Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render.

  Let me recount three personal anecdotes to illuminate the background and suggest some of the problems of this confrontation of East and West in religion.

  Fig. 5.3 — Martin Buber

  First: back in the middle fifties, when Dr. Martin Buber was in New York lecturing, I had the privilege of being among a number invited to hear him in a series of talks held in a small, very special chamber at Columbia. And there this eloquent little man—for he was, indeed, remarkably small, endowed, however, with a powerful presence, graced with that mysterious force known nowadays as “charisma”—held forth for some five or six weekly sessions with extraordinary eloquence. In fact, in that English was not his first but his second language, his fluency and easy eloquence were astonishing. As the talks went on, however, I gradually came to realize, about the middle of talk number three, that there was one word the doctor was using that I was failing to understand. His lectures were on the history of the holy people of the Old Testament, with references also to more recent times; and the word that I was failing to understand was “God.” Sometimes it seemed to refer to an imagined personal creator of this magnitudinous universe which the sciences have revealed to us. Sometimes it was clearly a reference simply to the Yahweh of the Old Testament, in one or another of his stages of evolution. Then again, it seemed to be somebody with whom Dr. Buber himself had been in frequent conversation. In the midst of one lecture, for example, he broke suddenly off and, standing for a moment bemused, shook his head and quietly said to us, “It pains me to speak of God in the third person.” When I reported this to Dr. Gershom Scholem (now also of Tel Aviv), he laughed and answered quizzically, “Sometimes he does go too far!”

  So with this mercurial word slipping this way and that, I cautiously raised my hand. The lecturer paused and considerately asked, “What is it?”

  “Dr. Buber,” I said, “there is one word being used here this evening that I do not understand.”

  “What is that word?”

  “'God,'” I answered.

  His eyes widened and the bearded face came a little forward. “You do not know what the word ‘God’ means!”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘God,’” I said. “You have been telling us this evening that God today has hidden his face and no longer shows himself to man. Yet I have just returned from India [and I had indeed been there, the year before],6 where I found that people are experiencing God all the time.”

  He drew suddenly back, lifting both hands, palms upward. “Do you mean,” he said, “to compare...?”

  But the M.C., Dr. Jacob Taubes, cut quickly in: “No, Doctor!” (We all knew what had been almost said, and I was just waiting to hear what the next would be.) “Mr. Campbell,” said Dr. Taubes, “only asked to know what you mean by ‘God.’ “

  The master quickly reassembled his thoughts, then said to me in the manner of one dismissing an irrelevancy, “Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”

  Which was an answer perhaps good enough from Dr. Buber’s point of view, but from another standpoint altogether inappropriate, since the people of the Orient are not in exile from their god. The ultimate divine mystery is there found immanent within each. It is not “out there” somewhere. It is within you. And no one has ever been cut off. The only difficulty is, however, that some folk simply don’t know how to look within. The fault is no one’s, if not one’s own. Nor is the problem one of an original Fall of the “first man,” many thousand years ago, and of exile and atonement. The problem is psychological. And it can be solved.

  That, then, is the first of my three personal anecdotes.

  The second is of an event that occurred some three years after the first, when a young Hindu gentleman came to see me, and a very pious young man he proved to be: a worshiper of Viṣṇu, employed as a clerk or secretary of one of the Indian delegates at the UN. He had been reading the works of Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, philosophy, and religion, works that I had edited many years before, and which he wanted to discuss. But there was something else that he wished to talk about too.

  “You know,” he said after we had begun to feel at home with each other, “when I visit a foreign country, I like to acquaint myself with its religion; so I have bought myself a Bible and for some months now have been reading it from the beginning; but, you know...” and here he paused, to regard me uncertainly, then said, “I can’t find any religion in it!”

  A fitting counterpart, that—is it not?—to Dr. Buber’s unspoken word? What for one of these two gentlemen was religion, was for the other no religion at all.

  Now I had of course been brought up on the Bible, and I had also studied Hinduism; so I thought I might be of some help. “Well,” I said, “I can see how that might be, if you had not been given to know that a reading of the imagined history of the Jewish race is here regarded as a religious exercise. There would then, I can see, be very little for you of religion in the greater part of the Bible.”

  I thought later that I should perhaps have referred him to the Psalms; but when I then turned to a fresh reading of these with Hinduism in mind, I was glad that I had not done so; for almost invariably the leading theme is either of the virtue of the singer, protected by his God, who will “smite his enemies on the cheek” and “break the teeth of the wicked”; or, on the other hand, of complaint that that God has not yet given due aid to his righteous servant: all of which is just about diametrically opposed to what an instructed Hindu would have been taught to regard as a religious sentiment.

  In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is—from the point of view of Indian thought—a style of religion for children. Whereas the final sense of all adult teaching is to the point that the mystery transcendent of categories, names and forms, sentiments and thought, is to be realized as the ground of one’s own very being.

  That is the realization formulated in those famous words of the gentle Brahmin Aruni to his son, recorded in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad of about the eighth century B.C.: “You, my dear Svetaketu, you are It” — tat tvam asi.7

  The “you” here meant was not the you that can be named, the “you” that one’s friends know and care for, that was born and one day will die. That “you” is not “It.” Neti neti, “not that, not that.” Only when that mortal “you” will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will “you” have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world: It is not the gods or any God, for example, that has been personified in worship. As we read in the great Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad (of about the same age as the Chāndogya):

  This that people say: “Worship this god! Worship that god!”—one god after another! All this is his creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods...

