On Satan

I cannot think of a better argument on behalf of Buddhism than Satan.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself there. It's a provocative line and the basis for exploring whether Buddhism's cosmology accounts for the rise and fall of the Abrahamic faiths' arch-villain. Five centuries before the founding of Christianity, the Buddha had laid out the causes and conditions for heavenly tumbles. What goes up...

Here I will treat Lucifer and Satan as being one and the same since that is how they are generally understood in Christianity. Ray Hermann has an article that delves more deeply into the origin of the appellations, one which sources the Prince of Darkness in an actual historical figure from ancient Babylon.

The Old Testament started out as stories perhaps inspired sometimes by quasi-historical events or figures, then were later pulled from their moorings and made more abstract. The abstractions were not about this particular evil king, but about any evil king who stands against God. When Netanyahu quoted Samuel 15:3 on the eve of the IDF's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, he made the modern Palestinians a stand in for the Amalekites of old. If you wonder why some cultures seem unable to let go and move on...

When you constantly reinterpret your present circumstances in terms of something that may or may not have happened 3,000 years ago, it's to be expected that progress in humane things will be slow at best.

Lucifer means "light bearer" (Lux, lucis/fero for you Latin hounds out there) and the name we have comes from St. Jerome's Vulgate, for centuries the standard Latin edition of the Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome's translation is from a Hebrew equivalent and, at least to my unscholarly eyes, seems accurate even if the whatness is missing. Did he carry torches? Was he in charge of keeping heaven lit?

In English, the "uh-fur" sounds the same when we say Christopher – the Christ Bearer. It seems "ifer" and "opher" are phonetically and definitionally the same across Latin and Greek.

Satan is mentioned sparingly in the Hebrew Bible and usually comes across as a free roaming spirit whose mission is to accuse and tempt. He is a corruptor of men and nations.

As we get into the New Testament, he becomes a much bigger deal. He tempts Christ in the desert and when he fails, realizes the stakes have been raised and that his days flitting about the earth are numbered. He has misjudged the carpenter's son and so for the rest of the New Testament, he becomes the boss of an evil army that seeks to destroy the Church and upend creation. Hell is losing souls to Jesus.

We turn to the Old Testament to get Satan's origin story. Ezekiel 29:11-19 refers to a cherub arrayed in every kind of finery and given pride of place in the divine pecking order. He is free to move about as he wishes, just as in the Book of Job (1:6). His freedom of movement associates him and his cohort with the medium of air in the New Testament and now, with UAPs.

15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till unrighteousness was found in thee.

If hell has its discontents, heaven is not without its critics as well. You can have it all and still be afflicted.

On this side of the grave, we wonder at what exactly eternity would look like in practical terms. For the theologically minded, the question becomes: What caused Lucifer, who conducted himself in perfection, to give notice and go independent? If there is free will in heaven, does that mean the saintly souls who wash up on celestial shores will themselves follow in Lucifer's path in a few years or aeons? What does free will even mean for creatures who have achieved perfection? What could possibly be better than being top dog in heaven? Will eternity be a never ending struggle against temptations that, when succumbed to, restart the whole damn cycle over?

V. 15 says "till unrighteousness was found in thee." Implied here is that the unrighteousness was already there, waiting to hatch. It was not something Satan picked up in his travels. Or maybe it was. There's not enough information. Maybe he got strange ideas from talking to other beings in parts of the cosmos we know nothing about.

If his ways were perfect, it was all an outer sham that eventually gave way to the inner rot. We see a creature with a defective will whose weakness overcomes his superlative nature, thereby cracking the facade. There is a flaw in him same as in every sentient being no matter the stature.

A little further, we read:

17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I have cast thee to the ground, I have laid thee before kings, that they may behold thee.

The brightness of the light bearer exceeded his wisdom and we see a practical Exhibit A of the warning found in Proverbs 16:18.

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

This was compressed into the English truism, "Pride goeth before the Fall."

