A Story of Faith, Signs & the Destroyer of Death
“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” 1 Corinthians 3:11
I’ve had an attachment to the Hindu god Ganesh, Lord of Beginnings and the remover of obstacles, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. He is often shown sitting upon Mushika, a tiny mouse, and I first read about him in a book called Had You Been Born in Another Faith by Marcus Bach when I was ten years old.
I suppose that image spoke to me long before I fully understood why. Like most children, I faced my share of adversity, but I carried more than most children should have. I was given adult responsibilities, and the punishment for failure was harsh. Somehow, the image of an elephant sitting on a mouse made sense to me: big things sitting on small things, strength resting on something that, by all appearances, ought to be crushed beneath it. It was a heavy weight, and like little Mushika, I survived it.
I’ve kept a Ganesh with me in one form or another ever since.
In 2000, I made my very first Internet purchase on eBay. I was buying a thangka, a traditional Tibetan hanging scroll painting on silk, of Ganesh resting on little Mushika. I sent my $25 off to Tibet and waited.
Six months went by. By then, I had decided that buying things on the Internet was probably a fool’s game. I had sent twenty-five dollars into the ether and apparently bought myself a lesson in bad judgment. Then, about nine months after I placed the order, a long tube showed up in the mail.
I pulled out the rolled-up cloth and carefully unrolled it across the floor.
It wasn’t Ganesh. Not even close.
There before me was a huge painting of Yamāntaka, the Destroyer of Death, a fierce deity of Vajrayana Buddhism.
Well, that kind of freaked me out.
I just sat there on the floor looking at the painting, wondering, “What is this?” I looked inside the shipping tube, hoping I might find some explanation, but there wasn’t one. So I did what any reasonably curious person with an Internet connection would do: I looked it up.
One thing about me has never changed. I’ve always believed in symbolism, signs, and those little moments when something arrives in your life and you can’t quite convince yourself that it means nothing.
I had ordered one God and received another, and the one I’d received was called the Destroyer of Death.
At the time, I didn’t know enough to understand what Yamāntaka actually represented. I only knew what I saw: a terrifying figure associated with death and wrath, a mistake from halfway around the world that had somehow landed on my floor. And I took it as a bad sign.
I rolled him back up, put him in the closet, and forgot about him.
Or at least I tried to.
He stayed there for years.
When Mom and I gave up living in a van and decided to settle in the Arizona desert in 2013, we purchased a small home. By then, I had gotten rid of almost everything I owned, but I kept a few things, mementos and treasures. Somehow, that painting was one of the very few things I couldn’t bring myself to part with. It followed me from the hills of Missouri to the Sonoran Desert.
Fourteen years had passed when I finally took it out of the tube again.
The painting hadn’t changed much, but I had. I looked at it with eyes that had grown older and, I hope, a little wiser. It was still filthy and smelled strongly of incense and smoke, with a gray film of dust and soot covering the silk. Parts of the painting were black, and in places you couldn’t see what was underneath.
I stood there looking at it and realized this wasn’t some cheap eBay mistake.
This painting mattered.
A small voice inside me was telling me to bring him back to his former glory.
I called the University of Arizona and found an art restorer with credentials impressive enough to make me trust him with the Destroyer of Death. I took Yamāntaka to his studio, and after a long conversation, I left him there.
The painting had been framed in three newer silk banners, which the restorer removed. Then came the real work. For months, he carefully removed layer after layer of smoke and incense that had settled into the silk over the years. He explained that it was an altar piece.
I’m embarrassed to tell you what the restoration cost, so I’ll put it this way: about the equivalent of two months of my summer electric bills. And when I asked what the restored painting was worth, the answer was basically one month of my summer electric bill.
A terrible investment.
A wonderful purchase.
I hung Yamāntaka in my living room.
Back then, I was no Martha Stewart. My house was a glorious, jumbled-up collection of things I loved, with very little rhyme or reason to any of it, and he just seemed to settle right in there.
A few years after I restored Yamāntaka, I began dating a Christian gentleman. We’re no longer together, but while we were, he found the painting offensive and demonic. To him, it represented death and darkness. Satan himself was hanging on the wall, or so he thought.
