Omnium Gatherum #85: Killing Them With Kindness, For Their Own Good

Howdy, folks!

Welcome once again to the Omnium Gatherum.

Or, if you’re new here, welcome to the Omnium Gatherum.

This time around I thought I would take you folks on a different kind of journey with a different kind of outsider viewpoint. Right up until the time When Corona-Chan Came To Town, I had been attending classes at one of my local community colleges in English and Journalism, mostly to stretch those formal learning and realization muscles again. Along the way, naturally, I had to write papers on various topics, depending on the class. All of this is to preface this column which will take on a quasi-academic tone as it explores the topic of Ozymandias from Watchmen and whether his actions were or could be justified as good and/or heroic and by what standard. 

Let us begin.

One of the most classic yet modern time travel story plots is a traveler or travelers going back in time to kill Hitler before he gets going. Many people would easily say yes to taking such an action—in this case killing Hitler as a child or young man—given the amount of death that occurred in the world leading up to and through World War 2. The point of such stories, however, is a chance to question the moral dilemma that even the taking of a life such as Adolf Hitler’s would and should bring up in humans. After all, we are talking about the ending of a human life and even Hitler deserves the right to live out his life, right? Once the question can be framed though (as in ‘right?’), we are entering the realm of moral quandaries. Another example of the kind of moral quandaries good science fiction can bring to light is the classic Doctor Who serial “Genesis of the Daleks”, wherein the Fourth Doctor as portrayed by Tom Baker is tasked by The Time Lords with going back to the origins of his most dreaded foes—the Daleks—and thereafter eliminating them as a threat to all of existence. At a critical moment, though, The Doctor questions his right to destroy the nascent Daleks in their genetic cribs before they become the dark force they would eventually be. Even though his companions Sarah Jane and Harry are fully convinced of the validity of the mission, the Renegade Time Lord wonders as to whether it’s his right to abort his worst enemies, pondering over the good that their existence causes to come into being as a consequence of that very evil existence. Heady stuff for what was supposed to be a children’s science fiction television program on a Saturday afternoon across the pond. However such stories lay out one of the difficult parts about being a hero, whether it be in reality or fiction, which is by what right or moral impetus does he or she take action in the world, especially when it is to save lives, limbs, and properties or even to save the whole world itself.

Even superheroes have to wrestle with this sort of moral thinking that may be more appropriate for a church, temple, mosque, any of the halls of power, or a college campus. From his very beginnings, Superman burst onto the scene fighting for the little guy in terms of saving wives from abusive husbands or the wrongly convicted from being executed by an unjust system or workers from greedy corporate overlords. All actions that were not simply good in a civic sense of the early 20th Century times but in a moral sense as well in terms of what would be called social justice. The burgeoning urban blight that Batman initially fought against was reflective of the same drives as his counterpart in the bright red and blue tights, acting as a moral force in the midst of the seemingly immoral archetypal big city. Even Wonder Woman initially took up the mission to come into Man’s World to stand up against the looming threat of the Nazis and World War 2 as much as she did for the love of one Steve Trevor and curiosity about that very outside world from which she and her fellow Amazons hid. In doing so, Wonder Woman chose to stand for the moral good America represented in the war, in addition to bringing her Amazon values into the so-called Man’s World. These examples and others demonstrate how much some kind of moral system or considerations drove both the creation and the adventures of these costumed superheroes. Generally for these early superheroes, one can assume that some variation of Judeo-Christian morals shaped who and what these characters were and how they operated; in Wonder Woman’s case, those foundational American morals would also find themselves coupled with additional feminist and Greco-Roman values, and, to give at least some acknowledgement to this interpretation of the original superheroine and her early adventures, some version of the ethics behind BDSM and polyamorous subcultures.

To experience how deep the link between ethics or morals and superheroes goes, one needs only to open up a copy of Champions the superhero roleplaying game to see for themselves as an example. The first chapter of the sixth edition of the core game rules book states upfront that one of the characteristics that separate superheroes from the heroes of myth and legend is an adherence to some moral code. An adherence which can lead to some interesting ethical questions for these superheroes. One can think back to the division sparked across the internets when Man Of Steel came out in 2012 which ended with Superman killing General Zod. Many longtime Superman fans were not happy to see their favorite superhero—the one who established the genre and many of its tropes—kill an enemy, no matter how well or poorly the film set up the situation where death was the only option. Even Zack Snyder, the film’s director, had to fall back onto the argument that this was the first outing for Superman and as such hadn’t locked into place his famous code against killing as his counter to all of the fan complaints. This was an argument that fell on a lot of deaf ears, as folks understood that Superman simply does not kill from years of seeing the kind of squeaky clean morals the character had stood for and demonstrated over decades of his existence. This was an argument that stretched one’s suspension of disbelief to its absolute limits. Especially given that this same character goes to see a Catholic priest when wrestling with whether to reveal himself to humanity after the remnants of his people have arrived and called for him to appear. A Superman who can wrestle with the moral quandary of telling humanity that an alien, a strange visitor from another planet, has lived amongst them for untold years really should have known about the very human prohibitions against killing. This assumption rings especially true if he knew enough about human morality to even seek out a Catholic priest, one of society’s purveyors of morality and moral order. I digress, but hopefully this rumination serves as further establishing the links between morals and superheroes.

