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labingiThe Dharma talk I intended last week gave me a piece of information that I feel has unlocked Mirage of Blaze for me, elucidating the thematic trajectory of the whole text. Maybe this is old news to some, but I wanted to write about it. Potential spoilers for all of Mirage
(Blanket disclaimer: I am a tiny baby Buddhist, so I’m likely getting details about Buddhist teaching wrong.)
The information mentioned in the Dharma talk was this: Many believe Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) to be the only bodhisattva to have attained Buddhahood and chosen to become a bodhisattva again, i.e. to relinquish Nirvana (and some small measure of enlightenment) to remain in service to sentient beings and feel some suffering in common with them.
Suddenly it all made sense!
In general Buddhist (not Mirage-specific) terms, this makes sense to me because Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion; that is to say, having compassion for others was her particular vow, the goal that set her on the bodhisattva path. To have compassion, however, it is helpful to have empathy, and to have empathy, one must be able feel, on some level, what someone else feels. So if someone is suffering, empathy implies some degree of suffering along with them; Buddhas do not suffer. (I feel my reading of this, however, is inflected by the Western roots of the word “compassion”: “suffering together,” whereas the Asian terms associated with Kannon generally refer to “perceiving” others’ situations; I guess that implies empathy to though?)
On to Mirage
Part 1: Minako
In a very Western way, I will lead off with my thesis: I think Mirage is saying that Naoe is on the same path as Kannon. (Perhaps in the very distant future, Naoe will fill the role of Kannon.) I had already come to the conclusion that Naoe was moving toward the bodhisattva path, but this makes the whole narrative much clearer.
For one thing, his story runs parallel to Minako’s, and Minako is explicitly likened to Kannon (over and over...). In the Shouwa prequels, Minako and Naoe are distorted mirror images of each other. Both their lives are defined by coming to love Kagetora, and Kagetora loves them both: they are the only serious, life-partner loves of his life. Both are willing to sacrifice greatly for Kagetora, and both express such a pitch of devotion (albeit in very different ways) that he comes to (provisionally) rely on them as people who won’t abandon him. The similarity of the roles they fill for Kagetora is the basis of Naoe’s jealousy of Minako and his private thought that if she were a man, she would replace him.
In the prequels, Naoe and Minako’s relationship does not go well, she dies, and he ends up with massive guilt for raping her. (I’m not sure how much guilt he feels for exorcising her; he had to do that to save Kagetora, and he’d certainly do it again.) His guilt drives him to a very rapid reevaluation of Minako. He goes almost at once from hating her to virtually worshipping her, and, thus, for both Naoe and Kagetora, she becomes the Kannon/Mary figure they appeal to for forgiveness. (Her own soul has passed on to be reincarnated, so I’m not confident these prayers are actually heard in any way.)
This pedestaling of Minako as Kannon is a problematic way to think about an ordinary (if impressive) human being, but it does surely show that Naoe has tremendous regard for the idea of Kannon. Though he disdains Buddhist practice in many ways, he profoundly honors her place in it.
Part 2: Future Naoe
To skip a bit of development (for now), the oldest Naoe we see is the “billion”-year-old Naoe from present Naoe’s weird vision toward the end of the series. Now, this vision isn’t necessarily a literal glimpse into the future, but whether it is or not, I think it thematically sets up a trajectory for Naoe after the story’s conclusion. Future Naoe comports himself much as I would expect someone on the bodhisattva path to do. He is calm, helpful, friendly, sympathetic, and demonstrates no signs of personal need or distress. He is very compassionate to Present Naoe. I think this scene is a hint that Naoe is heading toward the bodhisattva path, though very slowly. Even Future Naoe observes he himself is not at the end of his journey.
Part 3: Naoe Learning Compassion through Kagetora
The earliest Naoe we know of (the adult “original” Naoe, unless I’m missing something) is almost the antithesis of compassionate. He’s not a bad man by the measure of his society, but he is pretty low down on Kuukai’s stages of enlightenment, not exceeding stage 2 (of 10), which is grasping Confucian ethics. He is a good Confucian; his loyalty to Kenshin and Kagekatsu is real. He discharges his duties ably, and he expects to recompensed in kind. His greatest concern is that he is not fairly recompensed, that his work as a samurai is not properly valued in terms of wealth, honors, etc. In a word, his ambitions are wounded, and he doesn’t seem to think much beyond this. His powers of empathy, though not absent, are fairly underdeveloped.
