Suddenly a fully formed thought popped into my mind: “The moment has arrived, Gotama.”
“What?” I remember speaking aloud.
“You have been asleep. Now it is time to wake up,” my mind proclaimed.
7
An hour later I sat down under a large tree and announced to myself, “I will not move from this place, nor will I urinate or defecate, until I have achieved my goal of defeating death!” (NK; ASV 12:118) In heaven, the gods burst into applause upon hearing that. One god, however, was not pleased that I was on the verge of, shall we say, “piercing the veil.” That god was Mara, the god of death and delusion, my old nemesis. “Why do you look so upset, Father?” his three daughters, Lust, Delight and Appetite, asked him. “This sage Siddhartha is about to conquer my realm, daughters!” Mara cried. “If he succeeds, my rule will come to an end!” (ASV 13:15) (Given that Mara’s “realm” was death and that the desirability of death was what I was just about to grasp, I’ve never really understood why he was trying to stop me; weren’t we basically on the same team?) “Before this sage’s vision is realized,” Mara continued to his daughters, “we must fly down to earth and STOP HIM!” (NK)
A bit later, the four of them landed directly in front of me. Mara, not wasting any time, instantly aimed his bow and arrow at me. “Rise, sage!” he demanded. “Abandon your search immediately or I will shoot you with this love-tipped arrow! Rise, I said—RISE!!” I sat motionless, my hands gently folded before me, my eyes lightly closed. When Mara shot his love-tipped arrow at me, I did not even flinch. Seeing that, Mara slowly sank to the ground and muttered to himself, “The sage does not even notice the arrow I shot him with, does he have no feelings?” Suddenly his face darkened with rage. “He is not even worthy of my arrows, nor of the temptations of my three lovely daughters!” (Who were not, by the way, all that lovely. Lust was pudgy, with a moon-face; Appetite was bony, with an oversized nose; Desire had bad teeth and was slightly cross-eyed.) “What he deserves is to be destroyed!! DEMONS, ATTACK!!” Mara now shrieked and in an instant I was surrounded by demons waving clubs, swords and (weirdly, I thought) trees at me. (ASV 13:14–18)
These demons were hideous-looking creatures. There were three-headed fish with spotted bellies and one-eyed horses with elephant ears. There were cat-faced demons with messy, unkempt hair (sickening) and goat-faced demons who were balding (even more sickening.) Many of the demons were nude. They all hopped around in front of me, trying to scare me. But I sat motionless, calm in the face of the storm. “Terrify him, you fools!” Mara screamed at his demons and now they all stopped dancing around and started making scary faces at me, rapidly opening and closing their mouths and bugging their eyes out. One of the demons (a three-headed goat with messy hair) rolled his eyes around in his head and raised a heavy club as if he was going to bash me. Instantly I paralyzed him with love, however, and he stood there frozen, club in mid-air, blinking in confusion. A female demon named “Megahali” (and why I knew her name I’m still not exactly sure; none of the other demons even had names to my knowledge, but “Megahali” definitely did) grabbed a skull and started gyrating around with it in front of me. I’m not sure what she was trying to achieve, kind of a mix of “scary” and “sexy,” I guess, but when I ignored her, she had to slink away ignominiously. (ASV 13:49)
At that moment, a god bellowed down from the sky: “Give up, Mara! Your attempts to stop this sage are ignoble and your greatness is being compromised by your pride!” (ASV 13:69) I liked everything about what this god said except for that last bit about Mara’s “greatness.” Mara was not great; Mara was an impotent, blustery fool. In any case, the gods’ words only seemed to inflame Mara, who now marched on me with an Army of Demons which was mind-bogglingly huge, like literally extending to the edge of the universe. Mara was now riding on a 50,000-foot-tall elephant named “Girimikhala.” (How he got onto a 50,000-foot-tall elephant, I’m still not sure.)
As all this was happening, the gods gathered in heaven to gaze down on the battle. They started singing fight-songs to me, led by a giant snake named Makahala. This was going to be a rout and the gods all knew it: An army of demons the size of the entire universe led by a devil-king riding a ten-mile-tall elephant versus one man, sitting quietly under a tree. No contest. As Mara’s army drew nearer to me, however, for some unknown reason the gods all suddenly panicked and began to sprint away in every direction. (NK) You’d have thought that scaring the gods this way would have given Mara a boost of confidence, but it definitely didn’t. “Men,” he suddenly called out to his giant army, “we cannot possibly defeat this sage in a fair fight. Let us therefore attack him from behind!”
Mara created a massive tornado and flung it at me. Gale-force winds, powerful enough to blow mountains to pieces, rumbled towards me. My majesty was so profound, however, that the winds calmed before me, in the end not even stirring the hem of my garment. Next Mara tried to drown me, causing a sudden massive downpour, so much rain that it literally hollowed the earth out. Almost instantly the water all around me was a hundred feet high. Like the wind, however, the rain quickly receded before my virtuousness and in the end did not even dampen the hem of my garment. I could tell that Mara was getting frustrated now. He picked up a bunch of mountains (I think they were volcanoes—they were definitely fiery)
