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VII. Buddha and the Mythopoetic Tradition (1967) Lecture Given by Heinrich Blücher The mythical mind of man presents to us so much of the dream-like mind of man for when we dream we do not control our thoughts. They come to us quite arbitrarily being governed only by one single law of association which is always very hard to control. If one looks at the power that ancient myth once held over the mind of man one begins to wonder how mankind was ever able to break away from it, in the same way that one wonders, after awaking from a dream, how it is possible to break away from the world of images that only moments before had seemed so real. And the funny thing about all of this is that if one looks upon the most complete body of mythical speculation that the world has ever witnessed, namely, the myths of India, we see that they should have felt compelled to invent a symbol for this whole state of affairs. This symbol is embodied in the high God Vishnu who is said to come to the earth again and again in the form of different incarnations when the world is in need of him. The Hindus call him the god of dreams for his basic function is to sleep and eternally dream up new worlds which follow upon an endless cycle of birth and dissolution.(1) So now we must ask ourselves how this spell, and it must have been a tremendous spell, could ever have been broken? Many circumstances contributed to this. It would often come about that different myths would conflict with one another and the result would be tribal or caste wars. In between ages of peace and relative calm there would be periods of fighting and great conflict. But of even greater importance is the fact that to be able to break a myth means first to have known and to have analyzed what lay at the source of this tremendous power, to have developed what I call the metaphysical capacity to think about and analyze the world and ourselves. It has taken us a long time to develop this capacity and in a way I am sorry for having to put it quite in this way, because one can easily get the impression that I am speaking about the phenomenon of evolution and I am not an evolutionist and do not want to be mistaken for one. When I speak about the beginning of the power of thought and analysis in man I am thinking about the only phenomena I have been able to find in all of world history that I can properly call a development and that is the constant growth of man's world consciousness and his man consciousness. I have not said self consciousness because we are all too self conscious in this age although we take a great deal of pride in our so called individuality. No, psychologically I am not interested in any of that. I see now only one phenomena and that is the steady and slow growth of what man can and should be and I am speaking about man in general and not as an individual. It is true that every individual must go through a process of development but behind this human development there must be a concept of man and it is this that interests me. Against this picture of ever growing order and the creation of an orderly world there stands in contrast the mythical world which was so disorderly that one could almost treat their personages as actors and exchange one for another. All of the gods could incarnate themselves as animals, plants, stones, or any object in the universe and man too would go through various incarnations where no clear distinction could be made as to where one phenomena ended and another began.(2) There was no world picture then for the world was not organized in that sense. Yet despite this lack of order one can see a kind of strange consistency in the spectacle of endless reincarnations and the question once again presents itself how man was able to break away from this, especially since it presents us with such strange results. Recently an English astronomer, one of the leading scientists of our time, advanced a very interesting theory about our universe. It is a hypothesis, not a truth, about the possible origin and development of the universe, and it says that the universe has been for billions and billions of years exhibiting the phenomena of periodicity. During some of these periods it expands and it happens to be such a period that we are living in. Those galaxies that are on the periphery are receding at an astronomical speed and this continues until finally, they begin to slow again, and then contract, and for billions and billions of years the universe shrinks inwards into a compact mass of matter of enormous density and energy. Finally there is a great explosion and release of energy and it begins to expand again.(3) It is strange that we should find this strictly scientific hypothesis being advanced today in all seriousness especially since it was once formulated by an ancient Indian mythical speculator many centuries ago in quite a different way. He said that the universe is breathing...it expands, and then it contracts and that is its law.(4) Now this is rather odd, isn't it? Could it be that somewhere deep in the human mind where these speculations originate there are patterns from which they emerge? That is subconsciously, so to speak, there might be a collective unconscious which mirrors a single possibility as to the origin and development of the universe.