Vajra Previews: Knowing Your Enemy In Buddhism—A 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 dream reverses the ordinary fantasy: “I can stand outside death and watch it.” Āryadeva’s point is precisely that this observer-position is still a subtle self-construction.⁴ Death is not fully understood while “I” remain as the witness who possesses the event from outside. So the voice says: go back in. Meaning the real object of contemplation is not merely “that the body dies.” It is that this very consciousness that says “I am observing death” is also conditioned, dependent, unstable, and not finally ownable.
My research shows this fits three Aryadevan themes:
1. Impermanence is not about bodies in general. It is about undermining the assumption that “I continue.” In other words, the elemental continuum and the consciousness riding upon it cease.⁵
2. The body is not self, but neither is the witnessing consciousness a safe refuge. Chapter XIII’s point about mind arising dependently is relevant here: consciousness is not an independent spectator.
VIII. 23. “The mind arises in dependence upon the eye and visible form, like an illusion. It is not possible to call that which has real existence (sadbhava) an illusion.”⁶
3. The illusion-like character of experience is not nihilism⁷ (as Aryadeva’s teacher Nagarjuna was often accused of). The dream did not say “nothing matters.” It said the dying process matters so much that even subtle evasion must be seen through.
I’d endured this kind of claustrophobia years ago after having been in retreat a few weeks when the Deity, Guru, and Mantra suddenly combined into one all-absorbing reality. I had essentially ‘died’ to all else. Similarly, being expansively focused upon my corpse, and then having to re-inhabit it, produced an ‘unnatural,’ forced concentration, which I suppose is much like the actual experience of dying.⁸ My understanding became pressurized, saying not just the body is impermanent, but the observer of impermanence is also impermanent. This I then had to sit with inside my own dead body.
Of course, claiming a body as ‘one’s own’⁹ is the root of the problem and basis of all suffering. So the dream’s omniscient instruction was pointing out one conditioned delusion heaped upon another.
The tradition of going to the cemetery effectively began with the teachings on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness in the Sampanathana Sutta.¹⁰ Karen Lang, in a note on verse 24. (below), observes: “The cultivation of the navasubhasarrijm, which refer to stages in decomposition of a corpse, will curtail attachment to the body. But before one makes that trip, the awareness of death is first coupled with an astute analysis of that attachment:
“It is unreasonable to call that [human body) - in which detachment (vairdgya) may develop - pure. There is no thing that is
necessarily the cause of desire.” ¹¹
A dream of observing one’s death and subsequent corpse reveals from the standpoint of meditation—here, by by means of the second of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness—feelings.¹² Focusing on feelings about one’s death, what I experienced in my dream was psychological distance. (“I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there,” as a comedian once famously quipped.) So the Āryadeva corrective was to get back into my body even if it was dead. What better place to meditate on the nature of an imaginary self than the container space, now inanimate, in which it is first erroneously perceived to exist and greedily thought to be ‘one’s own’?
The dream reverses the naive fantasy: “I can stand outside death and watch it because I know something about the process.” Aryadeva’s point is precisely that this observer-position is still a subtle self-construction. Death is not fully understood while “I” remain as the witness who possesses the event from outside. The real object of contemplation is not merely “that body dies.” It is that this very consciousness that says, “I am observing death” is also conditioned, dependent, unstable, and not finally ownable.
One might think Āryadeva’s teaching had entered the dream as a correction: ‘do not contemplate death from the standpoint of an imagined survivor. Enter the very place where the sense of “I am aware of dying” must itself be relinquished.’ What this says about the text itself is that it still conveys a living transmission¹³ of a powerful Buddha dharma teaching that transcends mere conceptuality.
The fantasy of being able to observe one’s own death, from an exalted point of view, is also an aspect of Mara. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness first required¹⁴ the observation of the decaying human matter found in cemeteries, ghats, and so forth. A purified awareness of oneself and one’s death arises from observing the flesh peel back off the face of a burning corpses. There’s nothing else quite like seeing this. Having taken into one’s conscious awareness others’ elemental destruction, a more genuine meditation of one’s own impermanence begins. The above dream, with its omniscient instruction of reentering one’s dead body, is comparable to climbing into the burning dead skull of a corpse like the one I witnessed closeup, thanks to one of the Doms, at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi. To shun or not take advantage of such opportunities as these is to take the guidance and solace of Mara.
We first hear of the Buddhist Māra in the archaic verse texts of the Sutta Nipāta, especially the Padhāna Sutta,¹⁵ among the oldest datable Buddhist compositions. During Siddhārtha’s period of extreme ascetic striving near the Nerañjarā River—later associated with the Pragbodhi (Dungeshwari) caves—Māra appears under the ancient Vedic name Namuci,¹⁶ the drought-demon and cosmic obstructer defeated by Indra. The Buddhist tradition appropriates this pre-Buddhist figure and gradually transforms him from a mythological adversary into the embodiment of every force that prevents awakening.
By the tantric period, Māra had become less a single demon than a comprehensive map of bondage itself. The old Vedic and Purāṇic gods increasingly appear not merely as rival deities but as symbolic expressions of the Four Māras¹⁷:
1. Skandha-māra (Māra of the Aggregates)
The entire world of embodied existence ruled by Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva remains trapped within conditioned aggregates. Even the highest gods possess form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.
2. Kleśa-māra (Māra of Afflictive Emotions)
The passions personified by Kāma, the intoxicating powers of attachment, jealousy, pride, and anger, become embodiments of the kleśas that bind beings to saṃsāra.
3. Devaputra-māra (Māra as the Divine Tempter) Originally this was the actual celestial Māra, ruler of the highest desire-heaven.¹⁸ In Buddhist literature he functions as a kind of anti-Buddha, a cosmic tempter. Here many of the old gods become servants of distraction, pleasure, status, power, and spiritual complacency. The heavenly realms ruled by Indra or populated by devas are no longer ultimate destinations but refined prisons.
4. Mṛtyu-māra (Māra of Death) The ancient Vedic figures Mṛtyu (Death) and Namuci merge conceptually with the Buddhist understanding of mortality itself. Every conditioned existence, including divine existence, ends in dissolution. Even gods cannot escape impermanence.
Thus Vajrayāna performs a remarkable inversion. The great gods of India are not denied; rather, they are subordinated. Their realms, powers, and mythic functions are reinterpreted as dimensions of the Four Māras. In tantric iconography this culminates in wrathful deities trampling Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva, Indra, Yama, Kāma, and other gods beneath their feet—not as a rejection of Hinduism, but as a visual declaration that even the highest divine states remain within the domain of saṃsāra until transformed into wisdom.
In the Saṃyutta Nikāya, Māra repeatedly appears attempting to interrupt meditation, provoke fear, induce doubt, kindle desire, or persuade disciples that liberation is impossible. The pattern is consistent: Māra identifies some remaining attachment, conceit, or vulnerability and seeks entry through it; the Buddha or an arahant recognizes him and replies, “I know you, Māra,”²⁰ exposing the mechanism and thereby nullifying its power. The cycle therefore functions as a practical psychology of awakening.