  He is entered in the universe even to our fingernail-tips, like a razor in a razorc
ase, or fire in firewood. Him those people see not, for as seen, he is incomplete. When breathing, he becomes “breath” by name; when speaking, “voice”; when seeing, “the eye”; when hearing, “the ear”; when thinking, “mind”: these are but the names of his acts. Whoever worships one or another of these—knows not; for he is incomplete in one or another of these.

  One should worship with the thought that he is one’s self, for therein all these become one. This Self is the footprint of that All, for by it one knows the All—just as, verily, by following a footprint one finds cattle that have been lost...8

  I remember a vivid talk by the Japanese Zen philosopher Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki that opened with an unforgettable contrast of the Occidental and Oriental understandings of the God-man-nature mystery. Commenting first on the Biblical view of the state of man following the Fall in Eden, “Man,” he observed, “is against God, Nature is against God, and Man and Nature are against each other. God’s own likeness (Man), God’s own creation (Nature) and God himself—all three are at war.”9 Then, expounding the Oriental view, “Nature,” he said, “is the bosom whence we come and whither we go.”10 “Nature produces Man out of itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature.”11 “I am in Nature and Nature is in me.”12 The Godhead as highest Being is to be comprehended, he continued, as prior to creation, “in whom there was yet neither Man nor Nature.” “As soon as a name is given, the Godhead ceases to be Godhead. Man and Nature spring up and we get caught in the maze of abstract conceptual vocabulary.”13

  We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences—ever deeper, ever greater—of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.

  The word buddha means simply, “awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.” It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, “to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom”; also, “to perceive, to know, to come to one’s senses, to wake.” The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousness—as the value of a lightbulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.

  Do we have any such teaching in the West? Not in our best-known teachings of religion. According to our Good Book, God made the world, God made man, and God and his creatures are not to be conceived of as in any sense identical. Indeed, the preaching of identity is in our best-known view the prime heresy. When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for blasphemy; and when the Moslem mystic al-Hallaj, nine centuries later, said the same, he too was crucified. Whereas just that is the ultimate point of what is taught throughout the Orient as religion.

  So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group. The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother.14 And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves). Through our humanity we are related to Christ; through his divinity he relates us to God. And how do we confirm in life our relationship to that one and only God-Man? Through baptism and, thereby, spiritual member in his Church: which is to say, once again through a social institution.

  Our whole introduction to the images, the archetypes, the universally known guiding symbols of the unfolding mysteries of the spirit has been by way of the claims of these two self-sanctified historical social groups. And the claims of both have today been disqualified—historically, astronomically, biologically, and every other way — and everybody knows it. No wonder our clergymen look anxious, and their congregations confused!

  And so, what now of our synagogues and our churches? Many of the latter, I note, have already been turned into theaters; others are lecture halls, where ethics, politics, and sociology are taught on Sundays in a stentorian tone with that special theological tremolo that signifies God’s will. But do they have to go down this way? Can they not serve any more their proper function?

  The obvious answer, it seems to me, is that of course they can serve—or rather, could, if their clerics knew wherein the magic lay of the symbols they hold in their keep. They could serve simply by exhibiting these in a properly affective way. For it is the rite, the ritual and its imagery, that counts in religion, and where that is missing the words are mere carriers of concepts that may or may not make contemporary sense. A ritual is an organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these, not as verbal reports of historic events, either past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever. Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols “mean.” The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse. Dogma and definitions rationally insisted upon are inevitably hindrances, not aids, to religious meditation, since no one’s sense of the presence of God can be anything more than a function of his own spiritual capacity. Having your image of God—the most intimate, hidden mystery of your life—defined for you in terms contrived by some council of bishops back, say, in the fifth century or so: what good is that? But a contemplation of the crucifix works; the odor of incense works; so do, also, hieratic attires, the tones of well-sung Gregorian chants, intoned and mumbled Introits, Kyries, heard and unheard consecrations. What has the “affect value” of wonders of this kind to do with the definitions of councils, or whether we quite catch the precise meaning of such words as Oramus te, Domine, per merita Sanctorum tuorum?15 If we are curious for meanings, they are there, translated in the other column of the prayerbook. But if the magic of the rite is gone...

  Let me offer a few suggestions. Let me first present a few thoughts from the Indian tradition; then a thought from the Japanese; and finally, a suggestion of something that we as Westerners may require which the Orient cannot give.

  The fundamental text of the Hindu tradition is, of course, the Bhagavad Gītā; and there four basic yogas are described. The word yoga itself, from a Sanskrit verbal root yuj, meaning “to yoke, to link one thing to another,” refers to the act of linking the mind to the source of mind, consciousness to the source of consciousness; the import of which definition is perhaps best illustrated in the discipline known as knowledge yoga, the yoga, that is to say, of discrimination between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object in every act of knowing, and the identification of oneself, then,
with the subject. “I know my body. My body is the object. I am the witness, the knower of the object. I, therefore, am not my body.” Next: “I know my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.” And so on: “I know my feelings; I am not my feelings.” You can back yourself out of the room that way. And the Buddha then comes along and adds: “You are not the witness either. There is no witness.” So where are you now? Where are you between two thoughts? That is the way known as jñāna yoga, the way of sheer knowledge.

  A second discipline is that known as rājā yoga, the kingly, royal, or supreme yoga, which is the one that usually comes to mind when the word yoga is mentioned. This we might describe as a kind of psychological gymnastic of rigorous physical as well as mental attitudes: sitting in the “lotus posture,” breathing in deeply and out to certain counts in certain ways; in through the right nostril, hold, out through the left; in through the left nostril, hold, out through the right, and so on: all to various meditations. The results are actual psychological transformations, culminating in a rapturous experience of the whole sheer light of consciousness, released from all conditioning limitations and effects.