(5) A possibility that is now at least scientifically proved or half proved...we don't know! The ancient Indian speculators then, invented as their symbol the God Vishnu who is an eternal dreamer and in him we find a complete formula as to what the mythical mind is doing. They themselves became those eternal dreamers who dreamt up one world after another and the greatest change that has ever occurred in the mind of man occurred when man abandoned mythical thinking. Buddha called this state of affairs enlightenment and it is almost as if in the process of this awakening man finally comes to himself. I have now only to make one more decisive distinction. Up until about six hundred B.C. myths shall always be the product of some collective consciousness, i.e., they are the product of whole peoples and societies in conversation with one another and the mythical images spring from their conversation like the endless speculation of a dreaming crowd. Then suddenly individual persons begin to appear who not only challenge this collective consciousness but even begin to break it down. Metaphorically speaking it is almost as if the human mind had been in a deep sleep; had been buried in the earth and was dreaming there, and then suddenly it began to push its way toward the surface like a plant out into the open sky and sunlight. This is the first instance of human enlightenment that we are able to witness and it is of the utmost historical importance. (This was a period of great crisis).* We seem today to be approaching exactly such a period, namely, the end of the logical era where we somehow have to try to transcend the logical mentality with which we have been living. Our crisis today is as big as theirs and their crisis was tremendous. It produced during one historical epoch Buddha in India, Lao Tze in China, and Zarathrustra in Persia not to speak of Confucius (although he is not relevant to our imediate purposes). All of these men have one thing in common and that is they are checkers of dreams, that is they analyze these dreams and try to replace them with reality. Buddha in India and Heraclitus in Greece both refuse to dream and both attack their fellow man because all that they have in common is their own dreams and for this reason they cannot create a true understanding amongst themselves. Only by using reason is it possible to agree or disagree and in myth nothing like that was possible. You did not disagree; rather, you were agreed and you could not say no because there wasn't any no possible. It is almost as if man up to that time could only say yes and that the idea of a negation should be impossible for him.(6) And the fact that these men, quite in opposition to the collective consciousness of their times, set themselves against the myths, and that the great body of their propositions were eventually taken over by the masses of people is almost magic. As we look at these men we see that they never had intended to create or found a world religion. Buddha was not a religious man and he did not speak in religious terms. Neither was Lao Tze or Zarathrustra, as a matter of fact, Zarathrustra was very careful about making religious statements or statements about God. These ancient sages did not promise much. They did not promise eternity or what we today would call salvation. They promised only enlightenment and enlightenment is not salvation. They believed that they were living in an age when people were suddenly gaining courage and did not need salvation any more. Thus today we shall not talk about Buddhism as such, but rather about the Buddha. As a religion Buddhism has been accepted by millions of people and it is one of the most successful of world religions. I might even say that in our age of so called ecumenism when all of the religions of the world shall someday sit around a table and ask each other to unite and adjust to one another, that they shall find out in the process that if you want to sit in judgment of a religion then you judge it by the content of humanenness that is in it. And as they sit around this coference table one by one they will be asked to give account of themselves and someone will raise the bitter question as to how many innocent people were murdered and tortured for their various gods? "Oh please, you members of this united nations of metaphysical thinkers, give an account of what you have done", and then, one by one they will almost all fall down, for it will turn out that they are all very guilty indeed. And the only religion that will be able to say that it never encouraged a crusade or sent out missionaries to force others to accept it's way of life will be the Buddhists.(7) At the very least that is the praise that we must give to them. How the other religions of the world have conducted themselves in this matter is another question. They are all big civilizers and the essential question of the humanist as to how many innocent human beings must die for the glory of their beliefs leaves them all silent. Didn't the Christians in the sixteenth century murder Jews and put heretics to death at the stake simply because they had a different kind of belief? And what about Cardinal Spellman today? Do you really believe that we Americans are fighting God's war in Vietnam? We may be fighting a necessary war, I am not debating that, but to claim that we are fighting God's war is something that a Buddhist would never do. For heavens sake leave God out of this question, it is a human question, and to say that only God can give us an answer to this question is a dirty lie because it attempts to use God as an argument and God can never be used as an argument for the draft. If there are any arguments at all then they are human arguments, and if we believe in the draft then we must give reasons for that belief, and we must allow others to disagree with those reasons, and then we shall somehow through the democratic process decide upon the question. But certainly there is no God leading us, indeed he might