A legend about the Buddha's enlightenment has profound implications for Green Meditation. According to tradition, on the night of Shakyamuni's awakening, as he sat in deep meditation under the bodhi tree, the tempter Mara assailed him with numerous threats and distractions, including vast armies of demons and seductive dancing girls. When these failed to unseat the aspiring Buddha, as a last ditch effort Mara challenged his right to sit upon "the throne of enlightenment."
"Who bears witness to your attainment of Buddhahood?" demanded Mara.
In answer, Shakyamuni is said to have reached the fingers of his right hand down to touch the ground. "I call the Earth as my witness," he declared.
One legend has the Earth quaking. Another says that "myriad thousand-fold flower blossoms" rained down from heaven. Still another shows the Earth Goddess herself emerging with her body half out of the ground to confirm the Buddha's attainment. Every legend agrees, however, that the Earth itself bore witness to the appearance of a Buddha, or "World Honored One."
That is the traditional account, commemorated by hundreds of thousands of paintings and statues across Asia, which often depict Shakyamuni in this pose, referred to in Buddhist iconography as the "Earth Witness" mudra (or hand gesture). However, as I have written elsewhere in this series on Green Meditation, the purpose of every myth is to conceal one truth by revealing another, and this story is no exception.
A revealed truth binds us to the narrative in which it appears, hence its religious function (the Latin word for religion actually means "to fasten" or "to bind"). Once we have been bound to that narrative (once we have allowed it to "bundle" our various existential anxieties and fears and tie them off like a sheaf of grain), we no longer look at it that closely. Why would we? It has served its function. It has become a fixture, a source of stability that anchors our way of thought. We no longer question it because the point is not to question.
The concealed truth has just the opposite effect, provided we are able to recover it--it unbinds us, allowing the various fears and anxieties (which had previously been bundled together and "fastened" by religious narrative) to loosen and relax. At that point we discover that, far from overwhelming us as we always feared they might, they are at last seen and accepted for what they are. We are no longer subject to the emotional blackmail of "karmic threat" or other forms of organized religious thinking. Life and death are simply what they are, and always have been--part of the natural order that gives meaning, coherence, and ultimate value to all life.
Here, then, is an unbound (or "Green") reading of the same story.
For six days Skakyamuni has been meditating under the bodhi tree, where one by one he has seen the spiritual teachings and techniques he learned from his various teachers come to nothing. Finally, he is only sitting there with nothing left to do. In a sense, he has given up. There is nothing heroic in this. He has simply ended up where he was always going--which is nowhere--and he is honest enough to admit this to himself. The problem he has earlier identified as "suffering" is nothing more than self-importance in disguise. At one point he sees a leaf flutter down from the tree to settle on the ground and thinks to himself, "I am nothing more than that."
This is the point at which Mara arrives to "tempt" him. But what Mara tempts Shakyamuni with is not armies and dancing girls. At this point he has no illusions, and so there is no way to scare him, and whether or not he breaks off his meditation to mate with the dancing girls makes no difference either way. The real temptation comes only at the end, and far from being the final "sign-off" on Shakyamuni's enlightenment that it is held to be in the scriptures, this is the moment of truth.
What Mara tempts Shakyamuni with is the revealed truth of religion, a truth which will establish him as important once more--a Buddha, an Awakened One, a Tathagata who has seen what no other person has or could. Which means, of course, that he will become an object of veneration, and therefore also an object inspiring longing or guilt.
Mara asks, "What right have you to sit in the seat of enlightenment?" and Shakyamuni, until this moment not really even close to understanding what Green Meditation is or what it means, suddenly sees things with perfect clarity and wordlessly reaches down to touch the Earth, not to call it as a witness to his own self-importance, but in recognition of where he comes from, where he is, and where he is destined. It's all here, that gesture says. There is nothing more to say.
This Green reading of the traditional story about Shakyamuni's enlightenment inverts the historical order of Buddhism, suggesting that Shakyamuni may, in fact, not have been the founder of a new religion as we all suppose, but perhaps one of the very last human beings to live and teach Green Meditation. In other words, it tells us that Shakyamuni was quite possibly the end of a lineage rather than the beginning of one.
This would be the truth that unbinds the religion of Buddhism and places us once more in intimate, healing contact with the Earth and its natural rhythms. For we can then do as Shakyamuni did. Because what stands between us and touching the Earth is...well, only religion. In other words, nothing at all.
A brief disclaimer in closing: The "Green" reading I have offered of this story is in no way limited to unbinding the revealed truths of Buddhism. The same kind of reading can be offered of any foundational religious teaching, myth, or text. It only takes a bit of spiritual archaeology--in other words, a bit of digging and sorting until you hit paydirt (pun intended).
