The Attack of Mara

Only the temptation of the Devil remained! I summoned him. His sons came, —hideous, scale-covered, nauseous as charnel-houses, —shrieking, hissing, bellowing; interclashing their panoplies, rattling together the bones of dead men. Some belched flame through their nostrils; some made darkness about me with their wings; some wore chaplets of severed fingers; some drank serpent-venom from the hollows of their hands;—they were swine-headed; they were rhinoceros-headed or toad-headed; they assumed all forms that inspire loathing and affright.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony

At a key point in the story, Prince Siddhartha is determined to achieve enlightenment before a new day dawns. He accepts a bundle of grass from a grass cutter and then goes into the forest to find the appropriate tree to sit under in meditation. Eventually selecting an appropriate tree, he decides to sit on its southern side, but before he can do so, in a cartoonish moment, the entire (flat) earth tilts up sharply to the north. Concluding that this may not be the right spot, the prince proceeds clockwise around the tree. When he stops at the western and northern sides of the tree, the same thing happens: The earth tilts to the east and then to the south. When he continues to the eastern side, nothing happens, causing the prince to conclude that he should sit on the eastern side of the tree. In an equally dramatic version of the selection of the tree, the prince is unsure about which of the many trees in the forest is destined to become the holy of holies of the Buddhist world. Knowing of the tree’s miraculous qualities, he shoots a bolt of flame from his mouth that incinerates all the trees in the forest except the true tree. So much for Buddhist environmentalism.

Having chosen the tree and determined the proper direction, the prince spreads the grass at its foot and sits down to meditate, vowing not to rise again until he finds the state beyond birth and death. As he says in the Pali version, “Let only my skin, sinews, and bones remain and let the flesh and blood in my body dry up; but not until I attain the supreme enlightenment will I give up the seat of meditation.” But before he can begin to meditate, he is attacked. This is the scene that the French author Gustave Flaubert describes in his Temptation of Saint Anthony, one of the most famous, and certainly the most dramatic, scenes in the life of the Buddha: the attack of Mara.

Flaubert says, “Only the temptation of the Devil remained! I summoned him.” He is accurate here. Although in other versions the attack of Mara is not welcomed, in the Play in Full (Lalitavistara), the bodhisattva summons him: “Mara is the supreme lord who holds sway over the desire realm, the most powerful and evil demon. There is no way that I could attain unsurpassed and complete awakening without his knowledge. So I will now arouse that evil Mara. Once I have conquered him, all the gods in the desire realm will also be restrained.”

However, although Mara will eventually try to tempt the prince, Mara is not the devil. His name means “maker of death,” but he is not the lord of death who rules the hells; that god is Yama in the Buddhist pantheon. Mara is a god, specifically a god of the heaven called “Controlling Others’ Emanations,” the highest of the six heavens in the Realm of Desire. Like all beings in samsara, he is not an eternal being but rather someone who has been reborn as Mara. When his life span as Mara is expended, he will die and be reborn elsewhere, and another being in the realm of rebirth will be reborn as Mara.

Although his name means death, he is also a god of desire, striving always to cause those who seek to escape from the world of suffering to remain bound in it. Thus, in Buddhist scholastic literature, death itself is also called Mara; the afflictions of desire, hatred, and ignorance are called Mara; the constituents of the body and mind are called Mara.But Flaubert is right about temptation; there are many stories of Mara appearing, sometimes in disguise, to meditators, seeking to dissuade them from their quest. He appears often, for example, in a work called Songs of the Sisters (Therigatha—or, more literally but less euphoniously, “Songs of the Female Elders”). And before the prince left the palace, Mara tried to persuade him to rule the world as a cakravartin rather than escape the world as a buddha. But he failed at that, and now, as the prince is on the brink of buddhahood, the defeat of death, he must be stopped. On the whole, the life of the Buddha is relatively free from drama. It is almost entirely free of violence, making the attack of Mara one of the most widely depicted—in both word and image—moments in the biography, allowing the artist to depict all manner of monsters. Flaubert must have delighted in their long description in the Play in Full, where we read, for example:

Such an army had never been seen before, or even heard of, in the realms of gods and humans. The soldiers were able to transform their faces in a trillion ways. On their arms and legs slithered hundreds of thousands of snakes, and in their hands they brandished swords, bows, arrows, darts, lances, axes, tridents, clubs, staffs, bludgeons, lassos, cudgels, discuses, vajras, and spears. Their bodies were covered in finest cuirasses and armor.

Some had their heads, hands, or feet turned backward, or their eyes facing backward. Their heads, eyes, and faces were ablaze. Their bellies, hands, and feet were deformed, and their faces brimmed with vehement ardor. Their mouths, with protruding ugly fangs, appeared contorted in the extreme, and their thick and broad tongues, rough like a turtle’s neck or a straw mat, dangled from their mouths. Like the eyes of a black snake, which are flush with poison, their eyes were blazing red, as if on fire. Some of them were vomiting poisonous snakes, while others, like garudas emerging from the ocean, grasped these poisonous snakes in their hands and ate them. Some ate human flesh and drank blood, chewing on human arms, legs, heads, and livers, and slurping entrails, feces, and vomit.

Mara’s army is said to extend for miles in every direction, led by Mara himself, mounted on a huge elephant, transforming himself into a being with a thousand hands, each wielding a different weapon. Anticipating that his enlightenment is near, the good gods of the pantheon, including such famous figures as Indra and Brahma, are attending the Buddha. Yet when they see Mara and his minions approaching, they take flight, leaving the prince, alone and unarmed, seated beneath the tree. He is unfazed.

Mara and his hosts launch a hail of weapons at him, raining down flaming balls of coal, an avalanche of rocks, sandstorms, mud storms, and ash storms. As the various projectiles approach the prince, they turn into flower petals and sandalwood powder, settling harmlessly around his feet. Mara sends down torrential rains to wash him away, causing floodwaters that rise to the treetops. He remains dry. Mara unleashes hurricane-force winds to blow him away. The hem of his robe does not flutter. In one of the accounts of the Buddha’s enlightenment in the Mahavastu, he routs the army of Mara with a cough.

Seeing that the prince cannot be defeated with weapons, Mara turns to words, making a legalistic claim about property rights. Mara asks the prince what right he has to occupy that particular place under the tree. The prince replies that he has earned the right to sit there because he has practiced the perfections over the course of many lifetimes. The perfections (paramita) are sometimes referred to as the “bodhisattva deeds,” the virtues that the bodhisattva practices and perfects over millions of lifetimes in order to be able to achieve buddhahood in his final lifetime without the benefit of a teacher. In the Sanskrit tradition, there are six: giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. In the Pali tradition, there are ten, adding renunciation, truthfulness, determination, and equanimity. Mara rejects his claim because the prince has no witness to testify to the truth of his statement, saying instead that he, Mara, has the right to sit beneath the tree; a chorus of his monsters shout that they are his witness.

This sets the scene for, by far, the most famous depiction of the Buddha in Asian art. The prince has his hands in his lap in the standard posture of meditation, his right hand resting on his left. Now, he extends his right hand and reaches down to touch the earth with his fingertips. This is known in Buddhist iconography as the “earth-touching” (bhumisparsha) posture. He is calling upon the goddess of the earth, who has lived long, to testify that the prince has indeed practiced the perfections over many lifetimes. She testifies with a tremor.

This image is so familiar to us that we tend to forget how odd it is. Given that the Buddha achieved enlightenment in the posture of meditation, the posture that Buddhists would emulate for millennia, why would he not be depicted in that way? Why is he touching the earth, and at a point before, not after, his buddhahood? It may be because it depicts his defeat of Mara, the god of death. But it also may be because it connects him to the cult of the earth goddess, that just as the birth of the Buddha is associated with a tree goddess, so is the enlightenment of the Buddha associated with an earth goddess, named Sthavara. That goddess is particularly important in the Buddhist traditions of Thailand and Laos, where she is called Thorani. In their version of the story, rather than simply causing a tremor, she appears on the scene and begins wringing water out of her hair. This is all the water from the libations that the prince had offered in a past life. She wrings so much water from her hair that it causes a flood, which sweeps away Mara and his hideous horde.

Although his name means death, he is also a god of desire, striving always to cause those who seek to escape from the world of suffering to remain bound in it.

The attack of Mara, so famous in art and literature, has presented a challenge to European biographers of the Buddha who, following the lead of New Testament scholars, felt the need to explain away the miraculous. We can imagine, for example, that German theologian David Strauss would categorize this, and many other stories in the life of the Buddha, as what he called “poetical mythi,” which he defined as “historical and philosophical mythi partly blended together, and partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of the poet has woven around it.” The baby Buddha’s birth from under his mother’s armpit is obviously a problem, but one that could be explained away by appealing to some notion of purity, with the future Buddha avoiding the months of uterine horror described so gruesomely in Buddhist texts. The feats of strength are standard elements of myth, easily seen as interpolations. The childhood meditation under the tree seems unlikely but perhaps plausible, as are the chariot rides. The problem with Mara’s attack is that it is described in such detail and that it occurs at such a crucial moment in the narrative. It has to be interpreted.