This rapidly begins to change when he is assigned to work as a kanshousha under Kagetora. Kagetora provides a role model previously outside of Naoe’s ken. Despite his flaws, Kagetora has the admirable trait of immediate compassion for beings in pain, not only in thought but in action: his instinct is to spring to the aid of other people. (This is how he meets Minako, for example.) Naoe figures out pretty quick that, though Kagetora is deeply weighted with his own problems (when they start working together, he has just lost the civil war), none of that dampens his care for others, and Naoe comes to admire that intensely.
Their relationship, of course, has a rocky road ahead. Kagetora belittles Naoe (to test his loyalty). That hits Naoe exactly where it hurts, in his sense of not being given his due. It also hurts in a new dimension: the belief that he is, indeed, inferior to Kagetora, that he will never reach his heights of selfless service to others. This infuriates Naoe and drives him to various bad behaviors, which hurt Kagetora and others in turn. As painful and messed up as this dynamic is, it does spur Naoe to try to emulate Kagetora. It gives him a model of compassion to aspire to.
Sidebar on Naoe and sex: Early on in Kaikou (I don’t remember the details and am not going to fish for it right now), Kagetora berates Naoe for some failure of feeling, and this reminds Naoe of his wife complaining that he lacked emotion in bed. Based on this incident, Naoe resolves to get better at sex (and, as we know, he is successful). In its way, this is part of his becoming more compassionate. The Naoe we know later is good at sex because he’s tuned in to what his partner wants; he’s learned to pay attention to others’ feelings. In fact, it’s characteristic of Naoe’s point-of-view sex scenes that he thinks far more about his partner than he does about himself; indeed, he often seems almost unaware of his own pleasure. I suspect this is pretty unusual for human beings in general, and I would read it as evidence that, at least by the 20th century, Naoe has significantly developed his own instinct for prioritizing others, at least in that dimension. (Worth noting that this tendency is not only true with Kagetora, who he’s obsessed with, but seems an innate trait in Naoe himself, insofar as his female partners are not complaining!)
Indeed, from early on, Naoe is becoming a more compassionate figure. He develops some compassion quite early for Kagetora, especially when Kagetora’s second body as a kanshousha is a child’s and Naoe ends up his caretaker. Though Naoe always asserts that he could never compete with Kagetora’s inherent wonderfulness, we see numerous examples across the series of his empathy and compassion. He feels deeply for Haruie over losing her love, Shintarou. He is astute in his observation that Narimasa wants to be tortured by Sayuri, whom he wronged. His affection for the Kasahara and Tachibana families bespeaks a deep ability to care for people, well outside his obsession with Kagetora. At least by the 20th century, he is generally caring and helpful to most random people who happen across his path needing assistance.
Naoe’s ability to focus on others’ needs ahead of his own is put to the test in second half the main series when he has to face Kagetora’s soul dying. There are times when Naoe could have exorcised him and, thus, saved his soul, though not his identity as Kagetora. But in the end, he doesn’t. He honors Kagetora’s decision to sacrifice his life in order to create the Shadow Shikoku. That is surely the most difficult thing Naoe has ever had to do, and he does it to place Kagetora’s needs above his own, which is an act of stunning compassion.
Part 4: Naoe’s Compassion for Kagetora
Long before this particular trial, however, Naoe has been sacrificing for Kagetora. Throughout much of the middle of the main series, he repeats ad infinitum that this horrible, abusive push-and-pull they have with each other is their “ideal way of being.” When more objective folks like Irobe suggest they’re going to destroy themselves and should give it up, Naoe refuses. In fact, he staunchly eschews (almost) all the good Buddhist things that would calm his spirit and alleviate his pain. Instead he jealously guards his obsession with Kagetora and, when he needs to calm himself down, opts for superficial props like sex or smoking. He positively refuses mindfulness, having one of the most relentlessly active “monkey minds” of any character I’ve ever read. (That he can’t even be mindfully in the moment when he’s having sex with Kagetora really says something!)
