The dismemberment of the Man is here ascribed to the gods.
INTRODUCTION TO THE LAKKHANA SUTTANTA.
This Suttanta is a very interesting instance of the method, so often followed in the Dialogues, of pouring new wine into the old bottles.1
The brahmins had inherited a very ancient speculation (or, if that expression be preferred), a religious belief, in a mystic man, to whose dismemberment the origin of the world, and of all that is in the world, had been due.
Such a theory is not, however, exclusively Aryan. Relics of it, in its most savage ferocity, are found as far off as the South Seas, and lie hidden under the grotesque details of the myth of Osiris.
It is strange indeed that any such relics should have survived. For this idea runs counter to all the numerous cosmogonies that arose out of the later polytheisms.
In India we have the most ancient presentation of it in the % well-known Purusa-Sukta—a hymn now incorporated, it is true, in one of the latest portions of the Rig Veda, but pre¬ serving the memory of a trend of thought earlier, no doubt, than the cult of most of the Vedic gods.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the brahmin compilers of this anthology that they should have thought it worth while to include a concep¬ tion so foreign to the rest of the collection.
The dismemberment of the Man is here ascribed to the gods.
It is they who slay him and cut him up, and sacrifice him.
From the pieces are produced (we are not told how) various things that gods need—metres in which they may be praised; animals to be sacrificed to them ; men to perform the sacrifices; the earth and sky, the moon and the sun. x\s the gods are made in the image of men, it is scarcely prob¬ able that this bizarre idea could have arisen except among people who believed that a human sacrifice would bring advantage to the tribe.
Of course the victim of the gods, before there were any men, was no ordinary man. He was a mythic monster of a man with a thousand heads, a thou¬ sand eyes and a thousand feet, as suitable a victim for the gods as a captive enemy would be for men. So say the
opening verses ; afterwards the Man is treated as if he were the usual shape.
It is therefore quite possible that the beginning of the hymn is by one author and the rest by another.
Notwithstanding its own incongruities, and its direct con¬ tradiction of other stories of creation, this one survived.
A hymn of the Atharva (X, 2) returns to the subject.
The mythic Man loses in that hymn his thousand heads and eyes and feet, but the purpose of the hymn is to identify him quite clearly and completely with Brahma, the new personi¬ fication of the magic words of the sacrifice, the new name for a Spirit of the universe.
Thus do new gods absorb the old.
There is another mythical Man in the pre-Buddhistic literature, who is also identified with Brahman.
He creates all this out of himself.
But he is not a sacrificial victim ; and the long account of how he does it does not identify him with the Man of the Purusa-sukta.1
There is yet a third Man to be considered—the man in the eye, and in the mirror, and in many other things—the subject of the well-known passage incorporated in two Upanishads, and therefore older than either.2
This third Man is simply the animistic soul.
Which of these three is the one referred to in our Sut- tanta ?
It is necessary before we attempt to answer this question to see what the Pali evidence says. It is unfortun¬ ately very little, but not without importance.
In the first place there are several passages where brahmins of good standing are represented as claiming this theory of natal marks on the body of the superman as part of their stock of hereditary knowledge.3
It is true that when the whole list of such knowledge is given, this theory of marks is put at the end as if it were the least of all in importance.
Never¬ theless, if this statement be correct for the period of the rise of Buddhism, and for the localities mentioned, then it follows that the theory is not a Buddhist one at all : it is brahmin.
And the information is just what we should expect—certain brahmins, in their capacity as augurs and soothsayers, had worked out a theory of such marks, and handed it on to their pupils.
It must be recollected that there was then, in the valley of the Ganges, no astrology ;
and that in one of the very oldest of their documents—in the Silas—the Buddhists had expressly condemned all sorts of augury and soothsaying practised for gain by some samanas and by brahmins.1
This particular form of sooth¬ saying is there mentioned.
Secondly the Buddhists had a theory of the superman, the Maha-purisa.
It is only mentioned incidentally in a few passages ; but it was there.
Thus at Saijyutta V, 158 when Sariputta asks the Buddha what the saying, ‘ the super¬ man ’ means, he is answered as follows:
It is by emancipation of mind that I call a man super¬ man. Without that emancipation there is no superman. And how is one thus emancipated ? With regard to his body, his feelings, his mind and his ideas he continues to be so master of them by insight that, ardent, self-possessed and mindful, he overcomes both the dejection and the hankering common in the world. So doing his mind is purified, emanci¬ pated, free from mental intoxications.