The obvious strategy for the modern European interpreter is to psychologize it. And thus in the entry on “Buddhism” in the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1878 and written by Thomas W. Rhys Davids, a former colonial officer and Pali scholar, we read, “All his old temptations came back upon him with renewed force. For years he had looked at all earthly good through the medium of a philosophy which had taught him that it, without exception, carried within itself the seeds of bitterness and was altogether worthless and impermanent; but now to his wavering faith the sweet delights of home and love, the charms of wealth and power, began to show themselves in a different light and glow again with attractive colors. He doubted, and agonized in his doubt; but as the sun set, the religious side of his nature had won the victory and seems to have come out even purified from the struggle.” Thus, the prince is not the confident and courageous figure portrayed in the texts but a man who had long suppressed his human emotions and now is wracked with doubt. Rhys Davids would not be the last to offer this “psychological” interpretation. Others, writing after Freud, would see the Attack of Mara as the Attack of the Id, in which repressed forms of aggression are externalized as hideous demons. They must be faced and defeated, brought fully into consciousness and then conquered. But the attack of Mara’s army was not the last foe that the future Buddha had to face. There was another element of the id to be tamed. The next attack would take a sexual form. It is usually referred to as the attack of Mara’s daughters. Flaubert writes in The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

Then did he send me his daughters—beautiful with daintily painted faces, and wearing girdles of gold. Their teeth were whiter than the jasmine-flower; their thighs round as the trunk of an elephant. Some extended their arms and yawned, that they might so display the dimples of their elbows; some winked their eyes; some laughed; some half-opened their garments. There were blushing virgins, matrons replete with dignity, queens who came with great trains of baggage and of slaves.

With Mara’s demonic army defeated, his three daughters now approach the prince (in some versions at their father’s request, in others by their own choice) seeking to rouse him from his seat by arousing his lust. They have different names in different sources; in the Pali account they are named Tanha, Arati, and Raga: Craving, Discontent, and Lust. In the Play in Full, Flaubert’s source (where they are called Trishna, Rati, and Arati—Craving, Passion, and Discontent), they begin by displaying the thirty-two wiles of a woman, which the sutra enumerates. Flaubert draws from these in the passage above. The prince remains unmoved, using the opportunity to provide his own list, in his case, a list of the faults of the female form: “From the crotch, awful smells are leaked; / The thighs, the calves, and the feet are joined together like a mechanical contraption. / When I examine you, I see that you are like an illusion, / Which has deceptively emerged from causes and conditions.”

In the version that appears in Buddhaghosa’s Account of Origins (Nidanakatha), Mara’s daughters seek to determine what kind of woman will arouse the lust of the prince. First, each of the daughters turns into one hundred girls who stand before him. When he remains unmoved, they turn into one hundred young women who have not yet given birth, then one hundred women who have given birth once, then one hundred women who have given birth twice, then one hundred middle-aged women, then one hundred old women. In some versions, they take on this last form in order to arouse his pity; in others, to arouse his lust. In Ashvaghosha’s Deeds of the Buddha (Buddhacarita), the Buddha remains unmoved, but he uses his magical powers to lock the daughters of Mara into the last of their transformations. “Bending their feet, with decrepit limbs, they addressed their father: ‘O father . . . the lord of the world of Desire, restore us to our own forms.’ ” However, despite Mara’s great powers, he does not have the power to restore them to their youthful forms. At his suggestion, his daughters then seek refuge in the Buddha, as Buddhists would do for centuries when they declared, “I go for refuge to the Buddha.” The daughters do not mention the second and third of the three jewels, the dharma and the sangha, because the dharma has yet to be discovered, and the sangha has not been formed. Thus, although it is often said that Trapusha and Bhallika, who would offer the new Buddha his first meal seven weeks later, were the first to take refuge, it seems that that honor belongs to Mara’s daughters. As soon as they do so, the prince restores them to their youthful forms.

Mara’s daughters appear at different points in the enlightenment narrative. In the Great Renunciation (Abhinishkramana), they attempt to seduce the prince before their father’s army attacks. In the Play in Full, they arrive following the attack and return after he has achieved enlightenment. In the Account of Origins, they appear in the fifth week after his enlightenment. Here, as in so many other instances in the biography, there seems to have been a set of stock scenes that could be inserted into the drama at the discretion of the author. This scene with Mara’s daughters is one scene that is rarely omitted, demonstrating that Buddhist authors—who in many cases were celibate monks—rarely missed an opportunity to write about sex.

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This article has been excerpted from Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, published by Yale University Press. Run with permission from Yale University Press, all rights reserved.