Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  The Buddhist teaching in recognition of this fact is called the Doctrine of Mutual Arising. It implies that no one—nobody and no thing—is to blame for anything that ever occurs, because all is mutually arising. That fundamentally is one reason why in Japan, even shortly following World War II, I found among the people I met no resentment. Enemies mutually arise: they are two parts of the one thing. A leader and his following also are parts of the one thing. You and your enemies; you and your friends: all parts of the one thing, one wreath: “thing and thing: no division.”

  This, surely, is sublime. This, furthermore, is the inspiring idea that inhabits much Far Eastern Buddhist art. When you are looking, for example, at a Japanese painting of a crane, that is not simply what you or I might perceive as a crane, but the universe, a reflex of the ri hokkai, the one Buddha-consciousness of all things. Moreover, anything can be looked upon and immediately experienced this way.

  A monk came to Ch’i-an of Yen-kuan. “Who is Vairocana Buddha?” he asked.

  Said the Master, “Will you kindly bring me that pitcher?”

  The monk brought the pitcher to the Master, who then told him to put it back where he found it. The monk did so and asked the Master again to tell him of Vairocana.

  Ch’i-an replied, “He is long since gone.”11

  Fig. 7.6 — Zen Garden

  This, finally, then, is what is meant by the Mahāyāna Buddhist term zen < ch’an < dhyana = “contemplation.” It is a way of contemplation that can be just as well enjoyed while walking, working, and otherwise moving about in this world, as while sitting in a lotus posture, gazing at a wall or at nothing, in the manner of a Bodhidharma. It is a way of participation, living gladly in this secular world, both in the world and of it, our labor in the earning of a living then being our discipline; the raising of our family; our intercourse with acquaintances; our sufferings and our joys. T. S. Eliot, in his play The Cocktail Party, applied the idea—with a number of covert quotations from Buddhist texts—to the context of a modern social circle. And in medieval Japan this was the Buddhism of the samurai. Its influence can be felt to this day in the Japanese arts of defense: wrestling, swordsmanship, archery, and the rest. Equally in the arts of gardening, flower arrangement, cooking, even wrapping a parcel and offering a present, this Buddhism is in operation. Its way is the “way of the monkey,” jiriki, “own power,” exercised in relation not only to what might be regarded in our part of the world as concerns properly religious, but, even more deliberately and diligently, to every domain of life. Which, in fact, is what accounts in the main for the almost incredible beauty of Japanese civilization. Great poverty, suffering, cruelty, and injustices, all the usual concomitants of existence in this vale of tears, are present there in full measure—as everywhere, and as they will be, world without end. But there is also escape from suffering. The escape from suffering is nirvāṇa. And nirvāṇa is this world itself, when experienced without desire and fear, just as it is: ji-ji-mu-ge. It is here! It is here!

  To conclude, then: There is a popular Indian fable that Ramakrishna used to like to tell, to illustrate the difficulty of holding in mind the two conscious planes simultaneously, of the multiple and transcendent. It is of a young aspirant whose guru had just brought home to him the realization of himself as identical in essence with the power that supports the universe and which in theological thinking we personify as “God.”

  The youth, profoundly moved, exalted in the notion of himself as at one with the Lord and Being of the Universe, walked away in a state of profound absorption; and when he had passed in that state through the village and out onto the road beyond it, he beheld, coming in his direction, a great elephant bearing a howdah on its back and with the mahout, the driver, riding—as they do—high on its neck, above its head.

  And the young candidate for sainthood, meditating on the proposition “I am God; all things are God,” on perceiving that mighty elephant coming toward him, added the obvious corollary, “The elephant also is God.”

  The animal, with its bells jingling to the majestic rhythm of its stately approach, was steadily coming on, and the mahout above its head began shouting, “Clear the way! Clear the way, you idiot! Clear the way!”

  The youth, in his rapture, was thinking still, “I am God; that elephant is God.” And, hearing the shouts of the mahout, he added, “Should God be afraid of God? Should God get out of the way of God?”

  The phenomenon came steadily on with the driver at its head still shouting at him, and the youth, in undistracted meditation, held both to his place on the road and to his transcendental insight, until the moment of truth arrived and the elephant, simply wrapping its great trunk around the lunatic, tossed him aside, off the road.

  Physically shocked, spiritually stunned, the youth landed all in a heap, not greatly bruised but altogether undone; and rising, not even adjusting his clothes, he returned, disordered, to his guru, to require an explanation. “You told me,” he said, when he had explained himself, “you told me that I was God.”

  “Yes,” said the guru, “you are God.”

  “You told me that all things are God.”

  “Yes,” said the guru again, “all things are God.”

  “That elephant, then, was God?”

  “So it was. That elephant was God. But why didn’t you listen to the voice of God, shouting from the elephant’s head, to get out of the way?”12

  [Discuss]

  VIII—The Mythology of Love

  Fig. 8.1 — The Kiss

  VIII

  The Mythology of Love

  [1967]1

  What a wonderful theme! And what a wonderful world of myth one finds in celebration of this universal mystery! The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every loving heart. There were, moreover, two orders of love, according to the manners of manifestation of this divinity, in his terrestrial aspect and celestial. And Dante, following the classical lead, saw love suffusing and turning the universe, from the highest seat of the Trinity above to the lowest pits of Hell. One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian—a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused—because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

  Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God’s own word, to bow before any other being!

  The Persian poets have asked, “By what power is Satan sustained?” And the answer that they have found is this: “By his memory of the sound of God’s voice when he said, ‘Be gone!’ “ What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!2

  Another lesson from Persia is in the life and words of the great Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, who in A.D. 922 was tortured and crucified for having declared that he and his Beloved—namely God—were one. He had compared his love for God with that of the moth for the flame. The moth plays about the lighted lamp till dawn, and, returning with battered wings to its friends, tells of the beautiful thing it found; then, desiring to be joined to it entirely, flying into the flame the next night, becomes one with it.

  Such metaphors speak of a rapture that we all, one way or another, must at one time or another, either intensely or not so intensely, have experienced or at least imagined. But there is another aspect of love, w
hich some may also have experienced, and which is likewise illustrated in a Persian text. This one is from an ancient Zoroastrian legend of the first parents of the human race, where they are pictured as having sprung from the earth in the form of a single reed, so closely joined that they could not have been told apart. However, in time they separated; and again in time they united, and there were born to them two children, whom they loved so tenderly and irresistibly that they ate them up. The mother ate one; the father ate the other; and God, to protect the human race, then reduced the force of man’s capacity for love by some ninety-nine per cent. Those first parents thereafter had seven more pairs of children, every one of which, however—thank God!—survived.

  The old Greek idea of Love as the eldest of the gods is matched in India by that ancient myth from the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad cited above, of the Primal Being as a nameless, formless power that at first had no knowledge of itself but then thought, “I,” ahaṁ, and immediately felt fear that the “me” it now had in mind might be slain. Then, reasoning, “Since I am all there is, what should I fear?” it thought, “I wish there were another!” and, swelling, splitting, became two, a male and a female; out of which primal couple there came into being all the creatures of this earth. And when all had been accomplished, the male looked about, saw the world he had produced, and thought and said, “All this am I!”

  In the meaning of this story, that Primal Being antecedent to consciousness—which in the beginning thought, “I!” and felt fear, then desire—is the motivating substance activating each one of us in our unconsciously motivated lives. And the second lesson of the myth is that through our own experiences of the union of love we participate in the creative action of that ground of all being. For, according to the Indian view, our separateness from each other in space and time here on earth—our multitude—is but a secondary, deluding aspect of the truth, which is that in essence we are of one being, one ground; and we know and experience that truth—going out of ourselves, outside the limits of ourselves—in the rapture of love.

  The great German philosopher Schopenhauer, in a magnificent essay on “The Foundation of Morality,” treats of this transcendental spiritual experience. How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain—as though that other’s life were his own, that other’s danger his own? Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being. Schopenhauer’s name for this motivation is “compassion,” Mitleid, and he identifies it as the one and only inspiration of inherently moral action. It is founded, in his view, in a metaphysically valid insight. For a moment one is selfless, boundless, without ego.3 And I have lately had occasion to think frequently of this word of Schopenhauer as I have watched on television newscasts those heroic helicopter rescues, under fire in Vietnam, of young men wounded in enemy territory: their fellows, forgetful of their own safety, putting their young lives in peril as though the lives to be rescued were their own. There, I would say—if we are looking truly for an example in our day—is an authentic rendition of the labor of Love.

  In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of his God—which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said “I” and then realized, “I am all this world!” The first degree of such love is of servant to master: “O Lord, you are the Master; I am thy servant. Command, and I shall obey!” This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world. The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such a love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gītā between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Kṛṣṇa. The next, or third, degree of love is that of parent for child, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one’s heart the inward divine child of one’s own awakened spiritual life—in the sense of the mystic Meister Eckhart’s words when he said to his congregation: “It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.”4 And again: “God’s ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.”5 In Hinduism, it is in the popular worship of the naughty little “butter thief,” Kṛṣṇa the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated.6 And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, “O Master, I do not find that I love God.” And he asked, “Is there nothing, then, that you love?” To which she answered, “My little nephew.” And he said to her, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.”7

  The fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritual. In the words attributed to Jesus, “The two shall be one flesh.”8 For the “precious thing” then is no longer oneself, one’s individual life, but the duad of each as both and the living of life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear there anything like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.)

  And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one’s place in the world, wealth, social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of al-Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Kṛṣṇa, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kālī was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to respond.9

  Fig. 8.2 — Kṛṣṇa and the Young Wives

  There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Kṛṣṇa playing his flute at night in the forest of Vṛndāvana, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.10

  The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason.11 Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other
, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”12

  Saint Bernard’s contemporary Abelard saw the highest exemplification of God’s love for man in the descent of the son of God to the earth to become flesh and his submission to death on the cross. In Christian hermaneutics the crucifixion of the Savior had always presented a great problem; for Jesus, according to Christian belief, accepted death voluntarily. Why? In Abelard’s view, it was not, as some in his day had proposed, as a ransom paid to Satan, to “redeem” mankind from his keep; nor was it, as others held, as a payment to the Father, in “atonement” for Adam’s sin. Rather, it was an act of willing self-immolation in love, intended to invoke in response the return of mankind’s love from worldly concerns to God.13 And that Christ may not have actually suffered in that loving act we may take from a saying of the mystic Meister Eckhart: “To him who suffers but not for love, to suffer is suffering and hard to bear. But one who suffers for love suffers not, and his suffering is fruitful in God’s sight.”14

  Indeed, the very idea of a descent of God into the world in love to invoke, in return, man’s love to God, seems to me to imply exactly the contrary to the statement I have just quoted of Saint Paul. Implied, rather, it seems to me, is the idea that as mankind yearns for the grace of God, so God for the homage of mankind, the two yearnings being reciprocal. And the image of the crucified as both true God and true man would then seem to bring to focus the matched terms of a mutual sacrifice—in the way not of atonement in the penal sense, but of at-one-ment in the marital. And further: when extended to symbolize not only the one historic moment of Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary, but the mystery through all time and space of God’s presence and participation in the agony of all living things, the sign of the cross would then have to be looked upon as the sign of an eternal affirmation of all that is, ever was, or shall ever be. One thinks of Christ’s words reported in the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas: “Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone, you will find me there.”15 Also, those of Plato in the Timaeus, where he states that time is “the moving image of Eternity.”16 Or again, those of William Blake: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”17 And there is a memorable passage in the writings of Thomas Mann, where he celebrates man as “a noble meeting [eine hohe Begegnung] of Spirit and Nature in their yearning way to each other.”18