Maravijaya- Buddhist EventEvent"Victory over Mara"

The Setting at Bodh Gaya

After six years of ascetic practice, Siddhartha had abandoned extreme austerities for the Middle Way. His five fellow ascetics left him in disgust. Alone, he accepted a meal of milk-rice from the village woman Sujata, regaining his strength, and walked to Bodh Gaya. He seated himself beneath a pipal tree on a cushion of kusa grass offered by the grass-cutter Sotthiya. He would not rise until he had broken free of birth and death.

Mara felt the threat. If Siddhartha succeeded, Mara's dominion over samsara would crack. He gathered every force he had.

The Assault of Mara's Armies

Mara rode at the head of a vast army on his war elephant Girimekhala. Ashvaghosha's Buddhacarita describes demons with the heads of horses and serpents, bodies wreathed in smoke, carrying boulders and flaming weapons. The Lalitavistara Sutra says the force stretched across the entire horizon, accompanied by darkness and earthquakes. Even the gods who had gathered to witness the enlightenment fled.

None of it reached Siddhartha. The floodwaters parted around him. The winds could not flutter the hem of his robe. The Nidanakatha describes what happened to the weapons: they became a canopy of flowers above his head.

The Three Daughters

Brute force had failed. Mara sent his three daughters: Tanha (Craving), Arati (Aversion), and Raga (Passion). They appeared in forms of extraordinary beauty, dancing and offering themselves. Siddhartha did not move. The daughters aged before his eyes, their beauty collapsing into wrinkled flesh and sagging limbs. Unable to provoke even a flicker of desire or disgust, they withdrew.

The Earth as Witness

Mara tried a final argument. He challenged Siddhartha's right to sit beneath the Bodhi tree, claiming that he himself had greater merit and that the seat belonged to him. His armies shouted in unison to bear witness. When Mara demanded who would testify for Siddhartha, no one was there. He sat alone.

Siddhartha extended his right hand and touched the earth with his fingertips. In Thai and Southeast Asian tradition, the earth goddess Phra Mae Thorani answered: she wrung the waters of Siddhartha's accumulated merit from her hair, and a flood swept Mara's entire army away. The earth trembled. Girimekhala knelt. Mara fled.

The Three Watches of the Night

Mara was gone. Siddhartha continued through the night. In the first watch he saw his previous lives stretching back through countless world-cycles: king and beggar, animal and god, each existence linked to the next by the momentum of action. In the second watch the divine eye opened: he saw the death and rebirth of all beings according to their karma, falling and rising across the realms. In the third watch, before dawn, he penetrated the Four Noble Truths and the twelve links of dependent origination. He saw how ignorance gives rise to craving, craving to grasping, grasping to the whole chain of becoming and suffering. He saw where the chain breaks.

The morning star appeared. Siddhartha had become the Buddha. The earth trembled a second time. Celestial flowers rained from the sky. The gods who had fled returned.