While Mara may figure as a supernatural being, he is equally the personification of every force that sustains saṃsāra—death, craving, fear, self-identification, and the instinct to remain within conditioned existence. Mara is not only known as Namuci (“not-loosing”) but Kanha (“the dark one”), Maccu (“death”), Antaka (“the end”), and Pāpimā (“evil one”)²¹— all of which attest to his notoriety across Buddhist thought and literature. By the time of the Nikāyas, the old Vedic figure of Namuci (“the Non-Releaser”) has effectively become the cosmic embodiment of bondage itself.
The iconographic consequence is striking as the gods of the Brahmanical cosmos—once objects of reverence—are frequently placed beneath the feet of wrathful deities, trampled within maṇḍalas, or converted into guardians and attendants. The symbolism is not anti-Hindu polemic so much as a tantric declaration that every level of conditioned existence, from ordinary desire to the loftiest heavenly realms, remains within Māra’s domain until awakened wisdom converts it. That Shaivist Tantra influenced Buddhist Tantra, and vice versa,²² this friendly competition, creating a Vajrayana hegemony, is a win for Buddhist doctrine in general as the old Vedic gods become icons of what binds beings to cyclic existence, while the tantric maṇḍala dramatizes their transmutation into the very path of liberation.
Mara, as the embodiment of beings’ unskillful emotions — greed, hate, delusion—becomes this basic misperception of existence and ownership. In Mahāyāna, especially Madhyamaka and Yogācāra,²³ that third poison of delusion or ignorance expands enormously. Now beings do not merely misunderstand objects. They misunderstand: subject, object, selfhood, conceptual construction, language, identity, reality appearance itself. This is the turning point as the major symptom in the etiology of ‘existence as suffering’ is delusively taken as inherently real and becomes one with all ‘appearance.’
The pith of this existential misperception is much earlier exposed by Āryadeva using the common pot to point out how its nature is determined perceptually by it characteristics of color, shape, parts, etc.. He concludes:
I, 4. There is no direct perception of the entire
visible form (rupa), since
it has outer, inner, and middle parts.²⁴
This is “a refutation of the direct perception of the entire object; each sense faculty perceives part of the object, not the whole,” as Karen Lang notes having translated verses 1 - 4 in chap VIII. So I say how does one experience, as in my dream, one’s body being dead or alive, if a direct perception of its entirety is not possible? And by what reason, with its very existence unsubstantiated, can it be ‘mine’?
It’s then believed in the tenets that beings live inside conceptual imputation (vikalpa).²⁵ Not merely sensation. But with narratives, ego projections, identities, labels, and symbolic overlays. This is why later Buddhism becomes extraordinarily interested in naming, language, social designation, reputation, ideology, and doctrinal fixation or dogma. By the time of Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva ordinary social reality itself is already treated as semi-hallucinatory. In addition, Nagarjuna’s comment (in the 70 Verses?)²⁶ that one’s personality is essentially “a vacuous anonymity” is simply deeply unnerving to all but the Bodhisattva of the Emptiness Sutras who has first practiced The Four Fearlessnesses²⁷ (Catur-Vaiśāradya):
- Fearlessness in Realizing All Phenomena: The supreme confidence of knowing ultimate truth and declaring that all things are inherently empty.
- Fearlessness in Knowing All Defilements Are Destroyed: The unshakeable certainty that all mental poisons, karmic obstructions, and subtle delusions have been permanently erased.
- Fearlessness in Proclaiming Obstacles to the Path: The bold clarity to accurately point out to others exactly what blocks enlightenment, showing no hesitation before dogmatic or worldly critics.
- Fearlessness in Teaching the Path to the Cessation of Suffering: The absolute confidence to guide any sentient being out of cyclic existence by demonstrating the exact way to realize liberation.
And thereby conquered all fear by realizing that both the terrifying illusion and the self being frightened are entirely devoid of inherent existence.
The compassion component for all Mind Hero as Spiritual Warrior then becomes this:
"All bodhisattva-mahāsattvas should discipline their minds in this way: We must lead all living beings to the ultimate nirvana so that they may be liberated. Yet, when cosmic numbers of beings have been liberated, in truth, not a single being has been liberated. Why? Subhuti, if a bodhisattva still clings to the illusions of a self, a person, a being, or a universal life span, that person is not a true bodhisattva." ²⁸
In compassionate conjunction with this advancement, and far from nihilism, Āryadeva does not repudiate virtuous conduct; rather, he distinguishes it from merit pursued for saṃsāric reward. Ordinary beings compound their suffering through misperception, conceptual projection, and the adverse feelings arising from what they themselves have falsely invested with intrinsic attractiveness. In Chapter III, “Showing the Method for Rejecting Belief in Purity,” he begins dismantling the imagined uniqueness of the desired object:
VII, 3. There is not the slightest difference
found in sexual intercourse among all
women.
As beauty is enjoyable for someone
else also, what use is the best woman
to you?
Chapter VII broadens this analysis into a critique of attachment to desirable sense objects. Lang explains that afflictions arise through attachment to deceptively attractive objects and that, because afflictions and karma work together to perpetuate bondage within the painful cycle of birth and death, karma must also be exhausted. Even the most desirable sense objects are best relinquished because they are impermanent and productive of pain rather than lasting pleasure (VII.1–17, 20). Āryadeva then criticizes those who accumulate merit in expectation of sovereignty, pleasure, or a favorable rebirth (VII.18, 21–23, 25). The chapter culminates, after rigorous analysis, in a note of high renunciation:
VII, 24. Those who see the living world
as resembling a collection of
machines and as like illusory
beings quite clearly
attain the highest level.²⁹
When Ācārya Āryadeva says that no difference is found in intercourse “among all women,” he is not asserting that women or acts of intercourse are metaphysically identical. He is denying that pleasure inheres in a uniquely desirable woman. III.12–13 make the argument more precise: pleasure cannot be located intrinsically in desire or its object; Candrakīrti explains that the pleasure apparently arising in intercourse arises instead through false conceptions (kun tu rtog pa, saṃkalpa).
This inclines the present scholar-practitioner to see a possible conceptual opening toward later tantric methods—not a demonstrated historical derivation from Āryadeva. If pleasure cannot be found inherently in the object, the sense faculty, or the cognizing consciousness, then desire need not simply be indulged or suppressed. Later tantra can take this dependent complex onto the path and transform desire into non-grasping bliss inseparable from emptiness. More precisely, faculty and object constitute the paired sense bases (āyatana); together with the corresponding consciousness they form a threefold complex of elements (dhātu) whose conjunction conditions contact. Within the purified vision of the tantric maṇḍala, this complex may be experienced without imputing an inherently existing desirous subject, desirable object, or pleasure residing between them:
III, 12. If desire [in itself] were pleasure,
women would be unnecessary.
In no way is [true] pleasure seen as
something that should be rejected.³⁰
III, 13. Even in sexual intercourse with a
woman, pleasure arises from
something else [namely, imagination].
