The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [95]
Finally all these shattered people arrived in India, which can hardly take care of its own population, and among the refugees were the Dalai Lama himself and a number of the leading officers and abbots of the great monasteries now destroyed. And they all agreed, Buddhist Tibet is finished. My friend and the other young monks who had managed to escape were advised, therefore, to regard their vows now as of the past, and to feel free to choose, either to continue somehow as monks, or to give up the monastic life and try to find a way to reshape their lives to the requirements and possibilities of the modern secular man.
My friend chose the latter way, not realizing, of course, what this would mean in the way of frustration, poverty, and suffering. He has had a really difficult time, but he has survived it with the will and composure of a saint. Nothing fazes him. I’ve known and worked with him now for over a decade, and in all this time I haven’t heard one word, either of recrimination against the Chinese or of complaint about the treatment he has received here in the West. Nor from the Dalai Lama himself will you ever hear a word of resentment or condemnation. These men and all their friends have been the victims of a terrific upheaval, of terrific violence, and yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. Here is true religion, alive—today.
MOYERS: Love thine enemies.
CAMPBELL: Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.
MOYERS: What do myths tell us about a God who lets two sons in one family die in a relatively short period of time, and who continues to visit on that family one ordeal after another? I remember the story of the young Buddha, who saw the decrepit old man and said, “Shame on birth because to everyone who is born, old age will come.” What does mythology say about suffering?
CAMPBELL: Since you bring up the Buddha, let’s talk about that example. The story of the Buddha’s childhood is that he was born as a prince and that, at the time of his birth, a prophet told his father that the infant would grow up to be either a world ruler or a world teacher. The good king was interested in his own profession, and the last thing he wanted was that his son should become a teacher of any kind. So he arranged to have the child brought up in an especially beautiful palace where he should experience nothing the least bit ugly or unpleasant that might turn his mind to serious thoughts. Beautiful young women played music and took care of the child. And there were beautiful gardens, lotus ponds, and all.
But then one day the young prince said to his chariot driver, his closest friend, “I’d like to go out and see what life is like in the town.” His father, on hearing this, tried to make everything nice so that his son, the young prince, should see nothing of the pain and misery of life in this world. The gods, however, saw to it that the father’s program for his son should be frustrated.
So, as the royal chariot was rolling along through the town, which had been swept clean, with everything ugly kept out of sight, one of the gods assumed the form of a decrepit old man and was standing there, within view. “What’s that?” the young prince asked his charioteer, and the reply he received was, “That’s an old man. That’s age.”
“Are all men then to grow old?” asked the prince.
“Ah, yes,” the charioteer replied.
“Then shame on life,” said the traumatized young prince, and he begged, sick at heart, to be driven home.
On a second trip, he saw a sick man, thin and weak and tottering, and again, on learning the meaning of this sight, his heart failed him, and the chariot returned to the palace.
On the third trip, the prince saw a corpse followed by mourners. “That,” said the charioteer, “is death.”
“Turn back,” said the prince, “that I may somehow find deliverance from these destroyers of life—old age, sickness, and death.”
Just one trip more—and what he sees