Avalokiteshvara "The Lord Looking Down in Pity"
Suffering the evils of existence
Om mani padme hum "the jewel is in the lotus"
During his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paushed: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard.
Hinayana Buddhism reveres the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage. Mahayana Buddhism regards the Enlightened One as a world savior, and incarnation of the universal principle of enlightenment.
A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the Hinayana view, and adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincarnation; according to the Mahayana view, a type of world savior, representing particularily the universal principle or essence is enlightenment.
Mahayana Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bdhisattvas and many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the transcendent, one and only Adi-Buddha (Primal Buddha) who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.
"When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change."
This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things" or All beings are without self."
The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (he whose being is enlightenment); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them - and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.
Eighty four thousand
Kwannon
The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to forego until the end of time ( which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent - made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.
Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind.
Pg 152 yin-yang, tao
Great Original
T'ai Yuan
Combined yin-yang in herself
Word Made Flesh
Androgynous
Adam before Eve
Hermaphrodite (child of Hermes & Aphrodite)
The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where Go walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites", by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.
The mystery of creation
Devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle, and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.
As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. "Whatever is killed becomes the father." The impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.
Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.
Page 157 "turn the other cheek"
Motherly fathers, manipulating sons into defense
Pg 158 techniques/devices versus god is love
"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves"
"God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself."
Civitas Dei / Civitas Diaboli
St. Augustine
"And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way of consent...They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies"
The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards - and is.
We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other - the enemy - that one too is the God.
This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or secretarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the childhood parent images and ideas of "good" and "evil" have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the god, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world.
This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are "two halves of a split pea"; whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the divison of sex: the pronoun "He" was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find.
Annihilation of the distinction between life and release from life
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