The Temptation of the Buddha: A Fictional Study in the History of Religion and of Aesthetics
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
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“It has to be conceded that man cannot help revealing his personality in the world of use, but there, self expression is not his primary object. In everyday life, when we are mostly moved by our habits, we are economical in our expression… but when our heart is full in love or in other great emotions, our personality is in its flood tide. Then it feels the longing to express itself for the very sake of expression.”
Rabindranath Tagore
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“I believe that the more one loves, the more one will act; for love that is only a feeling I would never recognize as love.”
Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter
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Death of the Buddha—The End of the Story
The last part of their life has been much more settled. People have come to see them in greater proportion as their legs and stamina have weakened and as their fame has spread.
Gotama has lost the full belly of his middle age. Wearing a simple white dress, or long shirt, he is stooped. Carrying a strong bamboo cane, he walks ever more slowly. Desire; gray haired, at his side, holds his arm. Supporting him a bit, she is less stooped and still wears a colored sari.
A woman came forward and bowed. She kept her head down a while before admitting that she had a question. Gratefully receiving their gestures of encouragement, she asked Gotama, “Do you think about death? Some say that they have remembered other, previous, lives and that because of this they “believe in” reincarnation. Is this possible? What, Master Gotama, is the real, correct view about what happens after death?”
“How can I answer this? Gotama began laughing right away. “Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s is the wrong one.”.
The woman was surprised at this and said, rather bluntly, “Then you cannot tell me what happens when we die? Whether or not we really are born again and become another person somewhere else after our funerals?”
Gotama, who was already smiling, laughed out loud at this, saying, “Excuse me please. When you joined us did I ever agree to elucidate such points? Instead, let’s sit together a while and share a cup of tea.”
Although she did not understand the point of the Buddha’s reply and was somewhat embarrassed, she was happy for the opportunity to spend time in his company and she did partake of the tea. With a lively interest she listened when Gotama, cup in hand, broad smile on his face, renewed the conversation.
“When you came here, when you first greeted me, did I not return your greeting? And when, on one occasion, you presented to me the flowers you had brought from the town, a sweet and thoughtful gesture, did I not accept them most happily, enjoying their scent and beauty? And now we are sharing some tea. Why do you seek something more from me?”
Desire said softly, “He has never had interest in this type of inquiry. He wants, simply, to be helpful to those, as he says, ‘on the riverbank’. He says he will ‘show them the ferryboat’. But, don’t you say Siddhartha, and I like this part, that should they reach the far side, they may discover that there is neither river nor ferry boat nor even the two banks…”
“Nor any Buddha either!” Gotama added, laughing. “That is when the dream of this existence will be neither remembered nor forgotten. Meanwhile… illusion, delusion, and enlightenment are equally offensive. Everything is fine as it is.”
Desire, seeing that the woman was laughing, said to her, “You were asking something that is far from yourself. Maybe it is better to experience, to be aware of the here and now.”
It’s not hard to imagine that when death was at hand, Gotama knew it. Legend remembers that, calling people together, he said he didn’t have much longer to live and that if anyone desired to say something or hear an explanation about anything. anything at all he said, and that if anyone were too embarrassed, to have a friend speak for them.
“What?” Desire, who had been his companion continually, said, teasing him as she had when they first met, “for forty five years I have told everyone that the first fact of Buddhism is: This cannot be taught. And so now you will begin giving lessons?”
Taking her hands, Gotama said to Desire and to the larger group around her; “She is right.”
“Within this flux of perpetual perishing,
past and future are as perishable as the present; as any dream.
Let us bear witness to the impermanence
of everything actual.
A thing’s real constitution conceals itself,
All things constantly act and come to be but never are.”
“It is love that sees through all dissimulation and masquerade. It penetrates to the core. As a mother, even at the expense or risk of her own life, will love and protect her children, so likewise, it has been my wish to cultivate love without measure.”
Looking at Desire, at those around them, and up to the sky for the last time, legends concur that it was with these words, and while lying on his side, that Gotama Siddhartha, who had become “The Buddha”, died.
I end this narrative by asking the reader to imagine Desire organizing some of the “sayings of the Buddha” that had been collected, and helping to formalize the Eight Fold Path and the Four Noble Truths, and then, later, with her younger sisters, returning to their original work; spreading the teachings of the original Seven Rishis and Manu—in their new context—to other parts of the world.
AFTERWORD:
“But follow them no more; my course here bounded, as each artists’ is, when it doth touch the limit of his skill.”
Dante (Paradise)
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“Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”
Karl Marx
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Now that the foregoing historical fantasy is complete, I realize that, along with any artistic impulse, it was my own immature understanding and need to clarify and advance my thinking that motivated the whole project.
I had neither formulated an outline, nor decided against a plan, but had rather, spontaneously, following my interests, read, researched, and gathered materials, a good amount of which, as it turned out, could not be used directly in telling the story of the Buddha.
This ‘afterword’ will present, briefly, some of these discoveries; a few of the more unusual and provocative approaches towards an explanation and an understanding of the history of the period during which the Buddha lived. Of exceptional interest in their own right, they are, surprisingly little known. Taken together they provide additional insight into the psychology of the characters in the narrative.
Influenced always by historic and geographic circumstance, always and everywhere there have been great differences in man’s view of himself. And, subtle change in self-image occurs constantly, both individually, socially, and culturally. This said however, there is a consensus of opinion, which my own research verified, that definite, radical, and widespread changes in man’s view of himself (of ‘the human condition’) forever altered throughout the known world during the period with which this story especially has to do; the lifetime of the historical Buddha.
