The Buddha in the Tarot
Page 18
Although notable for its empirical pragmatism, the Buddha’s approach was also marked with a sense of creative innovation. He re-visioned the concept of “Brahmin” membership in terms of ethical conduct as opposed to natural birthright. In this way, he provided a rationale for establishing a spiritual community which cut across all caste divisions, and eventually, gender divisions. His insistence that the Sangha members should never own property nor prepare their own food meant that spiritual development could never be an individualistic pursuit, practiced away from society at large. Another creative move was to insist that his message did not eradicate but coexist with and absorb the religious, superstitious, and aesthetic norms of the communities it encountered. With the exception of the Brahmin priesthood and the sacrificial system, the Buddha, as Ling says, assumed a by-and-large “tolerant attitude” towards the religious customs of his day. In relation to folk beliefs and practices, he demonstrated a creative appreciation of the function that mythology and ritual occupied “in the lives of unsophisticated people.”20 This skillful approach resulted in the slow transformation of Buddhism’s outward appearance in some places, but one which nevertheless retained the integrity of its core teachings. This is a process that can clearly be seen in Buddhism’s interaction with Tibet’s original Bon tradition. Such innovations reveal creativity to be one of the hallmarks of an awakened mind. A mind without defilements, without unwholesome preoccupations, is at the same time one which uncovers the potential for natural and unconstrained creativity.
A Buddhist Reflection: Buddhism and Science
Buddhism, especially in its Mahayana/Vajrayana forms, is truly Apollonian in character, bringing together the worlds of reason and empirical pragmatism with those of emotion, mystery, and artistic creativity. This affective and artistic dimension is clearly found in various elements of the Tibetan tradition, whether sacred dance, chanted mantras, thankha painting, mandala construction, or the ecstatic prophecies of the Nechung oracle. In Zen Buddhism, similarly, meditation works in collaboration with a vast array of artistic pursuits, including poetry, calligraphy, the martial arts, gardening, and even tea-making.
Yet perhaps the main attraction of Buddhism for many in the West has been its apparent compatibility with science, or at least, a scientific sensibility. This attitude was clearly shown in a discussion between the renowned astrophysicist Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama. Sagan asked him a question which he presented to most religious leaders he engaged with – what would he do if science disproved one the central tenets of his faith, for example, rebirth? The Dalai Lama’s response was hardly expected: “Tibetan Buddhism,” he replied, “would have to change.”21 More explicitly, the Dalai Lama has written that if scientific investigation were to decisively show certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then Buddhism must “accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Spirituality, he says, must be in accord with the “insights and discoveries of science.”22 Such words reveal what is for many an attractive aspect of the Buddhist mentality – of putting reason and empirical evidence before speculation, dogma, or tradition. This pragmatic approach has set the baseline for others to go even further in their visions of a “religionless” or at least “agnostic” Buddhist culture of awakening, divested of harmful archaic accretions that have fastened themselves to the Buddha’s original vision of liberation. As Batchelor argues, blind allegiance to unverifiable beliefs, such as the six realms of existence or retributive karma, directs us away from “the Buddha’s agnostic and pragmatic perspective.” The Buddha did clearly accept karma, but in contrast with the understanding of many “religious Buddhists,” he focused on its “psychological” as opposed to “cosmological” repercussions.23
However, one of the most thought-provoking areas within the Buddhist-Science dialogue concerns an apparent convergence between various Buddhist concepts (especially emptiness and interdependence) and scientific theories relating to the nature of reality. In relation to Physics for example, there seems to be some resonance in the Mahayana distinction between relative and absolute levels of truth (discussed in The Fool and The High Priestess) and the distinction physicists make between Newtonian and Quantum descriptions of reality. This is a distinction between a diverse world of things, events, identities and causes, and one as the Dalai Lama says in which there are no “discrete, independent realities.”24 The Buddhist view of the interconnected nature of reality also coincides with observations of protons and their apparently simultaneous interaction at distance, which points towards a “nonseparable” understanding of the world.25 Again, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which for many physicists suggests the inseparable role of the observer in the reality being observed, seems congruent with certain philosophical strands within Buddhism; from the extreme idealism of Yogacara, which saw the world as an extension of mind, to the Middle Way of the Prasankiga school, which views the world as having only relative existence, reliant upon our shared language and concepts.26
Another area of fruitful dialogue has been in the area of consciousness research. Western models of consciousness have tended towards understanding it solely in terms of behavior or physical processes within the brain. Such models have tended to overlook its subjective dimension, focusing instead upon that which can be observed and measured. For the Dalai Lama, a comprehensive model of consciousness requires the integration of such third-party reductionism with “the subjective experience of the individual.”27 Buddhism, with its long history of rigorous investigation into this subjective dimension, may contribute towards a fuller picture of the mind. One way in which such collaboration has already been seen is in the area of “neuroplasticity” – the brain’s capacity for transformation and adaptation. Experiments involving the brain-monitoring of experienced Buddhist meditators have confirmed that mind-training (bhavana) leads to observable changes in the brain, and with this, alterations in psychological traits that were previously assumed to be fixed.
Judgement (20)
General Overview
This card illustrates a popular subject amongst artists of the Renaissance – The Last Judgement. This is the “end-time” when, according to the Book of Revelation, “the seventh angel blew his Trumpet” and it was time “for the dead to be judged.” (Rev. 11: 15, 18). The card shows the angel Gabriel, blowing the “Last Trumpet,” and the dead rising from their tombs. The Trumpet itself is depicted with a cross-emblazoned banner hanging from it, perhaps representing the idea of resurrection. In a departure from traditional Tarot renditions of this theme, Waite has shown six rather than three figures rising from their graves – three in the immediate foreground, and three on the other side of some watery expanse. Another modification is that both sets of figures depict a man and a woman with a child between them. In previous decks - for example, the Visconti-Sforza or Marseilles - the naked couple is usually depicted with an old man.
At the darker side of the spectrum of possibility, this card carries within itself the apocalyptic themes of judgement and cleansing destruction. The card is after all that of the Last Judgement, and Gabriel, as Cirlot reminds us, is the “angel of the apocalypse”; the one who “sounds the last Trump” in the “valley of Jehoshaphat.”1 The apocalypse is the “unveiling” of the end of the world. For the Abrahamic faiths in particular, this describes the final battle between the forces of good and evil, the resurrection of the dead, and God’s judgement upon the righteous and the damned. As Gabriel revealed to the prophet Daniel: “And many of those who are asleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12: 2). From this perspective, the three figures on the far shore perhaps represent those doomed to perdition, cut off from the righteous – as in Michelangelo’s rendition of this scene - by the river Styx.
A second theme in this card, and one that is linked to the first, is that of “transition.” The card as Fairfield says evokes a sense of “passing from one phase of life into another.”2 Pollack sees not o
nly transition but decision-making, suggesting that the cross on the flag indicates a crossroads in thinking.3 We can sum all this up in Greer’s proposal, which is that the card is the harbinger of a paradigm shift – the unexpected appearance of a “new perspective”; or, more negatively, “resisting transformation.”4 In this interpretation, the three on the far shore may represent the actualized potentialities of those figures nearest to us, while the river suggests the difficult waters of transition.
The much-used if not over-used concept of the paradigm shift ultimately derives from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In his book Kuhn set out to challenge the tacitly assumed view that scientific knowledge and understanding increases incrementally over time. Instead, Kuhn argued that many advances are made during short periods of dramatic shifts in thinking; they are “revolutions” in understanding. Kuhn compared such revolutions of the mind to a gestalt-like change in perception.5 Although Kuhn’s study was limited to the scientific disciplines, his concept of the Paradigm Shift has become a general colloquialism for dramatic transitions in general, particularly cultural ones. It has for example occupied a central place within New Age thinking from the 1980s onwards. What is particularly apparent, and of much relevance to The Judgement card, is that opposition to new cultural paradigms is often cloaked within the language of the apocalypse. In her number one best-seller The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, the evangelical writer Constance Cumbey described the then-emerging New Age in terms of a Satanic Conspiracy for world domination. Many in the evangelical right would still be happy with Cumbey’s initial assessment that the rise of feminism, gay rights, eastern mysticism, environmentalism, anti-war protests and Neopaganism are “definite signs of the end times.”6 Yet such apocalyptic fervor in the face of cultural change is certainly not confined to Christianity’s kooky corner. In a 2013 sermon to his congregation at the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirril, declared that the legal recognition of gay marriage was a “very dangerous sign of the apocalypse”; a step on the “path of self-destruction."7
Yet the sword of the apocalypse cuts both ways. For the old guard, the emerging new paradigm of the “Ecological Age”8 looks like the end of the world – a leftist, pagan, godless, unnatural and perverted realm of the anti-Christ which will usher in God’s cleansing judgement. For the proponents of this new paradigm, it is precisely an impending apocalypse towards which the old ways are steering us which must be avoided – the apocalypse of patriarchal fragmentation, blind consumerism, capitalistic greed, global militarization and ecological catastrophe. As Ruether puts it, exponential population growth, diminishing resources, pollution, and state violence have now become “the four horsemen of the new global apocalypse.”9 It appears that the words “Interesting Times” fall well-short of the sense of crisis, dread, and dislocation for all those living within a period of immense cultural and environmental shift – a perceived destabilization of reality itself, for which the only reasonable recourse seems to be to the tortured rhetoric of The Eschatos.
Yet a third interpretation of this card focuses upon the themes of awakening and rebirth; themes which cannot be neatly separated from the first two. Our sense of impending disaster and dislocation says Jung is simultaneously the end-point of a pregnancy which “heralds the throes of birth.”10 This sense of rebirth is something recognized by Place in his Alchemical Tarot deck, in which the Judgement card depicts young stalks of corn emerging from the Place of the Skull (Golgotha) - the site of the crucifixion, which in legend was also the hill under which the first Adam was buried. The awakened in Christ are a “new race”; children of a “new Adam.” As Paul says: “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Cor. 5: 17). In this reading, the watery expanse in the RWS card represents the waters of baptism and new life.
According to Gardner’s channeled Judgement, the “old self” will be “born again”; changed into a “new and vibrant being.” Such transformation becomes possible when we listen more carefully “to the Moon and the Sun.”11 Gardner’s alignment of Moon, Sun and transformation brings to mind the Great Work of the Renaissance alchemists. Indeed, it is notable that Smith’s rendition of the card suggests a fusion of elements from the Chymical Wedding found in various alchemical woodcuts, as in those of 16th-Century Rosarium Philosophorum.12 These illustrations show the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) of Sol and Luna, their sexual union, putrefaction in the grave, and the emergence of some new form of life – the Philosopher’s Stone or Divine Child. The Divine Child, which in our card stands with his back to us between his naked parents, is often viewed as a symbol of spiritual rebirth and transformation. For Cirlot, the child represents the “future,” “inner simplicity,” and identification with the “god within us.”13 For Jung, the divine child or puer aeternus is viewed as symbolic of an emerging potential towards the Self, brought about by the union of all opposites within the psyche – Sol and Luna, male and female, good and evil, dark and light, the conscious and the unconscious.14 A simpler interpretation might be that the child represents a new form of consciousness arising in the world; the shape of its full disclosure not yet revealed, suggested by his or her concealed identity. Pollack agrees, and argues the presence of six rather than three figures indicates that this transformation is not merely about the individual, but about the progress of humanity as a whole.15
In the Story of the Buddha: Conflict and New Life
The Buddha’s teachings may have signified the birth of a new culture of awakening, but this does not mean that they were not without opponents, whether from within or without. The Brahmins obviously had much to lose in the Buddha’s vision of a rational, casteless, non-theistic and ritual-free society. Their loathing for this new egalitarian order is clearly expressed in the Agganna Sutta, where the Buddha questioned Vasettha, a recent Brahmin convert to his teachings, on the how his former colleagues viewed his apostasy:
“The brahmins, lord, say thus: Only a brahmin is of the best social grade; other grades are low. Only a brahmin is of a clear complexion; other complexions are swarthy. Only brahmins are of pure breed; not they that are not of the brahmins. Only brahmins are genuine children of Brahma, born of his mouth, offspring of Brahma, created by Brahma, heirs of Brahma. As for you, you have renounced the best rank, and have gone over to that low class—to shaven recluses, to the vulgar rich, to them of swarthy skins, to the footborn descendants. Such a course is not good, such a course is not proper, even this, that you, having forsaken that upper class, should associate with an inferior class, to wit, with shaveling friar-folk, menials, swarthy of skin, the offscouring of Our kinsman’s heels. In these terms, lord, do the brahmins blame and revile us with characteristic abuse, copious, not at all stinted.”16
This vitriol intensifies in later Hindu apocalyptic, as in the Bhavishya Purana, which casts the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, incarnated to lead many astray with his false nastika dharma. In the Kalki-Purana, Vishnu descends as the apocalyptic avatar Kalki, whose mission among other things is to annihilate Buddhists, outcastes, men controlled by women, and re-establish the caste-varna and sacrificial systems. According to the Bhagavata Purana, Kalki, riding his white horse Devadatta, will “kill by the millions” those who have “dared dress as kings.”17 Kalki’s horse Devadatta (“God Given”) does of course have other links with apocalyptic conflict, being the name of Arjuna’s conch which, according to the Bhagavad-Gita, he blew before his all-out battle with his cousins the Kauravas. This conch was blown in the name of “duty and fame,” lest he “incur sin.” Surprisingly enough, Devadatta was also the name of the Buddha’s rather nefarious cousin, who attempted to split the Sangha, and even kill the Buddha himself.
Yet the Buddha recognized that another apocalyptic battle was one that took place within. In his conflict with Mara and his many demons, we see the archetypal template for the inner struggle that accompanies spiritu
al transformation. It is therefore of little surprise that many of the Buddha’s teachings were communicated through the metaphors of battle and conflict. “If one were to conquer a thousand thousand in the battle—he who conquers self is the greatest warrior,”18 he declared in the Dhammapada.