[Mara:]
“The things which are called ‘mine,’
And those who say, ‘mine’—
if your mind exists in these,
contemplative, you can’t escape me.”
[The Nikāya Buddha:]
“What they speak of is not mine.
I’m not one who speaks [that way.]
You should know this, Evil One:
you won’t even find a trace of me.”
– From the Kassaka Sutta, in the Mara Samyutta, in the Samyutta Nikāya. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
Why is it that elsewhere in the Kassaka Sutta the Nikāya Buddha says to Māra (in short), “The five sentient processes are yours, Evil One, but you can’t have access to that which has no such processes”? What does this mean? Is he saying he is no longer vulnerable to Māra because he knows some dimension other than the five sentient processes – the cognitive body, feeling-tones, perceptions, fashioning processes, and discernment? How can that be?
When the Buddha says he doesn’t own any of these processes (second verse above), he says this on the radical basis that he knows the dimension of reality where there are no sentient processes – no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, no object of mind; no seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, no cognizing. How could such a claim be made?
How is it that virtue, learning, dialogue, calm and insight can help the appropriate (or ‘right’) view to bring mind-release and emergence of wisdom? We might easily lack confidence that understanding could bring about freedom. What kind of understanding can do that?
And, if you practice the process of understanding, why is the mind more likely to be freed than not? Why isn’t it something that could go either way – this process of bondage and release? Why does the Nikāya Buddha say that it is a natural process, one that naturally leads forward in only one direction? “This is the direct way,” he says in the Mindfulness Sutta, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. How so?
I didn’t realise, when I began to look at the Māra myth, that I would find so much richness in it. To understand the value of Māra in the Nikāyas we have to address several other important issues – particularly: language-use, the use of negation (for instance, emptiness) in Buddhism, the nature of liberation, the luminous nature of the mind, and the nature of transcendence. These topics resolve the issue of how it is that we can defeat Māra and his army. I will come to a language we can use, to explore and stay steadily at the limit of conceptual knowledge.
“Ignorance is the negation of Enlightenment and not the reverse.” – D.T. Suzuki