ABSTRACT
My thesis for this chapter will be to show through the Buddhist Māra how a metaphysical allegory can be transformed over time into an ontological demon. Māra had been the god of love and lust in early Indian mythology (Guruge, 1997). In the Pali Canon (Tipitaka), probably written two or more centuries after the Buddha’s death, the authors crafted Māra as death and a tempter. The artful rendering of Māra also evolved from his earliest depiction as a handsome Eros-like humanoid in the first century B.C.E. into a demonic figure by the eighteenth century. The Buddha wrote nothing down, so whether the Buddha actually saw Māra or just crafted him as allegory is still subject for debate. Noted Buddhist translator T. W. Rhys Davids saw Māra as a “subjective experience under the form of objective reality” … “a psychological struggle with secular temptations. (Pande, 1995, p. 381)” I will agree with Rhys Davids and engage G.P. Malalasekera’s fourth signification of Mara that the chroniclers of the Buddha portrayed Māra as an allegory as early as the Padhāna Sutta in the Sutta-nipāta, the fifth book of the Khuddaka Nikaya—which the Buddha used to represent the non-believer, an evil one who would tempt the Buddha and his followers to stray from the eightfold path (Guruge, 1997; Malalasekera, 1937; Nanamoli, 1972). I will explore through art, literature and the hermeneutic process how the allegorical idea (and narrative tool) of Māra was transmogrified by later writers and artists into an embodied demonic entity.
