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Avalokiteshvara and The Watchmen
Avalokiteshvara is one of the Big Four Bodhisattvas, maybe the most popular of them all.
All the major Buddhist traditions — Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrahana — really dig Him/Her.
Avalokiteshvara is the original Watchmen. The name means ‘The Lord who gazes down at the World.’
A Bodhisattva is Enlightened and has decided to hang out here to benefit others all the time.
I take ‘Enlightened’ to mean free from the blind spots, mistaken ideas, and unconscious forces that largely determine my behavior. I do not act freely in each moment. I am mostly conditioned. I mean, conditioned at the level of seeing the things around me as solid persisting objects, or believing that the 3D movie in my head is the way things actually are. That’s deep conditioning.
I take ‘benefit others’ to mean serving as a source of some kind of helpful power we can all draw on to make life better. In the case of Avalokiteshvara, this power is Compassion.
Compassion doesn’t mean understanding or feeling what someone else’s pain is like — it means someone else isn’t someone else. Compassion comes from Latin for, ‘suffering with.’ Compassion means we’re not separate bags of flesh. We’re connected bags of flesh.
Plenty of wise people have suggested compassion as a great perspective to maintain. Helping others in a way that actually helps others also tends to help the helper feel like they’re doing right action, which feels good.
Superheroes almost always say they are trying to help others.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but for the most part it doesn’t seem to buy them much peace of mind.
Superman, for one, doesn’t exactly embody compassion either. He’s not like us and doesn’t emphasize the connection between us, if there is one.
He’s a strange visitor from another planet.
The way Superman and other Superheroes try to help others is almost always through direct action. Superpowers involve applied physical force that normal humans are not capable of.
