Mara — the demon of death, desire, and delusion — is the great tempter and adversary of Buddhism: the embodiment of all that binds beings to suffering and the cycle of rebirth, who assailed the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree on the night of his enlightenment and strove to turn him from awakening. He is the personification of the forces that obstruct liberation, the “Evil One” of the Buddhist cosmos.
The Lord of the Death-Realm
Mara’s name is bound to death (the root mr, “to die”) — he is the “bringer of death,” but more deeply he is the lord of the realm of desire and rebirth, the ruler of samsara, the cycle of suffering existence. He embodies everything that keeps beings trapped in suffering: craving and desire, aversion and fear, delusion and ignorance, attachment to the pleasures and the very continuation of conditioned existence. To be freed from Mara is to attain liberation; to remain in his power is to remain bound to the wheel of rebirth and death.
The Assault on the Buddha
Mara’s great moment is his assault on the future Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, as he sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi tree on the verge of enlightenment. Determined to prevent the awakening that would free beings from his power, Mara attacked with every weapon. He sent his hideous armies of demons to terrify the meditator with storms of weapons — but the missiles turned to flowers as they fell. He sent his three beautiful daughters — Craving, Aversion, and Delight (or Discontent) — to seduce and distract him — but the Buddha was unmoved. Finally Mara challenged Gautama’s very right to enlightenment, demanding who would witness his worthiness — and the Buddha touched the earth with his hand, calling the earth itself to witness, and the earth-goddess affirmed his countless lifetimes of virtue. Defeated, Mara and his hosts fled, and Gautama attained enlightenment.
The Adversary Within
Though personified as a demon-king, Mara is understood at the deepest level as the embodiment of the inner obstacles to enlightenment — the cravings, fears, distractions, and delusions of one’s own mind. The tradition speaks of the many “armies of Mara” (sensual desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, sloth, fear, doubt, hypocrisy, and the rest) that the practitioner must overcome. Mara continued to tempt and test the Buddha and his disciples throughout their lives, the ever-present adversary of the awakening mind. In Mara, Buddhism gave form to the forces that bind beings to suffering — the tempter and lord of death and desire who assailed the Buddha with armies and seductions and was defeated by the earth-touching gesture, the personification of every obstacle, outer and inner, to liberation.