Saint Judas

It was all because of the damn LOLcats. My engineer friend checks up on those things twice and thrice daily, and if he’s around my house I always find a captioned picture floating on the screen.

This one made me cry. So I had to explain to him.

This is a monk in Buddhist robes entertaining the visit of a cat. There are a number of variants on the story that accounts for a convention about depictions of Buddha and the animals: that is, the cat usually isn’t represented. Some stories say the cat killed a rat who was on a mission to summon the Buddha’s mother before his death, or to bring a needed medicine. Some say the cat recognized no higher spirit. But the one that sticks in my head tells that the Buddha lay dying, and knew death was coming, and that all the animals gathered at his bedside to pay honor to him. But the rat, as was its nature, was greedy of food and while all the other animals were lost in the reverence that the Buddha’s spirit evoked, crept up to the oil lamp and began to lap the oil. Seeing this, furious at the rat’s disrespect, the cat killed the rat with one pounce and shake of his head.

And so while the cat is credited with acting in reverence for the first human to achieve Enlightenment, because he shed the blood of another creature, he is not painted in scenes of the Buddha’s death. That’s the story.

“It’s one of those paradox things,” I said, “like the snake and Judas.” The Gnostics — and I have to watch out here, because there is a lot of cheapass Wal-Mart Gnosticism floating around — not only view the snake in the Garden of Eden as a wise messenger of enlightenment (with all the anguish attendant on awareness and adulthood), but make a saint of Judas, whose betrayal is viewed in some interpretations as the following of a necessary script. Jesus accepts the burden of crucifixion, so the story goes, and Judas accepts the burden of having his name live as a synonym for the grossest treachery, in order to bring about the liberation of spirit in that place and time.

You get this kind of oxymoronic toe-stubber in every good myth. Trickster stories are a coarser take on it: the legends about ambivalent characters who break the rules so that creation or evolution can happen. Loki, Coyote, you know the people who hang around at Trickster VFW.

And then I remembered from probably forty years back this poem:

Saint Judas
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

James Wright

The people who paint the world black and white are living in a childish dream. Finding the right thing to do at the right moment — especially when everything possible looks like the wrong thing — is never as easy in the real world as it is made out to be in the Scout Manual. Sometimes the necessary thing is an act of outrage. Sometimes the right path is a knife edge. Which, as everyone who has kept a cat knows, a cat can walk on. Humans have a far more awkward time. And that is why I cried.