He was not a torch bearer or the guy who switches on lights in the heavenly palaces and stadiums. The brightness that defined him emanated from himself. The passage is saying that Lucifer corrupted himself before he became the defiler of others: the cause was not something external to him. His good karma began running out and eventually, he lost his footing.

From Ezekiel and Isaiah, we have the picture of a heavenly being self-seduced by his own haughtiness to the point he was expelled along with his entourage from heaven.

From a Buddhist perspective, the story illustrates the impermanence of states within samsara (the endless wandering) and that there is nothing so good this side of Nibbana that it can satisfy thoroughly, putting the heart at complete rest.

In Revelation 12:7-9, the origin story is embellished to include Satan taking down one third (12:3-4) of the heavenly choir with him into the Pit. This is like a disgruntled top performer quitting a national advertising firm, taking whatever talent he can with him, to start a competitor. I think this is a subplot in one of the later seasons of Mad Men.

Those who followed Satan into rebellion were like their boss, dissatisfied. Say what you want about heaven, dukkha is no respecter of man, angel or beast. Christians will invariably say that the demonic is so by choice; it skirts the question about the kind of object that could draw one away from a beautiful existing focus. Who leaves these other objects lying about anyway that distract from the Beatific Vision?

In different metaphysical systems, devas are made of a subtle body that exists in varying degrees of refinement. Put another way, they've bodies and what is a body but a boundary between this and that? Once you enter the realm of subjects & objects, I & thou, you are in the formed, the created and the compounded – samsara. Here is the playground of dukkha.

Nibbana on the other hand is the unformed, the uncreated, the timeless, the deathless. There is either Nibbana or samsara. Heaven is firmly fixed in samsara as the scriptures of the traditions tell us. Nibbana once obtained can never be lost. Ever.

In his book The Big Picture, Sean Carroll summarizes the view of heaven presented by the English novelist Julian Barnes in his book A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters:

    A man, who had been a working-class Englishman, wakes up after his death in a new environment, where everything is wonderful. He can have anything he asks for, with one implicit catch: he has to have the imagination to ask for it. Being who he is, he has sex with countless attractive women, eats meal after amazing meal, meets up with famous celebrities and politicians, and becomes so good at playing golf that he scores a hole in one more often than not.
    Inevitably, he begins to grow fidgety and bored. After inquiring a bit from one of heaven’s staff members, he discovers there is an option to simply end it all and die. And do people in heaven actually choose to die, he asks?
    “Everyone takes the option,” the staffer answers, “sooner or later.”

Carroll observes, "You don’t really want to live forever. Eternity is longer than you think."

There is only so much sensuality that one can enjoy before it drives you to seek something else. The first bite of the gourmet-confected chocolate mousse is delicious, the second also yummy. By the 7th and 8th bite, the artisanal dessert has lost its charm and there is just a mopping up of residue. Hormones signal satiation.

In Barnes' story, the boredom of the saints gives way to a desire for sweet Eternal Oblivion while with Satan, it fuels the ambition to rule, to be in first position in the lowest realm:

What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
—Milton, Paradise Lost

In either case, there is a dissatisfaction with the way things are. Dukkha is always there in the background and like gravity, behaves as a perpetual weak force that eventually wins.

Barnes shows us a sensual heaven that is relatable in varying degrees to the one described by the major world religions. It is a place of objects and identities, this and that. Both Barnes and Carroll have the right intuition about the theoretical heaven realm, although they find Annihilation the natural, inevitable end of this life. Permanent Oblivion can be desirable because to be is to be incomplete, always wanting, always hungry.

For the Buddha, Annihilation and its contrary Eternalism – the belief that there is an everlasting soul that transmigrates across different forms over innumerable lifetimes, or that there are simply emanations of One Everlasting Self – are both wrong views that keep people lost, wandering in samsara.

The skeptical Westerner may look askance at the claim of multiple lives and Nibbana, but there is no way of escaping the empirical evidence for dukkha held in our own minds. Perhaps we know people who have wealth and status, but clearly suffer from insecurity. We ourselves no matter how low or high are always on the verge of a fall. At least our minds suggest this from time to time.