Malleable Māra

Transformations of a Buddhist Symbol of Evil

Michael D. Nichols

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438473222, 9781438473215
• eBook ISBN: 9781438473239
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Analyzes the breadth of representations of the mythic figure of M?ra in Buddhism to reveal how closely tied such narratives are to the social and historical concerns of Buddhist communities.

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

This is the first book to examine the development of the figure of M?ra, who appears across Buddhist traditions as a personification of death and desire. Portrayed as a combination of god and demon, M?ra serves as a key antagonist to the Buddha, his followers, and Buddhist teaching in general. From ancient India to later Buddhist thought in East Asia to more recent representations in Western culture and media, M?ra has been used to satirize Hindu divinities, taken the form of wrathful Tibetan gods, communicated psychoanalytic tropes, and appeared as a villain in episodes of Doctor Who. Michael D. Nichols details and surveys the historical transformations of the M?ra figure and demonstrates how different Buddhist communities at different times have used this symbol to react to changing social and historical circumstances. Employing literary and cultural theory, Nichols argues that the representation of M?ra closely parallels and reflects the social concerns and anxieties of the particular Buddhist community producing it.

1

Mapping out Māra

Who is Māra?

An early Buddhist Pāli text describes an encounter between the Buddha and a being named “Māra.” This Māra, attempting to assert his power over the Buddha as well as to frighten him, makes the following declaration:

The eye is mine, ascetic, forms are mine … the ear is mine, ascetic, sounds are mine … the nose is mine, ascetic, odors are mine … the tongue is mine, ascetic, tastes are mine … the body is mine, ascetic, tactile objects are mine … the mind is mine, ascetic, mental phenomena are mine … Where can you go, ascetic, to escape from me?1

This provocative, even chilling passage immediately prompts several questions. Who is this “Māra”? What is he after? How could he be so confident in his assertion of power and control over someone like the Buddha, someone who almost all other characters in these Buddhist texts and stories seem to revere?

These questions both intensify and also take a different tack when compared with an excerpt from a slighty later Buddhist text, the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, a Mahāyāna sūtra:

Mañjuśrī, you ask me why I am without servants, but all Māras and opponents are my servants. Why? The Māras advocate this life of birth and death and the bodhisattva does not avoid life.

The heterodox opponents advocate convictions, and the bodhisattva is not troubled by convictions. Therefore, all Māras and opponents are my servants.2

The juxtaposition of characterizations of this “Māra,” between the Pāli text and the later Mahāyāna text, is nothing less than jarring. How could Māra, the seemingly pernicious, intimidating figure from the Pāli text, now be in the service of Buddhism? What might account for such a change? In short, how can this be?

This book attempts to answer these questions by investigating the transformations and permutations of this Buddhist symbol of evil from its earliest representations to the modern day. What I have found is that the shift in understandings of Māra between Pāli and then Mahāyāna Buddhisms in India constitutes only one alteration in the portrayal of the figure. Besides moving from being an enemy of the dharma to a sort of undercover agent in its favor, Māra has been used to satirize Brahmanical divinities, take the form of wrathful Tibetan gods, communicate psychoanalytic tropes, and even appear in episodes of Doctor Who. This book traces and analyzes these transformations, arguing that the representation of Māra closely parallels and reflects the sociohistorical concerns of the particular Buddhist community producing it. The research question this book thus pursues is determining the extent to which the figure of Māra, throughout its history in multiple forms of Buddhism, has been tethered to local context, and specifically how Buddhist authors and thinkers employed and reinterpreted the figure of Māra to reflect changing doctrines and anxieties. Māra, like most myths, is therefore in a process of perpetual change and reinvention, but never neglect.

