Roda da Existência — ESTADOS SUPERIORES
Marco Pallis: LUZES BÚDICAS
Regarded from the human point of view, the supernal states are those which in greater or lesser measure escape the physical and psychic limitations of our own state of existence. The two sectors grouped in the supernal class may, however, themselves include quite a number of different degrees which we, in our present state, are hardly concerned with. It is said of gods or devas that theirs is a state full of delights such as ‘wishing trees’ able to grant any boon at the mere thought and other picturesque amenities of a similar kind; no pain can enter into this state while it lasts-which makes the moment of change when it strikes at long last all the more painful for the beings in question, as they suddenly wake up to the fact that their state of bliss is not eternal but remains subject to birth and death like every other existential state. As one Mongolian monk said to the writer: ‘the long-lived gods are stupid’. Lulled into over-confidence by sheer absence of contrast in their present condition they are wholly unprepared for the fatal moment when it comes and they may sink as low as hell itself, a truly lamentable fate.
Not all the gods, however, display this lack of intelligence. Many of them play a creditable part in stories of the Buddha. Some, such as Vishnu’s hawk-like steed Garuda, are constant attendants on the Buddha’s person whose canopy they provide; others again, and especially Brahma king of the Devas, after the Buddha’s Enlightenment persuade him to preach the Doctrine lest the world be utterly lost-this overcoming of the Buddha’s ‘reluctance’ at the instance of the gods features in the history of every teaching Buddha and is meant to convey symbolically that the knowledge possessed by an Enlightened One is so profound as to be virtually incommunicable to men in their present state of ignorance. The Buddha however consents to teach thus showing that, ignorance notwithstanding, the Light is not unattainable. For this we have to thank the persuasion of the gods.
Titans or Asuras, for their part, though superior to men in virtue of their possession of various powers, are always represented as contentious beings, full of envy for the gods and their felicity and ever plotting to dethrone them. Typically they are beings who through ‘austerities’, intense work carried out in various fields, have been enabled to extend their own natural faculties to the point of threatening Heaven itself. Sometimes titanic ambition even wears an altruistic mask as when Prometheus stole the fire from the gods in order to bestow it on mankind, thus exposing the latter to the consequences of his own act of profanation. It is typical of an asuric or promethean temperament to promote recklessly the use of abnormal powers from every kind of motive except the essential one, the one which could lead a being to Buddhahood. Lacking this motive it lacks all: such is the asuric sign in beings.