Why myths matter

His new novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale is not, as has become so popular, a retelling of an old fairy tale, but a new fairy tale set in our modern world. The story of Tara, a young woman who returns to her grieving family after a year disappearance having not aged a day, resists literal interpretation.

Instead, the grief of those effected by Tara's loss, much like the grief of Demeter for her daughter Persephone, gives us a rich metaphor for the internal processes of death and rebirth that cycle within us all.

The literal interpretation of myth has done nothing to lessen our hunger for the insight and wisdom it imparts through metaphor. But because as a culture we've lost sight of the real purpose of myths, we're in danger of stripping these stories of their true meanings and reducing them to empty fantasies, spectacle and immature wish fulfilment.

But with Some Kind of Fairy Tale recently optioned for film and Joyce's previous novel The Silent Land scheduled to begin shooting under the creative team responsible for Brokeback Mountain , maybe we can hope to see some real mythic storytelling returning to the big screen. Chasing rainbows: why myths matter. Literal interpretations of mythic stories miss their point of imparting wisdom through metaphor.

The truth hurts … there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or to put it another way. In order to create the great myths, a society needs a certain degree of development: sufficient size, trade interactions, wealth, stability, and a specialized, leisured class of literati. But the same factors that make this possible are also the factors that bring to a close the era that the stories tell of.

Thus myth, in the form that we have it, tells the story of its own death. This is the birth of self-reflection: a story about its own story. The story of the Buddha, while cast in the form of myth, is no longer an organic growth over centuries.

It is a conscious, deliberate formulation, conceived by masters of literary structure. One of the few modern masters of myth, Roberto Calasso , summed it up perfectly: the Buddha came to put an end to gesture. No longer was spiritual life measured by external expressions of narrative, sign, and ritual, but by an inner awakening. Buddhism—together with the other rationalizing movements of the time like Jainism—was the first generation of of post-mythic religions, serving a similar role as the philosophers did in Greece.

From then on, myth was used as a storytelling device, just as Hollywood uses it today. It might be used by people with a greater or lesser grasp of its depths, in more or less powerful or profound ways, but it is being used, deliberately, rather than emerging organically from the depths. Something like the Buddhacarita is as much a precursor of the modern novel as it is the inheritor of the ancient myth.

This is not to say that myth is in fact dead in Buddhism; there is always a vast gap between the insights of the sages and the understanding of the masses.

Myth is very much alive for many Buddhists; and the unawareness of this fact underlies many of the tensions we find in modern Buddhism. I have argued many times that the denial of myth, the chronic lack of understanding of what it is and why it matters, pervades modern Buddhist study and practice.

We have what is probably the largest and oldest collections of sacred stories anywhere in the world, yet they are routinely ignored and dismissed.

This is one of the reasons I abandoned my plan to write a proper article on Buddhist mythology for Wikipedia. The current article is appalling, but it is an reasonable representation of the current state of awareness and study of the issue. There are many rich veins of insight and study of myth in modern times. It would be nice to see the current impoverished study of Buddhism tap into these.

In India a similar process was going on long before Buddhism appeared. The old myths of the Rgveda lost their dominating importance and were challenged by new gods and new myths in the Brahmanas.

The large and elaborate srauta rituals became the exotic exception and the householder rituals became normal. But also the immortality of brahmaloka got in reach of humans - in the early Upanisads even not through rituals but through insight and spiritual understanding.

Eventually the pre-Buddhist Upanisads probably influenced by sramanas declare the end of old age, death, and sorrow:. And of course we have the same oscillation of recession and rejuvenation in Buddhism as well. For a long time arahantship is considered impossible any more among many Buddhists etc. This is not about the quality or content of the teaching. The adaptation style is presented in verse in the EBT.

This adaptation attitude of the Buddhist belief system has continued from early Indian Buddhism to different developments of Buddhism in India, China, Japan, and other areas. Mythology I think is at its root a way for cultures to present a way to make sense of life, which in reality seems to be simply a series of arbitrary events. Possibilities, of course, being possibilities that we can imagine. Real life events often strain our ability to make sense of them, so we make stories to digest them.

The really satisfying stories start out looking incomprehensible like life and then slowly reveal a pattern we can understand, or they provide an example of the experience being meaningful. They might write to an expected template, but they still have to populate it with semi-random details to make every story unique. I know of one professional writer who laments the turn away from reading fiction, that it sort of de-skills people when it comes to understanding human personalities, internal motivations, and ethics.

With Buddhist myth, I find the jataka and other mythological tales fascinating, as well as the cosmological depictions.

Philosophical speculation was generally discouraged as argument-causing, so moral fables were the release valve. Mahayana sutras later picked up that baton with mythologized Buddhas giving teachings to mythologized disciples and bodhisattvas. Finally, someone gets it! Yes, the core motif of Buddhist mythology is the death of the Buddha. And all the stuff —the stories, the stupas, the artworks, the legends, the whole Jataka and bodhisattva idea—is a response to the loss of the Buddha and the need to find some connection.

Again, thank you! This pattern is first established in the Khandhaka. And, while this has not been my focus of study, it continues today, whether with the hagiographies of forest saints, or the authorization-stories of secular institutions.

I mean, no-one is saying that mythology replaces the four noble truths. But the fact that it has been there since the beginning surely suggests that it is something rather more significant that just a bit of marketing.

Mythology is a way of telling the story of Buddhism in a way that connects with and is relevant to human beings.

Today, the popularity of the hero narrative shows that the power of mythological storytelling is undiminished. So happy to see a sympathetic take on mythology. The result is that we become culturally smarter and faster. Facebook Instagram YouTube. Privacy Settings. We use cookies to enhance your experience while using our website. If you are using our Services via a browser you can restrict, block or remove cookies through your web browser settings. We also use content and scripts from third parties that may use tracking technologies.

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