But he does all this, or at least the reason he cannot conceive of doing anything else is because Kagetora needs his obsession. He says something like this to Irobe in volume 15. Kagetora needs to be worshipped by him; without that adoration, his fragile ego will fall apart and his terror of abandonment take over. This is perfectly true—we see it happen in the Karin arc, where Kagetora thinks Naoe (being impersonated semi-badly by Kotarou) has ceased to love him. It does, indeed, crush him.
Naoe’s great argument against following the Dharma is, in essence, that his doing so would harm Kagetora, or to be more specific, harm him more than any of the harmful actions Naoe’s obsession drives him to (yes, even more than the rape of Minako, though Naoe does not exactly state it this way). And he’s right. At least, he’s provisionally right. There might be an utterly different scenario where the much healthier, less obsessive love of someone like Minako might also help heal Kagetora. But my sense is that, because it would be less obsessive, it would be harder for Kagetora to fully believe in and, thus, would slow his healing. In any case, that’s not a path Naoe has immediately available to him: he himself has been so wounded by Kagetora that were he to lessen his obsession, it would probably attenuate their relationship overall (increasing Naoe’s drive to leave and get some self-care) and that would wound Kagetora as Kotarou!Naoe does.
And Thus—Kannon
By now you can probably see where this is going. There is an analogy to be made between Naoe’s refusal of the Dharma and Kannon’s relinquishment of Buddhahood. Of course, Kannon is X-number of kalpas ahead of Naoe in overall spiritual development. But the analog is there, the willingness to sacrifice one’s own joy, one’s own enlightenment, to be present for other people.
I would read Naoe’s experiences with Kagetora as a crucible he goes through to emerge purer at the end. He puts himself through a lot of agony, and it teaches him some indelible lessons about the nature of suffering and his own capacity to be present for another person, his own ability for care for others, which even by the end of the main events of Mirage is immense compared to most of us. His life with Kagetora forges Naoe into a being oriented toward compassion. He has a very long way to go before he will be Future Naoe and longer still till he might become a bodhisattva, but if he gets there, I suspect he’ll get there with a vow very much like Kannon’s, to hear the plight of other people and alleviate their suffering.
(Blanket disclaimer: I am a tiny baby Buddhist, so I’m likely getting details about Buddhist teaching wrong.)
The information mentioned in the Dharma talk was this: Many believe Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) to be the only bodhisattva to have attained Buddhahood and chosen to become a bodhisattva again, i.e. to relinquish Nirvana (and some small measure of enlightenment) to remain in service to sentient beings and feel some suffering in common with them.
Suddenly it all made sense!
In general Buddhist (not Mirage-specific) terms, this makes sense to me because Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion; that is to say, having compassion for others was her particular vow, the goal that set her on the bodhisattva path. To have compassion, however, it is helpful to have empathy, and to have empathy, one must be able feel, on some level, what someone else feels. So if someone is suffering, empathy implies some degree of suffering along with them; Buddhas do not suffer. (I feel my reading of this, however, is inflected by the Western roots of the word “compassion”: “suffering together,” whereas the Asian terms associated with Kannon generally refer to “perceiving” others’ situations; I guess that implies empathy to though?)
On to Mirage
Part 1: Minako
In a very Western way, I will lead off with my thesis: I think Mirage is saying that Naoe is on the same path as Kannon. (Perhaps in the very distant future, Naoe will fill the role of Kannon.) I had already come to the conclusion that Naoe was moving toward the bodhisattva path, but this makes the whole narrative much clearer.
For one thing, his story runs parallel to Minako’s, and Minako is explicitly likened to Kannon (over and over...). In the Shouwa prequels, Minako and Naoe are distorted mirror images of each other. Both their lives are defined by coming to love Kagetora, and Kagetora loves them both: they are the only serious, life-partner loves of his life. Both are willing to sacrifice greatly for Kagetora, and both express such a pitch of devotion (albeit in very different ways) that he comes to (provisionally) rely on them as people who won’t abandon him. The similarity of the roles they fill for Kagetora is the basis of Naoe’s jealousy of Minako and his private thought that if she were a man, she would replace him.