Superheroes are generally presented as forces for good, locked in an archetypal battle of good versus evil, with evil being represented by supervillains naturally. One has to try to imagine how the events depicted in the ground breaking superhero limited series Watchmen shook the world of superhero fans when it was first released serially between 1985 and 1987. Like similar ground breaking superhero stories of the same time period (The Dark Knight Returns, Squadron Supreme, and Marvelman/Miracleman, to name a few), Watchmen pushed the boundaries of the superhero genre, bringing in more elements of science fiction and social fiction in terms of its speculation about what would happen if superheroes existed in the real world and how they would impact politics, culture, science, and more. Ostensibly a murder mystery at its beginning, through 12 issues this maxi-series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons showed its readers a world where one truly super powered human being, Dr. Manhattan, had completely changed the geopolitical and technological landscape from the 1960s into the 1980s. This simply wasn’t the regular world plus superheroes as most superhero comics depicted in those days. Or, to use Stan Lee’s phrase, that the world of Marvel was the world outside your window, a world its readers were already familiar with. The world of Watchmen was different. It was a world seriously impacted by the existence of just one man who could alter matter, teleport, and take other god-like actions. Though the world of Watchmen had many changes, there were many things that remained the same despite those changes, including the then ongoing threat of nuclear or some other totalizing global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, in addition to the problems of  “promiscuity, drugs, campus subversion” and so on, as Captain Metropolis names them when he hosts the ill fated first and last meeting of The Crimebusters as revealed in flashback in issue 2, page 10, panel 2 (Moore & Gibbons). It was a world of greater contrasts than the standard superhero setting. It was a world where such a god-like being was beyond the normal morality—as demonstrated by Dr. Manhattan’s idly standing by while The Comedian gunned down a pregnant Vietnamese woman during the Vietnam War in issue 2, pages 14-15 (Moore & Gibbons); what ‘normal’ superhero would let such an action take place in their presence?—only adhering to any kind of loyalty to his home country out of inertia more than anything else, which proved relatively easy to break simply by breaking the few human connections he had. 

Despite his powers and the moral quandaries they engendered or perhaps because of them, Dr. Manhattan isn’t the most important moral actor in Watchmen. That role falls to Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias. At this point in time, there’s little worry about spoiling the ending of the story for either of the two people who will read this essay, so I can freely discuss that Ozymandias, the freebooting swashbuckling superhero and self advertised ‘World’s Smartest Man,’ is the primary moral actor at play in Watchmen. Ozymandias, with his master plan to save the world, engages in a series of actions that simply are not what most would consider heroic, let alone superheroic. Murder, poisoning, and mass murder (which sounds reminiscent of that infamous line from Blazing Saddles, “Rape, arson, and rape.”) are amongst the actions that end up being taken as part of Mr. Veidt’s plan to save the world from the very disasters that Captain Metropolis had outlined that fateful day in 1966. A plan that may have been inspired by the captain’s exasperated declarations at the end of the fateful Crimebusters meeting in issue 2, page 11, panel 7, “Somebody has to do it, don’t you see? Somebody has to save the world…” (Moore & Gibbons). A plan that required murder, poisoning, and mass murder as actions to achieve its ends. Actions that would normally be associated the villain or supervillain, as Ozymandias even jokes about when he says in issue 11, page 27, panel 1,  “Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain, Do you think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?” (Moore & Gibbons), showing some understanding and self awareness as to the nature of the situation he has created. 