Again at Anguttara II, 35 a brahmin, known by his epithet of Vassakara, the Rain-maker, calls on the Buddha.
He is most probably the same rain-maker as the one wTho afterwards became notorious as the spy and traitor who brought about the destruction and slaughter of the Licchavis.
He says that they (the priests) call a man endowed with four qualities a very wise man, a superman (a Maha-purisa).
Those qualities are
(1) That he is learned.
(2) That he is a good expositor of the meaning of what he has learnt by heart.
(3)Â That he has a good memory.
(4) That he is expert and untiring in everything a layman has to do, and can search out expedients for doing and carrying through anything that has to be done.
The answer, put into the mouth of the Buddha by the early Buddhists, amounts to this :— Very well.
It is not for me to express approval or dis¬ approval. That you know best. I also call a man of four qualities very wise, a superman. And what are those quali¬ ties ? (1)
He concerns himself with the advantage and
the welfare of the great masses of the people, many are the folk he has established in the Ariyan system—that is in the beauty of righteousness as set forth in the Ariyan Path.
(2) He can think about a thing, or not, just as he wishes; he can harbour an aspiration, or not, just as he wishes. Thus is he master of his mind in the trends of thought.
(3) He can enter at his pleasure without toil or trouble into the four ecstasies that are beyond thought and yet pertain to this present life.1 2 (4) He has put away the intoxications arising from lust and becomings from speculation and ignorance.
Thus does he gain and abide in that sane emancipation of heart and mind that he knows and realizes even in this present life.
The story goes on to say that the Buddha himself (let us add, like any other Arahant) has done all this; and then it winds up in an impassioned verse which sums up the lesson of the talk.
Again there is a verse included in the Dhammapada anthology—it is No. 352—which in different phraseology asserts the same conclusion, that is, that the Arahant is the superman.
Unfortunately this particular verse is one of those the origin of which has not yet been traced; and the new edition of the text puts the very word in question (Maha- purisa, the superman) in brackets, as if it were an inter¬ polation.
This is not correct. The commentary has the word, and the reading is confirmed by Anguttara II, 37.2
These are the only passages in the 16 vols. of the four Nikayas in which the word has so far been traced.
is sufficient to show that the word is not in use as a technical term in the Buddhist doctrine.
It occurs only when the brahmin use of the word is referred to (Sariputta was a brahmin), and is there used to«show the startling contrast between the brahmin and the Buddhist conceptions of what a superman must be.
So with these marks.
Our Suttanta says that—granted, for the purposes of this argument, that these are supermen recognizable by bodily marks that may be discerned at birth —then the superiority of these children is due entirely to good deeds done in a former birth, and can only be main¬ tained, in the present life, by righteousness.
The superman, by the theory, becomes either king or leader of a religious movement.
In either case it is righteousness that produces and keeps alive the gain.
The marks must have the same origin, and the results would be the same without them.
It follows that the marks are incidental; they don’t really matter.
And as a matter of fact we never hear of them again, as a serious proposition, in ail the immense literature of Buddhism throughout the centuries of its development in India, and China, in Ceylon, or in Japan.
The idea survived in the brahmin schools. Eleven centuries later Varaha Mihira still has a list of such marks.
Why did the Buddhists
never take to it ? Can it be possible that this Suttanta was not without influence in keeping alive among the Buddhists their sane dislike to all the animist arts of soothsaying ?
It would seem that the more learned and influential brah¬ mins shared this feeling.
They have preserved very little of the details of such arts.
And on these particular marks they have nothing to say.
Most of the marks are so absurd, considered as marks of any human, that they are probably mythological in origin, and three or four seem to be solar.
Our Suttanta seems gravely ironical in the contrast it makes be¬ tween the absurdity of the marks and the beauty of the ethical qualities they are supposed, in the Suttanta, to mean.
And Buddhaghosa makes pathetically futile efforts to bring some sense into them.
It is quite evident that his tradi¬ tional forerunners have understood them as little as he does himself. ~T. W. Rhys Davids, Sacred Books of the East, Page 132-135
god god god god god god god god god god god god god
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation