(republished with edits)

Samantabhadra becomes Vajrapani by Vairocana and then argues with Vairocana about Mahesvara, leads Mahesvara and his entourage to Mount Meru, all flee or are defeated but Mahesvara, and in a grueling battle, Vajrapani kils Mahesvara.

Samantabhadra is the first person to receive enlightenment. Vajra means diamond, lightning, meteor. Vairocana is the cosmic buddha. Mahesvara is the lord of samsara, the causal prison of karma. Samsara is the wheel of endless striving.
The story could have easily been repeated in Christian terms.
Jesus becomes the Messiah by God, then argues with God like Job did about Satan and sin, leads the devil to Mount Zion on the cross, all flee or are defeated but Satan, and in a grueling battle, Jesus kills Sin and Death.

It’s the same story.

What is the vajra?

The vajra is that primordial unity that is beyond all divisions. The great divine perfection that is natural to everything. Grace. Pure, elemental diamond, harder than anything else. Pure, unhindered lightning. Pure, unstoppable meteor. And it is out to kill the root of fragmentation. Differentiation is not the same as fragmentation, a la David Bohm.

Now the problem with Vajrapani is that he is attacking Mahesvara from a motive of trying to destroy. In a sense, it is the Mahesvara within him that is fighting Mahesvara. But to relinquish the fight would seem tantamount to allowing Mahesvara to rule over him. Vajrapani presents a nondualistic dualism, and whether or not that allows Mahesvara to continue to exist is up in the air. Does nondualism tolerate or oppose dualism? If nondualism opposes dualism, doesn’t that lock nondualism and dualism in their own duality? But if nondualism does not oppose dualism, then dualism will try to conquer the nondualistic.

The same could be said of a forest. If people give equal space to all activities, in a liberatarian/hippie kind of way, then greedy industrialists who want to commodify the natural world will come in and decimate ruthlessly. They will plunder, poison, waste, slaughter. The people should protect the forest. But if the people take on a tribalistic mindset, then the fundamental conflict that is in the heart of the greedy industrialist will not be overcome. It will continue to exist within the hearts of the environmentalists.

I feel that much of the same problem is at work in the story of Marduk, in a more morally ambiguous manner. The primordial mother and father, Salt Water and Fresh Water, named Tiamat and Absu, create the gods, who become raucous. Absu is angry and wants to kill them so they can rest in peace. Tiamat is defensive and protective of her offspring. But one of the gods overhears the conversation, but only part of it, and spreads the word that Absu is about to kill them all. So the gods kill Absu in his sleep and turn his body into their abode. Tiamat becomes filled with tempestuous wrath, a tremendous sea dragon. The gods cannot defeat her or her monsters. Only Marduk, Lord of the Storm, is strong enough to tie Tiamat up in a net of winds and pierce her heart through with an arrow of lightning. Marduk then creates the world out of her carcass and makes the first humans using the blood of her most vile monster, Kingu. In a sense, it is the Tiamat within Marduk that is fighting Tiamat, the sea monster in him that is able to fight another sea monster. Could Marduk be later haunted by the ghost of Tiamat? In killing his mother to protect himself, he has acted just like his mother. Both acted in a morally foggy space between justice and power. Her heart lives on in him, so to speak. The moral prow of civilization is still infected with the monstrous, salty indifference that is hard to categorize as just order or psychopathic dominance.

In Christianity, we see a radical kind of openness breaking through in Jesus—just read the gospels and you’ll see that Jesus really made a huge positive impact—but then in his wake, Christianity sprung up and was beset with the same poison he tried to overcome. He was trying to personify God and make heaven appear nearer than it ever had, to remove the power gap and bureaucracy between humans and the divine. But there was a strong tide within Christianity to make Jesus into an object, to whack people with their crosses and scriptures and cross-emblazoned swords. Jesus on the cross is a vision of God objectified, killing the divinity with the idolatry of representation. That vision has been recast as a weapon, cutting apart the world at the same time it is constantly imploding upon itself.

Vices are paradigmatic, and to confront vices on a paradigmatic level requires some kind of agency beyond the span of the paradigm. To truly go beyond dualism, you cannot simply avoid it, because that is still a dualism. It is simply to push dualism into the shadows of the unconscious, where it can lord over the mind in secret, even if outwardly it has reversed its moral polarity, so to speal. You have to qualify dualism to really go beyond it.

The forest spirit in Princess Mononoke opposes and allows its own plundering, because it is life itself, within the death, within the poison behind the blind killing, within the harmonious life of the ecosystem. When it has been decapitated, it is awesome in vengeance. But it is swift to move on. It is so caught up in the stream of deep time that the billows of the moment do not take precedence in its attitude.

To follow God, we keep being pulled through layer after layer.