What sensible person would maintain
that the cause is just
a female companion?³¹
There is lore, unsourced here, of the ‘Maritime Dissemination of Esoteric Buddhism,’ taking place just a few centuries after the above was written, that Tara (‘liberation’) arose with the desire of West Bengali sailors long at sea who propitiated her image, said her mantra, and cavorted in her transcendental ‘forest’ or mane of hair—the Sambhogakaya—evidence a truer nature of mind was realized through this method (tantra) by forestalling pleasure—practicing forbearance—applying compassionate method and realizing desire’s empty nature. The ‘mane of hair,’ we presume her famous forest, can currently be sourced from Khentze Rinpoche, an avid influencer, who starts out saying in his video: “It says right in the Tara text you should become her…or at least go with her…into the mane of her hair.…” Thus it follows—the author’s hunch here—that one in this place and proximity to Tara, as such(ness), then becomes the Buddha Tara arising from within a primordial forest of boundless gratification who is always at one’s beck and call as long as one’s supplication, faith and devotion, remains.³²
Shantideva, writing a handful of centuries after this time, shored-up Buddhist ‘renunciation’ post-Vulture Peak sutras on Emptiness, while at the same time promoting Bodhicitta of the Bodhisattvas as unshakable Maha sattva, and winning over Himalayan cultures adopting at that time what would later become ‘Vajrayana’ as the definitive overarching term for their lineage.³³ This was when “masters like Padmasambhava (8th century) and later Atisha (11th century) traveled from India to establish Buddhism in Tibet, carrying with them the fully matured version of this tradition from the hinge point of the Yoga Carya Mahavairocana Tantra to the Highest Yoga Tantra, Anuttara, development. A considerable development within the Buddhist śāsana, this tantric tradition drew on earlier dhāraṇī, mantra, ritual, and Mahāyāna sources while forming new scriptures, initiatory systems, and ways of organizing practice; with the Guhyasamāja tradition becoming one influential expression of that development.³⁴
In Shantideva’s early life as Shantivarman, he rejected his kingship after a dream of Manjushri already occupying that throne. “Inwardly and in secret, he received the teachings of the entire Tripitaka from Mañjushri. He meditated upon them and condensed their precious contents into two shăstras: the Digest of All Disciplines (Shiksha-samuchchaya) and the Digest of the Sütras (Sütrasamuchchaya). But though he gained mastery in the boundless qualities of abandonment and realization, the other monks knew nothing of this; and since to all outward appearances his behavior seemed to be restricted to the activities of eating (bhuj, sleeping (sup), and pottering around (kutim gata), they gave him the nickname of Bhu-su-ku.”
But as is famously known, there was a blind attempt by the other monks to ‘out’ ‘Bhu-su-ku’ as a monk who just eats, sleeps, and shits. “Their plan was to take it in turns to expound the scriptures so that, when Shäntideva's turn came around, he would be embarrassed. The abbot did so, and to everyone’s surprise Shantideva at once promised to give a teaching. At this, a few of the monks began to have misgivings, not knowing what to think. Doubling down on the humiliation quotient, they arranged a great quantity of offerings on the ground outside the monastery. They invited a large congregation of people, setting up an enormously high lion throne in their midst. They then summoned Shantideva; and most of the monks were thrown into a confusion when they suddenly caught sight of him sitting high up on the throne, not knowing quite how he had managed to ascend it. "Would you like me to expound the teaching of a former scholar?" asked Shāntideva. "Or would you prefer me to recite something you have never heard before?" Everyone was thunderstruck. "Please teach us something completely new," they said. Now, the Shikshasamuchchaya is too long, while the Sutrasamuch-chaya is too short; and so Shantideva expounded the Bodhicharyavatara, which, though vast in meaning, is compendious in expression. The noble Mañjushri appeared, seated in the sky, and many of the people saw him and had great faith. Even more remarkable, when Shantideva came to the beginning of verse 34 of the ninth chapter ("When real and nonreal both are absent from before the mind..."), he and Mañjushri began to rise higher and higher into the sky until at last they disappeared. Shanti-deva's voice, however, continued to resound so that the commentary was completed.”³⁵
“It is a frequent practice among commentators to divide The Way of the Bodhisattva into three main sections, along the lines of a famous prayer attributed to Nagarjuna:
May bodhichitta, precious and sublime,
Arise where it has not yet come to be;
And where it has arisen may it never fail
But grow and flourish ever more and more.³⁶
According to this scheme, the first three chapters ("The Excellence of Bodhichitta," "Confession," and "Commitment") are designed to stimulate the dawning of bodhichitta in the mind. The following three chapters ("Awareness," "Vigilance," and "Patience") give instructions on how to prevent the precious attitude from being dissipated, while the seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters ("Heroic Perseverance," "Meditation," and "Wisdom") prescribe ways in which bodhichitta may be progressively intensified. The tenth chapter is a concluding prayer of dedication.” (BCA, Intro.)
That being what the book is about, what happens to those who actually hear these teachings is extraordinary because the composer, “like Nagārjuna before him, possessed to a remarkable degree the unusual combination of a powerful intelligence linked with a keen appreciation of the sufferings of the world and a deep sense of tenderness toward others.” (BCA, Intro.) This is astute. Having not read or been taught ‘The Bodhisattva’s Way’ extensively for some great time—the first being shortly after receiving my MA in English Lit.—what I’ve recently discovered, somewhat ironically, is that Shantideva initiates a call for deep introspection, as well as a psychological self-sufficiency, revolutionary as anything in Western literature. I was curiously reminded of the ontological ’presence’ in the essays of Thoreau on ‘Walden Pond’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude.’
Interestingly, in the case of Wordsworth and his colleague Samuel Coleridge,³⁷ it’s well known the that some of their best work was influenced, if not relied on recent breakthroughs in the field of psychology, notably David Hartley who wrote the philosophic psychological classic Observations on Man.³⁸ Shantideva, in a similar capacity—say as a therapeutic moral psychologist—created a psychological revolution inside the Mahayanist vehicle by promoting ethical conduct that followed from transforming through a monitoring self-awareness the causal architecture of a mind found both in Abhidharma psychology and Hartley’s ‘associationism’.
There’s a Buddhist analogue to Hartley in the Abhidharma–Yogācāra psychology of volition, habit, and latent trace. In both systems, moral life is not first a matter of stricture and commandment but of conditioning: acts leave residues; residues incline perception; repeated perceptions become dispositions; dispositions ripen as character. Hartley’s vibrations and “vibratiuncles” are not Buddhist bīja, but they perform a comparable functioning by making one psychologically responsibility for their actions first before being just an automaton of rules. This is also why Śāntideva’s ethics often reads less like moral legislation than like therapeutic training. While he frightens us in that good old-fashion way, the fright is nominally exploitive and largely medicinal. As an astute clinician, he treats anger, pride, attachment, and self-cherishing as conditioned pathologies that can be interrupted, re-associated, and replaced. In this sense Śāntideva stands nearer to Hartley than to the moralist Shelley distrusted: goodness cannot simply be decreed from outside; it must be imaginatively and affectively re-formed from within. Mañjuśrī’s wisdom and Śāntideva’s discipline thus promote the śāsana through a surprisingly modern psychology of responsible volition: liberation begins when one sees that intention is neither sovereign self nor helpless fate, but a trainable continuum of causes.
Hartley’s Observations on Man is explicitly a synthesis of neurology, psychology, spirituality, and moral formation; Yogācāra’s ālayavijñāna was developed to explain continuity, karmic latency, and conditioning without a permanent self; and Shelley’s account of the moral imagination in A Defence of Poetry provides the bridge from external “legislation” to inward transformation. His famous claim that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”³⁹ does not advocate moral lawgiving but the imaginative cultivation from which ethical action naturally arises.
