Mahasattva, had gone walking in the jungle. There he encountered a weary tigress who a few days before had been delivered of seven cubs. Since she could find no meat or warm blood to feed them, they were all about to die of hunger. Mahasattva thought, “Now the time has come for me to sacrifice myself! For a long time I have served this putrid body and given it bed and clothes, food and drink, and conveyances of all kinds.… How much better to leave this ungrateful body of one’s own accord and in good time! It cannot subsist for ever, because it is like urine which must come out. To-day I will use it for a sublime deed. Then it will act for me as a boat which helps me to cross the ocean of birth and death.” With those words the prince threw himself down in front of the tigress. But she was too weak to move. Mahasattva, being “a merciful man,” had carried no sword. So he cut his throat with a sharp piece of bamboo and fell near the tigress, who soon ate all his flesh and blood, leaving only bones. “It was I,” the Buddha explained to his disciple, “who at that time and on that occasion was that Prince Mahasattva.”

  Finally, as Prince Siddhartha, he had been born again into a life of luxury. For the young prince the King provided three palaces, one for winter, one for summer, and one for the rainy season. During the rainy season the prince was entertained by beautiful dancing girl-musicians, as his father did not want him to be tempted to leave the palace. Shuddhodana had reason to take special measures to keep his son Gautama at his princely station. For Gautama’s birth, Buddhist scriptures reported, had been most unusual. When the birth approached, Queen Maya accompanied the King to Lumbini, “a delightful grove, with trees of every kind, like the grove of Citraratha in Indra’s Paradise.”

  He came out of his mother’s side, without causing her pain or injury. His birth was as miraculous as that of … heroes of old who were born respectively from the thigh, from the hand, the head, or the armpit.… He did not enter the world in the usual manner, and he appeared like one descending from the sky.… With the bearing of a lion he surveyed the four quarters, and spoke these words full of meaning for the future: “For enlightenment I was born, for the good of all that lives. This is the last time that I have been born into this world of becoming.”

  (Translated by Edward Conze)

  Seven Brahmin priests predicted that if the boy stayed at home he would eventually become a universal monarch, but if he left home he would become a Buddha.

  He was married off at the age of sixteen to his cousin Yashodhara, “chaste and outstanding for her beauty, modesty, and good breeding, a true Goddess of Fortune in the shape of a woman.” And in due time Yashodhara bore him a son. “It must be remembered that all the Bodhisattvas, those beings of quite incomparable spirit, must first of all know the taste of the pleasures which the senses can give. Only then, after a son has been born to them, do they depart to the forest.”

  On his pleasure excursions the young Gautama was awakened to human suffering. The gods dismayed him by images of old age and of disease. Finally they showed him a corpse. And at the sight of death his heart was again filled with dismay. “This is the end,” he exclaimed, “which has been fixed for all, and yet the world forgets its fears and takes no heed!… Turn back the chariot! This is no time or place for pleasure excursions. How could an intelligent person pay no heed at a time of disaster, when he knows of his impending destruction.”

  Now, at the age of twenty-nine, Prince Siddhartha (not yet a Buddha) began his experimental search for truth, which meant a way out of the sufferings of the world. For himself and all mankind he sought escape from Creation. When, why, and how suffering had first been brought into being was not his concern. Would it not be enough to show the way out of the suffering that plagued mankind every day?

  After the vision of the corpse, the gods sent a vision of a religious mendicant to remind Gautama o
f his mission to deliver mankind. In the long past this apparition had seen other Buddhas. Now he exhorted Gautama to follow in their path. “O Bull among men, I am a recluse who, terrified by birth and death, have adopted a homeless life to win salvation! Since all that lives is to extinction doomed, salvation from this world is what I wish and so I search for that most blessed state in which extinction is unknown.” With these words the being rose like a bird into the sky. Gautama, amazed and elated, was now fully convinced of his mission of salvation. “Then and there,” Buddhist scriptures report, “he intuitively perceived the Dharma [the ultimate reality; The Way], and made plans to leave his palace for the homeless life.”

  In the middle of the night, before setting out “to win the deathless state,” Gautama took a parting look at his beautiful wife and his infant son asleep in their palace bedchamber. He did not awaken them for fear they might dissuade him from his flight. Gautama’s next years of relentless search for Enlightenment and Salvation rivaled the range of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Baffling episodes of mysticism and satanism were interrupted by blinding flashes of common sense.

  For a while he sat at the feet of renowned sages, learning their systems for escaping selfhood by entering “the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception” through the ecstasy of mystic trances. They still did not lead him to Enlightenment.

  Then he turned to a monkish life of self-denial. He starved himself until his buttocks were like a buffalo’s hoof, his ribs like the rafters of a dilapidated shed, the pupils of his eyes sunk deep in their sockets “as water appears shining at the bottom of a deep well,” and the skin of his belly cleaved to his backbone. We see the emaciated Gautama in the unforgettable Greco-Gandhara sculpture of the second century. “This is not the Dharma which leads to dispassion, to enlightenment, to emancipation,” he concluded, “… Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished.”

  When his five companion ascetics abandoned him, he returned to a normal diet, his body became fully rounded again and “he gained the strength to win enlightenment.” When he walked toward the roots of a sacred fig tree (now called the bodhi tree, Ficus religiosa) intent on his high purpose, Kala, “a high-ranking serpent, who was as strong as a King elephant,” was awakened by “the incomparable sound of his footsteps” and saluted Gautama, who seated himself cross-legged in the most immovable of postures and said he would not arise until he had received Enlightenment. “Then the denizens of the heavens felt exceedingly joyous, the herd of beasts, as well as the birds, made no noise at all, and even the trees ceased to rustle when struck by the wind.”

  Now he suffered his final trial, the siege of the satanic Mara, Lord of Passions. Mara’s demonic army, including his three sons (Flurry, Gaiety, and Sullen Pride) and three daughters (Discontent, Delight, and Thirst), attacked the impassive Gautama. He speedily dispersed Mara’s hordes, who fled in panic. The great seer, “free from the dust of passion, victorious over darkness’ gloom,” using his skill at meditation entered a deep trance. In the first watch of the night (6:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) he recalled all his own former lives, the thousands of births he had been through. “Surely,” he concluded, “this world is unprotected and helpless, and like a wheel it turns round and round.” He saw that the world of samsara, of birth and death, was “as unsubstantial as the pith of a plantain tree.” In the second watch (10:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M.) he attained “the perfectly pure heavenly eye” and saw that the rebirth of beings depended on the merit of their deeds, but “he found nothing substantial in the world of becoming, just as no core of heartwood is found in a plantain tree when its layers are peeled off one by one.” In the third watch (2:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M.) he saw the real nature of the world, how greed, delusion, and ignorance produced evil and prevented getting off the wheel of rebirth.

  The climax of his trance was Enlightenment, the state of all-knowledge. “From the summit of the world downwards he could detect no self anywhere. Like the fire, when its fuel is burnt up, he became tranquil.” “The earth swayed like a woman drunken with wine … and the mighty drums of thunder resounded through the air. Pleasant breezes blew softly, rain fell from a cloudless sky, flowers and fruits dropped from the trees out of season—in an effort to show reverence for him.”

  Gautama now at the age of thirty-five had become a Buddha. He arose and found the five ascetic monks who had abandoned him. To them he preached the middle way to Enlightenment, which became the essential doctrine of Buddhism: the Holy Eightfold Path—right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, and the Four Holy Truths. These Truths were: first, that all existence—birth, decay, sickness, and death—is suffering; second, that all suffering and rebirth are caused by man’s selfish craving; third, that Nirvana, freedom from suffering, comes from the cessation of all craving; and fourth, that the stopping of all ill and craving comes only from following the Holy Eightfold Path. These steps to the extinction of self were the way of the Buddha, the way of Enlightenment.

  Is it any wonder that the Buddha dismissed those who asked when and how the world was created? That he aimed at them “the unbearable repartee” of silence? What soul en route to Buddhahood would waste energy on the mystery of creation? The Buddha aimed at Un-Creation. The Creator, if there was one, was plainly not beneficent. The Buddha charitably had not conjured up such a Master Maker of Suffering, who had imposed a life sentence on all creatures. If there was a Creator, it was he who had created the need for the extinction of the self, the need to escape rebirth, the need to struggle toward Nirvana. The Lord of the Buddhists was the Master of Extinction. And no model for man the creator.

  4

  The Homeric Scriptures of the Greeks

  THE Greeks’ spirit of inquiry grew with the centuries. But their sacred epic had little to say about Beginnings. Instead it was a saga of human adventure and human gods. Homer’s two testaments, the Iliad and the Odyssey, remain the first and greatest epics of Western civilization. Still, who Homer was, how Homer worked, and how the stories were perpetuated have baffled scholarly detectives for three thousand years. And the making of the Homeric saga remains a parable of the mystery of creation.

  Plato (427?–347 B.C.), a mythmaker of proven talent, complained that while Homer was “the greatest of poets and the first of tragedy writers” it was unfortunate that he had become “the educator of Hellas” and the guide “for the ordering of human things.” He was troubled that the Iliad and the Odyssey offered no set of moral commandments or divine ordinances but only epics of a long-past heroic age. Homer sang in the Iliad of four days in the ten-year war of the Greeks against the Trojans and in the Odyssey recalled the adventures of one Greek on his way home. From about 1200 B.C. and for seven hundred years until Plato’s time these two epics were the basis of Greek religion and morals, the chief source of history, and even of practical information on geography, metallurgy, navigation, and shipbuilding. Still more remarkable, for two and a half millennia after Plato, the Homeric epics as primordial works of the imagination reigned over the Western world of letters. The core of humanistic scholarship, the songs of Homer resound without interruption above the changing dogmas of politics, religion, and science. The prophetic Greeks called him “the poet.”

  Homer’s survival is a stark contrast to the fate of the Greeks’ other creations. The Acropolis lies in ruins, and there is probably not one complete freestanding statue surviving from the Great Age. We cannot hear Greek music. Their literary legacy, which has dominated Western culture, survives only in fragments. While we know the names of at least 150 ancient Greek writers of tragedy, what remain for us are mere samples. Of all the 92 plays of Euripides whose names survive we have only a fifth (18 or 19), of the 82 of Aeschylus less than a tenth (7), and of Sophocles’ 122, a fifteenth (7). Would the power of the ancient Greeks have been greater or less if the bulk of their work had come to
us? Of the works of Agathon, the most eminent follower of the three famous tragedians at whose house Plato set his Symposium, we have only fragments. Yet Agathon was reputed to be the great innovator, the first to write a tragedy on his own imaginary subject and the first to divide a play into acts. For us he is hardly more than a literary rumor.

  In the lottery of time, Homer’s two great epics managed to survive. Why? How? Homer’s chances of survival were multiplied by his perennial popularity in all sorts of climates. His works were copied again and again, somehow undimmed by centuries of changing styles. There were some happy coincidences, such as the dry climate of Egypt that happened to provide natural museum conditions for preserving fragile manuscripts. And Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt (332 B.C.) set the scene for Greek rulers to found the greatest of all ancient libraries at Alexandria. In the literal sense, in Egypt Homer survived the test of time. Of the Egyptian papyri that have lasted into our century, about half are copies of the Iliad or the Odyssey, or commentaries on them. In the Hellenistic Age, after the death of Alexander the Great, educated Greeks continued to learn Homer by heart, much as, later, the people in the West would know their Bible, or as Muslims memorized their Koran.

  Even after the rise of Christianity, the Iliad and the Odyssey remained the very model of the heroic epic, outshining Christian classics. English critics who disagreed about everything else were all Homer’s acolytes. Alexander Pope preached:

  Be Homer’s works your study and delight;

  Read them by day, and meditate by night.

  And the romantic John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” discovered the world: