Living with the Devil

by Stephen Batchelor

  Or had the policeman’s gun that fired the bullet that killed Erwin von Scheubner-Richter on November 9, 1923, been angled fractionally to the right, it would have struck the man whose arm was linked to his: Adolf Hitler. Had Hitler died at that moment, my mother and the man she might have married would almost certainly not have met in the North African desert. The same shot would likewise have scrambled in unforeseeable ways the myriad circumstances, choices, and events that led her to meet my actual father some years later.

  To dwell on the improbability of spending seventy-odd years on this planet as one of six billion worrying apes upsets the consoling belief that deep down inside I am a permanent and independent soul. Yet as long as I can remember, this same me has gazed out faithfully and unwaveringly onto a world of other things and people from its solitary aerie concealed inside this flesh. The person whose story begins with a memory of sitting on a woman’s lap, nestling in the folds of her fur coat while peering through an airplane window at the miniature houses and cars of Toronto, seems to be the very one who is writing these words now.

  In an abstract and ineffectual manner, I know this cannot be true. For I have grown up and changed. I can no longer identify with either my three-year-old body or three-year-old mind. Physically, emotionally, and mentally I have become someone else. But I cannot help feeling that I am the same person who wiggled that child’s chubby fingers and reveled in its infant delights. Yet as soon as I turn my attention toward this indisputably real person, he slips away. He vanishes.

  I did not choose to be here, but now I cannot accept the thought of not being here. However certain I feel about the necessity of my existence, the only certainty I face is that this seemingly necessary being will perish. This heart will cease pumping blood, these lungs will cease drawing air, these neurons will cease firing in my brain. My body will rot or be consumed by fire, and within a matter of years I will linger on by the slenderest of threads as a memory in the fading minds of those who once knew me. And when they are gone, only photographs and marks I made on paper and computer discs will remain. Then these traces too will turn to dust.

  I avoid such thoughts by keeping my attention firmly focused on getting through the business of daily life. Or rather, an instinctive urge to survive keeps my attention focused on this task. For even when I stop to meditate on the contingency and transience of this existence, I find myself repeatedly torn away by other thoughts and feelings that clamor for attention. I do not want to be distracted from my contemplation, but I find it hard to resist the urge to be elsewhere. At such moments, my entire organism seems subject to compulsions I can barely control. In spite of myself, I am drawn away from an awareness of the contingent flux of life and back to the cell of self-centered preoccupation.

  When Dante enters hell’s ninth and final circle, he finds himself on the edge of a vast plain of ice. He heads off into a dark, cold wind to discover Satan submerged to his chest in the ice, flapping his six batlike wings. In contrast to the fiery upper circles of hell, where beings suffer tortures cruelly fashioned after their sins, “the king of the vast kingdom of all grief” is frozen and trapped. Likewise, my restless fears and longings feel as though they are governed by a tyrannical self that seems frozen at my core. It is here that the denial of life’s contingency and the insistence on my own necessity are most intensely experienced. Dante’s descent into hell suggests that the closer you come to the heart of the demonic, the more you are deprived of light and warmth. You experience alienation and despair. Hell is a metaphor of desolation.

  But the devil is more than just a figurative way of describing a compulsive reaction to this contingent world into which we were thrown at birth. There is something demonic about the contingent world itself. This is a place where things we don’t want to happen, happen. Cars skid on ice and swerve off roads into trees instead of reaching their destination. Floods, bombs, and earthquakes destroy in moments what years of labor have created. At times I feel hemmed in on all sides: inwardly subjected to the urges of an organism that is programmed to survive, outwardly overwhelmed by the tragedy of a suffering world. No matter how sincerely and passionately I choose to do good, I keep doing the opposite. I make a declaration of my most deeply held values, only to find myself furtively betraying them. I take a vow to dedicate myself to the welfare of others, but remain resolutely committed to my own well-being.

  “I yearn to be free of pain,” wrote the eighth-century Indian Buddhist Shantideva, “but rush straight into it; I long for happiness, but foolishly crush it like an enemy.” A thousand years later, Pascal noted how “we desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only misery and death.” Such contradictoriness is more than an occasional moral lapse that could be corrected by the fear of punishment or a timely boost of righteousness. It appears to be knit into the fabric of existence itself.