That understanding works as long as the actions he undertakes are judged by those very Judeo-Christian morals mentioned above. However, Judaism and Christianity are not the only religions on this planet and therefore aren’t the only moral systems in use and at play. That is something else that Adrian Veidt understands, as his origin demonstrates. Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are the other major religions on this planet and each of them break down into variations, just as Judaism and Christianity do. To be fair, one could argue for a religion free morality developing over the last few centuries since The Enlightenment but that isn’t the subject for this essay. Of the other three religions mentioned, Buddhism is of particular importance in this situation as the inspiration for Ozymandias is a character named Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. As created and ultimately discovered to be owned by Pete Morisi, Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt was a young American raised in a Himalayan lamasery where he learned ancient mystic secrets of the mind that gave him powers and abilities. Now when one says Himalayan lamasery that naturally suggests Buddhism as well as the old trope of ‘Eastern Mysticism’ and even summons images of warriors training at temples, whether it be in the Kung Fu TV series, any Shaw Brothers movie, or in the recent Doctor Strange films. Moore and Gibbons did a marvelous job of switching around a lot of elements associated with Cannon when creating Ozymandias but there is one particular brief callback to the inspirational character that offers a place to assume something about the latter. Ozymandias admits to his manservants when recounting his origins, in issue 11, page 10, panel 4, that he had “travelled on, through China and Tibet, gathering martial wisdom as I went” (Moore & Gibbons).  Despite all of the hero worship of Alexander the Great and the overtly Egyptian inspired visual trappings of his costume, Ozymandias admitted to studying martial arts in The Far East like his inspiration and counterpart Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, which opens up the possibility that he may have trained at a Shaolin temple somewhere in China at the very least, that being the most likely source of some of that “martial wisdom” he claimed. As far as Tibet is concerned, there was a strong link between the yogic arts and what is called Tantra as both were concerned with mastery of the body in ways that strengthen the spirit. Tantra, as a grouping of a variety of religious and mystical practices, focuses on more than mere sex as we in the West tend to think. Just as a simple look at the video clip of Kung Fu versus Yoga on YouTube, courtesy of the Wu Tang Collection, where a couple of martial artists face off against a very flexible yogi shows in a fanciful manner the martial possibilities inherent in yoga. In addition to this, Tibet was also the home of many magical traditions like Tantra, including ones associated with war magic, according to the book and exhibition Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism. One of the interesting parts of Tantrism, according to Julius Evola, and one that applies to this situation, is its complicated system of the three different paths beings could follow through life and in the practice of Tantra. I’ll try to explain these as simply as possible, based on Evola’s definitions. The first path is that of the pashu or primitive; this is the path that the common man takes, the path of ordinary religious pursuits. The second path is that of the vira or hero; this is the path taken by those who wish to go beyond the norm. The third path is that of the diyva or god; this path goes even beyond that of the vira. Given Ozymandias’ drive was to be like Alexander, the ultimate warrior king of his day—a quest that took Veidt to Tibet in the first place—it may be fair to work under the assumption he was likely walking the path of the vira as described in Tantric Buddhism. Why? Because one of the end results of the path of the vira is the person becomes a chakravartin or wheel turning king (Evola 55). What better goal for a man who aspired to be a modern Alexander the Great? And if such is the case, then his actions were actions of merit rather than demerit in Tantric Buddhist terms.

How? It is the task of the rest of this essay to explicate.

There will be two big digressions before we move forward though. First, in a totally informal fashion, I will list the books and articles that I am using for this column. Obviously I will be referring to Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons by the issue numbers, even though I am using the graphic novel reprint. For its description of the basic tenets of Tantrism and its relation to Buddhism, I will be referring to The Yoga Of Power by Julius Evola. I mentioned Champions the 6th edition rule book by Steven S. Long and Aaron Allston above. I will also refer to these two papers, “Compassionate Violence? On the Ethical Implications of Tantric Buddhist Ritual” by David B. Gray and “On the Auspiciousness of Compassionate Violence” by Stephen Jenkins for their explanations of the principle of compassionate violence. And a late addition to this essay is Lords Of The Left-Hand Path by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D.