In the prequels, Naoe and Minako’s relationship does not go well, she dies, and he ends up with massive guilt for raping her. (I’m not sure how much guilt he feels for exorcising her; he had to do that to save Kagetora, and he’d certainly do it again.) His guilt drives him to a very rapid reevaluation of Minako. He goes almost at once from hating her to virtually worshipping her, and, thus, for both Naoe and Kagetora, she becomes the Kannon/Mary figure they appeal to for forgiveness. (Her own soul has passed on to be reincarnated, so I’m not confident these prayers are actually heard in any way.)
This pedestaling of Minako as Kannon is a problematic way to think about an ordinary (if impressive) human being, but it does surely show that Naoe has tremendous regard for the idea of Kannon. Though he disdains Buddhist practice in many ways, he profoundly honors her place in it.
Part 2: Future Naoe
To skip a bit of development (for now), the oldest Naoe we see is the “billion”-year-old Naoe from present Naoe’s weird vision toward the end of the series. Now, this vision isn’t necessarily a literal glimpse into the future, but whether it is or not, I think it thematically sets up a trajectory for Naoe after the story’s conclusion. Future Naoe comports himself much as I would expect someone on the bodhisattva path to do. He is calm, helpful, friendly, sympathetic, and demonstrates no signs of personal need or distress. He is very compassionate to Present Naoe. I think this scene is a hint that Naoe is heading toward the bodhisattva path, though very slowly. Even Future Naoe observes he himself is not at the end of his journey.
Part 3: Naoe Learning Compassion through Kagetora
The earliest Naoe we know of (the adult “original” Naoe, unless I’m missing something) is almost the antithesis of compassionate. He’s not a bad man by the measure of his society, but he is pretty low down on Kuukai’s stages of enlightenment, not exceeding stage 2 (of 10), which is grasping Confucian ethics. He is a good Confucian; his loyalty to Kenshin and Kagekatsu is real. He discharges his duties ably, and he expects to recompensed in kind. His greatest concern is that he is not fairly recompensed, that his work as a samurai is not properly valued in terms of wealth, honors, etc. In a word, his ambitions are wounded, and he doesn’t seem to think much beyond this. His powers of empathy, though not absent, are fairly underdeveloped.
This rapidly begins to change when he is assigned to work as a kanshousha under Kagetora. Kagetora provides a role model previously outside of Naoe’s ken. Despite his flaws, Kagetora has the admirable trait of immediate compassion for beings in pain, not only in thought but in action: his instinct is to spring to the aid of other people. (This is how he meets Minako, for example.) Naoe figures out pretty quick that, though Kagetora is deeply weighted with his own problems (when they start working together, he has just lost the civil war), none of that dampens his care for others, and Naoe comes to admire that intensely.
Their relationship, of course, has a rocky road ahead. Kagetora belittles Naoe (to test his loyalty). That hits Naoe exactly where it hurts, in his sense of not being given his due. It also hurts in a new dimension: the belief that he is, indeed, inferior to Kagetora, that he will never reach his heights of selfless service to others. This infuriates Naoe and drives him to various bad behaviors, which hurt Kagetora and others in turn. As painful and messed up as this dynamic is, it does spur Naoe to try to emulate Kagetora. It gives him a model of compassion to aspire to.
Sidebar on Naoe and sex: Early on in Kaikou (I don’t remember the details and am not going to fish for it right now), Kagetora berates Naoe for some failure of feeling, and this reminds Naoe of his wife complaining that he lacked emotion in bed. Based on this incident, Naoe resolves to get better at sex (and, as we know, he is successful). In its way, this is part of his becoming more compassionate. The Naoe we know later is good at sex because he’s tuned in to what his partner wants; he’s learned to pay attention to others’ feelings. In fact, it’s characteristic of Naoe’s point-of-view sex scenes that he thinks far more about his partner than he does about himself; indeed, he often seems almost unaware of his own pleasure. I suspect this is pretty unusual for human beings in general, and I would read it as evidence that, at least by the 20th century, Naoe has significantly developed his own instinct for prioritizing others, at least in that dimension. (Worth noting that this tendency is not only true with Kagetora, who he’s obsessed with, but seems an innate trait in Naoe himself, insofar as his female partners are not complaining!)