  Even when a calm, authoritative voice whispers that I am contradicting myself by indulging a compulsion, why do I find it so hard to desist? It is as if a relentless power is driving me toward an inescapable fate. Part of me feels hypnotized, as if it is sleepwalking, under a spell, addicted to a sensation it cannot renounce. I know why I shouldn’t be doing what I am, but can’t seem to help it. The struggle to resist temptation is like the struggle to resist the pull of a tide. And these longings seem but pale shadows of that deeper and darker drift of our existence, which is known as the devil.

  3

  Mara—The Killer

  IN POPULAR MYTHOLOGY, devils are quixotic and cruel tyrants who relish tormenting their victims. Their vitality obscures how the demonic is subjectively experienced as a state of existential and psychological paralysis. When seized by a demon, one feels suffocated, oppressed, and fatigued as one struggles to be free from what entraps one. The devil is a way of talking about that which blocks one’s path in life, frustrates one’s aspirations, makes one feel stuck, hemmed in, obstructed. While the Hebrew Satan means “adversary,” the Greek diabolos means “one who throws something across the path.” In India, Buddha called the devil Mara, which in Pali and Sanskrit means “the killer.”

  In an early discourse entitled The Striving, Gotama recalls,

  I was living on the bank of the Neranjara River engaged in deep struggle, practicing meditation with all my strength in the effort to find freedom. Then Mara came up to me and started talking in words appearing to be full of sympathy: “You are so thin and pale,” he said. “You must be nearly dead. It would be far better to live. You could do much good by leading a holy life.”

  The devil appears to have Buddha’s best interests at heart. At first glance, what he says seems reasonable. Mara discourages Buddha’s asceticism and extols a life dedicated to doing good in the world. He does not encourage Gotama to do anything evil. His aim is to weaken his resolve to be free from the compulsive drives that trap him in cycles of anguish.

  While speaking to Gotama, Mara “stood right next to Buddha.” The devil insinuates himself in such a way that he seems to be part of Buddha’s own thinking. But Buddha recognizes him, saying,

  I see your troops all around me, Mara, but I will proceed with the struggle. Even if the whole world cannot defeat your army, I will destroy it with the power of wisdom just as an unfired pot is smashed by a stone.

  To show his potency, Mara is depicted as a warlord mounted on an elephant, commanding a legion of troops. Buddha did not consider “any power so hard to conquer as the power of Mara.” He enumerates the armies under Mara’s command as sensual desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, lethargy, fear, doubt, restlessness, longing for gain, praise, honor and fame, and extolling oneself while disparaging others. Gotama tells of how he struggled to be free from these forces that seemed to besiege and attack him, blur his vision, darken his understanding, and thus divert him from his goal of freedom.

  Identifying with a desire or a fear tightens the knot that binds one to it and, thereby, the sway it can have over
one. Only when Buddha was able to experience the desires and fears that threatened to overwhelm him as nothing but impersonal and ephemeral conditions of mind and body, did they lose their power to mesmerize him. Instead of perceiving them as forces of an avenging army intent on his destruction, he recognized that they were no more solid than brittle, unfired pots that crumble on being struck by a well-aimed stone. As soon as Buddha stopped compulsively identifying the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arose within him as “me” or “mine,” Mara could no longer influence him.

  This does not mean that Buddha was either unaware of these thoughts and feelings or that they no longer occurred for him. Rather than deleting them, he discovered a way of being with them in which they could gain no purchase on him. Mara describes this with an analogy:

  I remember once seeing a crow hovering above a lump of fat on the ground. “Food!” it thought. But the lump turned out to be a rock, hard and inedible; the crow flew away in disgust. I too have had enough; I’m like that crow pecking at a rock; I am finished with Gotama.

  Buddha makes himself immune to Mara. No matter how much Mara tries to inveigle his way into his mind, Buddha remains calm and equanimous. He inhabits that free and selfless space that is outside of Mara’s range. He is one “whom Mara cannot overcome, any more than the winds can overcome the Himalaya.” Buddha compares someone who “has deprived Mara’s eye of its opportunity” to a deer wandering at ease in the remote depths of a forest, who “walks without fear, stands without fear, sits without fear, lies down without fear.” For, having “blindfolded Mara,” he becomes “invisible” to the devil. Mara, however, compares himself to a crab whose limbs have been torn off by children. He says to Buddha: “All those distortions, manoeuvres, and contortions of mine have been cut off, broken, and smashed to bits by you.”

  Unless we are prepared to regard the devil as a ghostly apparition who sits down and has conversations with Buddha, we cannot but understand him as a metaphoric way of describing Buddha’s own inner life. Although Buddha is said to have “conquered” the forces of Mara on achieving awakening, that did not prevent Mara from harassing him until shortly before his death fifty years later. Mara’s tireless efforts to undermine Buddha by accusing him of insincerity, self-deception, idleness, arrogance, and aloofness are ways of describing the doubts within Buddha’s own mind.

  Mara stands for those patterns of behavior that long for the security of clinging to something real and permanent rather than facing the question posed by being a transient and contingent creature. “It makes no difference what you grasp,” said Buddha, “when someone grasps, Mara stands beside him.” Mara is that desperate longing for a self and a world that are comprehensible, manageable, and safe. Such clinging, however, turns into a kind of death. As its hold tightens, one feels as though life itself is being stifled and snuffed out. Mara is sometimes called Namuci, the drought demon of Vedic mythology, whose name means “one who withholds the waters.” The hold that Mara exerts blocks the flow of life just as Namuci’s grip prevents the monsoon from unleashing its waters.

  In response to Mara’s provocations, Buddha says, “I know you, evil one. Do not think otherwise.” The devil is conquered not by forcibly expelling him but by understanding his strategies and seeing through his charade of invincibility. Experiential insight into the nature of Mara is the key to freeing oneself from his grip. Buddha was able to overcome Mara by stabilizing his attention sufficiently in meditation to be able to see clearly and deeply into the nature of the demonic powers that assailed him. Once he understood exactly what he was up against, he could no longer be tricked by Mara’s hypnotic and seductive gaze.

  As soon as Mara realizes that Buddha understands him and is inaccessible to him, he departs. “Mara was so upset by his failure,” says The Striving, “that he dropped his guitar and the moment it fell to the ground he disappeared.” Elsewhere, “Mara shook his head, lolled his tongue, knit his brow into three furrows, and departed leaning on his staff.” On another occasion, he

  went away from that spot and sat down cross-legged on the ground not far from Buddha, silent, dismayed, with his shoulders drooping, downcast, brooding, unable to speak, scratching the ground with a stick.

  With his guard down, Mara is tragically human. He might have stepped out of the pages of a novel. In contrast, Buddha tends to be rather distant. He commands respect, but rarely allows a glimpse of his humanity. Mara may be duplicitous and parasitic, but in the acceptance of his failings he is oddly endearing. We sense something of ourself in him.

  Mara approaches Buddha as “a farmer, carrying a large plough on his shoulder, holding a long goad stick, his hair disheveled, wearing hempen garments, his feet smeared with mud.” He takes the form of a brahmin, “with a large matted topknot, clad in an antelope hide, old, crooked like a roof bracket, wheezing, holding a staff of udumbara wood.” The bedraggled farmer and wheezing brahmin embody the sensuality of the natural world. When Buddha exposes him as Mara, the farmer retorts, “The eyes are mine. Shapes and colors are mine. Their impact on the eyes is mine. Consciousness is mine. Where can you go to escape me?” Mara saturates every nook and cranny of life. Not only is he everything one sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, and thinks, but he is also the acts of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and thinking themselves. Mara draws us under his spell through the fascination and terror of the natural world.

