University of Virginia Library

THE BUDDHA AND MARA

The parade we have so far witnessed of the grand Buddhist protagonists
will be seriously unrepresentative if we do not also give a place, if not of
honour then of a conspicuous nature, to Buddha's great antagonist,
Mara. This demon antagonist appears in village myth and ritual frequently,
for he is to the Buddha as baab (demerit) is to bun (merit).

Mara is generally regarded as the personification of death; he is the
Buddhist counterpart of the principle of destruction. In more philosophical
terms he can be equated with the whole world of sensuous existence and
the realm of rebirth, as opposed to liberation and nirvana: for such a world
is under the sway of desire and death. And in the thought of the Pitakas
there is a clear connection between desire and death. For the world built
on desire waxes and wanes, flourishes and decays; hence the ruler of
worldly desire is also god of death. But Mara is not the ruler over hell.
The function of judgment and punishment is assigned in the Buddhist
pantheon to Yama, the god of the dead.

The Buddhist texts refer extensively to the various encounters between
the Buddha and Mara the tempter; Mara's temptations also extended to
monks, nuns and laymen in order to lure them from the path. In the
Padhana Sutta Mara is represented as visiting Gotama on the banks of
the Nerañjara, where he was practising austerities, and tempting him to
abandon his endeavour. But the most important encounter—greatly
elaborated in later books and chronicles, and constituting today a lively
part of village lore—is the attack on and temptation of the Buddha by
Mara, as the Buddha sat under the bo tree immediately before his enlightenment.
This encounter not only is recalled in some village rituals but also
gives mythological legitimacy to a ritual act performed widely and
habitually—yaadnam, the pouring of water on the ground when transferring

merit. I shall relate the bare details of this great encounter between good
and evil in Buddhist folklore:

When Gotama sat under the bo tree engaged in his final effort to attain
Buddhahood, Mara, whose nature is sinful, determined that he must at
once destroy the man who was about to pass beyond his power. He first
sent his three daughters Raka (raga = love), Aradi (arati = discontent),
and Tanha (trichna = desire), beautifully bedecked, to tempt him. Gotama
drove away these women who wanted to chain him in the fetters of
concupiscence. Then King Mara, in fury, assembled his generals and his
fearsome army and decided to make war on the bodhisattva so that he
might flee in terror. At Mara's approach all the deva gods, the Nagas and
other spirits who had gathered round the bodhisattva to pay him homage
and sing his praises, took unceremonious flight, except the earth goddess.
Mara employed all his miraculous powers to hurt the bodhisattva—from
the brandishing of weapons by hideous forms, the causing of thunderstorms
and violent gales, to the final hurling of his powerful thunderbolt, which
however stood over the Buddha like a canopy of flowers. Undaunted,
Mara challenged the Buddha to prove that the seat, the throne on which
the Buddha sat, was his by right. Mara proved his own claim to that
throne by calling on his generals to affirm his might.

Here we must let Alabaster (1871, pp. 154-5) present to us his translation
from Siamese sources:

The Thai villagers of today, whenever they have done an act of merit
which is rewarded by blessings chanted by monks, transfer some of this
merit to the dead, to the gods, to other humans, by pouring water upon
the earth, thereby calling upon the goddess of the earth, Nang Thoranee,
to witness the act.