The Demon Mara

And The Bad Things about Bad Things

Relief fragment of Mara in Gandharastyle, found in Swat Valley (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(demon))

Hatred is wishing that something might not exist in the future. And Greed is the opposite. Wishing that something might indeed exist in the future.

Hatred and greed can feed off each other, and themselves. You can hate hate, or be greedy for greed. Or be greedy for hate, or hate greed.

Hatred and Greed lead to many bad things. For example:

Anxiety is the feeling that the future will be bad. It derives from either hatred or greed. Either because something you don’t want to exist will exist, or something you want to exist won’t.

Regret is the feeling that the past was bad. Like anxiety, it relies on hatred and greed. You can only regret something that didn’t happen but you wanted to happen, or something that did happen but you wanted not to happen.

Similarly, you can be anxious about being anxious, or regret regret. You can even be anxious about being anxious about being anxious.

All these bad things have two things in common:

1. They involve time (future and past).
2. They involve a belief in certainty.

Remove either time or certainty and the bad things vanish.

There is no Satan or Shaitan in Buddhist cosmology. The closest thing we have is the demon Mara. Mara is the embodiment of the belief in time and certainty. A sort of control-freak-par-excellence.

Disappear Mara and badness disappears.