"The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life--which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of nirvāna. Briefly, nirvāna means "the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion." As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree [...] the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally "Desire-Hostility," or "Love and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāna.
["The verb nirvā (Sanskrit) is, literally, 'to blow out,' not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw.... Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified,' i.e., quenched, when the mind has been curbed, one attains to the 'peace of Nirvana,' 'despiration in God.'... It is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached, of which it is well said in another tradition that 'it passeth understanding'" The word "de-spiration" is contrived from a literal Latinization of the Sanskrit nirvāna, nir = "out, forth, outward, out of, out from, away, away from"; vāna = "blown"; nirvāna = "blown out, gone out, extinguished."]
Having subdued within himself to the critical point of the ultimate ember the Threefold Fire, which is the moving power of the universe, the Savior beheld reflected, as in a mirror all around him, the las projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings--the will to live according to the normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends, and means. He was assailed by the last fury of the disregarded flesh. And this was the moment on which all depended; for from one coal could arise again the whole conflagration.
This greatly celebrated legend affords an excellent example of the close relationship maintained in the Orient between myth, psychology, and metaphysics. The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds. No doubt the reader has been struck by a certain resemblance of this ancient mythological doctrine of the dynamics of the psyche to the teachings of the modern Freudian school. According to the latter, the life-wish (eros or libido, corresponding to the Buddhist Kāma, "desire") and the death-wish (thanatos or destrudo, which is identical with the Buddhist Māra, "hostility or death") are the two drives that not only move the individual from within but also animate for him the surrounding world. Moreover, the unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidyā). Yet the aims of the two teachings--the traditional and the modern--are not exactly the same.
Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. But for the one who has deliberately undertaken the difficult and dangerous journey beyond the village compound, these interests, too, are to be regarded as based on error. Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not by readjusting the desire (eros) and hostility (thanatos)--for that would only originate a new context of delusion--but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root, according to the method of the celebrated Buddhist Eightfold Path:
Right Belief, Right Intentions,
Right Speech, Right Actions,
Right Livelihood, Right Endeavoring,
Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration.
With the final "extirpation of delusion, desire, and hostility" (nirvāna) the mind knows that it is not what it thought: thought goes. The mind rests in its true state. And here it may dwell until the body drops away. [...] Such an ideal is well known, also, to Hinduism: the one freed in life (jīvan mukta), desireless, compassionate, and wise, "with the heart concentrated by yoga, viewing all things with equal regard, beholds himself in all beings and all beings in himself. In whatever way he leads his life, that one lives in God.""
[END EXCERPT]
It may seem to the reader of this blog that Campbell's agenda here is to promote Buddhism over other religions, but this would be an unfortunate misinterpretation, though understandable given the lack of context. His main point is that Buddhism, perhaps more than any other modern religion, has maintained as its core principle and as the primary aspect of its theological concern that same call to transcendence and transversion of the monomyth that has in other religions been diluted or forgotten by an excessive attention to minor theological discrepancies. As such Campbell strives to demonstrate by means of example how clearly the Buddhist mythos illustrates, as a primary example among many available, the inherent syntax of religious conception and its demonstrable identity to the monomyth. My own thoughts on this matter follow:
1. Symbolism is a linguistic device necessitated only by a limitation or repression of consciousness that renders the object of consideration ineffable [i.e. that manifests delusion].
2. Transcendence is the event/state of assimilating that which was previously ineffable and is thus synonymous with and identical to the individuation/enlightenment event/state whereby limitation/repression ["Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion"] are rendered nonexistent [nirvāna = "extinguished"].
3. Transcendence is thus expressed as a linguistic/logical-order transformation between two categorically distinct states: from symbolism, the inferior, to designation, the superior.
4. Designation is a linguistic event/state whereby the expression is identical to the object of consideration [Wittgenstein's imperative has been satisfied: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen"--"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." i.e. The means of linguistic communication is sufficient to attain identity with the object, rather than being insufficient and therefore necessitating a resort to symbolism.]
5. The consolidation of all the manifestations of religion and sympathetic magic throughout the world into the singular syntax of the monomyth is precisely such a transformation from symbolism to designation.
6. Therefore, all religion has already been rendered categorically obsolete through the combined efforts of the sciences of anthropology and psychology. In this regard religion is no different than any other phenomenon that science has enabled humanity to transcend and even, with a sufficient degree of accompanying technology, dictate. To the scholar of the monomyth, religion is no more or less significant a phenomenon than the changing of the tides by the revolution of the moon, or the transition of seasons by the rotation of the earth's axis in relation to the sun, or any other such phenomena that once were attributed an exaggerated significance and regard due to a lack of comprehension of the relation between effect and cause.
7. Though the argument of the preceding points is definitively debatable at an ontological level, it must be acknowledged that, as the infrastructure of a metaphysical paradigm, they represent not only an internally congruent system (a system lacking internal contradictions/paradoxes), but also a system that seems capable of assimilating and reconciling a vast number of otherwise incompatible and even hostile metaphysical paradigms (i.e. various religious paradigms). The sheer measure of verifiable data in support of this paradigm, compared with the unverifiable arguments resorted to by other paradigms (what some would call Apologetics), is also a significant element of consideration.
8. God is dead, and what is more, we can prove it.
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