I think it was the philosopher Carl Jaspers that first called this period the ‘Axial Age’. Now, in the axial age, it becomes characteristic for the individual, for the first time, to think of himself as an individual, to be aware of his isolation, to try to understand, through the use of reason and philosophy, the physical universe.
The way man, pre and post Axial Age, saw himself in relation to ‘the gods’ is particularly telling. By ‘gods’’ I generally mean those figures described by Homer, and the older Vedas, the pantheon, which we learn of first in Sumer. The hold of these ‘gods�
� upon the individual—which involved a particular recognition of the human limit—would, in the post- axial age, never again be so integrally conceived.
Along with the elaborately described rituals prescribed by the gods, a certain awe began to disappear, the corollary of which was a new preoccupation with the direction, morality, and meaning, of his own life, and also with the possibilities of life after death.
In this sense it appears that in the axial age, man emerges as much a new type, and that a very different mankind passes from the scene.
When I began to look at pre axial age ‘India’ in this light, the question of the antiquity and origin of Vedic tradition, its relation to the Indus civilization, and the search for the possibility of any links with Sumer, became an anchor of my research. Several of the discoveries of these investigations, which continue to occupy me—and, for the most part, remain unsettled, are included here.
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY’S HYPOTHESIS:
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“The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, we may learn, and know things better. This—as we well may conjecture, resembles truth. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, now will he know it… and even it perchance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would not himself know it; for all is but a woven web of guesses.”
Xenophanes
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Venus as a Comet
In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky’s first book, ‘Worlds in Collision’, appeared in print propounding a startling theory—startling partially because of its broad ranging erudition and scholarship encompassing such divergent disciplines as classical literature, paleontology, folklore, biblical studies, psychology, geology and astronomy, etc., and startling partially because of its implications if correct.
Briefly; what he presented was the idea that two series of cosmic catastrophes took place within historical times, 34 and 26 centuries ago. The sequence he constructed was that what we now know as the planet Venus was shot out from some convulsions of the planet Jupiter and became a comet. Falling towards the sun, it assumed a stretched out elliptical orbit. Passing close enough to Mars to drag it out of its own orbit, and cause significant disruption, it then passed on by the earth.
Velikovsky writes, “It was in the second millennium before the present era … that the Earth underwent one of the greatest catastrophes in its history… a celestial body… a new comet came very close to the Earth, touching it with its gaseous tail.”
About 800 years later, Venus came close enough again to Mars and also Earth to wreak major havoc. The spectacle of this event, shown through a broad ranging survey of the written records of the entire world from that period, serves as the starting point which leads Velikovsky to a radically revised chronology of world history.
Velikovsky’s analysis puts the development of religion, particularly Judaism in a new light, but likewise a good deal of world mythology and sacred literature in general. What is described in the ancient texts is taken seriously and literally but seen in a new light.
Isaac Asimov, who referred to Velikovsky’s theories as a type of ‘exoheresy’ wrote: "For one thing Velikfovskianism, and indeed, any exoheretical view that becomes prominent enough to force itself on science, acts to puncture scientific complacency—and that is good. An exoheresy may cause scientists to bestir themselves for the purpose of reexamining the bases of their beliefs, even if only to gather firm and logical reasons for the rejection of the exoheresy—and that is good too. An exoheresy may cause scientific activity which, in a serendipitous fashion, may uncover something worthwhile that has nothing to do with the exoheresy—and that is very good, if it happens."
Asimov’s references to ‘science’ and ‘scientific complacency’ have obvious implications and applications to the story we have imagined..
JULIAN JAYNES’ BOOK:
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
First published in 1976, Julian Jaynes’ work, has not received the attention it deserves. Crossing many disciplinary boundaries and arriving at non-traditional conclusions, it presents a critical challenge that is not easily met.
A pretty good summary of the book’s main idea appears on the dust jacket. “Ancient peoples… could not ‘think’ as we do today, and were therefore not conscious. Unable to introspect, they experience auditory hallucinations—voices of Gods, actually heard as in the Old Testament or the Iliad—which, coming from the brain’s right hemisphere, told a person what to do in circumstances of novelty or stress. This ancient mentality is called the bicameral mind”…
… “Only catastrophe and cataclysm forced mankind to learn consciousness and that happened only three thousand years ago… Not a product of animal evolution, but of human history and culture, consciousness is ultimately grounded in the physiology of the brain’s right and left hemispheres.”
If we can accept this hypothesis, for which Jaynes’ book provides evidence and support, we can understand then that the end of the bicameral period signals the beginning of ‘consciousness’, the sign posts of which are the birth and rise of philosophy, democracy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, Judaism, etc. Each of which, in light of Jayne’s theory, can be seen as presenting guides for navigating the new predicament of post bicameral man.
It is for the first time; in the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BCE, that the nature of ‘psyche’ (life/spirit/soul), becomes an object of interest and of controversy. Solon’s famous “know thyself,” and Socrates’ “the unexamined life is not worth living,” have full meaning in this context. For a man to ‘know himself,’ in the new sense, the divine voices must be a thing of the past, no longer necessary. At this point in time the voices already are being pushed aside, relegated to the ‘high places’—temples and so forth. Wily, crafty Odysseus, capable of ingenious and on the spot invention, becomes the model of the NEW MAN.
Specifically, the origin of consciousness begins when (Jaynes explains) man ‘knows himself’ by initiating memories of his own actions and feelings, looking at them together with a sort of model; an ‘analog I’ generated at every point by the thing it is an analog of.
Built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior, an ‘operator’ emerges; a metaphor of ourselves, neither thing nor repository; intimately bound up with volition and decision, ready to explain anything we may find ourselves doing; or to guide and predict what we might be likely to do. Very useful, it can move about vicariously ‘doing’ things in our imaginations that we are not actually doing.