Second, this subject matter is not for the faint of heart. After all, I will be offering a religious rationale for committing violence that covers someone’s ass morally, albeit in purely Tantric Buddhist terms alone. That’s dangerous stuff to release into the world, quite frankly. However, as some of this research came to me in answer to a quandary I had, namely how to mix Buddhism with superheroes for a long stalled project, I feel confident that this explication will not necessarily release any more death into this world than it is already experiencing as of this writing in the Years of Our Lord 2022-2025 Gregorian. To further explain how and why I came across the two essays I will be referencing throughout, I will say that the early conclusions I reached, in consultation with a couple of leaders in the form of Buddhism I practice as well as some study led me to an effective dead end in terms of blending superheroics and Buddhism. After all, Buddhism is a religion generally assumed to be one of peace, where one goes to seek enlightenment. That, despite all those chop socky films I saw as a kid, there wasn’t a place for violence in mainstream Buddhism. Which was disappointing and frustrating to me, quite frankly, as the whole point of superhero fiction is the Never-Ending Battle, the ongoing battle between good and evil seen equally as cosmic drama and infinite game, which serves to keep the superhero franchise going as long as possible, pitting the lead against a rogues’ gallery of supervillains in varying degrees of rotation. How could I write about a superhero who wanted peace and did everything to downplay violence? (And yes, there probably was a way which didn’t interest me to find as I’m rather fond of the Never-Ending Battle, and I was and am still very interested in telling that kind of tale much more than a more peaceful and peaceable one, which says a lot about me, I suppose.) However, given that humans have a remarkable ability to justify violence even within supposedly peace loving religions, as both the modern background of religious inspired terrorism from the Middle East and lyrics like “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” demonstrate, there would likely have been ways for violence to find itself justified within the context of Buddhism. Seek and ye shall find, as it were. My initial research turned up at least two papers on the concept of compassionate violence but it wasn’t until I started reading Evola’s book that I began to piece together tangentially a possible Buddhist moral rationale for why Ozymandias did what he did while still being the hero in the course of thinking about how to approach my original concept with this new information.

To begin, I have to start with explaining what is meant by compassionate violence and its relationship to Buddhism. After all, the phrase sounds oxymoronic. How can one be compassionate while committing violence? Doesn’t violence imply the passions like anger and fear? And doesn’t violence immediately earn one demerit or negative karma, as per Buddhist morality? Under normal circumstances, that connection would be true. However, as Gray summarizes in his paper,    

 “For example, the Upaya-kausalya Sutra relates what has become a famous episode in the past life of the Buddha. According to this scripture, the Buddha was previously a captain named ‘Greatly Compassionate,’ [or] Mahakarunika who was transporting five hundred merchants on a journey. He becomes aware that a notorious bandit is planning to attack and kill the merchants. He realizes that he has three possible courses of action, to, first, do nothing, and allow him to kill the merchants, which would be terrible for all involved. Secondly, he could warn the merchants, who would then preemptively kill the bandit. The only problem with this is that the merchants would suffer the karmic consequences of killing. Thirdly, he could kill the bandit himself, and thereby take the karmic burden onto himself, sparing both the bandit and the merchants. He chose the latter action” (Gray 3-4).                                                                                                                  

The latter action that meant the captain simply killed the bandit. In another version of the story, the captain did what this viewpoint considers an additional good deed after taking the bandit out in a dingy and tried to get him to understand reason and possibly spare the captain from doing what he felt was the best course of action.

In Buddhism, karma is best translated as action. In other words, the actions we take determine the response we receive back from the universe. Positive actions earn merit while negative actions earn demerit. Simple, it seems. Yet there’s another factor that is considered just as important in Buddhist thought and this is intention. It is with intention that the idea of compassionate violence finds its validity. In the parable, Captain Greatly Compassionate found himself in a situation where he was willing to take on the negative karma of his action to kill the bandit in order to spare both the bandit and the merchants from the negative karma they would have accrued if the bandit had killed the merchants or the merchants had killed the bandit. Because Greatly Compassionate was willing to take that negative karma unto himself, out of compassion as befitting his name, he actually was awarded merit for his actions. In other words, his intention to take on the negative karma himself purified his killing of the bandit karmically, as in changing poison into medicine, a long held Buddhist principle, thereby turning demerit or negative karma into merit or positive karma.

Great, right? So what does that have to do with Watchmen and Ozymandias in particular?

What is Ozymandias’s intent in Watchmen? To save the world and nothing less, in apparent response to Captain Metropolis saying, pleading, “Somebody has to do it, don’t you see? Somebody has to save the world…” (Moore & Gibbons). Not for glory, not for reward, but simply to save his world in such a way as leave it in such a condition for a significant period of time, much like the relative peace of the world as ruled by Ozymandias’s hero Alexander the Great. In order to fulfill that intention, Ozymandias has to take action and it is those actions and their consequences that provide the bulk of the story of Watchmen. 

