The Heart Sutra, Dinderblob/Darkinbad, and Zion

Rambling sync-posts are back!

I woke up Saturday morning with the name Dinderblob in my head for no apparent reason, perhaps the echo of a forgotten dream. I recognized it as the name of one of the gods imprisoned inside a mountain in The Tinleys and, seeing no relevance to anything, filed it away.

In the morning, I read a few sections of the Doctrine & Covenants, including Section 38. This bit piqued my interest:

And I [Jesus] have made the earth rich, and behold it is my footstool, wherefore, again I will stand upon it. And I hold forth and deign to give unto you greater riches, even a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh; And I will give it unto you for the land of your inheritance, if you seek it with all your hearts (D&C 38:17-19).

I think the wording implies that this "land of promise" is not on earth.

When I came to the famous line, "I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine" (D&C 38:27) it made me think of last year's syncs about the Ace of Hearts and the Mormon idea of Zion being "one heart and one mind," "the pure in heart."

In the afternoon, my wife and I had to run some errands together. She said she was going to put on some music in the car, so I braced myself for some Post Malone (her current kick), but I was pleasantly surprised when she instead put on something completely different, and completely new to me: a Chinese translation of the Heart Sutra chanted to a jazz piano accompaniment. I couldn't really follow the Chinese in any detail (Buddhist sutras are pretty far removed from everyday language), so I tried to recall how the sutra goes in English. It's been a decade or so since I've read it, though, and I kept getting tripped up and slipping into the language of the Book of Mormon -- thus noticing, for the first time, their similarity. Here's Lehi:

[R]ighteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. Wherefore, it must needs have been created for a thing of naught (2 Ne. 2:11-12).

And here's Avalokiteshvara:

All things are by nature void

They are not born or destroyed

Nor are they stained or pure

Nor do they wax or wane

So, in emptiness, no form,

No feeling, thought, or choice,

Nor is there consciousness.

No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;

No color, sound, smell, taste, touch,

Nor what the mind takes hold of,

Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance or end to it,

Nor all that comes of ignorance;

No withering, no death,

No end to them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,

Or end to pain, or noble path

To lead from pain;

Not even wisdom to attain!

Attainment too is emptiness.

Aside from the opposite value judgments -- what the prophet dismisses as meaningless is embraced by the bodhisattva as the highest truth. Lehi characterizes his version of the Heart Sutra's vision as "all things" being "a compound in one," "one body." This language ties in with the Mormon texts I had been thinking of earlier: "one heart and one mind," "if ye are not one ye are not mine."

Later in the day, Dinderblob was still floating around in my mind, so I looked up references to The Tinleys on this blog. In "Tin soldiers and griffins," I found this:

In the opening pages, [Thinley] Norbu mentions that the Buddha first taught Prajnaparamita "at Vulture's Peak" in northern India.

Noting that Vulture's Peak would have been named for the Himalayan griffon vulture, I tied that in with The Tinleys, where a griffin lives on Donchatryan Peak and has imprisoned Dinderblob and the other gods inside it.

That is -- or was until this post -- this blog's only use of the Buddhist term Prajnaparamita (sometimes translated "perfection of wisdom"). The full Sanskrit name of the Heart Sutra is Prajnaparamitahridaya -- "The Heart of Prajnaparamita."

Coming back to my earlier reading of D&C 38, I had connected "if ye are not one ye are not mine" with the "one heart and one mind" Ace of Hearts syncs. I noticed that that word mine tied in, as a pun, with one of those Ace of Hearts posts, "I've been a miner for a heart of gold." That post includes these lines from "With?"

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

The name Darkinbad has a similar feel to Dinderblob, I think.

If we interpret Darkinbad as Elvish (from darak "wolf" and bad "way, path"), it would be the equivalent for wulf-weg, which by all rights ought to be (but is apparently so far unattested as) a Norse or Anglo-Saxon kenning for the path the Sun ("Brightdayler") or Moon takes across the sky, each pursued by a wolf.

J. C. Dollman, The Wolves Pursuing Sol and Mani (1909)

Darkinbad going down into the dark abyss and bringing all things to light also ties in with Leo's recent thoughts on the Jaredites bringing light to the Inner Earth, and indeed creating there a new "sun" and "moon," in his post "Primeval Unlight."

Today I read D&C 84:

The Lord hath gathered all things in one.

The Lord hath brought down Zion from above.

The Lord hath brought up Zion from beneath (v. 100).

"All things in one" is the language of Lehi's Heart Sutra, and here it is explicitly tied in with the Zion "one heart and one mind" concept. The last of the three lines quoted also made me think of Leo's Inner Earth musings. "The Lord hath brought down Zion from above" clearly refers to the City of Enoch returning to earth. "The Lord hath brought up Zion from beneath" has traditionally been interpreted as the earthly city of Zion rising to meet Enoch's halfway -- "To meet the Lord and Enoch's band triumphant in the air," as Edward Partridge put it in a hymn. However, I think something leaving earth for heaven would be described, for us here on earth, as being "taken up" (as in Moses 7:21), not "brought up." I think it makes more sense to read this as a subterranean Zion (as in the Matrix movies) being brought up to the surface. Parley Pratt's hymn is perhaps more apropos than Partridge's:

Angels from heav’n and truth from earth

Have met, and both have record borne;

Thus Zion’s light is bursting forth,

Thus Zion’s light is bursting forth

To bring her ransomed children home.

To bring her ransomed children home.