Buddhist tradition speaks a character called Māra who takes the role of being the very embodiment of delusion. The night before Siddhartha’s enlightenment, he visits him under the Bodhi tree. He says to himself, “How dare a mere human seek enlightenment?“.
To break his resolve, Māra throws everything at the runaway prince of Lumbini. Through the course of the night, he takes many forms to scare, seduce and enrage him. The Boddhisattva met each attack with an open heart of acceptance. In one of the stories Māra shot a rain of arrows of greed and hatred. As the arrows come close, they just turned into flower blossoms. When it was dawn, Siddhartha was surrounded by a mound of flagrant petals, and when he opened his eyes, he opened them as Buddha, the “Awakened One”.
Māra fled at the sight of the Buddha but it wasn’t their last encounter. Throughout his life, he made unexpected appearances. Ānanda, the Buddha’s most beloved attendant made sure to alert the Buddha whenever he saw Māra . The Buddha’s immediate response to Māra’s presence was to say “I see you Mara!”
Instead of ignoring, fighting or running away from Māra, he merely acknowledged that he saw him. After that he invited him for tea, even offering him a cushion. Māra hung around for bit but seeing that he had no effect on the Buddha, he simply left.
This is it. The implication of this teaching is so powerful. The Buddha didn’t engage, fight, run or away from what is unpleasant. Instead he acknowledged his presence and faced Māra. By opening his heart with compassion, the Buddha found peace.
For some reason, this particular story prompted a sense of Metanoia. Treading these waters however, the tendency to canonize the subject to the point of separative indifference is immediately obvious. To me, the poetic license and empathetic projection added more color, more evidence to the fact the Buddha was distinctly human.
So I see you Māra, and I invite you for tea.