Not Bliss

Like a lot of people, I’ve always been interested in mythology. Probably because of the monsters and the gods, and cool magic weapons and the sex (there’s a lot of that in most mythologies). What’s not to like, right? I also really like huge storylines, that exist in complicated, almost living universes. I mean, that’s a major reason I’m into comics, and why I like to follow TV shows, too. I mean, from Saturday morning cartoons to Buffy The Vampire Slayer to 24. The mythologies of just about every oldschool culture I’m aware of (or more importantly care about) certainly exist in those kind of universes. I mean, maybe we wouldn’t have TV shows without the world’s of mythology as a precedent. And, a lot of people say comics are a sort of “modern mythology”.

My High School experience really fueled my interest in mythology, too. The Academy At Charlemont, is very much into teaching “the classics”. I remember doing a lot of stuff  on Greek Mythology especially.

And, I had this Yoga teacher in an afterschool Yoga thing back in High School who also helped me get my mythology fix. In my Senior year, at the end of our Yoga classes, this guy would have “storytime”. Yes, I was a senior in High School, I was 18 years old and I got Storytime. It was awesome. For that whole spring, after every Yoga class, he told us a bit of the Mahabharata. If you who don’t know, that’s one of the two big Indian epics, the other is the Ramayana. The Mahabharata really is an “epic”, it’s a gigantic story in the massive universe that is Indian Mythology. And, like I said earlier, I’m a big fan of that kind of thing. So, it was pretty amazing to hear it every day after Yoga.

Side Note: Actually, Grant Morrison, a comic writer hero of mine is working with Virgin Comics and writing an animated version of the Mahabharata called MBX. I’m not sure how faithful to the actual myth it will be, it might be a lot different. It definitely looks like it will have SCI FI elements.

But, You know, I think most importantly in High School, I got introduced to the bizarre mythology that is Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism may have some of the freakiest looking gods of any mythology. And, what’s even stranger is that the scarier a god looks, the better the chance there is that he’s a good guy.

In High School, my friend Nicholas Taupier’s dad  was a huge Tibetan Buddhist. And for some time I had had an interest in Buddhism in general. Whenever I was hanging out at Nicholas’ house, I’d talk to his dad and get another bit of knowledge on Tibetan Buddhism. I remember one day he told me about Manjusri. Manjusri is a Bodhisattva I particularly like because he’s a real bad ass warrior. He actually has two forms, and they both fight that good old fight. Manjusri’s first form isn’t as weird and scary-looking as most Tibetan gods. He’s kind of a pretty boy:

But, don’t let that fool you. Check out the dude’s flaming sword. Flaming swords are pretty badass, right? I mean, Azrael, the one-time sort-of-replacement Batman in the 90s comics (who has come back into the current Batman comics, actually during all this Battle For The Cowl insanity) is a real badass, too. And Azrael also wields a flaming sword. But, unlike Azazel, Manjusri doesn’t fight criminals and supervillains. Or maybe he does. Maybe Manjusri fights the biggest, baddest supervillain of all time: Ignorance.

Manjusri’s flaming sword cuts through ignorance, not the bodies of bad guys. Ignorance that gets in the way of enlightenment. Or, more importantly, ignorance that makes us suffer. That, of course, is a major belief in Buddism in general, not just the Tibetan variety.

The idea in Buddhism is that we suffer because we fail to see the world as it really is. We get distracted. We get distracted by our desires for material or other forms of external happiness things or negative emotions (anger, fear, greed..). The fact is (at least the way I see it) outside the ideas of Buddhism, ignorance is seriously dangerous.

I’m about to sound like Yoda a bit, but ignorance, a lack of understanding, causes hate, causes war, violence, oppression. Or, on a more personal level or maybe more psychological level, it can lead us to depression or frustration. When we’re ignorant about the world and our place in it, we don’t understand how to be happy with who we are and where we’re at.

Of course, we can make ourselves ignorant, too. When we chose to deny something, to ignore it because it’s hurtful, it’s actually hurting us more than if we chose to confront it and learn to understand it. To go back to Buddhism, that’s a big way we can “suffer”.

And, the less we understand about things, the more stuck we are. The more stagnant our lives become. I think education is really the only way we can better ourselves. My dad is actually responsible for giving me that idea. He has always stressed how important it is for me and for my Sister to get a good education. My dad values education so much that he worked two jobs, running on only 3 hours of sleep a night to put my Sister and me through school. He still hustles hard for our education. And, I really appreciate that. That’s probably why I value education like my dad. And, why I think Manjusri is such a cool guy. Because Manjusri fights the antithesis of education.