Of course, any strict comparison between the writings of the Buddhist saint ‘Bhu-su-ku’ and the Romantic luminaries is ultimately untenable as the messaging of one was for monks and lay practitioners, the other, for educated worldlings or Thirtikas (i.e., adherents of non-Buddhist philosophical traditions.)⁴⁰ But this handily shows a relativity of cultural impact and doctrinal evolution for both the Buddhist Enlightenment and the European one; the latter’s philosophic residential range of thought stretched—an unresolved ex nihilo (from nothing) causation dilemma—between the ‘birds’ of Aristotle’s materialist ‘Analytics’ and the ‘clouds’ of Plato’s idealistic ‘Socratic Dialogues’.
Whereas Thoreau eschews the determinacy of ‘the crowd’: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."⁴² Shantideva essentially dethrones the old Indic gods determining one’s karma (here, meaning ‘action’) by moving the battleground to a self-sufficiency of personal, psychological accountability. This is well demonstrated in the following verses of his entirely original approach to teaching the Buddha’s Dharma:
- I am as if benumbed by sorcery,
My mind reduced to total impotence
With no perception of the madness overwhelming me.
O what is it that has me in its grip?
- Anger, lust-these enemies of mine— Are limbless and devoid of faculties.
They have no bravery, no cleverness;
How then have they reduced me to such slavery?
29. I it is who welcome them within my heart,
Allowing them to harm me at their pleasure!
I who suffer all without resentment—
Thus my abject patience, all displaced!
- If all the gods and demigods besides
Together came against me as my foes,
Their mighty strength—all this would not
avail
To fling me in the fires of deepest hell.
34. Therefore, if these long-lived, ancient
enemies of mine,
The wellspring only of
increasing woe,
Can find their lodging safe
within my heart, What joy or peace in this
world can be found?
Then, after having established grounds for taking personal responsibility, he refocuses Mara as the afflictions:
45. Common enemies, when driven from the
state,
Retreat and base themselves in other
lands,
And muster all their strength the
better to return.
But our afflictions are
without such stratagems.
46. Defiled emotions, scattered by the eye of
wisdom!
Where will you now run, when driven from my
mind?
Whence would you return to do me harm?
But oh—my mind is feeble. I am indolent!
47. And yet defilements are not in the object,
Nor yet within the faculties, nor somewhere in
between.
And if not elsewhere, where is their abode
Whence they might wreak their havoc on the
world?
They are simple mirages, and so-take heart!
Banish all your fear and strive to know their
nature.
Why suffer needlessly the pains of hell?
48. This is how I should reflect and labor,
Taking up the precepts just set forth.
What invalid in need of medicine
Ignored his doctor's words and gained his
health?⁴³
So ‘Vigilance’ is then constantly needed, which is the next chapter.
- First, with mind's imagination,
Shed the covering of skin,
And with the blade of wisdom, strip The flesh from off the bony frame.
- And when you have divided all the bones, And searched right down amid the very marrow, You should look and ask the question:
Where is "thingness" to be found?
- If, persisting in the search,
You find no underlying object,
Why still cherish-and with such desire—
The fleshly form you now possess?
- Its filth you cannot eat, O mind;
Its blood likewise is not for you to drink;
Its innards, too, unsuitable to suck-This body,
what then will you make of it?⁴⁴
But this is precisely what tantric denizens of the cemeteries, the real antinomians and not the fashionable charlatans (adorned with bone earrings, necklaces, etc.) of that time, did. Our true Kapalika, known from the dramas of the 6th and 7th centuries,⁴⁵ would not be saying ‘O mind’ but ‘O filth’ and sinking his or her face into an empty skull of the foulest secret substances so as to be swiftly mounted by tantric deities⁴⁶ and then, precisely through the transformation of addiction to cognition (O mind!) penetrate the doctrine of dependent origination and experience the highest ranges of Shunyata realization.
The imagination at this stage of Buddhist doctrine has been isolated as both a tool of salvific analysis or the enemy of mental attachment. Being both, it becomes neither, but rather is revealed as the projector of hallucinations. Shantideva is championing, or perhaps steering, an entire Buddhist vehicle of that time, renovating and reinvigorating, from the monastic’s point of view, a faultless path from the purest bodhisattva intention. No antinomian transformative convolutions of ethics and ego predisposition is required only the highest faith arrived at once the doctrines of Dependent Origination and Emptiness have been realized and mastered to the point one’s own body—or ‘purpose’ as Sachen would later declare in his ‘Four Partings’⁴⁷—is eventually more easily sacrificed for the welfare of others:
- They should not give up their bodies
Whose compassion is not pure and perfect.
But let them, in this world and those to come, Subject their bodies to the service of the supreme goal.
And particularly relevant:
VIII, 129. All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for
others. All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for
oneself.⁴⁸
One of the truly devastating insight in Śāntideva is that beings defend suffering-producing illusions as though they were identity itself. When put into a modern context we see this is no longer simple ignorance but compulsive self-fabrication. It begins by defensive self-protection of whatever sustains the image of ourselves, even when that defense prolongs suffering. For examples: praise—a criticism of something I wrote feels like a threat to my worth; I attack the critic instead of considering the criticism. Or, role—being “the knowledgeable teacher” becomes so necessary that admitting uncertainty feels humiliating. Or, narrative—I cling to “I am always misunderstood,” dismissing evidence that someone has understood me because it unsettles the story through which I know myself. Or, recognition—another person receives credit, and I experience their success as my disappearance. Or, emotional positioning—I maintain my grievance because relinquishing it feels like surrendering my claim to innocence, justice, or sympathy. All these becomes as if one’s very survival depended on them. The disturbing insight is that we can defend the very pattern that hurts us because we have come to experience it as ‘who I am.’
It may be, seen in Shantideva’s light, all Mahayana tenets handily carry over and resonate within our modern psychology. The above examples are of course talking above about the Eight Worldly Dharmas,⁴⁹ adopted by the Tibetan lamas perhaps around the time of Gampopa, distilling Atiśa’s earlier Kadampa teachings into a practical lens of self-examination that remains central to Buddhist training today. Their canonical roots, however, reach back to the early Buddhist scriptures, where they appear in the Pāli Aṅguttara Nikāya (AN 8.6, the Lokavipatti Sutta) as the aṭṭha lokadhammā—the “eight worldly conditions”: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. There they describe the ordinary fluctuations of worldly existence to which all beings are exposed.
By the time these teachings entered the Kadampa and later Kagyu traditions, their emphasis had subtly shifted. Rather than serving merely as a description of worldly experience, they became a searching diagnostic of spiritual motivation, especially within lojong (mind-training). Addressed not to beginners but to committed practitioners, the question became unsettlingly direct: Why are you really practicing? If one’s Dharma is secretly driven by the hope of gain, praise, pleasure, or reputation—or by fear of their opposites—even the path itself has become another expression of the worldly concerns it is meant to transcend.
In terms of who or what to think is the Buddhist Enemy at this juncture, this brings us to the Tibetan Expansion of the phrase ‘Bewilderment and Confusion’ as a Saṃsāric Atmosphere through centuries of teaching in Lojong (Seven-Point Mind Training), Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Lamdré,⁵⁰ where confusion becomes almost environmental—not an independently existing atmosphere, but a misrecognition that conditions the whole lived field of perceiver, appearance, emotion, and habit. It is no longer merely that “I made a mistake” or acted unvirtuously; sentient existence itself—birth, individuation, and death—is experienced within an enchanted misrecognition.