Jaynes likens this analogical realm to the order of mathematics. It had become the subject of intense investigation by the writers of the Upanishads and by the pre Socratics, when Gotama Siddhartha considered it in 450 B.C.
This theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind illuminates the question with which the present narrative fantasy began; that is, the relationship of religious and aesthetic experience.
When the bicameral mind begins to break down, poetry is called the divine speech. It’s only later that a division or specialization occurs. In the realm of religion there are prophets, institutionalized sometimes as oracles, and in the aesthetic, there are poets.
Originally the result of direct inspiration, eventually Poetry began to require training, became something one had to learn not unlike having a religious experience. A technique designed to stimulate an experience was required. Characteristic of both techniques is the care to include and encourage receptivity.
Jaynes quotes the famous English 19th century poet Percy Shelly, who expressed his understanding of this need for receptivity very clearly when he wrote that, “A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry’. The greatest poet cannot even say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness… The conscious portions of our nature are prophetic neither of it
s approach nor its departure.”
Citing examples from a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, Jaynes concludes that all post bicameral creative or innovative ‘thinking’, shares this character, and relies upon the same inspiration as the older mentality. He offers the following formal summation; that all creative thought includes the following three stages.
1)Preparation—the problem consciously worked over.
2)Incubation—without conscious concentration.
3)Illumination—later justified by logic.
The techniques of Buddhism, at all stages of its history, notably, fit this paradigm, most dramatically those of the Zen school where through specific techniques the conceptualizing mind is silenced and original mind is discovered.
THE ARYAN QUESTION
The word Aryan is Sanskrit and means ‘noble/cultured’. It is the word used in the Vedas by its authors to refer to themselves. It is still unsettled—no one knows for sure who the original Aryans were and where they came from. As touched upon in the second set of program notes, within the last quarter of the twentieth century, and especially since the turn of the century, a major shift in understanding of this ‘Aryan question’ has occurred.
The original theory that had gained wide acceptance, and is still credited by some, was that (whoever they were) the Aryans either migrated into or invaded India sometime around 1500 B.C. This ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ derived from an observation made in the early nineteenth century in the field of linguistics that Sanskrit, the ancient language in which the Vedas are written, has extremely close affiliations with Latin and Greek.
Sir William Jones, famously proposed in 1786, “No philosopher could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from a common source.”
The hypothesis deriving from this observation, which came to be so influential, was that the very widespread distribution of what came to be called the ‘Indo-European’ family of languages had been affected, in historic time, by the mass movement of a race of peoples; the Aryans, who, coming in ‘migratory waves’ had left a homeland (perhaps the Caucasus Mountain area—but never identified with certainty) and divided en route with some going to what became Europe, the rest to what became India.
Citing evidence within the Vedas, the original theory imagined the Aryans as a light skinned, blue-eyed people; skilled at horsemanship, equipped with chariots and iron weapons, who overwhelmed and subjugated the indigenous inhabitants whose civilization was at a lower level than their own, imposing their own culture and religion.
When, in the 1920’s and 30’s, the cities of Muhenjo-Daro and Harappa were unearthed and it soon became clear that these sophisticated urban centers dated from well before (at least a thousand years before) the supposed 1500 BC date imagined for the Aryan Invasion, a ‘revised theory’ proposed that the Aryans had overrun a river valley civilization which had flourished for at least a thousand years before their arrival; a civilization more advanced but weaker in technology and military prowess.
Where previously the Aryans were seen to be bringers of civilization to a barbaric India, now they were seen to be destroyers of a culture and civilization far older than their own. A further revision suggested that the Aryans may have for a time lived peacefully with the remnants of the once powerful, but now already long in decline, Indus Valley civilization.
Expressed perhaps best by the 20th century scholar, professor and author Gordon Childe, the Revised Theory retained the essential point of Aryan superiority by relocating it. “The lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither material culture nor a superior physique, but a more excellent language and the mentality it generated … at the same time (Childe continues) the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them, by bare superior strength, to conquer even more advanced peoples and impose their language…”
European intellectual and moral superiority was a forgone conclusion to the savants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proved by the success of European colonialism, Christianity and the Industrial Revolution. The condition of superiority was seen in the classical Greeks and carried forward by the Romans. With the discovery of the Indo European language family here was evidence for an even earlier history, one set with a prehistoric past that only archeology could discover. The Aryans or Indo Europeans must have been blessed with this ‘superiority’ since they too were successful conquerors of vast lands.
However, the influential work of Franz Boas, in Race, Language, and Culture, was able to demonstrate conclusively and influentially that those three (in his title) elements are independent historical variables that characteristically shift, diverge, mix and change even over short periods of time. Thus the term “race”, as it had been used was not meaningful. At least in the more learned scientific and academic writing and opinion it was effectively discredited as a useful concept in human biology.
The influence of Edward Said, writing within the last fifty years, has been a force for the thorough discrediting of the theory of inevitable superiority and its attendant conclusions. “I doubt,” he wrote, in his widely read Orientalism, if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.”
The work of Boaz and Said has helped to open scholarship of the modern period to a re examination of all aspects of the ‘Aryan question’. Today a new consensus informs investigators that it is at least possible, and even likely, that the last two hundred years of linguistic, archaeological and historical hypotheses have represented a great and sustained error.
The very latest thinking suggests a new model. It sees the Vedas and Vedic culture as very much older than had been originally thought and likely originating in the far South. For many, it confirms the outline of the story told in the Vedas and suggests now the likelihood of Vedic Aryans living in the sub continent since the Deluge.
