Guardians of The Gate
First,
the mouth of one is closed, and of the other open. They are
thus a pair of opposites.
Good and
evil are a pair of opposites; so, also, male and female – as
Adam and Eve
realized when, having eaten of the fruit of the tree, they saw that they were
naked. The exile followed this discovery of duality,
opposition, separation: it was then that they become separated from God.
Approaching the imposing gate of the Buddhist temple at
Likewise in ourselves, if our attachment to
ego has not been conquered,
so that the fear of death and a desire for continued life are still the
governing principles of our experience and action, we are unfit psychologically
to pass through the guarded gate to the Immovable Spot, where the Buddha sits.
Physically we may go through the gate and walk along the broad path into
the temple, there to stand taking pictures, or in prayer; but we shall not by
that physical act have made the passage psychologically. TMD
203/4
For
the Bodhi-tree is not geographically situated – as Eden was once thought to be –
but is within us, and to be found there; and what is keeping us away from it is
attachment to our separate lives as egos – to ahamkara, as the Indians
say, “the making of the sound, I.”
In
other words: it is our own attachment to our temporal lives that is keeping us
out of the garden. Could we get rid of this, we should walk
in truth through what has been called, in a Japanese Zen Buddhist work, “The
Gateless Gate,” Mu-mon, since nothing is there, no cherub at either hand,
only our own misidentification of ourselves with our mortal part.
TMD 204
(Is)
it not evident that Jesus, crucified on the
Tree of Eternal Life, the Holy Rood
– that second tree of Eden, the way to which was guarded by Yahweh’s cherubim
and flaming sword – must have passed through the guarded gate to the Tree and
thus opened the gate to ourselves? Indeed, is that not
precisely the sense of the term “New Testament”? Fearless of
death, and clinging neither to life nor (as we have read in Paul to the
Philippians) to the form of God, he emptied himself altogether of both temporal
and eternal categories, whether of experience, or thought, or of feeling.
TMD 205
In Genesis 3:22-24, we read that when Yahweh drove Adam and Eve from the
garden so that they should not “take of
the tree of
life, and eat, and live forever … at the east of the
garden of Eden
he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which tuned every way, to guard the
way to the tree of life.” That sword of flame is the
counterpart of the lion’s face of Gafurius’s monster, while the guarding
cherubim correspond to the heads at either side. An essential
feature of temple arts generally, whether of Antiquity or the Orient, is such a
threshold feature: two guardians (either in human or in animal form) with a
portal between to some sacred precinct.
For example, at
Nara (Japan), before the
Todaiji Temple with its immense bronze image of “The Great Sun Buddha,”
Mahavairochana (weight, 452 tons; height, 3 feet, 6 inches; date A.D. 749),
there is a large, detached south gate where two imposing giants (26 feet, 6
inches high) stand guard with threatening weapons. The mouth
of one is open; that of the other, closed. Fear of death and
desire for life would be the immediate sentiments that such an actual pair would
excite in any visitor – which are the sentiments to be left behind by anyone
passing through, not simply physically as a tourist but for an experience within
the sanctuary of release from the pressure of the consciousness of mortality.
They correspond to the wolf and leopard of Dante’s vision, attending the
lion of his pride. So that from this point of view, what is
excluding man from the knowledge of his immortality is not the wrath of some
external god, but the maladjustment of his own mind. Within
the sacred precinct of the Buddhist temple, therefore, seated on a fully opened
lotus before the wish-fulfilling “Tree of ‘Awakening’” (bodhi), the Great
Sun Buddha, with his right hand raised in abhaya-mudra, the “fear not
posture,” and his left extended in the “boon-bestowing posture” varada-mudra,
gives freely to all who approach, the gift of his light.