He asked me to put it back in storage.
So I did.
Not because I believed he was right, but perhaps because I loved him and perhaps because I wasn’t yet sure what I believed myself.
Back into the closet Yamāntaka went.
And that’s where things get interesting.
I’ve now been a Christian for three years. Even before I became a Christian, I looked at Buddhism primarily as a philosophy rather than a religion. Over time, I came to recognize something in Buddhist thought that helped me understand peace, attachment, suffering, and the human tendency to cling to the very things that hurt us.
Becoming a Christian didn’t erase everything that came before it. If anything, it forced me to look more honestly at the things I’ve carried with me, the things I believed, and the things I was afraid to understand.
I don’t believe Yamāntaka is Christ, and I don’t believe Buddhism and Christianity are interchangeable. But I’ve learned that I don’t have to be afraid of wisdom simply because I first encountered it in a form I didn’t understand.
Perhaps that is part of what becoming a Christian has meant for me: learning to look again.
And when I look back now, I realize Ganesh was the beginning of that journey.
Ganesh had first spoken to the little girl in me. An elephant resting on a tiny mouse, something enormous sitting on something small without crushing it. He represented beginnings and the removal of obstacles, but to a ten-year-old girl carrying more weight than she should have, I think I saw something else. I saw the possibility of surviving what felt too big for me.
I didn’t have the words for that then.
I do now.
Yamāntaka didn’t replace Ganesh. He became something different.
Ganesh had taught me something about surviving the weight pressing down from the outside. Yamāntaka would eventually teach me to look at the weight I was carrying on the inside.
I don’t find Yamāntaka repulsive, and I don’t find him demonic. I find him strangely comforting because I finally learned what I had been looking at all those years.
The name itself tells part of the story. Yama is associated with death, and antaka means one who brings an end. But Yamāntaka isn’t simply a god of death. In Vajrayana Buddhism, he is a fierce manifestation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva associated with supreme wisdom.
He is called the Destroyer of Death.
And what he destroys isn’t life. He destroys ignorance, ego, and attachment, the things inside us that keep us trapped.
His appearance is frightening because the teaching isn’t meant to be pretty. Sometimes wisdom has to come at us with its teeth showing. Sometimes the thing we need to destroy isn’t something outside of us at all. Sometimes it’s the part of ourselves we’ve spent years protecting.
That part speaks to me.
Maybe because I spent so many years protecting the parts of myself that were built to survive: the little girl who learned to carry adult responsibilities, the woman who learned to carry the weight, the woman who kept moving, adapting, and putting one foot in front of the other.
For a long time, I thought survival was the same thing as strength.
I’m not sure I believe that anymore.
Sometimes strength is being willing to let something die: an old fear, an old story, an old version of myself that once kept me safe but no longer needs to run the show.
I didn’t know any of that when I first opened that tube on my floor in 2000. All I knew was that I had ordered Ganesh and received death.
I thought it was a bad sign.
Now I wonder if it was simply a different kind of beginning.
For years, I kept Yamāntaka hidden because I was afraid of what he might mean. Later, I put him away because someone I loved was afraid of what he meant. And now, after all these years, I’ve brought him back into the light.
He’s hanging in my office as I write this.
The Destroyer of Death.
I look at him differently now, not as a warning, not as something evil, and not as something I have to explain away. He reminds me that my past doesn’t have to be erased for my faith to be real.
I don’t have to pretend I came to Christianity without a history.
I had a history.
I wandered, questioned, searched, and carried things I didn’t understand. Some of them frightened me. Some of them saved me. And some of them simply waited until I was old enough, and brave enough, to look at them again.
Yamāntaka is one of those things.
Covered once in smoke and dust, carried from Tibet to Missouri to Arizona, hidden in closets, restored by careful hands, and nearly forgotten more than once, somehow he’s still here.
So am I.
Maybe that’s what the Destroyer of Death has come to mean to me: not the death of my past, but the death of the fear that my past has to be destroyed before I can step fully into the light.
Yamāntaka represents a different kind of beginning for me, not a beginning that requires me to erase who I was, but a beginning that allows me to finally understand who I have been.
And for the first time, I’m not afraid of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment