What is myth? In my opinion, all the
old myths – and here I’m speaking
primarily of those originating before
the 1 st millenium BCE – were
originally inspired by true events.
They were the news, the gossip, the
family sagas of the day. They came
to life in the hands of the
storytellers and bards. The stories
that survived were those that struck
a chord in consciousness. Each time
they were retold, the tellers would
embellish or alter a little; and when
the changes resonated with the
audience they would be passed on,
and so the myths evolved by a sort
of natural selection of thought, a
little bird of story soaring in the sky
of the mind. There was no question
of any individual deliberately
creating their own stories. The myths
were communal creations. This is
why they offer such wonderfully
direct insight into the consciousness
of the times. There seems to not yet
have been the idea of an objective
standard of truth; no distiction
between how things could be, or
should be, and how they really are.
There was, therefore, no question of
the myths being taken as literal,
objective truth – the tellers of the
stories would not have understood
what that meant. The myths were
projections of the people’s fears,
desires, hopes, joys, and anguishes
into the world outside.
But in the ‘axial age’ around the
middle of the 1st millenium BCE a
new idea began to be born.
Knowledge became something that
was not just inherited, but reflected
upon and consciously revised. A new
rational consciousness emerged,
supplanting the old mythic
consciousness. The most brilliant of
the rational cultures were the
Greeks, specializing in external
science, and the Indians,
specializing in inner science. Both
realized that truth is an elusive
thing and so they devised special
techniques for its apprehension; in
Greece, reason and logic; and in
India the science of meditative
insight. Either way, myth would
never be the same again.
The fields of cultural endeavour in
the West became split in two. One
branch, loosely called ‘science’, dealt
with the objective investigation into
the external, material world. The
second branch, loosely called ‘the
arts’, dealt with the expression of
inner feelings and perspectives.
‘Fiction’ was born, the deliberate
creation of stories that both the
author and the reader realize are
not true. Fiction is a private
undertaking. It can never be free
from irony, self-consciousness, and
personal quirks; thus its usefulness
as a psychological record is of a
different order than myth.
But now that the original domain of
myth became split in two, it became
possible to investigate myth with
science, to inquire as to what extent
myths were literal, objective history.
Again, the field split in two. For
those commited to the search for the
real, it soon became obvious that
the myths are highly unreliable
quides to history, and that new, non-
literal, symbolic methods of
interpretation must be developed in
order to tease out the truth. This
process started early; by the 5 th
century BCE in both Greece and
India the old myths were being
questioned, denied, or even
ridiculed. In fact, the history of
humanity is almost by definition the
history of the ending of the myths,
the slow and agonizing death of
God.
Inevitably the reaction set in.
Threatened and fearful, some
insisted that the myths were literal
objective reality – a claim that I
believe would have been
incomprehensible in the age the
myths were born. So came the great
reversal. After the axial age
witnessed the flowering of the spirit
of reason in humanity’s most
brilliant cultural inflourescence, we
fell into the Dark Ages. Across both
Europe and Asia the medieval period
saw the transformation of democratic
experiments into absolute
autocracies; the spirit of inquiry into
dogmatic orthodoxies; freedom of
speech and thought into creedal
conformity; the experience of
liberation into the rote learning of
scholastic curricula; spiritual life as
a ‘calling out’ to transcend petty
boundaries of self, of tribe, of nation
into religion as bureaucratic,
patriachal, hierachical institutions
for the buttressing of national
identity and state power.
As time goes on, and the events portrayed in the myths recede
further into the conveniently mysterious past, the myths become more and more incongruous. They must be maintained by an ever shriller incantation. Exclusivity gives way to intolerance; intolerance leads to alienation and tribal prejudice;then comes hostility, blind hatred, and ultimately murderous fury. The mythic consciousness becomes so out of touch with reality that it is not merely dysfunctional, but actually insane. A well documented case of this in Buddhism is Japanese Zen. The hierachy evolved a myth that identified the Emperor, the Sun-god, as an emanation of the primordial Buddha. The bulk of the
Zen establishment for a hundred years encouraged the notion that to kill or die for the Emperor was a sacred act. This was a key support for the warrior culture that erupted in the barbarism of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, leaving tens of millions dead, probably more than the crusades or jihad, amid some of the worst atrocities imaginable.
https://sites.google.com/site/santipada/it'stimeSelain cerita Abhidahamma yang terlalu berlebihan, juga ada perjanjian antara Sang Buddha Gautama dan YA Ananda ketika mengangkar YA Ananda menjadi pelayan dari Sang Buddha Gautama.