Why Can't Humans See the Gods?

An old teaching of the East holds that man is born with five kinds of eyes, and most men die having opened only one. Perhaps that is why the gods can walk among us unseen. They cross our rooftops on the wind, they stand in the marketplace crowd, they pass us on the road. And yet, if you turned around right now, you would see no one. So where are they? If heaven is really so crowded, why is it invisible? The old teachers answered without embarrassment. The gods are not far away. Our eyes are too weak. If you grew up in the West, this may be new. So let me lay out the five eyes as the Buddhist texts teach them. The first is the flesh eye, which sees the solid stuff of the world. Wood and stone, cloth and skin. The second is the divine eye, and nobody is born using it. It opens slowly, through years of meditation and a purified heart. And through it, a person sees the beings of heaven as plainly as you see this screen. A room can be full of music, yet until a radio is tuned to it, you hear only silence. The gods, the texts say, are like that. Their bodies are made of finer stuff than ours, closer to light than to stone. And flesh eyes slide off them. Heaven is not hiding. It is playing on a channel our eyes were never built to receive. The old stories love a god who carries that second sight in his face. His name is Erlang Shen, a warrior of heaven, and in the middle of his forehead stands a third eye, called the Eye of Heaven. In Journey to the West, heaven sends Erlang to capture Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Wukong changes shape again and again, a bird, a fish, a snake, even a little temple, with his tail stuck up as the flagpole. The armies of heaven had failed, but Erlang was not fooled. His third eye saw through every disguise to the monkey hiding inside it. The gods, the stories teach, can always see us, and no mask we wear has ever fooled them. And yet, sometimes the veil tears, and an ordinary man sees. A woodcutter named Wang Ji climbed Mount Shishi to cut firewood and heard singing. Four young men sat singing over a board game, and they gave him something to eat, a thing like the pit of a date. When the game ended, the handle of his axe had rotted away in his grip. He walked home and found strangers in his house, his family gone. Decades had passed while he watched one game. Those young men were immortals. Wang Ji had stood before the divine, eaten its food, and never known. He saw them perfectly, and simply did not know what he was seeing. Sometimes the veil is a torn robe and a smell of wine. In Hangzhou, there was a monk named Daoji, and the other monks could not stand him. He ate meat, he drank wine, his robes were filthy, he stumbled like a drunk, and the temple threw him out. The crowds laughed at the mad monk, but the poor of the city noticed what the temple had missed. Wherever he went, the sick recovered and the wronged found justice. Slowly the word spread. This beggar was no beggar, and the people recognized him for what he was, the dragon subduing Arhat, a guardian of heaven walking the earth in a madman's body. A god had lived among them for years in plain sight, and nearly everyone walked right past him. Perhaps the veil is thinner for some than for others. Folk belief speaks of the yin-yang eye, a second sight that lets a person see spirits among the living. Some are born with it, most often small children, whose eyes have not yet hardened to the world. Some receive it after standing at death's door and coming back. Wipe your eyes with the tears of a cow, the old tales say, and for a while you may see what the cow sees. That is how the tales hand it down, something people did and saw. Beneath it sits the same conviction as the scriptures. Sight is a gift that is given, not a right that is owed. The gods show themselves to the fated and the sincere, at the moment heaven chooses, and not one moment before. This is why the world looks the way it does. If the divine moves on a finer channel than flesh can receive, then of course the street looks empty. A crowded heaven and an empty street. Statues we can see, and gods we cannot. A mad monk we laugh at, until the day we need him. The traditions never taught that the gods are absent. They taught that our eyes are unfinished. So the next time the hairs rise on your neck in an empty temple, or a stranger's kindness finds you just as you are about to break, remember the five eyes. Perhaps something passed that your one open eye was never built to catch. And if the gods can move among us unseen, one question follows like a shadow. In the next episode, we ask, why do the gods know everything humans do?