This is where Māra really evolves. Māra is now distraction, discursiveness, emotional seduction, symbolic intoxication, institutional ego, ideological fixation, spiritual ambition, self-performance. Not external devilry but an auto-hypnosis through grasping. And so the Buddhist traditions gradually move from cognitive error to existential misperception to ontological bewilderment to self-perpetuating symbolic hallucination.⁵¹ By the Tibetan period, Māra is no longer merely “a demon.” But becomes the entire auto-enchanting structure of confused appearance itself captured by the expression ‘confusion and bewilderment.’
We can unpack this as such by tracing its doctrinal trajectory. Early Buddhism often presents ignorance as a mistaken cognition. One sees impermanent as permanent, suffering as happiness, non-self as self, impure as pure.
The correction is epistemic, this is why we see Nagarjuna’s Muladaramadyamika coupled with Dharmakirti’s 70 Verses⁵² as a useful commentarial perspective. Basically they’re saying you are wrong about what is there. Māra at this stage often appears as a tempter, deceiver, or distractor. The problem is: “You have believed a false proposition.”
By the time of the Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka traditions, the problem is a deeper, existential misperception. One does not merely think incorrectly. One inhabits reality incorrectly.
As we’ve seen, Āryadeva repeatedly attacks the assumption that there exists a stable standpoint from which experience is possessed. The dream of my death that opens this article illustrates this beautifully. The body was dead. Yet a subtle position of appropriation still remained in the witnessing of my dead body. The dream’s voice rejects even that refuge by saying “go back in.” Now the problem is no longer: “I believe something false.” It becomes: “The very manner in which I experientially exist is distorted.”
Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva push further into an ontological bewilderment. The issue is not merely that beings misperceive things. The issue is that they continuously reify. They project intrinsic existence onto what is only dependently arisen. This is not simply an error within reality.
It is a confusion regarding what reality itself is.
The bewilderment lies in taking relational phenomena as self-established entities. The dream again reflects this. The witness appears more subtle than the body. More spiritual. More enduring. Yet the dream’s teaching is: That too is merely another dependently arisen appearance. The witness is not outside the system. It is one more event within it.
The problem is no longer merely mistaken perception but a self-perpetuating symbolic hallucination so that the entire field of experience becomes self-reinforcing. Concepts generate emotions. Emotions generate habits.
Habits generate appearances. Appearances reinforce concepts. A world is continuously manufactured and then mistaken for something independently existing. Late Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism observes and analyses exactly all this. So at this point “hallucination” does not mean seeing things that do not exist. Rather it’s seeing dependently arisen appearances while simultaneously misunderstanding their mode of existence. The hallucination is not the appearance. The hallucination is the interpretation. This is equivalent to the ‘false imaginings’ determinations from Dharmakirti logic-epistemic analysis coming after Nagarjuna’s root text on causation.⁵³
Māra, necessarily mercurial, is always there wherever delusion holds sway: an anthropomorphic adversary and foil, giving a face and limbs to what the deluded find difficult to recognize within themselves. In the early discourses he appears as a being. A tempter. A lord of death. Yet already these texts also identify his domain with the impermanent constituents of experience. The Buddha’s realization of Nirvāṇa does not establish that no beings exist; it reveals release from the conditions that give Māra his hold. The Udāna describes this release as the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned—the end of suffering, beyond coming and going, arising and passing away. It is realized during life through the extinction of greed, hatred, and delusion, while bodily and sensory experience continues. The later Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra speaks more affirmatively of permanence, bliss, purity, and ‘Self,’ associating this last term with Buddha-nature. These are distinct scriptural formulations, not a single description of an empty realm without inhabitants. Against them, Māra’s significance deepens: the adversary encountered outwardly can also disclose attachment, grasping, self-clinging, and the conceptual proliferation (prapañca) through which delusion renews its world.⁵⁴
By the Tibetan period, especially in Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, Lamdré, and advanced Madhyamaka-inflected tantra, Māra can become almost indistinguishable from the auto-enchanting power of confusion itself. Not a demon. Not even a psychological state. Rather, the spontaneous tendency of bewilderment to fabricate a world and then become convinced by its own fabrication.
One could almost define Māra as bewilderment becoming persuasive,⁵⁵ bringing us back to my dream. The most striking feature is that the voice did not tell me: “The body is unreal.” Nor did it say: “You survived death.” Instead it insisted that the witnessing consciousness itself was also an element in the process. Why? Because the final refuge of bewilderment is often the witness (as is politic’s ‘pro bono’ for the scoundrel.)⁵⁶ The gross self (as it is dross) may be abandoned but still the subtle self remains: “I am the one who knows there is no self.” Thus it betrays its own ‘self’ as a lie.
Āryadeva is merciless precisely at that point.⁵⁷ The observer of impermanence becomes the final object of impermanence. The observer of death becomes the final object of death. The witness becomes one more appearance. And when even that is seen through, Māra loses his last place to stand. Not because a demon has been defeated. But because the mechanism that continuously manufactures the demon has finally been recognized.
Āryadeva subjects the mind to examination no less than the body. The witness, too, must be examined: consciousness arises in dependence and cannot claim the privileged position of an independent knower.⁵⁸ His examination of desire makes a related point: desire and its objects cannot be understood apart from the conceptual constructions through which they are apprehended.⁵⁹ Even the conviction that one has stepped outside delusion remains open to scrutiny.
The practitioner has ceased identifying with the body. Yet a subtler identification remains: “I am the consciousness that knows the body is not self.” The observer is not standing outside the stream. The observer is part of the stream. Here the argument returns to the dream’s instruction: “Go back in.” Not because the body is the self, but because the witness is not outside dependent origination. Māra can survive a philosophical defeat by taking refuge in the very observer who believes himself victorious.⁶⁰ The dream voice’s command—“return to the body so that the dying can be completed”—thus becomes a symbolic refusal of that final exemption. What must end is the claim to stand apart: even the consciousness that recognizes impermanence cannot make itself its exception.
In “The Thirteen Benefits in Detail,” Samantabhadra’s Aspiration to Good Actions (Zangchö Mönlam) declares:
“They will quickly go beneath the bodhi-tree,
And there, they will sit, to benefit all sentient beings, then
Awaken into enlightenment, turn the wheel of Dharma,
And tame Māra with all his hordes.”⁶¹
End
Sequential footnotes:
1. The standard Sanskrit title is Catuḥśataka (more fully, Catuḥśatakaśāstrakārikā), “Four Hundred Stanzas/Treatise.” Its sixteen chapters move from the four inversions to analysis of self, faculties, objects, extremes, conditioned things, and teacher–pupil relations. Karen Lang, Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka: On the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986).
2. This is the essay’s interpretive horizon, not a single definition supplied by Āryadeva. Early sources present Māra as both an interlocuting deva and a name for death, temptation, and obstruction; Madhyamaka analyzes the grasping that gives those forces purchase. Āryadeva’s analysis should not reduce the early Māra-personage to metaphor.