Gregory Possehl in Indus Age, wrote that, “In the end, there is no reason to believe that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke the Indo-European language and was possessed of a coherent or well defined set of features.”
L.A. WADDELL’S ARYAN THEORY
The ‘strong view’ of the theory of the Aryans as a distinct racial group who became civilizers in India has nowhere been presented with as much force of originality and scholarship as by L.A. Waddell, the author of The Makers of Civilization in Race and History, Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered, The British Edda, Egyptian Civilization: It’s Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology, and other formidable works.
An authority in many fields, the breadth of his erudition allowed him the freedom to make connections and to arrive at conclusions that are of extreme novelty and which few are in a position to critique. To characterize his conclusions as unorthodox is not sufficient. He establishes an entirely revised chronology for historical man, documenting it with evidence from the most diverse sources.
Waddell’s deciphering of the ancient seals unearthed in the Indus Valley disclosed, for him, the Sumerian origin of the founders of that ‘great colony’ around 3100 B.C., and that it remained a colony until around 2260 B.C. His translations of Indus Valley King lists show ‘absolute agreement’ with Sumerian King lists—“not only in names and achievements, but also in precise chronological order of their succession.” This established “with absolute certainty”, for him, their identity with the Sumerians.
“The Sumerians—those foremost civilized and civilizing ancient people whose monuments and high art of 5000 years ago are the wonders of the modern world—were the long lost Aryans… The Phoenicians were not Semites, as has been hitherto
supposed, but Aryans and the chief colonizing branch of the Sumerians; and that the people who colonized and civilized India, as well as those who colonized and civilized the Mediterranean, Northwest Europe, and Britain, and who were the ancestors of the Britons, were literate Aryans, and belonged predominately to the Phoenician branches of that race.”
Further, Waddell’s investigations of the Puranas—the Vedic epics of the ancient heroes—showed that “most of these kings had never been in ‘India’ at all! They too were, instead, identical with those of Sumerian and Babylonians.”
Waddell’s understanding of the word ‘Aryan’ seems to be totally at odds with the modern view. He writes that it was used by the ancients in a solely racial sense to designate the “master men” who “civilized the aborigines”. With regard to the migration of the Aryans, he writes that a “great migration” to India did take place, but not until the period of 700/600 B.C. . That migration, he wrote, came from Asia Minor and consisted of the remnants of the Sumerians. The cause, he explains, was the “devastating and annihilating war of extermination waged by the Assyrian king Sargon II.”
The Waddell Problem
The ideological component in Waddell’s work is complex and unusual, not always easy to comprehend. A further complication, especially at first, is his sometime use of common words in a specific, technical manner.
‘Orientalism’ is not reason enough to warrant discounting all of L.A. Waddell’s conclusions. These are hard to sort out. Though little credibility is given to his translations of the Indus script by expert opinion, the consensus articulated by the powerful within academia, final judgments are not presently possible, if indeed we are ever to know.
For the purposes of this narrative it is enough to call attention to his work, citing his influence, He is a remarkable example of the ability of a single individual to create a fresh vision of history.
Trying to reconcile Waddell’s view of history—in particular his use of Sumer as a model for understanding the Indus Valley Civilization with that of Gregory Possehl’s, led me to a broader conception of my fictional characters, Kama Mara and Gotama Siddhartha, both of whom, I imagine, thought of themselves as Aryans.
THE ARCHAIC REVIVAL AND THE RETURN OF THE GODDESS:
Some possible questions with no possible answers:
1. Is the role of Desire, and of her sisters (only now beginning to be imagined) better understood in relation to the concept of a “return of the Goddess”?
2. As the Renaissance is associated with the revival of the Classical, will the next age be associated with the Archaic?
3. Are the currencies of the phrases “archaic revival” and “return of the Goddess” in themselves testimony enough of their phenomenal actuality?
The sometimes disorienting rush of the 20th and 21st century civilization’s technological progress and social change has prompted many to look back in time for a model and anchor. The prevalence of religious fundamentalisms would indicate a yearning for the remote and pre historic past (‘the archaic’ as it were)—a time before the current problems all began. In this context the fairly recent rediscovery of the Great Goddess of Neolithic times, and the currencies of theories as to the great extent, continuation, and evolution of her worship in the river valley civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, where modern civilization began, assumes an important psychological significance.
Probably it was the Swiss mystic philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung who has best expressed the modern understanding that man, no longer believing in gods, may experience the gods nonetheless but as psychic factors; specifically as archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Writing convincingly about the rise of then contemporary fascism, Jung described the German nation as possessed by a re-emergence of the Grail Mythology. In this context he described the archetypes (functioning like the old gods) as collectively bringing salvation and protections together with disorder and destruction; requiring sacrifice and ritual, operating individually and collectively, having the power to heal and to destroy; not just individuals but an entire people.
Following this Jungian model, it is the premise of a book written in 1984 called Return of the Goddesses, by Edward C. Whitmont that, fed unconsciously and motivated by archaic emotions and instinctual habit patterns of a deeper mytho-magical state of which it is unaware, the collective ‘patriarchal ego’ is operating in increased maladaptation; that the analytic/ rational and owner/ materialist trends which are its expression have caused contemporary man to become profoundly estranged from both nature and himself; and consequently to be at grave risk.
Whitmont’s argument is that it is this crisis which has constellated or precipitated the Goddess archetype ; the return of the Goddess and her domain in the present moment.
But what is the “domain of the Goddess?”
I had imagined her domain to consist in anima figures—in art, literature, and in ‘real life’—upon whom the complex contents of these unconscious archetypes of the unconscious may be projected.