Defining Our Demon-God

Before proceeding, further details are needed about the nature and scope of Māra in the earliest Buddhist imagination of the figure. In the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha supposedly tells a group of his followers, “Bhikkhus, I do not consider any power as difficult to conquer as the power of Māra.”3 At least on the basis of some of Māra’s regular epithets, the Buddha’s warning seems reasonable. At various points, Māra has been declared Antaka (“Endmaker”), Kaṇha (“Dark One”), Adhipati (“Overlord”), Namuci (literally “Non-releaser,” but also the name of a Vedic demon), and Pamattabandhu (“Relative of the Careless”).4 Most frequent of all perhaps is Pāpimā (“Evil”). The name “Māra” itself comes from the root mṛ, “die,” which being in a causative sense, can be glossed as “causer of death,” or more bluntly, “killer.” At the same time, he is also, as Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita describes him, Kāmadeva, (“god of desire”) and kāmapracārādhipati, (“supreme lord of the movements of desire”).5 As a fusion of the impulses of life and death, desire and destruction, the closest parallel to Māra’s role in Buddhism that one could find in Western traditions would necessitate combining Cupid and the Grim Reaper into a single personality.6

As god of both death and desire, early Buddhist traditions considered Māra lord of an entire realm called, variously, Kāmaloka, Kāmadhātu, or Kāmavācara. All who are subject to birth and death are thus subject to Māra’s influence and control. A passage from the Bhikkhunīsaṃyutta of the Saṃyutta Nikāya describes Māra’s station in that very way: “[T]he thirty-three [gods of the old Vedic pantheon], the underworld, the tusitā gods, the gods who foster creation, and those who are Vasavattin gods, are all bound by the bonds of desire and they go again under the control of Māra.”7 Conceived in this way, Māra is a god reigning above other gods, let alone more minor beings, such as humans and animals. This characterization, in view of the divisions of Buddhist cosmology, places Māra in the higher heavenly worlds of the Kāmaloka, which lies below the Rūpaloka and Arūpaloka, respectively. Given the reference in the Bhikkhunīsaṃyutta, however, and the broader description of Māra as lord both of desire (kāma) and death (mṛtyu), even the devas of those higher realms exist under Māra’s control, as they are all still subject to death and rebirth. The symbol of Māra is thus coextensive, on a macrocosmic level, with the Buddhist conception of saṃsāra, the ever-turning process of death and rebirth, and the god’s sphere of influence and control extends from one end of existence to the other. It is thus no surprise that visual depictions of saṃsāra—which are called bhavacakras (literally “wheel of becoming”) and show the different realms of sense desire as regions of a spinning disk—show it grasped tightly in the fangs and claws of Māra, such that he is wrapped entirely around it, making it almost an extension of his monstrous body.

At the same time, though he is considered an eminently cosmic figure holding dominion over all beings, Māra’s presence also penetrates to the innermost reaches of existence, claiming control over the processes of the senses and cognition. For instance, in the quotation opening this chapter, Māra claims possession of the five senses and the mind, along with their processes and objects.8 The Majjhima Nikāya’s Āneñjasappāya Sutta seemingly grants this claim, describing both senses and perceptions as under the “sway of Māra” (māradheyyam),9 the “province of Māra” (mārass’ esa visayo), “Māra’s bait” (mārass’ esa nivāpo), and “Māra’s pasture” (mārass’ esa gocaro).10 Another Majjhima Nikāya text (the Cūlagopālaka Sutta) associates Māra’s realm with all that is shot through by the three poisons: passion, hate, and delusion (rāgadosamohānaṃ).11 Additionally, when bhikkhus ask the Buddha to explain the exact nature of Māra, he frequently declares that wherever there are formal, sensual, or mental formations, there is Māra.12

Early Buddhist traditions thus conferred a towering scope upon the figure of Māra, from the macroscopic levels of cosmic realms to the microscopic inner reaches of individual beings. Even this brief delineation of early understandings of Māra’s role and place in existence helps reveal the point of contention between Māra and the Buddha, and explains the former’s desperate attempts to prevent Gautama’s awakening. The dharma (Pāli, dhamma), or Buddhist teaching, constitutes a way to escape saṃsāra and Māra’s control, expansive and total though it may seem. Nirvāṇa (Pāli, nibbāna) represents a state outside of the Kāma-, Rūpa-, and Arūpalokas and extends beyond sensory and cognitive perceptions. As supreme lord of desire and death, as the appellation Kāmādhipati literally connotes, Māra is thus attempting to prevent Gautama from escaping his control when he assails the ascetic’s meditation at Bodh-Gayā. Indeed, further drawing on the sense of Māra as a lord or ruling being, we could even consider his intentions to halt the spread of the dharma as an attempt to quell a rebellion in his realm. Seen this way, his prowling after bhikkhus (not to mention the Buddha himself) in order to re-enmesh them in the world of death and desire takes on the appearance of a hunt to capture and stamp out dissidents.

Approaching Māra

With the imposing, expansive nature of the Māra myth in mind, the question naturally arises: how ought one to study such a figure? The very use of the word “myth” somewhat tips my hand as to the sort of approach I will employ in this book. By way of contrast, though, it is helpful to note the other ways Māra has attracted the attention of scholars. The first sustained book-length work on the figure, the late nineteenth-century text Māra und Buddha by Ernst Windisch, approached Pāli texts about Māra from a primarily philological perspective and considered the emergence of the narratives as evidence of the gradual degeneration of a once purely rational and philosophical tradition.13 Similarly focused entirely on Pāli texts, in an essay in volume two of the Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names, G. P. Malalasekera put forward a theory on Māra arguing that the figure arose from its etymological connection to the word for “death,” then expanded to include causes of death, and then possibly historical personages of high station who were opposed to the Buddha’s teaching.14 Later, Trevor Ling also analyzed the Pāli collection of texts in Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil, arguing that Māra served as symbolic shorthand for the abstract elements of Buddhist doctrine, serving the purpose of bridging philosophical concepts with popular folklore.15 Finally, James Boyd employed a phenomenological approach to compare Pāli (and some Sanskrit) textual appearances of Māra to Christian traditions in Satan and Māra.16

This book differs from these previous studies in many respects. In terms of scope, rather than focus on a particular textual canon or specific epoch, I examine Māra longitudinally and diachronically, across Buddhist schools, time periods, and geographies. Additionally, rather than philosophical or linguistic, my approach for analyzing Māra across these times and venues is primarily literary and mythological. By reading Buddhist texts as literature, I partly follow Ralph Flores, who has argued that this kind of hermeneutic helps illuminate “how Buddhist ideology and rhetoric are at work in shaping responses in listeners and readers.”17 In an even more recent work entitled Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu Narrative, Naomi Appleton explores how authors in those early traditions borrowed from and contested with rival traditions through storytelling.18 In much the same manner, we will see that the literary figure of Māra has been an integral part of just such a web of reactions and interactions for Buddhists, not only in India, but beyond. As a final note of distinction from past analyses, as the preceding point suggests, this book also investigates the vastly understudied social dimensions of the figure of Māra. By examining the changing ways Buddhist authors and communities have employed the myth of Māra to reflect their social relations, we can appreciate how they have, at times, used Māra to literally demonize their rivals.

Before proceeding, though, the concept of “myth,” and the very word itself, have been critiqued and contested in the field of Religious Studies. J. Z. Smith, for instance, has taken the study of myth to task for decontextualizing and dehistoricizing its subjects and the societies concerned.19 On that same note, Bruce Lincoln has charged that “myth is often treated as an anonymous and collective product, in which questions of authorship are irrelevant.”20 To a great degree, foundational scholars in the field such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade, advocated precisely this kind of position. Lévi-Strauss, for instance, wrote that “Myths are anonymous … When a myth is repeated, the individual listeners are receiving a message that, properly speaking, is coming from nowhere.”21 Eliade, for his part, considered myth primarily as evocation of actions having taken place in illo tempore, the inaccessible period prior to creation.22 In addition to criticizing the category of “myth” for its tendency to decontextualize religious phenomena, Robert Ellwood has questioned the methodological rigor of the concept, as “no way of analyzing my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Reprints
• Note on Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Mapping Out Māra
• Chapter 2 Machinations of Māra: The Myriad Menaces of the Evil One
• Chapter 3 Māra the Demon: Asura Ancestry
• Chapter 4 Māra the God: Brahmanical Background
• Chapter 5 Māra’s Metamorphosis: The Rise of the Mahāyāna and Its Impact on the Evil One
• Chapter 6 Māra Multiplied: The Evil One Across Asia
• Chapter 7 Go West, Evil God: Modernized Māra
• Chapter 8 And then Māra Disappeared: Concluding Thoughts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover