Vajra Previews: Knowing Your Enemy In Buddhism—The Last Word on Mara, Featuirng Teachings From Aryadeva And Shantideva
I dreamed last night I was dead, standing studiously next to my lifeless form, after having earlier researched Āryadeva’s Catushaka (The Four Hundred Treatise)¹ for a piece on the evolution of Mara’s evolving significance to the Buddhist concept of “confusion and bewilderment.”² This of course is the primordial human condition prior to Buddhist refuge. In the dream a voice told me to get back into that bodily form so I could really die. This because my form of gross consciousness still contained all the necessary elements (bhutas, kleșas, atoms, etc.)³ for a real death to occur. This sounded odd to me because I was outside my body observing only that which could die but was being told by an omniscient voice that it was precisely that consciousness of my death that needed to be inside the lifeless form so as to lose what was most important about the process dying. So I got back into my dead body and waited to lose that same consciousness in order for my death to become ‘real.’ The ...