“You see, my son, here time becomes space” (Old Gurnemanz, in Parsifal, Act 1).
Buddhism did not emerge ex nihilo from the ineffable experience of an inspired ascetic. The cycles of metaphors—considerably extended—borrowed from Brahmanism bear witness to this, and the conventional use of the ideas and figures of Brahmanism presupposed a thorough knowledge of Vedic or sub-Vedic legends and practices (Brahmanas, Upanishads, early Epics). It also presupposed a Buddhist orthodoxy sufficiently self-assured to enlist, on the most critical points, these provisions of images diverted from their primitive meaning to serve the Good Law. The Buddha, for example, was depicted as emerging from or retracing the course of time, like the god Agni, the first-born of the cosmos. No one was mistaken. The same went for the assertion that the Buddha and those who came after him were the true Brahmins, the only Brahmins, the “true Elders. They followed in the footsteps of the one who had proclaimed: “I am the Elder,” meaning that he had freed himself from the rules of cosmic duration, as well as from enslavement to those of space, and this “recurrently,” towards the past, as well as towards the future, whose bonds he cuts. In order to impose his doctrine, the Buddha would have to establish his transcendence with regard to the two things in the world that invisibly constitute him: cosmic expanse and world Time.
In Buddhism, the doctrine of salvation is established on the contrast of two temporalities between which all communication is prohibited.
Prohibition or logical impossibility?
The vicious circle of transmigration, conceived as an “infernal” chain of causes, is matched by the leap into Nirvana, a problematic concept that can be defined neither by existence, nor by nothingness, nor by a combination of the two, nor by their simultaneous negation. It is “beyond any logically constructible notion,” as Paul Mus puts it. Irrational? Not so sure. It is weighed down with a weight of reality, thanks to the idea of its liberating virtue, a great discovery of the Buddha, revealed by him alone and to which he alone opens access, revealing a “beyond,” where he welcomes the Bodhisattvas who present themselves there, and revealing himself in the imagined form of a Refuge, (a place of) Bliss, like an Island emerging from the waters of existence, which are nothing but Pain, as we all know.
In Buddhist practice, time is not, in itself, the object of particularly frequent or in-depth meditation or development. Buddhists begin by contemplating in spirit the numberless, restless mass of beings: passing from state to state, from world to world, from the deepest hell to the highest heaven, and from heaven to hell, through all the intermediate conditions, with incessant returns, from all time and forever, inevitably reproduced beyond death in new bodies created by their attachment to existence and their past deeds, with no other origin than themselves, in the night of the past, and with no other future than themselves, in the depths of the future. All this against the backdrop of a world without initial Creation or final Destruction. Nirvana can conceivably be described as “the Issue.”
The describable Buddhist image of “time” incorporates the deities of the Indian pantheon (with their clientele or divine entourage): Indra, Brahma and others. It was reserved for certain schools to represent these metaphors and turn them into dogmas, breaking with the old school precisely where it had become overloaded with borrowings, now integrated into the system in their own right. The interpretive cycle into which these gods are introduced, a cycle that explains, governs and limits them, and which pushes the bodhisattvas out of the universal Impermanence, is the result of Buddhist dogmatics. While the universe presents itself to the imagination of the whole of India as a superimposition of worlds, the wheel of samsara shatters this common belief and collects the elements that range from the deepest hell to the highest heaven. But it replaces the layered structure with a circular permutation, under the law of the twelve causes (see note above). For both Brahmanism and Buddhism, the movement of the machine reflects the course of cosmic time. “Becoming” is produced by a mechanism that Hindus see as a cosmic machine with rotating movements that provide an image of the dual process of enslavement and liberation: a single rotation, but performed in different directions. At the heart of the Hindu idea of a universal mechanism lies a technical object: the rice-field noria, a wheel with bamboo tubes that alternately moves water from one to the other of the two streams it connects.
