The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [445]
`the great Narayana, the soul of the universe, with a thousand omniscient eyes, at once being and not-being, brooding over the waters without form, supported by the thousandheaded snake of the infinite.'
But when Brahma addresses this apparently supreme being, the voice which answers is that of Vishnu:
`Do you not know that it is I who am Narayana, creator, preserver and destroyer of worlds, the eternal male, immortal source and centre of the universe? You yourself were born from my imperishable body.'
Eventually Siva joins them and is welcomed by Vishnu as the `god of gods'. Siva ends his reply:
`I, the supreme indivisible Lord, am three ... Brahma, Vishnu and Siva: I create, I preserve, I destroy.'
The three great Hindu divinities have by this time become virtually interchangeable aspects of each other, like three different faces of the same single god.
During the centuries between 700 Bc and 500 BC this tendency for all the multiplicities of gods to dissolve in favour of a single supreme being was gathering momentum in many different cultures. And this brought with it a wholly new perception of how mankind should relate to the unseen dimension beyond his mortal, physical existence.
In China in the sixth century, we see this in the teachings of Lao-Tzu, a pupil of Confucius. The Chinese had already begun to view everything in the universe as being made up of the interplay between two opposing principles, the yang and the yin: male and female, light and dark, strong and weak, dominant and submissive, upper and lower, solid and fluid, hot and cold. There was nothing which could not be seen in these terms. Yang was creation, yin was completion, yang was the idea, yin its material realisation. Yet the two opposites were always two halves of one whole. If, in any context, one principle predominated, this was because the state of cosmic balance had been lost; and there would then be a tendency for it to become unbalanced in the opposite direction. The teaching of Lao-Tzu was that the only way to understand life and the universe was to see that everything in them ultimately belongs to a single, indivisible, living entity: `the One'. The central principle of life is `Tao, `the Way, to become at one with the One, which implies rising above all opposites, because the Tao is the state of perfect balance in which the opposites no longer exist. In the Tao the yin and the yang are one. All partial views and divisions are illusory. All sense of separate existence must be transcended, to achieve union with the One that is eternal.
A remarkably similar perception was being arrived at in India through the body of Hindu teachings known as the Upanishads, which were being set down from around 700 BC onwards. The divided nature of human consciousness means that we are imprisoned in maya, that state of illusion which comes from seeing the world in terms of opposites, which are always getting out of balance. But within us is the atman, our true Self, that part of us which is part of the Atman, the Universal Soul. The only way to escape imprisonment in maya is to reach the state where all individual appetites and distortions of subjective consciousness are transcended. This is the state of nirvana, where all personal attachments end, and where the individual atman can be rejoined in perfect union with the Atman which is the state of perfect consciousness ruling the universe.
Until the reaching of nirvana, the Hindus believed, each separate individual