Avalokiteshvara as Scintilla of the World
It has been said that the modern world was defined when a poet-philosopher stood upon a stump and decried “God is dead!” This declaration, whatever its original intent, has been fundamentally embraced by modern, secular culture, from Darwin to Heisenberg, from Freud to Russell, as an underpinning to the very idea of the Age of Reason: humankind does not need God; we can create our own Paradise. Indeed, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the popular idea of the scientific community was that the Golden Age was just around the corner–Reason had created industry, technology, modern economy, and science, of its own standing and natural course, and would eventually solve all problems and suffering. This humanistic belief in god-is-dead-ology persists today, in some ranks ironically, even with wholesale blind faith.
Yet, as a rising body of social and scientific critique emerges from the horizon, with such titles as [i]Dark Age Ahead, The Coming Plague, Twilight of American Culture, Twilight of Common Dreams, The End of Education, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Slouching Towards Gomorrah[i/], and many more, a new cultural consciousness is emerging which recounts the old words of Marcellus, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Hamlet I.iv). It seems from circumference to center the Age of Enlightenment is dimming down, and the neo-post-deconstructionist age may well be defined by another poet-philosopher standing on the self-same world stump declaring, “Man is an idiot!”
In such a cosmos where is humanity to turn? From what point of orientation are we to proceed? What does it really mean to be human? Questions such as these have been asked innumerable times by countless minds all pressing forward with roughly the same goal in mind: Awakening. This concern is ultimately the Human concern. It is time-transcendent. That is to say, humans of the Stone Age and homo sapiens of the post-modern age exist upon the same world-stump, accompanied only by different costume and props. It is modern hubris (just as it was ancient hubris) to think one’s own plight is ultra-unique in creation when in fact creations’ whole psychological purpose is to arouse the fundamental concern of Awakening with its accompanying questions: How does one cease to suffer? How does one alleviate other’s suffering? How does one find meaning and peace regardless of the costume and props? The answers, if lived, change everything–change human, change cosmos, change god.
Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion. With one thousand eyes and one thousand arms, that is to say with innumerable sight organs by which observation of every aspect of cosmos is perceived and innumerable action appendages from which the cause of a new order of things may appear, Avalokiteshvara exists as the see-er of humankind’s plight, the hearer of the worlds cries, and the pathway out of the Human Predicament. It is no surprise that Avalokiteshvara is often depicted in 33 forms, and in other places with eleven heads on three levels. Eleven, three, 33, are all cosmic numbers describing the relationship between Earth, Moon, and Sun. Avalokiteshvara is thus the Bodhisattva of the cosmic Earth in its entirety. As both a male and female power, this Bodhisattva of compassion also encompasses the entirety of human experience. Avalokiteshvara is intimately familiar with the Human Predicament. As divine compassion, however, Avalokiteshvara is more than empathetic to humanity, but is profoundly woven into the cosmic field and capable of generating new possibility. He is the power of transformation; she is the scintilla of the world.
A scintilla is the divine spark which causes the fundamentum, the first lump of butter to form in the churning milk. From whence it comes no one knows, only that when the first lump appears homogenous chaos is transformed. The world-stump with its endless declarations which manipulate culture in repeatable patterns is itself illusionary. The stump is homogenous suffering; it is the foundation stone of the kingdom of Ozymandias; it is entropy. The only way to transcend this fallen world axis with its ultimate Human concern is to become Avalokiteshvara, not by clutching one of his thousand hands, but by becoming his eyes and his hands. In Avalokiteshvara’s realm the world fades and no more pronouncements are made upon it, but for the first time the senses are made alive, the eyes see anew, the hands act anew, and the ears open up to hear for the first time the whisper of the cosmos: “Om mani padme hum.” Amazingly, miraculously, this cosmic whisper is the sound of compassion.
Posted by john at May 23, 2006 09:05 PM
