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I daresay. But does it logically follow that they are one and the same? No and no. I can not exist without eating or breathing – does it mean that I and the air I breathe, I and the food I eat, are one and the same? The Melkor/Eru relationship may be imagined to be similar to that – all things that make existence of Melkor possible are good and come from Eru. His mind, his might, his fëa, his very existence come from Eru, and is a gift of Eru, and in that sense, Melkor, to find a better word than separate, can not be without Eru.
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First of all, I should clarify this by saying that I am not talking about Buddhism as an ideology. I am talking about Buddhism as what is. This is haughty and presumptuous on my part, but bare with me.
Tolkien's book is not about duality (Good vs Evil), but triality. Three examples are
Eru, Melkor, and the Ainur
Flame Imperishable, Void, and Ea (That Which Is)
Aragorn, Arwen, and Elrond
In the Tolkienian cosmology, each of the individuals in these trialities is both a free agent and divinely attached to the other two
Eru is Supreme One
Melkor is one who desire to be All
the Ainur are Many in the service of the One
The emergent conflict is Ea
Now, if Eru has a plan for Ea, there can be no conflict. Yet we all know that the stories in the Silm, LotR and TH are conflict narratives.
Life is suffering.
Suffering is caused by attachments.
By eliminating these attachments one can transcend this existence and achieve a higher state of being.
The Illusion in Buddhism is the separateness of life and death. We suffer because we feel we have to act according to whatever moral code we inherited from our parents and our parent-culture in this life - death is our only adviser on how to live life. Tolkien saw through the parent-culture: he recognized that industrialization is a Yang force, the God separated from the Goddess. The
Lord of the Rings is his linguistic-alchemical attempt to unite God and Goddess.
What he overlooked is the illusion that birth and death exist.
There can be no divine will in a free agent.
The body is a musical note: it is born, dances, and dies.
Frodo is attached to saving the Shire. He suffers for the Shire, is unfulfilled, and then dies. It doesn't get more Buddhist than that: it doesn't get more real than that.
How could 'Frodo' possibly retain his body-mind form after death? How can Eru create an Eternal body which did not exist when Eru began?
Realizing that there is no difference between Divine Will and Free Agency, that every act Frodo carried out was both fully manifested in himself and in Eru at all times throughout the novel, is not Paradox: it is Liberation, Gnosis, Eucatastrophe to simultaneously know and feel that God has no plan for you, that you and you alone are that which you seek.
Buddhism offers rational practice to the individual to realize this in the Here & Now.
I propose that one could achieve eucatastrophe solely by combining Mahayana Buddhist practice with the Eru-Arda cosmology: but then, on what plane would the two meet?
