Last month, at Darwin’s Birthday Party, I sat next to a long-time friend and talked a bit about how the Buddha’s teaching addresses three moral levels, here listed from lowest to highest: (3) lack of regard for others, aka “Wrong View” (2) concern for others and striving to do the right thing aka “Right View, With Taints” and (1) doing the right things out of selflessness, aka “Supramunane View” — and not your usual sort of selflessness, either, but a very special kind.
My friend’s response was to say that this had parallels in the earth-based religions’ considerations around “Maiden, Mother, Crone” — which at the time simply gave me pause. I said, “I can see that,” and set it aside.
Almost a month later it arises again in my thinking (sincere thanks to Matt) so that on one level I can see definite parallels, and on yet another I also see that what the Buddha was saying was truly timeless but the examples he used were deeply embedded in his time, place, culture. I had been trying to understand why he was so hard on those he perceived as being all about “atta” (self) — after all these were the folks who went off into the forest and minded their own business; the worst I can find them doing in the canon is denying the view of others — while he was far kinder to those who were all about karma — yet they were the ones slaughtering animals on the behalf of high officials and rajas. But in stepping back and seeing it in terms of Maiden, Mother, Crone there may be an answer.
When seen as mythical structure, with no intention to pin these actual behaviors on anyone I know — in fact quite the opposite, because I’m saying that these are archetypes and there are really no examples of people who are exactly and totally like any of them — “Maiden” represents the totally selfish person who has recently discovered sensual pleasures and is sampling them here and there to see how far they go and has very little perspective on how her behavior affects the rest of the world; “Mother” has to grow up a little and take responsibility for others and do the right thing, though on some level we can see that the things she is doing are still out of self-interest and self-perpetuation, since it’s her baby that she is growing up for; “Crone” on the other hand has had lots of time to gain wisdom and is well past having particular concern for either sensuality or generating herself into the future.
If the Buddha was trying to point out something timeless, but all his references were to the folks of his own time, it almost doesn’t matter who appeared to be doing the more dramatically wrong things. He may well have seen the newish concepts around “atta” — self — as being a really bad trend and representative of the most harmful of human behaviors, “karma” as taking responsibility but for less-than-ideal reasons (selfish interests), and only his path as the one that truly frees a person.