ATDTDA: 749/750 "The Compassionate"

[Mark Kohut]

heartily seconded.......
   
  whenever Buddhism kicked into TRPs vision, AtD is THE BOOK which holds his deepest
  beliefs about it for our--anyone's; certain archetypal character's lives (Like Cyprian)---
   
  I remember bits in GR and, yes, a deep use of many concepts in Vineland...
   
  mark

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
  This all involves backtracking a smidgen. Lots of folks follow 
the scientific/technological forking roads in Pynchon, 
considering those to be the signs and symptoms of our 
redoubtable author's inspirations, his primary concerns.
I think this skew has to do with the idea that scientific 
concepts are intellectually more 'real' than intellectual notions 
around the occult. In any case. I seem to be using some sort 
of metaphysical philter whilst reading OBA's stuff, finding all 
paths pointing to the one, true. . . . 

There is this search in Theosophy for the place where Christ
can be found along with Avalokiteshvara, that place you're 
supposed to find in your journey to the east. A meeting place 
for all these paths, a shared holiness, a shared radiance, a
shared space for Illumination, Compassion & Grace.

In any case, I got to thinking about Cyprian and "the 
Compassionate" that Yashmeen cites on page 749 and 750.

Buddhist aesthetics, very much like its literature, brings 
home spiritual truths in the simplest manner graspable 
by all. The various bodhisattvas too dominate the 
spectrum of Buddhist art, illustrating this abstract 
conceptualization in as hard hitting a manner as do the 
various myths surrounding them. The most prominent 
bodhisattva in this regard is Avalokiteshvara.

http://www.exoticindiaart.com/article/bodhisattva/

The store where I'm now working [The Brass Unicorn*] has a
statue of Avalokiteshvara. It's in the Northeast corner of a room
that is used for a variety of things, Pranic healing and meditation
included. Avalokiteshvara starts as near gender netural/fey while 
male but develops and mutates over time to near gender netural 
but female, in the forms of Quan Yin and Buddhist adaptations 
of Tara, an elder Hindu female deity transformed into aspects of 
the Buddah.

The word 'Avalokiteshvara' is derived from the Pali verb 
oloketi which means "to look at, to look down or over, to 
examine or inspect." The word avalokita has an active 
signification, and the name means, "the lord who sees 
(the world with pity)." The Tibetan equivalent is spyanras-
gzigs (the lord, who looks with eyes). The text known as 
Karanda-vyuha (8th century AD) explains that he is so 
called because he views with compassion all beings 
suffering from the evils of existence. It is interesting to 
note here that a dominant feature in the description of 
Avalokiteshvara is his capacity to "see" the suffering of 
others. No wonder then that he is often represented with 
a thousand eyes symbolizing his all encompassing ability 
to view with compassion the suffering of others, thus 
sharing in their sorrows, a first step towards their ultimate 
alleviation. Not only that, he further has a thousand hands 
too which help in the mammoth task of delivering 
innumerable beings to their ultimate spiritual fulfillment.

http://www.exoticindiaart.com/article/bodhisattva/

"The Tibetan equivalent is spyanrasgzigs (the lord, who looks 
with eyes)"---That notion of spycraft and the omniscience of the 
celestial view of things brings us back to the P.O.V. of the C.o.C.

The house where I live has many representations of Quan Yin:

http://www.livingsacred.com/quan-yin.shtml

My wife has been aquiring them, with a lot of help from her friends.
There's three in the office where I'm writing, four or five in the 
bedroom, two/three in the living room, a couple in the kitchen. . . .

I usually work from the notion that the general motion of dieties over
time is to move from the positive feminine principle [Lucina, Morning 
Star, Venus] to the pejorative male principle [Lucifer, Falling Angel,
Whore of Babylon]. So I'm suprised when a very good Goddess
like Quan Yin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Yin or the Various 
Taras http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(Buddhism) turn out to be 
aspects of an even better sorta-male diety, the Lord of Compassion,
Avalokiteshvara. http://meditationincolorado.org/avalokiteshvara.htm

I can't help but think of Cyprian as the Compassionate One in our story.

As we are headed for [and/or, possibly, have already left] Shambhala,
It behooves us to dig into the infrastructure of Buddhism. I'm
not at all sure when Buddhism really kicked in as a theme or thread
in Pynchon's work. There is the self-immolation sequence in CoL49,
where the recently fired accountant plans on going out in the manner
of protesting monks in Vietnam. There's that first gleam of the
Japanese Insurance adjustor in Gravity's Rainbow, followed up
by the big-time role for the aforementioned Takeshi Fumimota that
drives Vineland, a thoroughly underated saga of karma and retribution. 
I suppose I'll have to re-scrye Mason & Dixon for whatever Buddhist
references are incryped within, meanwhile wondering if dog has a 
Buddah nature. [MU!!!]

As regards "Against the Day", Buddhism gets bigger play than in 
any other work by Pynchon, and somehow Pynchon manages to 
tie together Shambahala and philately with a pretty pink bow at 
the end of AtD. Therefore, it behooves us to pay attention to the 
earliest myths and legends of Buddhism and to pay attention to 
Compassion in the latter half of our story just as much as Iceland 
Spar, Odin's Gnosis and the "Hanging Man" card guided us in the 
first half of our story thus far. There is a shared religious/scientific 
metaphor here [as per usual in Pynchon], the alchemical drivers 
of his "infernal machines" hidden by the scientific explanations 
placed before us, usually explored further, in that game of 
misdirection and religious/scientific/metaphysical three-card-monte 
that OBA endlessly plays.

* Our store's name is an alchemical allusion, and though
I cannot recall its description, I'll bet I'll find it in:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14847/The-Alchemy-Key


       
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