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#22 | |
A Shade of Westernesse
Join Date: May 2004
Location: The last wave over Atalantë
Posts: 515
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Quote:
Tolkien's book is not about duality (Good vs Evil), but triality. Three examples are Eru, Melkor, and the Ainur Flame Imperishable, Void, and Ea (That Which Is) Aragorn, Arwen, and Elrond In the Tolkienian cosmology, each of the individuals in these trialities is both a free agent and divinely attached to the other two Eru is Supreme One Melkor is one who desire to be All the Ainur are Many in the service of the One The emergent conflict is Ea Now, if Eru has a plan for Ea, there can be no conflict. Yet we all know that the stories in the Silm, LotR and TH are conflict narratives. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by attachments. By eliminating these attachments one can transcend this existence and achieve a higher state of being. The Illusion in Buddhism is the separateness of life and death. We suffer because we feel we have to act according to whatever moral code we inherited from our parents and our parent-culture in this life - death is our only adviser on how to live life. Tolkien saw through the parent-culture: he recognized that industrialization is a Yang force, the God separated from the Goddess. The Lord of the Rings is his linguistic-alchemical attempt to unite God and Goddess. What he overlooked is the illusion that birth and death exist. There can be no divine will in a free agent. The body is a musical note: it is born, dances, and dies. Frodo is attached to saving the Shire. He suffers for the Shire, is unfulfilled, and then dies. It doesn't get more Buddhist than that: it doesn't get more real than that. How could 'Frodo' possibly retain his body-mind form after death? How can Eru create an Eternal body which did not exist when Eru began? Realizing that there is no difference between Divine Will and Free Agency, that every act Frodo carried out was both fully manifested in himself and in Eru at all times throughout the novel, is not Paradox: it is Liberation, Gnosis, Eucatastrophe to simultaneously know and feel that God has no plan for you, that you and you alone are that which you seek. Buddhism offers rational practice to the individual to realize this in the Here & Now. I propose that one could achieve eucatastrophe solely by combining Mahayana Buddhist practice with the Eru-Arda cosmology: but then, on what plane would the two meet? ![]() Last edited by Son of Númenor; 11-15-2007 at 08:52 AM. |
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