Of those attached to the Five Aggregates consisting of physical form, feelings, thoughts, inclinations and sensory awareness, can we say they’re in league with the Buddhist devil, Mara the Evil One? We sure can. And this might go a long way in explaining why the Buddha, many times, said of the Five Aggregates, they are not my self. The Buddha, unlike ordinary people (prithagjana), was able to break his attachment to Mara’s realm. He fully realized that he was not any one or all of these devilish aggregates.
First of all, how is Mara defined? Literally, in Sanskrit, Mara (with diacritics, mâra) means killing, slaying, slaughter. So now, who is Mara the Evil One? There are a lot of references to Mara in the Pali canon not to mention the Mahayana canon. He is sometimes referred to as death itself, “the king of death” or “the lord of the realm of lusts”. His other names include Papima (evil one), Kanha (the dark one), Adhipati (the chief), Antagu (destroyer), Maccu (killer), Pamattabandhu (friend of the indolent or the thoughtless).
Mara controls the whole of worldly existence which includes birth and death. He oversees samasara, in other words, He is opposed to nirvana. There are five Maras (the reader will note that there is no Mara of the Atman or Self). They are as follows:
1. Mara of the Aggregates (khandha/skandha)
2. Mara of Defilement (kelesa)
3. Mara of Death (maccu)
4. Mara of Karma
5. Son of God Mara (devaputta)
Probably the most insidious of the five Maras is Mara of the Aggregates because he is our psychophysical body. Instead of carefully identifying and analyzing each and every aggregate of the psychophysical body like form (rupa) or consciousness (vijñâna), rejecting them because they belong to Mara, we proudly believe that we have understood what the Buddha taught, namely, there is no real self! At this point, however, we just became the thralls of Mara of the Aggregates—we've made a pact with the Buddhist devil, in other words. We’ve been greatly deceived and shall remain such for as long as we insist that the rejection of self is more important than the rejection of the Five Mara Aggregates that make up our psychophysical body.
Mara is really lord of all traps for keeping us on the wheel of samsara so as to continually re-experience birth and death. Mara, we might say, runs the Evil Empire; who is master of the dark side of the force. The Buddha before his enlightenment has to fight Mara and his tenfold army, which includes the sons and daughters of Mara. It is only through Mind and its immaterial powers that the Buddha is finally able to defeat Mara and his huge army. This, of course, is nothing new to the literature of religious India such as the fight story between Lord Shiva and Kamadeva in the Mahabharata. Finally, this excellent verse from the Lalitavistara Sutra:
Seeing the frightful transformations of Mara’s army,
The Pure Being recognizes the all as a product of illusion.
There is no demon [Mara], no army, no beings;
there is not even a self.
Like the image of the moon in the water,
the cycle of the three worlds is misleading.
Mara? Do you mean the Super Ego?
Posted by: Ted Bagley | October 27, 2009 at 12:08 AM