  As a warm-blooded, breathing, conscious creature, Gotama is intimate with Mara. Yet he knows Mara, has conquered Mara, and is immune to Mara. “Where there are no eyes, no shapes or colors, no impact with them and no consciousness of them,” he says in response to the farmer’s question, “there is no place for you there, evil one.” Buddha escapes Mara by abiding in emptiness: that open spaciousness of mind where fantasies of being a fearful and isolated self no longer ensnare him. He is fully in the world but no longer fooled by the way things appear as discrete units designed to attract or repel him. Mara has no place in this emptiness because he is the one who both conjures up and sustains the illusion of the segregated specifics of life.

  In order to “arouse fear, trepidation and terror” in Buddha, Mara harnesses the forces of nature herself. He detonates explosions that sound “as though the earth were splitting open.” He shatters boulders near Buddha, he appears as a giant elephant, a king cobra, and an ox. Mara is the natural world in all its glory and horror. This very earth that can leave you dumb with wonder as you contemplate its selfless unfolding will destroy you with neither malice nor mercy should its tectonic plates shift beneath your feet. Sublimely indifferent to our hopes and fears, life snuffs us out at death no matter how tenaciously we cling to it.

  Mara means “the killer.” Mara is the Grim Reaper. In Tibet, he is depicted as Yama, lord of death, holding the world between his teeth, ready to clamp shut at any moment. The devil is the precariousness of existence, its unreliability, its arbitrariness. Shortly before Buddha’s death, Mara pays him a final visit. “You have accomplished everything that you set out to do,” he says, “Your teaching and community are well established. Your legacy is assured. Now please die and enter the final nirvana.” Rather than rebuke him, Buddha says, “You need not worry, evil one. The Tathagata’s passing will not be long delayed.” Gotama knows the game is up. Mara neither slinks away in despair nor drops his guitar and disappears.

  Buddha calls Mara the Antaka. While anta means “end,” “limit,” “boundary,” or “horizon,” the Pali suffix -ka implies “one who makes” or “imposes” such things. Mara is that which limits us, confines us within boundaries, fixes our horizons, and brings everything to an end. Not only are we limited by what our physical body allows us to do and ultimately by its death, we are constrained by other boundaries that are neither unavoidable nor necessary. We inherit or adopt opinions about ourselves and the world that we cling to and refuse to relinquish. So certain are we of being “right” that our convictions feel embedded in our flesh. Yet, to be ensnar
ed by them locks us into fixed dogmatic positions, which are a form of intellectual and spiritual death.

  Mara stands for sex as well as death. He is both the yearning to conceive life and that which brings it to an end. Sexual desire has such deep biological roots that, of all Mara’s troops, it assails us most forcibly. Only after Mara has failed in his attempts to influence Buddha do his three daughters approach their despondent, doodling father and promise to “catch Buddha with the snare of lust.” They offer themselves to Buddha in every imaginable female form, but he remains unmoved. For an ordinary mortal to have resisted such an erotic assault would, they reflect, have produced either cardiac arrest or insanity. Only the impotent would be unmoved. While Buddha remains alert to the urges of his biology as they run amok in his mind, he experiences neither pent-up frustration nor sexual impotence. His fantasies and feelings have free play without his being fixated on any one of them. He dispels Mara’s daughters as effortlessly as does “the wind a fallen cotton tuft.”

  Nowhere is Mara’s treachery more apparent than when he suggests that death is nothing to worry about. For while personifying death, Mara is that quiet, consoling conviction that one will be exempt from it. “Long is the life span of human beings,” he whispers. “One should live like a milk-sucking baby.” Mara infantilizes us, makes us crave the blissful forgetfulness of being cuddled and nourished. He jump-starts the furious insistence to have what we want and the whine of thwarted desire. “Short is the life span of human beings,” counters Buddha. “One should live as if one’s head is on fire.”

  Mara is the existential trickster. His ambiguity and unpredictability reflect the ambiguity and unpredictability of life itself. Not only does he appear in a bewildering variety of forms, his moods lurch from arrogance to despair. He can speak with detached reason one moment, only to hurl insults and taunts the next. Like the forces of nature, he is consistently unpredictable. We cannot foresee what Mara will do next, but we can learn to recognize his signature.