3. These are the dream’s compressed Buddhist vocabulary, not a canonical inventory of substances required for “real death.” Bhūta may denote the four elements; kleśa afflictive factors; atoms (paramāṇu) objects of Buddhist and non-Buddhist debate. None is a permanent bearer migrating unchanged through death. Cf. Catuḥśataka II.16: each element lacks independent power, and the body arises through combination.
4. This is a defensible Madhyamaka reading, not a quotation from Āryadeva. A basis is Catuḥśataka X, which rejects an independent self, together with XIII.23: mind arises dependently upon eye and visible form “like an illusion.” The argument denies an intrinsically established witness, not empirically functioning knowing.
5. Qualification is necessary. Buddhist schools deny a permanent consciousness “riding” the elements, but generally do not teach that causal continuity simply terminates at ordinary death. This life’s psycho-physical configuration ceases; absent liberation, causal continuity and rebirth remain. The sentence works phenomenologically within the dream, not as a general doctrinal definition.
6. Correct reference: Āryadeva, Catuḥśataka XIII.23, not VIII.23: “The mind arises in dependence upon the eye and visible form, like an illusion. It is not possible to call that which has real existence (sadbhāva) an illusion” (Lang, 1986). The verse denies mind the status of a self-grounding spectator; it does not deny conventional cognition.
7. Nāgārjuna’s classic refusal of the nihilist inference is Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XXIV.18–19: dependent arising is taught as emptiness, dependent designation, and the middle way. Emptiness removes intrinsic existence, not conventional efficacy, karma, compassion, or the distinction between bondage and release.
8. The comparison records the author’s contemplative inference, not a universal phenomenology. Buddhist death analyses distinguish dissolution of the present psycho-physical basis from realization of selflessness; absorption, deity-yoga, and bodily death should not be identified merely because all suspend ordinary reference points.
9. The early formula is: “This is not mine; this I am not; this is not my self,” applied to each aggregate (e.g., Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, SN 22.59). Appropriation (upādāna) of the aggregates sustains suffering; the body alone is not uniquely its “root.”
10. Correct titles: Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10) and Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (DN 22). They are early witnesses to cemetery contemplations, not evidence that the practice began there. The nine contemplations (nava-sivathikā) occur under mindfulness of body; Lang’s “nine perceptions of the foul” reflects the related navāśubhasaṃjñā tradition.
11. Āryadeva, Catuḥśataka III.24, trans. Lang: “It is unreasonable to call that [human body]—in which detachment (vairāgya) may develop—pure. There is no thing that is necessarily the cause of desire.” Desire cannot be located as an intrinsic property of body or object.
12. The second foundation is contemplation of feeling-tone (vedanānupassanā): pleasant, painful, and neutral feeling, internally and externally, in arising and vanishing. Modern feelings about death are not its precise object. Corpse contemplations belong to the first foundation, body, though the dream’s affective distance may be examined under the second.
13. The imperative not to contemplate death from an imagined survivor’s standpoint is the author’s inference. Its textual warrant is cumulative: X dismantles self; XIII independently established faculty, object, and mind; XVI attachment to theses. No extant stanza has been verified in which Āryadeva directly commands the witness to “go back in.”
14. “Required” is historically too strong. MN 10/DN 22 place nine cemetery contemplations within contemplation of body, alongside breathing, postures, clear comprehension, anatomical parts, and elements. The Vārāṇasī experience is a modern analogue, not evidence for the practice’s origin or necessity.
15. Sutta Nipāta 3.2 places the striving Bodhisatta on the Nerañjarā and has “Namuci” address him before naming the tempter’s armies—desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, sloth, fear, doubt, hypocrisy, gain/honor/fame, and self-praise/disparagement. “Among the oldest datable Buddhist compositions” is safer than an exact date.
16. Namuci is an adversary of Indra in Vedic literature, overcome through foam, neither wet nor dry. “Drought-demon” and “cosmic obstructer” summarize a complex figure and should not imply that Buddhist Māra simply descends from one Vedic prototype. The Buddhist poem reuses the name while defining its opponent through an ethical-psychological army.
17. The standard list is kleśa-māra, skandha-māra, mṛtyu-māra, and devaputra-māra—Tibetan nyon mongs pa’i bdud, phung po’i bdud, ’chi bdag gi bdud, and lha’i bu’i bdud. This taxonomy should not be projected wholesale into the oldest Māra poems, where person, death, temptation, and obstruction overlap.
18. Māra is associated with Paranirmitavaśavartin, the highest heaven of the desire realm; he is a powerful deva there, not necessarily sole sovereign. Devas and Indra are not intrinsically his “servants”; they remain conditioned and may support the Dharma.
19. Identifying trampled Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva, or Indra with particular Māras belongs to specific late Indian and Tibetan iconographic systems, not to the four Māras’ definition. Hevajra and Cakrasaṃvara materials can be doctrinally subordinating and historically polemical; “not a rejection of Hinduism” should remain a guardrail, not exclude sectarian contest.
20. The Māra-saṃyutta (SN 4) and Bhikkhunī-saṃyutta (SN 5) repeatedly make recognition decisive: Buddha, monk, or nun recognizes Māra, who departs “sad and disappointed.” The pattern supports the essay’s psychology while presenting Māra as an interlocuting being, not merely a mental state.
21. Pāli epithets include Namuci, Kaṇha, Maccu, Antaka, and Pāpimā. Etymologizing Namuci as “Non-Releaser” fits the Buddhist context, but historical etymology is contested.
22. Buddhist and Śaiva tantric communities developed in proximity, sometimes appropriating deity forms, mantras, maṇḍalas, and claims of supremacy. “Friendly competition” and “creating a Vajrayana hegemony” are not neutral descriptions. Each image must still be read from its own tantra and sādhana.
23. Madhyamaka analyzes reification of intrinsic nature (svabhāva); Yogācāra analyzes constructive discrimination, latent seeds, and subject–object bifurcation. They should not be presented as successive stages of one theory without qualification.
24. Correct reference: Catuḥśataka XIII.4, not I.4. XIII.1–4 argue that a sense faculty encounters a part or feature, not an independently given whole; XIII.4 notes that visible form has outer, inner, and middle parts. Lang treats the passage as a refutation of direct perception of the entire object.
25. Vikalpa/kalpanā ranges from conceptual construction to imagination and is not uniformly delusive. Āryadeva XVI.23 locates bondage in conceptual construction, while conventional designation remains necessary for teaching. “Semi-hallucinatory” works if it means dependently constituted and misconstrued, not nonexistent.
26. The attribution “one’s personality is essentially ‘a vacuous anonymity’” has not been verified in Nāgārjuna’s Śūnyatāsaptati and should not be cited as his wording. Until a reliable source is identified, treat it as the author’s formulation as he remembers having read it in Peter Della Santino’s translations of Nāgārjuna.
27. The four vaiśāradya are classically the Tathāgata’s fearlessnesses in declaring full awakening, destruction of contaminants, obstacles, and the path to release. They are not preliminary exercises a bodhisattva first practices before tolerating emptiness, though Mahāyāna texts give other bodhisattva enumerations. Relevant sources include Mahāsīhanāda Sutta (MN 12) and Prajñāpāramitā discussions.
28. Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā, section 3 in Kumārajīva-derived chaptering, says that a bodhisattva vows to liberate beings, yet no being is ultimately liberated; one apprehending self, being, living soul, or person is not a bodhisattva. The paradox joins universal vow to non-apprehension without canceling conventional beings or compassion.
29. Karen Lang, Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka: On the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986), 17, 76, 78. Lang’s synopsis concerns Chapter VII, “Showing the Method for Rejecting Attachment to Desirable Sense Objects.” Verses VII.18 and VII.21–23 criticize merit pursued for sovereignty, desirable future results, or other saṃsāric rewards: “Merit is in all respects like a worker’s wages” (VII.23). VII.24 then supplies the culmination: “Those who see the living world (jagad) as resembling a collection of machines (yantra) and as like illusory beings (māyāpuruṣa) quite clearly attain the highest level (param padam).” Lang notes the parallel in Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra II.154. This passage is distinct from III.24, which concerns the body’s impurity and its capacity to produce detachment. The subsequent quotation of III.13 therefore begins a related but separate argument concerning the imagined location of pleasure.
30. The sexual-desire verses are Catuḥśataka III.3, III.13, and III.12 in Lang. They attack localization of pleasure in an intrinsically attractive object. They do not historically clear the way for tantric sexual yoga or identify sense organs with primordial Buddhas; such rereading requires tantra-specific evidence and initiation-sensitive restraint.
31. Āryadeva, Catuḥśataka III.3, III.12–13, trans. Lang, 39–40. III.3 does state: “There is not the slightest difference found in sexual intercourse among all women”; Lang groups III.3–7 under the rejection of attachment to women, explaining that both attraction and the qualities inspiring it are impermanent. III.12–13 make the analysis more exact: desire cannot itself be identical with pleasure, while the pleasure apparently arising through intercourse does not arise inherently from the woman. Citing Candrakīrti’s commentary, Lang explains that it arises from “false conceptions” (kun tu rtog pa, saṃkalpa). Āryadeva does not reject every form of pleasure: Lang compares the distinction between defiled sensual pleasure and undefiled pleasure arising from meditative cultivation and the destruction of the contaminants. The suggestion that this analysis “cleared the way” for later tantric transformation is the author’s retrospective inference, not a historical claim made by Āryadeva or Lang. Strictly speaking, an internal faculty and its corresponding object constitute the paired sense bases (āyatana); when the corresponding consciousness is added, the analysis is that of the three associated elements (dhātu) whose conjunction conditions contact. The further language of primordial Buddha nature and blissful fulfillment requires an appropriate tantric source and should not be attributed to the Catuḥśataka.
32. No primary source has been identified for the claims about West Bengali sailors, Tārā’s hair, sambhogakāya, realization, or the sequence from forbearance to gratification. Maritime Tārā cults are plausible, but this narrative must remain oral or interpretive until its textual or archaeological source is supplied.
33. Śāntideva is generally placed in the eighth century and Āryadeva around the third.
34. Mahāvairocanābhisaṃbodhi is commonly Caryā tantra in Tibetan systems, while Guhyasamāja becomes central to later Yoga/Anuttarayoga classification.
35. The Padmakara life of Śāntideva transmits Tibetan hagiography: Mañjuśrī appears in a dream; at Nālandā he seems to do bhuj, su, and ku, hence Bhusuku; challenged to teach, he recites the Bodhicaryāvatāra and ascends with Mañjuśrī during IX.34. This is sacred biography, not independently verifiable institutional history. The raw, colloquial equivalent ("eats, sleeps, and goes to the toilet/shits") appears in translator footnotes and commentaries describing practitioners or figures like Shantideva's early days at Nalanda University (for instance, in annotation notes referencing Khenchen Ngawang Palzang’s writings or traditional Bodhicaryāvatāra commentaries).
36. Padmakara gives the standard structure: chapters 1–3 generate bodhicitta; 4–6 prevent decline; 7–9 increase it; 10 dedicates merit. The familiar prayer is widely attributed to Nāgārjuna in Tibetan transmission, but its precise Indian locus requires verification.
37. Hartley’s influence on Coleridge’s early associationism is direct; Wordsworth’s is more diffuse. Coleridge later criticizes associationist mechanism in Biographia Literaria. This supports the essay’s arc from empiricism toward imagination, inward Christ, and revelatory nature.
38. David Hartley, Observations on Man (1749), explains association through bodily vibrations and “vibratiuncles.” Comparison with Buddhist seeds (bīja), latent tendencies (anuśaya/vāsanā), and karmic conditioning is functional, not genealogical; the systems rest on different ontologies.
39. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840), uses the phrase in an argument for poetry’s enlargement of imagination and sympathy. He marks a countermovement from reductive empiricism toward imagination (especially in its ability to imagine others’ pain) as moral organ; this bears no esoteric hegemony over Śāntideva but rather is a universal support for compassion.
40. Correct Sanskrit: tīrthika (Tib. mu stegs pa), a Buddhist doxographical term for non-Buddhist adherents. Applied to European writers, it is knowingly anachronistic and rhetorical.
41. The “other Enlightenment” names renewed attention to Platonism, inner revelation, imagination, and nature as divine book. Related to Aristotle’s Analytics, Buddhist critique allows conceptual knowledge to make correct conventional distinctions while leaving self-grasping intact.
42. Thoreau, Walden, “Conclusion”: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” Thoreau contests conformity; Śāntideva contests afflictions. The resonance is accountability, not shared metaphysics.
43. These verses belong to chapter IV, “Carefulness,” “Conscientiousness,” or “Awareness.” Śāntideva personifies afflictions as internal enemies while denying them limbs, courage, intelligence, or independent location; IV.47 finds them neither in objects nor faculties nor between them: they are illusion-like. This is not a technical definition of Māra, but it enables the essay’s relocation of the enemy into grasping.
44. These verses analytically strip the body to skin, flesh, bone, and marrow and search for its essence. Their purpose is vigilance against attachment, not literal charnel-ground consumption. They continue impurity contemplations while pressing the Madhyamaka question of what analysis can find.
45. Mahendravarman I’s seventh-century Mattavilāsaprahasana depicts a Kāpālika with skull bowl, tavern, and lost skull; Bhavabhūti’s eighth-century Mālatīmādhava offers a later, darker portrayal. These are comic or hostile literary representations, not transparent ethnographies, and cannot establish practitioners’ realization, diet, or sacramental intention.
46. No primary tantric text has yet been identified that supports the expression “swiftly mounted by tantric deities.” As the author recalls, the wording derives instead from a social-media video account of an occurrence interpreted by its participants as a tantric deity entering or possessing a practitioner. Its outward features may be compared with recorded trance ceremonies of the Nechung State Oracle of Tibet, whose present kuten, or medium, is Venerable Thupten Ngodup. Such visual resemblance does not establish that the two events involve the same deity, ritual process, lineage, or contemplative attainment. Charnel-ground antinomianism, skull implements, and transgressive substances are attested within particular tantric systems, but these practices are initiation-bound and symbolically overdetermined; costume, imitation, or appetite alone provides no authority to enact them.
47. Sachen Künga Nyingpo’s Zhen pa bzhi bral states: “If attached to this life, you are not a Dharma practitioner; if attached to saṃsāra, you do not have renunciation; if attached to your own purpose, you do not have bodhicitta; if grasping arises, you do not have the view.” The third line grounds the contrast between self-purpose and bodhisattva service; it does not command premature self-sacrifice.
48. V.87 restrains bodily giving until compassion is pure; VIII.129 says the world’s happiness comes from wishing happiness for others, while its suffering comes from wishing happiness for oneself. Together they unite radical altruism with graduated training.
49. AN 8.6 lists gain/loss, fame/disrepute, praise/blame, and pleasure/pain. Tibetan ’jig rten chos brgyad teaching does not originate with Gampopa, though Kadampa and Kagyu manuals intensify it as a diagnostic of motivation. Cf. Atiśa’s mind-training legacy and Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation; state transmission and development, not invention.
50. “Almost environmental” is used metaphorically: confusion is not an independently existing atmosphere but a misrecognition that conditions the apprehending subject, the appearances apprehended, and the emotional and habitual responses through which each reinforces the other. Tibetan sources employ several related but non-equivalent terms, including ma rig pa (ignorance or non-knowing), ’khrul pa (error, delusion, or mistaken appearance), and rmongs pa (bewilderment, obscuration, or dullness). Lojong treats this condition practically by exposing self-cherishing and transforming adverse circumstances into the path; see Chekawa Yeshé Dorjé, Seven Points of Mind Training. Mahāmudrā traces confusion to dualistic fixation and failure to recognize the nature of mind and its appearances; see Rangjung Dorjé, Aspiration of the Mahāmudrā of Definitive Meaning.(lotsawahouse.org) Dzogchen gives ma rig pa the more specific sense of nonrecognition of rig pa, from which ’khrul pa unfolds. Lamdré presents its own progression from impure through experiential to pure appearance within the path-and-result system; compare Virūpa’s Vajra Verses and Ngorchen Könchok Lhündrup’s Beautiful Ornament of the Three Visions. (sakya.org, sakyatradition.org) These traditions therefore converge in diagnosing pervasive misrecognition, but they do not share a single account of mind, appearance, path, or result. “Enchanted misrecognition” is the author’s synthetic expression, not a translation of one Tibetan technical term.
51. This is the essay’s synthesis, not a received chronology. Early Buddhism already analyzes proliferation (papañca); Madhyamaka is not merely a later shift from epistemology to ontology; Tibetan traditions do not simply replace demon with psychology. Māra remains a deva-personage while also naming death, aggregates, affliction, temptation, and obstacles appropriated by self-grasping.
52. Correct titles and relation: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā analyzes dependent arising and emptiness; Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika develops logic and epistemology. The “seventy verses” are more likely Nāgārjuna’s Śūnyatāsaptati, not Dharmakīrti’s. These works are not conventionally coupled as root text and necessary commentary.
53. “False imaginings” may gloss vikalpa/kalpanā or Yogācāra’s abhūtaparikalpa, but should not be assigned generically to Dharmakīrti. Nāgārjuna’s causal analysis and Dharmakīrti’s theory of perception and inference answer different questions. The cycle “concepts into emotions into habits into appearances into concepts” is a modern synthesis, best paralleled with Yogācāra seeds and perfuming and the twelve links.
54. Cf. Udāna 8.1–8.4, especially 8.1 on the end of suffering beyond arising and passing away, and 8.3 on the unborn and unconditioned. Itivuttaka 44—not 43—distinguishes Nirvāṇa with a remainder, realized by the living arahant whose senses still function, from Nirvāṇa without a remainder after death. These passages do not describe a place emptied of beings. Nor does Māra develop simply from an external personage into an internal metaphor: Saṃyutta Nikāya 23.1 already identifies the five aggregates with Māra or mortality. The paragraph’s closing terms summarize ways his obstructive function may be understood; they are not a quotation or a uniform Mahāyāna definition. For the affirmative language of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, see chapters 11–12, “On the Four Inversions” and “On the Nature of the Tathāgata,” in Kōshō Yamamoto’s translation, edited by Tony Page (2007), pp. 99–101. Here ‘Self’ is explicitly associated with Buddha-nature. The sūtra’s setting at the Buddha’s final teaching should be distinguished from its later historical composition.
55. “Māra is bewilderment becoming persuasive” is the author’s aphorism. Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Lamdré offer parallels concerning misrecognition and grasping, but none supplies this exact sentence.
56. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” is Samuel Johnson’s remark as reported by Boswell; the political substitution is the essay’s adaptation. The subtle witness resembles consciousness appropriated as “I” and “mine,” not a metaphysical witness entity.
57. Prāsaṅgika is not simply “a non-assertion with negative implication.” Tibetan doxography distinguishes non-implicative negation (med dgag, prasajya-pratiṣedha) from implicative negation (ma yin dgag, paryudāsa); emptiness is usually presented as the former. Whether Prāsaṅgika “has no thesis” is a separate, contested question concerning Candrakīrti’s method. The witness can undergo this analysis without reducing Prāsaṅgika to sheer non-assertion.
58. Cf. Āryadeva, Catuḥśataka XIII.23, on cognition arising dependently upon eye and form and its comparison to an illusion; X.10, on the difficulty of asserting a permanent conscious self whose cognition requires the senses. “The witness, too, must be examined” applies these arguments to the essay’s observer position; it is not a quotation from Āryadeva.
59. Cf. Catuḥśataka VIII.2–3, not VI.3 or XIII. VIII.2 observes that the same object elicits attachment, aversion, or indifference in different people; VIII.3 examines desire and related states in relation to conceptual construction. The paragraph paraphrases these verses; the previously supplied English quotation and Sanskrit spellings are omitted pending verification against Lang’s printed text.
60. Māra’s taking refuge “in the very observer who believes himself victorious” is the essay’s amplification of self-clinging and dependent cognition. The concluding interpretation treats the dream as a symbolic enactment, not a doctrinal account of dying. What loses its footing is consciousness appropriated as an independent self, not the conventional occurrence of knowing.
61. The King of Aspiration Prayers: Samantabhadra’s “Aspiration to Good Actions”, section 3.2, “The Thirteen Benefits in Detail,” concluding stanza; English translation published by Lotsawa House. The final Tibetan line reads: བདུད་རྣམས་སྡེ་དང་བཅས་པ་ཐམས་ཅད་བཏུལ། ། — “And tame Māra with all his hordes.” (lotsawahouse.org)
Core bibliography:
● Āryadeva. Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka: On the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge. Translated by Karen Lang. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986.
● Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, especially XVIII and XXIV; Śūnyatāsaptati.
● Śāntideva. The Way of the Bodhisattva. Translated by the Padmakara Translation Group. Boston: Shambhala, 1997.
● Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10); Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (DN 22); Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59); Māra-saṃyutta (SN 4); Bhikkhunī-saṃyutta (SN 5); Padhāna Sutta (Sutta Nipāta 3.2); Dutiyalokadhamma Sutta (AN 8.6).
● Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā (“Diamond Sūtra”), §3 in conventional chaptering.
● Sachen Künga Nyingpo. Zhen pa bzhi bral (“Parting from the Four Attachments”).
● Mahendravarman I. Mattavilāsaprahasana; Bhavabhūti. Mālatīmādhava.
● David Hartley. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. 1749.
● Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Biographia Literaria. 1817.
● Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 1821/1840.
● Henry David Thoreau. Walden,
“Conclusion.” 1854.
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