The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [73]
This entire collectivity of legends, I proposed, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination: a crucial victory by which death and its handmaiden, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination. The fact that Christianity was now extinct was, I suggested, eloquent testimony to the efficiency with which it had done its work. In a world that had tamed and all-but-conquered death, its carefully calculated absurdities had no utility whatsoever.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Perhaps paradoxically, the majority of my critics were no better pleased by my account of the defects of Christianity than my account of its strengths. Few of my fellow historians were able to accept my view of religions as systems of psychological armaments, and their refusal even to board my train of thoughts robbed them of all sympathy for its subsequent stations, let alone its terminus. Many of them were quick to point out that it was what I applauded in Christianity that had sealed its doom on the world stage.
My critics were, of course, correct to argue that it was the ridiculous emphasis of most Christian sects on personal salvation and the imminence of apocalypse that had ensured their redundancy after the Crash. The relative success of the Eastern religious traditions in a world of putative emortals was probably ensured by their reference to a much greater timescale. I was in better agreement with conventional theory when I admitted that even true emortals could derive valuable psychological comforts and benefits from the attempt to think in terms of 4,320,000,000-year-long kalpas and 311,040,000,000,000-year-long mahakalpas, but my attempt to track the corollaries of this thesis soon departed from the common track and lost the grudging sympathy that the argument had briefly gained.
The fundamental ingenuity of the Eastern traditions could, I suggested, be seen as a brilliantly simple inversion of the key move in the Western traditions. In the West, the aim of the “individuar’ human was to win for his death-resistant element the privilege of a happy immortality. In the East, where the notion of human-as-individual never took root, the aim was not to acquire immortality but to escape it. Buddhism refused belief in a soul or “person,” asserting as an axiom that there is no permanent state underlying the ceaseless flux of physical and mental states, and that death is merely a transition between incarnations. Hope was directed toward the eventual annihilation that was nirvana rather than the salvation of heaven.
I extrapolated my own system of metaphors by suggesting that Buddhism had outlasted Christianity because the weaponry its items of faith offered for use in the war against death was more intimate and more personal, more akin to swords than cannon.
The furtherance of this analysis did not please contemporary Buddhists at all. They objected to my judgment that the doctrine of dukkha—the “ill fare” that rendered life itself inherently unsatisfactory—was a last-ditch defense all but equivalent to capitulation with the great enemy. They also disliked my account of Maya, the symbolic embodiment of the temptations and allurements that stand in the way of nirvana, and they interpreted my careful comparison of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with its Egyptian equivalent as a disparagement. Mercifully, there were no Jains around to object to my lukewarm account of the attempt to fight death with death, seeking liberation in self-mortification