But I have been influenced by Terrence McKenna, who, in a book called The Archaic Revival, articulated a different, and, I think, a much broader view;
“the real division between masculine and feminine is not a division between men and women but rather a division between ourselves as conscious animals—omnivorous, land clearing, war makers, supreme expressions of the Yang, and the circum global mantle of vegetation—the ancient metastable Yin element that constitutes by far the major portion of the bio mass of the living earth.”
McKenna further instructs us to consider that inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence.
“The widely felt intuition of the presence of the other as a female companion to the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self awareness, self reflection and self articulation; the light of the Great Goddess.”
“The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our group existence in the world. What I call the ‘archaic revival’ is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The ‘archaic revival’ spells the eventual break up of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization. Rather it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that the overarching theme that directs the archaic revival is the idea/ideal of a Vegetation Goddess—the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaia.”
ZECHARIA SITCHIN’S ANNUNAKI HYPOTHESIS:
The enormously popular series of books published over the last quarter century by Israeli born author Zecharia Sitchin under the general title “The Earth Chronicles”, follows Velikovksy’s lead in bypassing academia and going straight to ‘the public’ with his original scholarship and conclusions. Like Velikovsky, he is concerned with the written records of all ancient peoples. but it is particularly the Sumerians, whose innovations agricultural, metallurgical, pastoral, astronomical, nautical, architectural, legal, literary and otherwise started civilization as we know it, that interest him most. Where many most have read Mesopotamian literature as ‘mythological’ Sitchin’s reading is literal, historical.
Strikingly, individual Sumerians rarely took credit for their formidable inventions and accomplishments, instead attributing everything to a group sometimes called ‘gods’, but usually referred to, by them, as the ‘Annunaki’; a group of individuals, male and female, who “to earth from heaven came”; who were their acknowledged superiors and masters in all respects.
With regard to the project of imagining a life of the Buddha, Sitchin’s perspective influenced directly the account of the ‘Deluge’ given here by Kama Mara, who speaking as a Vedic Aryan, confirms the legend of Manu. This is same account we know from the Sumerians, the outline of which is that the gods saw a disaster approaching that
would cause a worldwide flood and decided that mankind should not be warned, but rather, should perish. It is in the Sumerian and Vedic accounts that we find the most information about this period.
When the waters began to subside, the leaders of the Annukaki made the decision—partly out of desperation—to redirect humankind with a goal of restoring the planet to habitability, making men now somewhat more like junior partners than slaves, and introducing and teaching to them the techniques of farming and animal domestication.
Eventually kingship, based on the Annunaki model, was “bestowed upon mankind”—worldwide—but first, in about 3800 B.C., in Sumer. (Prior to that time it was only the Annunaki and their descendants who ruled.) Sitchin’s understanding is that the ‘goddess’ Innana had been given the Indus Valley as her own domain and that kingship was established there in around 2800 B.C.
Relying mostly on fresh interpretations of clay tablets and cylinder seals from Mesopotamia, especially the so-called creation story of the Babylonians, the ENUMA ELISH—which he considers to be a description of the astronomical events which created our present solar system—Sitchin has constructed a complete narrative history which traces the story of the Annunaki; their origins on the planet Nibiru; their sojourn to Earth; their family relationships, rivalries, loves, and, eventually their departure.
Sitchin’s discovery that Nibiru, the home planet of the Annunaki has an orbital period of 3600 years meant for him that one Annunkai year was equivalent to 3600 years for an earthling. Hence the relative immortality of these ancient ‘gods’.
Naturally, each approach to the sun by Nibiru was critically important to the Annunaki. But, Sitchin writes, there are also hints that as the approach of the planet Nibiru around the sun swung it into the vicinity of Earth, immense gravitational and electro magnetic forces have—especially on its more recent orbits—gravely threatened the population of the earth.
Sitchin writes that at the time of last approach—in around 550 B.C. the Annunaki all departed from the earth and have not returned.
RUDOLPH STEINER’S READING OF INDIAN HISTORY
The techniques of the ‘spiritual science’ of anthroposophy begun just about a century ago have added another dimension to contemporary understanding. Not dependent upon archeology, linguistics, or scholarship of any kind, Rudolph Steiner’s method, which might be considered a round about return to the mentality prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind, was to rely upon a direct ‘reading’, or clairvoyant experiencing of the Akashic records.
Steiner’s Christianity did not interfere with his intense interest and admiration for Gotama the Buddha. In a talk given in 1909, transcribed in a book called From Buddha to Christ, Steiner endeavored to present a fresh context for the life of the Buddha, giving his interpretation of the role of Buddhism in world history and its place in human spiritual development. I will quote at some considerable length from this talk of Steiner’s in the hope that a patient reader may find, as I did, interest and value pertaining to the present fictional narrative and to the theory, of the birth of consciousness from the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
In characteristic declamatory and authoritative style, Steiner jumps right in;
“In early times the nature of the soul was such that in a condition between waking and sleeping man gazed into the world that lies hidden in the senses. Our consciousness today alternates between waking and sleeping states and we think of ‘intelligence’ in connection with the waking life only. In more ancient days, however, pictures continually arose and passed away before the soul of man. These pictures were not as void of meaning as our dreams are today but were related to super sensible events. Out of the condition of consciousness arising from these flowing pictures, our present so-called intellectual consciousness gradually evolved. A kind of primeval clairvoyance preceded the gradual development of our modern consciousness. Prehistoric man, gazing into the super sensible worlds with this dreamlike clairvoyance, not only acquired knowledge but experienced a deep inner satisfaction and bliss as he felt the connection of his soul with a spiritual world. It is gradually becoming evident that sublime conceptions of a spiritual world were current among ancient peoples but were clothed in pictorial forms. Myths and legends are only intelligible when we trace them back to a primal wisdom that was altogether different in its nature from the intellectual science of today….”
“ …Man, once united with the spiritual world… has since descended into the world of the senses. And this feeling gradually extended into a general attitude of soul until man could say that he had entered the phenomenal world but that it was Maya, illusion. Only when he was linked with the spiritual world could he know his true being. Among the peoples who preserved this dim remembrance of ancient clairvoyant powers, there arose a sense of loss and certain indifference to the material environment and to all that can be apprehended by the senses.”
India, Steiner said, was such a place; where the religious life which arose was the natural fruit of a looking backward to man’s former union with the spiritual world. “We can only understand the nature of the Buddha when we contemplate him in that setting.” Steiner says, citing “the deeply devotional mood of Indian culture.”
What Steiner has to say about Manu and the birth of Indian culture after the flood I also want to include here, without much comment, again begging the reader’s indulgence for a second long series of quotations. Arcane and unscientific, Steiner’s observations are, of course, not verifiable through deductive reasoning, and upon these grounds, readers may wish to disregard them. But I include them for their colorful suggestiveness, and—not disrespectfully—imaginativeness. Much to my surprise, when I discovered them after completing the story, I noted that, by providing specific background details for the broad historical aspects of my fictional narrative, they have helped me to imagine more thoroughly my own story .
Going back to Atlantis, which came up so often in my research, Steiner states that,
“the entire culture went out from a great initiate associated with ‘the Sun Oracle.’ The ‘Manu’, as this leader of the Sun Oracle was called did not choose the bearers of post Atlantean culture from among the so-called scientists and men of learning, nor from the clairvoyants and Magi of that time. He chose plain people who were gradually losing the clairvoyant faculty. Our present stage of consciousness only began to develop at the end of the Atlantean epoch. The great Manu gathered around him those who could think intellectually… those who understood and developed the rudiments of counting and reckoning… such were the men who… journeyed with Manu to the Asian sanctuary from which post Atlantean culture was to emanate. Leaving America aside, Europe, Asia and Africa are populated by the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who journeyed to these lands under Manu’s guidance… from the very beginning he had to take care that everything might prove of value to a future development should be carried over from the past into the future…”
“In the case of ordinary man the etheric body separates from the astral and ego soon after death, and gradually dissolves in the universal ether. The same occurs with the astral body after a certain time but this law is sometimes broken in the interest of spiritual economy. Such was the case of the Seven Great Initiates… It is known in the Mysteries how to preserve the valuable etheric and astral bodies developed by the greater initiates… These bodies were kept intact… The initiate of the Sun Oracle (Manu) journeyed to the other Atlantean oracles to collect the seven etheric bodies of the greatest initiates. Those he took along with him. His wisdom attracted a number of people who gathered around him, and under his influence their capacities developed and they gradually grew purer… After a certain time had elapsed, it was possible to incorporate the seven most important etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the ancient Atlantean oracles into seven human beings. In regard to their egos, their power of judgment, etc., they were quite simple people of no importance whatever from an external standpoint. They bore within them,
howsoever; the seven most highly developed etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of Atlantis. These etheric bodies had streamed into them, making it possible for them to send out at certain times, through inspiration from above, the great, powerful visions and truths of evolution. Thus, they were able to speak of all this exalted wisdom.”
“The Great Initiate sent those Seven men, those Seven bearers of wisdom, to India when the people still had a deep comprehension for spiritual things and for the spiritual worlds… These seven men were called the Seven Holy Rishis. It was they who inaugurated our post-Atlantean culture.”
POSTLUDE: Part One
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“Truth exists for the wise; beauty for the susceptible heart. They belong together—are complementary”.
Ludwig van Beethoven (written in a friend’s autograph book in 1797)
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The view that every natural process is fundamentally inexplicable, that we are faced with an awesome difficulty in arriving at certain knowledge about anything at all, that beneath cause and effect lies process, and that we do not know the true nature of a single causality was first forcefully expressed in the writings of some of the earliest Greek philosophers. The vocation of Plato’s Socrates, several generations later; to challenge certain knowledge, is perhaps this view’s clearest expression. In this light his famous maxim, to “know thyself”, is interpreted as “know your limits”, or “know how limited you are”.
When we follow reason, inevitably, eventually, we do come into contact with the unfathomable. As far as we know, truth is unknowable. It was ‘Axial Age’ man, realizing this, who first learned to make conjectures systematically to get closer to certainty. Modern man, following the same philosophic and scientific procedures, has gone further and shown that the best we can do, in each case, is to identify the setting in which the actual drama unfolds.
Like philosophy, and like science, aesthetics is a way of knowing. But unlike these, and like the wisdom of early India, which pays attention to the wholeness of the world, aesthetics is based on an emotional, intuitive understanding, and on a feeling of and for the unknown, which is behind the visible and tangible.
From the beginning language has been both the greatest asset and the greatest problem. Holding logic captive, it ever enables and limits perception. When, with the clue of logic, thinking (always in words) strives to penetrate the uttermost depths, again and again reason is led to its limits, coiling itself around, snake like, finally biting its own tail… until… as Schopenhauer (inspired by the newly translated axial age Indian philosophy) observed, a new perception is released which, in order to be endured, will require Art as protection and remedy.
In art, a totality of events and values, the illusive world, too extensive and too complex for our understanding, in and through symbol, is given limits and measures.
The method of art, requires the application of creative power for a reconstruction and representation, in visible or audible forms, of the perception of a harmonious interconnected unity. Success of this procedure rests upon the fact that the artistic creation must be simply a different expression of the same unity. Through the setting up of this symbolic relationship the artist may learn and also reveal much that he did not know before.
Art of this type is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but is, in fact, a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature. It is in this sense that art is understood as the highest task and proper activity of man.
Art that does not reveal mysteries, which does not add to the knowledge of being, or lead to the sphere of the unknown, is a parody of art.
‘Wisdom’, as the professed goal of philosophy and of some religious thinking, belongs to art in so far as it fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical purpose.
POSTLUDE: Part Two
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“Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? So that all one’s perceptions halfway to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?”
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
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Inspired by Democritus, a contemporary of Gotama, who first taught that to arrive at a truth conjectures must be made, approaching the end of this project still seeking to illuminate the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience, I want to consider further, in this context, the role of culture and society in Gotama’s life.
Even the highly personal, individual nature of both aesthetic and religious experience can be seen and evaluated best within the greater context of culture and society. In the INTRODUCTION—it was Jane Harrison’s idea about the aspects of patriarchal propaganda in later Greek mythology that had served to both anchor and stimulate conjecture, here in the POSTLUDE, an idea of John Berger’s, from his book “The Success and Failure of Picasso”, may serve in a like manner.
I doubt that he was the first to express it, but Berger makes the point very clearly that when a culture is established—stable and secure and its values certain, it presents its artists with subject matter and there is, then, agreement about what is or is not significant.
Examples abound which illustrate the point, and its corollary, that artists, at such moments, identify with tradition and that their work is dictated by it. This seems a universal principle; analogous and applicable in many different mediums of expressions and in diverse periods and cultures.
Likewise conversely, when a culture is in a state of transition or disintegration, the freedom of the artist to choose his own subjects increases. Likewise, (as the three sisters say in chapter one) the artist’s responsibilities will increase, as then he must choose for society.
Though it is apparent that distinctions between, and categorizations of, certain artists and cultures within these two broad types proposed by Berger might be proportionately difficult, yet, there is power and validity to this idea.
Berger observed Pablo Picasso’s work functioning as an artistic expression of the social and cultural disintegration of the twentieth century. The violence of the two world wars, the technological and population explosions of the twentieth century, the many shifts in perspective through which humanity went during Picasso’s long lifetime were influences which might be said to have contributed to the freedom of his expression with regard to subject matter and style. He did not work within a tradition, except for traditions of his own creation like ‘cubism’ or the ‘blue’ or ‘rose’ periods, and in those he did not remain long.
Looking for a time and artist most representative of Berger’s category of ordered stability, the 13th century (especially as it was imagined and written about by Henry Adams) came to mind.
Not of the generations which created the great cathedrals described by Adams, though he uses the same symbols to tell the same stories, the first great modern pictorial artist to express this stability is Giotto. It’s his individuality that’s separates him.
Giotto is hard to place within Berger’s two categories and the ways in which he doesn’t fit seem instructive. Apparently, a great and perceptive artist, while operating within accepted parameters in a (relatively) stable culture and society, can still—through the manipulation of traditional symbols in a novel manner, create (and exemplify) radical, transformational change in that culture and society.
Giotto, like an artist of the first type, accepts the themes dictated by the culture (such as the events of the Gospels, or of the life of St. Francis). It’s his employment of these subjects that makes him an artist of the second type.
The originality of Giotto’s narrative depictions reveals a new focus, one more expressive of emotion, intelligence, and of individual character. In keeping with this new subject matter, he creates and employs a new pictorial technique, one of refreshing naturalism.
The spirit of the handling, the mode of handling, becomes an end in itself, penetrating every part of the matter. Mere subject matter, the actual details/circumstances of a particular event, gives
way to form.
Are Giotto’s innovations in the direction of individuality and human feeling reflective of proportionate societal shifts? Or, does his art originate these shifts? And… in which of one of Berger’s categories, shall we put him?
Despite Giotto’s embrace of stereotypical thematic materials, prior dogmatisms are left behind. More expansive, alternative values replace them. The expression of his own individuality implies or becomes prophetic of a larger transformation of culture and prepares the way for the emerging developments of the Renaissance.
Even though his paintings depict events with which his audience is familiar, Giotto never submits his imagination completely to external demands. Instead, he employs it to gain an ever-increasing control over the disciplines and elements which best reflect and express his own artistic talents and spirit. Giotto’s real subject matter is his own viewpoint, his individual way of seeing.
Ironically, this is what makes it possible for others to identify with his vision. His influence becomes a turning point, sparking a second axial age. With Giotto, one era fades, a new one dawns.
The very notion of ‘subject matter’, for all subsequent, post-Giotto great artists, is transformed. In one way or another it becomes their own individual way of seeing… and even the function of sight itself.
Consideration at such length of this apparent tangent is already rewarded as it has made possible imagining the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe as an echo of the axial age, that earlier period when man first began to look within for his direction and the period of time with which this project has been concerned.
In the earlier civilizations, prior to the axial age, the influence of the gods is all pervasive. Within this context, all art is ‘religious’ art. Alike, among the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Hebrews, for instance, this is readily apparent. Within these powerful societies, in all aspects of life, we encounter the unflagging rigor and devotion to its gods expressive and characteristic of an unchanging, hierarchical vision. At this point, there are only artists of Berger’s first type.
Reading the biblical writings we see that, gradually, over time, an increasingly expressive religious individuality may emerge within a hierarchical culture. Simultaneously reflecting and recreating that stable and established religious tradition that defined them, a Hebrew poet or prophet’s own personal way of seeing, his ‘vision’, becomes generally and widely influential.
In this sense certain biblical writers resemble, at least to some extent, artists of Berger’s second type. Yet, proportionately, in so far as the themes of these religious creators indicate a characteristic cultural identity and an orientation of submissiveness to a particular greater than human divinity, then each biblical writer is more like an artist of the first type.
In the way that I imagine that Giotto’s individual and naturalistic art emerged from an older pictorial tradition of iconography, this story has imagined the birth of Buddhism from the traditions and spirit of the Vedas.
Looking within for his life’s direction and purpose, like Giotto’s, Gotama’s devotion was, finally, not to the dictates of tradition, but was directed to the logic of his own vocation, and to developing his own relative strengths, so that he might gain an ever increasing control and perfection of his own nature.
And comparable to Giotto again, Gotama developed an original conception; a way of experiencing that led to new ways of being, becoming a standard for the future. Becoming both model, subject, and expression, Gotama’s conception changed forever the way man saw himself in nature.
With this brief consideration of Giotto and Gotama—two highly individuated types of creative genius—we are brought back around once more to the theme of the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience.
In an essay “What is Art”, Leo Tolstoy defined art, as an activity “based on the fact that a man receiving, through his sense of hearing or sight, another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who experienced it.”
Accordingly, with the authority of a broad common sense, he reasons, that any true aesthetic experience will be characterized by a sense of union or identification of the receiver of the artistic impression with the creator of it. In this state not only is consciousness of the separation between the receiver and the creator destroyed, but also that between all whose minds experience this work of art.
And so, art, he quite reasonably points out, is at its best only when it is communicated with sincerity; that is, when it is an inner need that compels the artist to express the feelings which have accumulated within him.
Tolstoy’s understanding is that this freeing of one’s individual personality from its separateness and isolation—in the uniting of it with others, is the chief characteristic of aesthetic experience and the great attractive force of art.
This sense of a union or identification of the receiver of the impression with what creates it, becomes useful in trying to think freshly about the comparisons between aesthetic and religious experience, both of which establish authentic relation to all that is around us.
The reader will have observed that a ‘meditation’ upon the complex relationship between aesthetic and religious experience has been a sub dominant theme of this project. An initial PRELUDE of aesthetic arrest (the Giorgione painting) brought cascading forth something like an historical novel centered around the most famous of all religious experiences; that of Gotama Siddhartha beneath the Bodhi tree.
Finally… this question begins to settle and it becomes possible to better understand Gotama’s experience… and to imagine how, inspired and compelled by inner need to express and communicate the feelings built up within him that derived from his own experiencing of reality, of his own individuality in relation to infinite being, he became a religious artist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
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“The learned reader must have observed that in the course of this mighty work, I have often transcribed passages out of the best ancient authors, without quoting the original, or without taking the least notice of the book from whence they were borrowed.”
Henry Fielding, Chapter one, book xii, Tom Jones
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Readers familiar with the lore of Buddhism may have recognized some passages from the sutras put into the mouths of my fictional characters, but ideas and passages and phrases have been ‘borrowed’ also from outside the realm of Buddhism.
F. Nietzsche’s voice, especially as he speaks in “Twilight of the Idols”, informs Kama Mara and sometimes, also Desire. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, Albert Schweitzer informed the narrator’s view of Buddhist ethics; likewise, Jean Genet, his concept of ritual drama. The reader may divine others.
Quotations have been a large part of this enterprise, and are identified as such, but the reader, as if on a scavenger hunt, also may look for and find a phrase or two of Gerard Nerval, Alan Watts, Sri Auribindo, A.N. Whitehead, Jack Kerouac, Anita Desai, Marcel Proust, Georg Lukacs, Joseph Campbell, Martin Heidegger, Albert Barnes, G.I. Gurdjieff, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Heraclitus.
I have tried to use these voices the way a jazz musician sometimes will quote a melodic phrase of another tune altogether in one of his improvisations; with humor and with the hope that the source may be recognized and given renewed attention because of the fresh context.
It has been remarked that the Age of the Seven Sages was not very concerned about the attributions of wise sayings, but considered it very important when someone adopted a saying.
Spanning about three thousand years, taken mostly in India, but also in other countries where Buddhism has been practiced, the photographs in this book, were compiled from many sources, but I would like to acknowledge especially three books; The Art of Indian Asia, by Heinrich Zimmer, completed and edited by Joseph Campbell and published by the Bollingen Press, The Art of India Though the Ages, by Stella Kramrisch, published by Phaidon, and the Art of India; Temples a
nd Sculptures, by Louis Frederic, published by Abrams.
Looking through the photographs in these books I began to notice that here were the characters I had imagined. Of course there is Gotama, but when I found Kama Mara and his daughters, so strikingly represented and in such detail, across the ages… my manuscript came alive.
Nearing the end of this project, a quest for a detailed, but still clear map of ancient India to accompany this book led me to the map room of the library of Dartmouth College where I encountered a librarian, Peter Allen. His general expertise and willingness to help led, finally, to the three original maps, created especially for this book, which contribute so much to amplify and illuminate the text.
Two relatives played important roles. My daughter Luette Saul was the first reader. Her incredulous remark, “You don’t describe anything!” got me to rethink—to very positive effect—all my sentences. Thank you Luette. Bethany Carland Adams did laborious, significant, professional editing, contributing many useful suggestions, all the while with great respect for the original text. Thank you Bethany.
Finally, I want to acknowledge a woman named Helen Barrett whose suggestion, now almost two decades ago, of a back and forth writing exercise initiated this project. Some of her phrases may have survived.
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