Kṣitigarbha, Lazarus, and Christ

On Katabaseis

I was recently arrested by the following image, which gave me the most curious and in some ways splendorous dream:

First, the dream: I was in hell. Not, mind you, an ancient hell: not a subterranean hell, a chthonian nightmare beset by the draconic breath of cavernous beasts and baleful woes, no Sheol or Hades or Tartaros or naraka or Inferno. Instead, I was in that most traditionally modern hell of a high school gymnasium, and I was surrounded by many of my nearest and dearest as we went through a series of torments designed by what I can only describe as white, evangelical demons, their A-shirts showing through their pit-stained white button-ups, their glasses set squarely on their faces, the words of their masters Wayne Grudem and John Piper on their lips. It became apparent to me after spending some time with them that they did not coerce the souls under their supervision by means of force, but word: they were reiterating to these souls arguments about the eternity of their punishment, teasing them with the possibility of early release only to reveal that they had been lightly fudging in promising what they asserted again and again were impossibilities. And at one point in the dream, I realized that my otherself in the dream was perfectly well aware that their theology was, in fact, demonic, and was able to begin articulating to them the necessity and clarity of universal salvation, even the magisterial arguments of That All Shall Be Saved.

If I sound like I jest, that would only be because the logic of dreams is, of course, not the logic of our everyday waking consciousness, and because most people do not spend the amount of time that I do talking, thinking, or reading about religion.¹ But in all earnest, this is what I saw; the dream concluded before I could successfully convince one of the demons of their error and get their assistance in freeing those enthralled. Upon waking and talking it over with a friend, I pursued the origins of the image above, and found that it is of the popular bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha , also known as Dizang in China and Jizo in Japan, whose vows are to those trapped in the underworld.

Kṣitigarbha first appears in the Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva Pūrvapraṇidhāna Sūtra, an extremely well-liked Mahayana work in Chinese Buddhism.² In the Sūtra, an immense number of cosmic beings—Buddhas, bodhisattvas, devas, nagas, demons, and more—gather around the Buddha, who admits that even he cannot number the full extent of these beings with his awakened vision; among them, he notes, are those beings yet to be delivered by Kṣitigarbha over infinite, long kalpas. As the reader comes to learn, Kṣitigarbha’s bodhisattva vow is especially devoted to liberating beings from the narakas or hells, which in the South Asian religious milieu out of which Buddhism generally, and Mahayana in particular, proceeded, are particularly horrible even by comparison with Abrahamic/Adonaistic standards; he will not enter nirvana until every last hell is empty. The moral superiority of Kṣitigarbha to the majority of Christians, who are perfectly content to abandon the majority of humanity to hell—even their dearest loved ones—to obtain their own celestial bliss in the heavenly world, should be obvious. Mahayanist devotees of Kṣitigarbha not only look to his help for salvation from the narakas, but in some sense venerate and participate in his own efforts to liberate beings from those realms within samsara that are most subject to suffering.

The image that sparked my dream caught my attention specifically for the water that Kṣitigarbha comes to drip on the flaming hand of the damned. The parallel in Christian Tradition is of course to the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Lk 16:19-31), when the Rich Man asks of Father Abraham, gazing at the bliss Lazarus enjoys in his “vale” or upon his “breast” (dependent on how one desires to translate kolpos, on which see here), requests that a drop of water be placed upon his tongue to relieve him of fiery agony. Abraham insists that this is impossible, that the separation between them is too great, and that the Rich Man now suffers in exchange for the comfort he experienced in life, while Lazarus now experiences relief from his sufferings. Lazarus is no Kṣitigarbha: he is experiencing his own karmic rewards in the afterlife just as is the Rich Man, and has not renounced, or rather transcended, the normative chain of cause and effect that conditions rebirth in various lokas. The point of the parable for the Lukan Christ, after all, is castigation of the rich for the punishments that await them in contrast to the comforts that await the poor; Christ is not here outlining the path of the bodhisattva, or the path of the saint, the imitation of his own messianic quest to invade, vanquish, and liberate hell.

Though later Western thinkers like Sts. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas saw Christ’s invasion of the underworld as of limited effect, reserved purely for the righteous of Israel, the Eastern Fathers more or less consistently see Christ as liberating all souls from the underworld, leaving only Satan enchained there.³ The New Testament does not remark at great length on Christ’s descent to the underworld; it is even ambiguous in the relevant texts whether it takes place before or after Christ’s resurrection (1 Pet 4:1-6), though early on the standard narrative of death, descent, resurrection, and ascent became normative. In that normative gospel of late antiquity, Christ descends from the heights of reality to its absolute lowest point to raise up the kosmos from the death of non-being back to heavenly life; and in the most striking visions of that dominical activity, in the writings of figures like (St.) Origen of Alexandria, the Cappadocians (most explicitly in St. Gregory Nyssen), (St.) Evagrios Pontikos, St. Maximos the Confessor, and St. Isaac the Syrian, the work of salvation is not complete until Christ the Savior has liberated every being suffering from the infection of evil into the created order, from the most remote and microscopic to the largest and macrocosmic, all or nothing, the whole or no one.

Again, this is not a big part of the earliest kerygma, despite the precedent in Jewish apocalyptic for descending heroes, prophets, or visionaries (as in, for example, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah) and its later popularity in the Greco-Roman world (where Jesus joined the ranks of heroes who descend into the underworld like Asklepios, Theseus, Herakles, Orpheus, and so forth). But the Harrowing of Hell speaks to the epic compassion with which Christ became synonymous for Christians of the “Great Church” and its traditions. Particularly in the Syriac-speaking Christian world, in those missions of the Church of the East that intersected on the Silk Roads with Mahayana Buddhists and Manichaeans as they filtered South into India and East into Tibet and Western China, a figure like Kṣitigarbha—coming to popularity during the same Tang Dynasty in which the Assyrians enjoyed relative success in their Chinese mission—would have coded very similarly to Christ himself. Manichaeans were comfortable with iconographic depictions of Jesus as a Buddha or construction of him as a bodhisattva; Christians, in turn, were happy to adopt the Buddha as a prophet of Christ and a Christian saint (Barlaam and Josaphat) and likely read the bodhisattvas of Mahayana through a similar assimilative lens, albeit one centered in the Christian narrative. In terms of traditional constructions of Jesus’ significance, Jesus as Buddha or bodhisattva is most closely related to Jesus as Teacher and Savior, and less so to Jesus’ identification by his earliest followers in the more culturally specific, apocalyptic Jewish categories of messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Lord, and so forth; while not incompatible, either, with the conciliar Christ of ecumenical dogma and metaphysical speculation, Christ the bodhisattva emerges less from abstract cosmology and more from the concrete experiences of suffering and bliss.⁴ Doubtless, Western Christians are tempted to dismiss this Jesus as insufficiently Christological by their own standards; and yet, their Christianities are dying, while the Christianities of Asia, Africa, and South America, for whom these and similar images are often significant, are thriving.

Images of liberation, like conceptions of suffering, evolve with the cultures and individuals that conceive them. Jesus as Davidic messiah was deeply significant for Paul the Apostle, who, despite being a fairly well-off Hellenistic Jew and Roman citizen of the first century, became convinced of an apocalyptic vision of Israel’s relationship to the gentile nations and the world’s relationship to God and longed for the final conquest of evil divinities that held the world enthralled to sin and death. Jesus as cosmic liberator, the essence of this portrait, remained significant even as Christians grew socially and culturally less comfortable with the Jewishness of the historical Jesus and the deep connections of the original confession, Iesous Christos, to Jewish royal and nationalist aspirations. Likewise, there have been and are today many people who would find the construction of Jesus in Paul and the Gospels as a messianic king less attractive than the notion of Jesus as an otherworldly, divine-human figure whose kingship is expressed through a commitment to the liberation of all beings from suffering, and an understanding of the Kingdom of God as something more like nirvana/nibbana or moksa. Sure, Christians have a canonical commitment to one set of images, that ground them in the shared milieu of Judaism and Islam and the Near Eastern, Mediterranean context of Christianity’s origins, but a center does not need to be a circumference; Christians have, can, and should tolerate a variety of forms that Jesus may assume in common consciousness, because for many, it is in these novel apparitions that the glorified Jesus has any significance at all. Christologies themselves can limit or liberate.

In this sense, one of the meanings I take my dream to have conveyed is that suffering is largely the product of our enthrallment to ideas. Concepts invariably get in the way of living, and of experience untainted by the disappointment inherent in dukkha; and perhaps also they are the stuff of hellfire, the reification of one’s evil as one’s self-representation, credulous assent to the word of one’s captors in a kind of cosmic Stockholm Syndrome that only a bodhisattvic parousia might break. The demons themselves are beholden to delusions about their own rights, privileges, and abilities, about the scope and importance of their activities; they know some things, and are unenlightened concerning others. In Christ’s parable, Abraham and Lazarus are still devoted to karma yoga, unaware of the jnana that until Christ saves the rich man they cannot be fully saved either, only temporarily relieved from the sufferings of this life. Christ, like the yogins, ascetics, bodhisattvas, buddhas, and other teachers of South and East Asia, comes to instruct not only men but gods, not only demons and damned souls but saints as well in the final scope of the Kingdom’s horizon, in which there is time enough for every image’s archetype to be fully realized in act, where the reality before which every thought and mold evaporates like so much fire before soothing water.

1. For a recent and strong take on the science of dreaming, see Sidarta Rabeiro and Daniel Hahn, The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams (New York: Pantheon, 2021). For interpretation, much depends on one’s tradition, but I prefer Jung, whose Symbols and Interpretations of Dreams is sometimes included with The Undiscovered Self (for a recent edition see here).

2. An accessible translation can be found here; see Robert E. Buswell, Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Zhiru Ng, The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva: Dizang in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Hank Glassman, The Face of Jizo: Image and Cult in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012).

3. See here: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/christ-the-conqueror-of-hell-the-descent-of-christ-into-hades-in-eastern-and-western-theological-traditions/.

4. See Donald S. Lopez and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds., The Christ and the Bodhisattva (New York: SUNY, 1986); HS Keel, “Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 16 (1996): 169-185; Martien E. Brinkman, The Non-Western Jesus: Jesus as Bodhisattva, Avatara, Guru, Prophet, Ancestor, or Healer? (London: Routledge, 2014); S. Mark Heim, Crucified Wisdom: Theological Reflection on Christ and the Bodhisattva (New York: Fordham, 2018).