The code of discipline (Vinaya) of an ancient Sanskrit school, the Mulasarvastivadin, describes the “Wheel” of transmigration and, by contrast, the Refuge of Nirvana. One exercise consists in drawing it, starting with the “circle” shape from which we are to make a wheel. In the center of the hub, we draw five spokes representing the five abodes of beings (gati, the paths of existence). Below the hub are the hells (naraka), which are more like purgatories in that their stay is no more definitive than that of the other sectors. On either side of the hub, we find the animals and the ghosts, hungry souls, spirits of trees, places, etc., and above them, men and gods (devas). At the hub, we draw a white circle with the Buddha’s image in the center, then all around (on the wheel’s rim) the twelve conditions (nidana) or signs of birth and of the suppression of birth. A vignette depicts each of them. For dogmatists, causes are all that matter: they are the time of eternal duration. They bring death back to life, prolonging it until a new death, then, always the same, project it beyond this death into another life, and so on. They are not only the representation of successive reincarnations, but also the direct reason for Impermanence. In the place of the rim, we must then represent an irrigation wheel, a noria, and place a large number of buckets of water on it. The creatures that are born and die can then be represented: those that are born have their heads out of the bucket; those that die have their feet out of the bucket.
Above the wheel, the great Yaksha of Impermanence, his hair sparse and his mouth open, spreads his two arms wide to hold the wheel of birth and death.
He figures in the mechanism something that can be defined as a large “bolt.” On another level, he points to the goal and reminds us that it can be reached. Artists’ imaginations have gone further than the strictly dogmatic. The great Yaksa of Impermanence provides a (partial) key to interpreting the causal structure represented by the twelve signs. He is its expressive figure, personifying it without yet divinizing it. He is “Time,” but grasped in its causes, “per causas.” The Yaksha of Impermanence presides over the incessant destruction of all existences produced within the circle. He is a kind of deity of time, but of karma. Which cannot be represented.
This great Yaksa foreshadows the Mahakala of later schools. He is the “Time” beyond the time of causal enchainment, of which he is also the figure, that of unlimited “duration,” the prison of centuries. He is above the wheel, but part of the circle, and yet at the junction of two temporalities: that of the unlimited duration of imprisonment, and the other temporality which is a “non-duration,” a non-time. He is a figure of what we call the “threshold,” which he shows. But he is not its guardian. He is not the divinity of the passage. And he is not yet Yama, the Lord of Death, the monster who prevents beings from escaping, but the leaven is in the dough.
Buddhist dogma is played out in the arrangement of the two temporalities described, which have no logically possible communication. Buddhists have nothing to say about the one, that of nirvana. The other, which they reject, is rich in color and full of all forms of life, at least in Hindu imagery. While respecting their incompatibility, this opposition of temporalities founds the movement from one to the other, i.e., the idea of a “before” and an “after,” the very idea of time as “the number of movements according to the anterior and posterior” (the before and after). This is why it was possible for the mechanism to mutate towards another idea of temporality. Would this have been enough to escape cosmic fatality? Impossible to say.
At what point did we move from the ambiguous, paradoxical figure of a guardian of the threshold and a deity of “passage” to that of Yama, the Lord of Death, or “Mahakala, the Devouring Time,” a gigantic ogre with a wrathful gaze, whose crown of five skulls characterizes the five poisons of the spirit: anger, ignorance, the power of the mind, the power of the heart, the power of the soul? Anger, ignorance, desire, jealousy and pride transformed into wisdom, he encircles the wheel and prevents it from turning by sinking his claws and teeth into it, preventing beings from leaving it to find the Buddha outside, on the Island of the Blessed. This is undoubtedly the imprint of tantric and, in particular, Shaivite practices. It is through these that Mahakala will henceforth be assimilated to Yama, the Lord of Death, and will pass from the figure of an almost guardian of the threshold, the figure of the articulation between the two temporalities, to that of an implacable jailer and a frightening judge.
Buddhist metaphysics is an erroneous metaphysics, still too largely dependent on the mythologies of Hinduism, and it is discouragingly pessimistic, not to say depressingly nihilistic. But beyond the senseless hubris of a theoretical Buddha about whom we know next to nothing, beyond the cohorts of his “saved ones”—the countless Bodhisattvas—beyond the parody of goodness made into a mockery by Orientalism right up to the present day, this metaphysics still offered a way out for thought. This Buddhism opened up new perspectives.
But the bad leaven was undoubtedly already in the dough.
At what point in history was this shaggy deity transformed into “the demon who governs Buddhism?” And above all, according to what rituals, from the depths of the ages and the wildest superstitions? To find out, we will have to go back to Shaivism, or tantrism, when Buddhism opened up the arcana of esoteric black magic and witchcraft rituals, with a view to acquiring supra-normal powers. Black desires concealed beneath the great black cloak of Nirvana.
As black as the “great black demon” waving above his wheel…
Featured: Mahakala and Companions, Central Tibet, Ngor Monastery, ca. 1700.