And, it makes sense that being educated, being wise, and understanding what’s actually going on is empowering. I mean, why else would governments work hard to keep their people from getting too smart? Really bad governments, like Pol Pot’s regime certainly tried to deal with educated people so he could oppress the country. I mean, Pol Pot was crazy, but he still understood his real enemy was education. He was out of his mind, he he thought the only educated people in Cambodia were people with glasses. But, still, when he massacred them, he was using ignorance as a weapon against dissent from his people.

But, not only “crazy” regimes use ignorance as a tool to maintain power. Here in America, education is rarely a high priority for federal spending. We especially saw a lot of ignorance-mongering during the last 8 years. So many people have written about this, but here’s me doing it, too. The terror alert levels and propaganda being spread about “the enemy”, the “axis of evil”. That was a deliberate attempt to spread fear, hate and ignorance. The Bush administration did a lot of criminal things, and with a good amount of this country stupified, they got away with them. I mean, a lot of Bush’s cronies are actually wanted for crimes in Europe. If these guys travel to Europe, they could be arrested right away. I really hope that Obama will prosecute some of these criminals here in America because what they did was unforgivable. But, the are getting away with it because they’ve used ignorance to cover it up.

Manjusri’s duty is to cut through all those sorts of illusions. The ignorance that (whether created by others, or ourselves, or both) holds us back from progressing. I suppose he exists as a Bodhisattva to inspire us with his cool, bad ass flaming sword to defeat ignorance in our lives. To slice through bullshit, basically. Just like how heroes like Batman and Azrael might inspire us to defend what’s dear to us or to confront evil we see. In fact, Batman uses ignornace as a weapon. But, not like Pol Pot did. Batman turns the ignorance of his enemies against them.Christopher Nolan’s excellent movie Batman Begins really explores that side of Batman. Batman turns his enemies’ fear and hate (again, those are products of ignorance) against them by being an embodiment of it.

This is a very different approach to how Manjusri defeats his villain. Manjusri just cuts it up with his firesword. That’s much more straight-up to me. But, actually, Manjusri’s second form: Yamantaka uses similar tactics to Batman. Yamantaka is not a pretty boy in the slightest. He’s one of those “freaky-looking” Tibetan gods:

Batman dresses like he does and fights like a ninja in order to scare the badguys. But, Yamantaka is way scarier than Batman ever could be. But, never fear, Yamantaka’s  a good guy. And, the villain  Yamantaka has to fight isn’t as easily spooked as Gotham City villains. Yamantaka fights death. That’s what his name means in Tibetan: Death-Destroyer. Many Tibetan deities like Yamantaka have scary forms to fight death, but Yamantaka fights death in a special way. He fights both phyiscal death (which is how he’s immortal) but also he fights a more spiritual death. Yamantaka fights the sort of stagnation we can get into by holding on too tightly to things.  Yamantaka fights the really tough form of ignorance: our belief systems.

Yamantaka busts up personal belief systems that are causing us to suffer. Belief systems that make us hateful or depressed or afraid or otherwise unhappy. When we’re unhappy like this, it’s a real bummer, and Buddhists think it keeps us from enlightenment. Whether we’ll become “enlightened” or not, it’s good to not be unhappy.  Right? After all, life is very short. We can’t kill our physical deaths like Yamantaka can. But, we can defeat our spiritual deaths.

If we’re suffering, behaving the same way over and over and not getting happy, (and Buddhists think we all are, all the time) then we are a sort of ” walking dead” aren’t we? I guess Yamantaka inspires us to be scarier than what scares us.

To go in and defeat beliefs systems that have made us the walking dead. Defeating this kind of ignorance is very hard.This takes more than just a pretty boy with a sword which is why, like Goku going Super-Sayain 3 to fight Buu in Dragonball Z, or Iron Man donning the Hulkbuster armor to fight, well the Hulk,  Manjusri has to transform into a tougher form to take these deep-rooted beliefs out.

I guess because I value education so much, and I think Ignorance is real bad, and (more importantly) because I like flaming swords and monsters, I’ve been interested in Manjusri and Yamantaka since I first heard about them. And, I think, like the superheroes I’ve always loved, Manjusri and Yamantaka fight for us: the innocent. They defend us from evil, in a way. But, unlike superheroes, we can’t be passive and just let them swoop in to save us.

Appropriatly, we have to learn from Manjusri and Yamantaka. We have to fight ignornace like they do, but we have to fight it ourselves.

While I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, I do find a lot of Buddhist ideas interesting. I think it is always important to examine the ways we think and coming to a better understanding of that. It’s why I’m very interested in psychology, too. And, in many ways, Buddhism is a form of psychology. Sometimes it has cool gods and monsters attached to it, like how it is in Tibet. I think examining how we think is really at the core of Buddhism. And it’s probably the first step in fighting ignorance like Manjusri and Yamantaka do.

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