But I’m a grown up, and I don’t need the PG version. I know that killing babies is wrong. I know that a mother’s love for her child is a very great thing. And when I look at these stories, and listen to the voices that tell me that that these stories are meant to convey such messages – and nothing else – I am far from satisfied.
If we give up our efforts to ethicize and rationalize – just for a moment! – and look at the images and ideas these stories present, what we are seeing is the presentation of violence and death within a religious parable of compassion and wisdom. This has an impact on the mind, regardless of the context it is in. The end result is the dramatic juxtaposition of elements – murder and compassion, grief and fury, and so on. These all occupy the same narrative ‘space’. If we were to draw them as an image, they would appear side by side, or in sequence.
Whereas an ethical interpretation wants to favor one side and oppose the other – Devadatta is evil! Buddha is good! – on a mythic or existential level these depict equally valid realities. Ethically, death is worse than life; but existentially, they are equally real.
Deep myth depicts this situation, the coextensive existence of death and life, murder and love. It lies prior to and indifferent to our moral judgements. In Hinduism, the goddess of Death is the most compassionate of all deities, since she makes it possible for new life.
This is why all so-called ‘primitive’ religions include elements that, to the axial, ethicized mind, seem bizarre, irrational, and cruel.
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I think modernist Buddhism has forgotten this old wisdom. I think we have become so caught up the idea of Buddhism as a rational, compassionate religion, that we deny and try to pretend that irrational, uncompassionate things could ever be a part of ‘real Buddhism’. And in doing so, we render ourselves incapable of any interesting or useful way of understanding or dealing with the demonstrably irrational forces that we find, for example in the objections to bhikkhuni ordination.
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In such approaches, we leach meaning from our texts, and end up with a Buddhism that is idealized and unrealistic. It becomes like the imagined birth of the Buddha: without pain, without blood, without humanity.