be insulted if he were to hear this. I think that I should be insulted if I were a God, which fortunately I am not. The astonishing thing then, about the so called higher religions is that they were originally put forward not by religious, but by philosophical men, and we are presented with the spectacle of whole societies that capitulate and begin to accept the personal consciousness of one man, and I do not say individual, but rather man. Each of them set before themselves the task of ridding their respective societies of every trace of collective consciousness and of the entire tradition of produced dreams and myths and they came to be accepted to such a large degree that Friedrich Nietzsche was to make the observation that only thoughts which come on the wings of doves can change the world. The thoughts that we shall consider now are thoughts which came on the wings of doves; silently, from man to man, and with the awakening of the human capacity to reason that this entails men discovered that they were not only dreamers, but that they could control their dreams and discover the grains of truth that were in them. That they could get hold of their dreams, because they wanted to get hold of their life, and with the acceptance of the powers of persuasion and argument, the metaphysical stature of man would then be increased. There is a story about the Buddha who is reproached by one of his followers because he refuses to answer one of the great metaphysical questions of the human mind: namely, the question as to whether or not the universe is finite or infinite and whether or not the saints died as we do and are reborn again, or do not die and are not reborn? Buddha refuses to answer this question for the simple reason that it does not have an answer but to explain the reasons for this would require a lifetime and in the end the only result would be that he would have squandered both his own life and the life of his disciple."We live", he says, "in a burning house, and I want to run out, but first you want me to tell you who it was that set the fire and in the meantime we are burning."(8) He developed this tough rejection of any kind of senseless metaphysical speculation, because he had been raised in the tradition of Indian myths and he hated them. We today in the west have forgotten the distinction between the teachings of Buddha and those who came after him. Buddhism is not the same as Hinduism and in the beginning they were bitter enemies. When Buddha refused to accept the existence of the untouchables as a caste he attacked the very foundation of Hindu society, and the fact that he was able to gain a foothold in India at all shows that a real revolution was taking place. He excluded no one from his monasteries; he took untouchables, he took women, and there was no distinction made between men or between sexes. Everyone had the possibility of becoming a Buddha and this concept instigated a great revolution, not fought by weapons, but rather by the permanent retirement of more and more people from society. One could either live in a monastery to concentrate upon one deliverance and freedom, or one could return to his village to live a life of service and meditation. To Buddha it made no difference so long as one realized that a life of obligation in the village would place obstacles in the way of one's liberation, but still these obstacles could be overcome and there was no exclusivity implied in the commitment he asked of men. So we can now see more clearly that what Buddha ultimately proposed was a way of life. Today that way of life has become embellished. In Tibet for instance, the embellishments have gone very far and Buddhism has been fused with every kind of mysticism and ritual the mind can imagine.(9) Buddha is no longer listened to any more. He only would have laughed at those who believe that they could become a Buddha simply by smearing their faces with ashes or starving themselves and having their heads shorn. "No", he would have said, "you are not a Buddha but only a charlatan and you would do better to forget about all of that and concentrate upon your deliverance." A complete break with the mythical world! What made it possible? How are we to explain this spectacle of the mythical world being broken into pieces? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if you really want to observe the world and what goes on in the world you really need to be at a certain distance from it. The distance I am speaking of is tremendous. It means that you must make a very sharp distinction between humanity, man, and nature and it means something else as well. Because in the world of the Hindus every phenomenon had been transformed into every other phenomenon; man, God, and nature were interchangeable, and so from man and nature the world of the gods must be sepqrated as well. One no longer could encounter in the world a God any time that he wished; no Krishna could ever appear to you in one of his various incarnations and no Vishnu would come to you when you were frightened to listen to your prayers. Because as far as Buddha was concerned these gods when they came into the world came not as deliverers but as demons and these demons ultimately possessed you and were the cause of your fright. And in a way this became a little embarrassing for Buddha because he did not recognize a single demonic force operating in the world. Not a single one and he replaces the concept of salvation with the concept of Buddhahood which is merely a concept and not a god or demon. It can neither harm another human being nor do him any good but is something that the individual person can acquire only for himself. |
