Medusa and Chan

  The story of Medusa continues to inspire me, ever since I first became acquainted with it through the popular 1981 movie Clash of the Titans. I was quite enthralled as a child to see the then "state of the art" technology through which Medusa is portrayed. Looking back on it now, as a teacher who is about to prepare a class on "Heroes" to young students, I am not so sure whose side I am on anymore, and sometimes I am more inclined to sympathize with Medusa than with Perseus. After all, as the story explains, Perseus sets out to slay Medusa on a dare from a rather foolish king named Polydectes. In this fashion, Medusa is slain without much more motive than, say, showing off (literally) one's exploits and proving the protagonist's mettle as a heroic figure in Greek mythology. If there were any figure to be pitied, perhaps it would indeed be Medusa, who is punished with very "hideous" looks (again, subjective) by a goddess who despises her bragging. Needless to say, many of the stories of the gods and goddesses relate fascinating tussles that are inspired mostly by jealousy.
    But to compare this myth in the light of Chan, I sometimes ask myself, what does the story of Medusa tell us about the mind? The key to the story is the theme of "reflection" or seeing one's image in the mirror. Medusa's downfall is that her nemesis has a shield which prevents him from seeing directly into Medusa's face; the shield also contains a mirror which allows Perseus to see Medusa's image without seeing her face "directly". Does any of this remind the Chan practitioner of any analogies in Surangama Sutra, such as the finger that points to the moon, or the moon's reflection itself? For Perseus, seeing the image as an image dis-empowers the gaze of Medusa. Because the mirror is only a construction or an appearance, Perseus doesn't actually succumb to the effect of Medusa's powers.
   I believe that this story speaks to two particular aspects of Chan practice. One is about seeing the nature of the mind, particularly the tendency to take things around us to be "real" meaning static, permanent and independent entities. This permanence grants power to what is otherwise only an appearance that is fleeting and has no permanence. I am sure that people have had the experience at some point of being in a dream where they feel that they are falling or tripping over something, after which they have a knee jerk reaction that makes their body try to "balance" itself. Once the person recognizes the dream for what it is, the sense of falling is also seen as a reaction to an appearance in a dream. Unless the person falls back into the power of the dream itself, they will not succumb to the belief that what they "tripped on" was a real thing that exists outside the mind.
  The second aspect speaks to the tendency for humans to believe that they are engaging independent beings, instead of thoughts. This often happens in cases where a person is angry from a fight or conversely feeling "good" about someone else. Even when the person is no longer present, the person will often bring up thoughts about them and take these thoughts as the actual existence of the person in front of them. To know that these thoughts aren't actual people is like having a shield that shows the reflections of things as only reflections, not "actual" beings. It is sometimes scary to realize that most of our days are spent interacting with thoughts instead of with "real" persons but it can be liberating in the sense that one is no longer enmeshed in a never ending conversation with their thoughts.