Indeed, from early on, Naoe is becoming a more compassionate figure. He develops some compassion quite early for Kagetora, especially when Kagetora’s second body as a kanshousha is a child’s and Naoe ends up his caretaker. Though Naoe always asserts that he could never compete with Kagetora’s inherent wonderfulness, we see numerous examples across the series of his empathy and compassion. He feels deeply for Haruie over losing her love, Shintarou. He is astute in his observation that Narimasa wants to be tortured by Sayuri, whom he wronged. His affection for the Kasahara and Tachibana families bespeaks a deep ability to care for people, well outside his obsession with Kagetora. At least by the 20th century, he is generally caring and helpful to most random people who happen across his path needing assistance.
Naoe’s ability to focus on others’ needs ahead of his own is put to the test in second half the main series when he has to face Kagetora’s soul dying. There are times when Naoe could have exorcised him and, thus, saved his soul, though not his identity as Kagetora. But in the end, he doesn’t. He honors Kagetora’s decision to sacrifice his life in order to create the Shadow Shikoku. That is surely the most difficult thing Naoe has ever had to do, and he does it to place Kagetora’s needs above his own, which is an act of stunning compassion.
Part 4: Naoe’s Compassion for Kagetora
Long before this particular trial, however, Naoe has been sacrificing for Kagetora. Throughout much of the middle of the main series, he repeats ad infinitum that this horrible, abusive push-and-pull they have with each other is their “ideal way of being.” When more objective folks like Irobe suggest they’re going to destroy themselves and should give it up, Naoe refuses. In fact, he staunchly eschews (almost) all the good Buddhist things that would calm his spirit and alleviate his pain. Instead he jealously guards his obsession with Kagetora and, when he needs to calm himself down, opts for superficial props like sex or smoking. He positively refuses mindfulness, having one of the most relentlessly active “monkey minds” of any character I’ve ever read. (That he can’t even be mindfully in the moment when he’s having sex with Kagetora really says something!)
But he does all this, or at least the reason he cannot conceive of doing anything else is because Kagetora needs his obsession. He says something like this to Irobe in volume 15. Kagetora needs to be worshipped by him; without that adoration, his fragile ego will fall apart and his terror of abandonment take over. This is perfectly true—we see it happen in the Karin arc, where Kagetora thinks Naoe (being impersonated semi-badly by Kotarou) has ceased to love him. It does, indeed, crush him.
Naoe’s great argument against following the Dharma is, in essence, that his doing so would harm Kagetora, or to be more specific, harm him more than any of the harmful actions Naoe’s obsession drives him to (yes, even more than the rape of Minako, though Naoe does not exactly state it this way). And he’s right. At least, he’s provisionally right. There might be an utterly different scenario where the much healthier, less obsessive love of someone like Minako might also help heal Kagetora. But my sense is that, because it would be less obsessive, it would be harder for Kagetora to fully believe in and, thus, would slow his healing. In any case, that’s not a path Naoe has immediately available to him: he himself has been so wounded by Kagetora that were he to lessen his obsession, it would probably attenuate their relationship overall (increasing Naoe’s drive to leave and get some self-care) and that would wound Kagetora as Kotarou!Naoe does.
And Thus—Kannon
By now you can probably see where this is going. There is an analogy to be made between Naoe’s refusal of the Dharma and Kannon’s relinquishment of Buddhahood. Of course, Kannon is X-number of kalpas ahead of Naoe in overall spiritual development. But the analog is there, the willingness to sacrifice one’s own joy, one’s own enlightenment, to be present for other people.
I would read Naoe’s experiences with Kagetora as a crucible he goes through to emerge purer at the end. He puts himself through a lot of agony, and it teaches him some indelible lessons about the nature of suffering and his own capacity to be present for another person, his own ability for care for others, which even by the end of the main events of Mirage is immense compared to most of us. His life with Kagetora forges Naoe into a being oriented toward compassion. He has a very long way to go before he will be Future Naoe and longer still till he might become a bodhisattva, but if he gets there, I suspect he’ll get there with a vow very much like Kannon’s, to hear the plight of other people and alleviate their suffering.