How does Ozymandias and his actions relate to Buddhism then? As mentioned above, Ozymandias admits to having traveled to and studied in China and Tibet, both places shaped by Buddhism, especially in the areas of martial arts or as he puts it “martial wisdom”. Even a cursory knowledge of schools like Shaolin demonstrates the link between Buddhism and martial arts. In addition, Tantrism itself is a mix of native Tibetan religious practices and influences from Hinduism and Buddhism. The more direct yet implied connection is the link between Ozymandias and his comics inspiration and analog Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. Or, as the old saying goes, the apple does not fall from the tree. Taking these links into account, I am arguing that Ozymandias may have been a Tantrika or Tantric practitioner and was following the path of the vira, which would have put him on a path to acting in ways outside of those of normal society. After all, as stated in his origin recounting, Veidt says a conqueror, Alexander, is his role model. That’s not a usual role model for a person, let alone someone destined (if only by the nature of his destiny being dictated by his role in the story of Watchmen) to be a superhero. That’s almost like Superman saying that Nietzsche or Sargon the Great were his heroes when he was growing up; the ‘natural’ assumption is that figures like Moses and Jesus were Superman’s heroes, in addition to his farmer adoptive father. Given that Watchmen was an attempt at telling a more realistic superhero story, it makes sense that a fictional character would look up to a historical figure as inspiration as such an action grounds the character. This hero worship also acts as a foreshadowing of Veidt’s own aspirations. Coincidentally, Gautama Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, came from a warrior people and it was said his destiny was to either be a wheel turning king or a great sage. We know which path he chose. Just as Ozymandias chose the path of the superhero. As such, whether it was his early adventures as a “freebooting hero” or his ultimate mission, Ozymandias understood, especially after that Crimebusters meeting, that he was living in exceptional times or interesting times as the Chinese would say. And that he was not only an exceptional being, as his origin describes (genius, born to wealth, reduced to self chosen poverty, only to become a Horatio Alger type success figure in the years after his adventuring days), but he was living in exceptional times.  That’s important from the Tantric perspective. According to Gray, “Rather, it [violence] is left open as a possible mode of action, albeit an exceptional one, to be used by exceptional beings under exceptional circumstances” (Gray 1). Simply by this definition, the world of Watchmen, a world of a 1985 Gregorian where Richard Nixon is still president and Dr. Manhattan is the sole defense against the Soviet Union would qualify as exceptional circumstances. Just as Dr. Manhattan and the rest of the main characters would qualify as exceptional beings, albeit tangentially in the sense that Gray means bodhisattvas in his paper. As he explains about the parable he shared,         

 “This story presents a situation which is clearly an ethical dilemma, especially if one believes in karma and rebirth. It presents a scenario of ‘compassionate killing,’ in which a spiritually advanced being, a bodhisattva, engages in violence as a last resort. The parable makes it very clear that underlying motivation is not anger or hatred, but rather compassion for all involved. This is plausible within the general scope of Buddhist ethics, since Buddhists have long privileged intention as the key feature for ethically evaluating an action. The Buddhist focus on intention and the introspective orientation that it implies allows considerable ethical flexibility. This focus shifts emphasis away from outward adherence to rules of morality, and promotes the view that the individual is an ethical agent engaged in what Foucault termed ‘ethical work,’ in which one strives ‘not only.... to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behavior.’ As an agent who is a locus of a complex and ever changing social network, the bodhisattva’s goal is to act so as to maximize benefit for all involved, but since these decisions to act are purely contextual, it is not possible to adequately formulate ethical rules that would apply to all situations.” (Gray 4)   

Surely the plan to trick the world into uniting against a common, albeit imaginary, foe qualifies as a situation that seeks to maximize benefit for all, right? So what if there’s the loss of some life along the way? Wasn’t this the sort of moral dilemma Harry Truman faced as president when deciding to drop atomic bombs on Japan? In terms of deciding between that action and the possible losses on both sides of a land invasion. There was going to be wholesale death in either case. This puts the decision to drop the atomic bombs, despite whatever else can be said about such actions, to be the lesser of two evils at that time. This sort of situation where one has to take what would otherwise be considered as a negative action and have it turn out to be a positive one is how Ozymandias connects to Tantric Buddhism, beyond a brief mention of traveling to and learning in Tibet, in that his actions were aimed at creating maximum benefit for all and is a perfect example of the Buddhist concept of expedient means. Or as Gray puts it, “Tantric Buddhist thinkers advanced the proposal that bodhisattvas, on account of their underlying compassionate orientation, are exempt from ordinary ethical norms.” This is why this topic has the potential to be dangerous but is worth exploring nonetheless.

Now, just as superheroes can often possess powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary mortals, this could conceivably put them on a similar plane as bodhisattvas, especially given Gray’s explanations. For example, the late, great writer/editor Denny O’Neil often considered superheroes to be the modern equivalent of tutelary gods, protector deities summoned by the people in times of crisis. To my own way of thinking, superheroes are a modern mix of bodhisattvas, chakravartins, and devas, in the sense that they share the compassionate mission of the bodhisattva to remain in the world until all of it is saved, have the capacity to rule and change the world like a chakravartin or wheel-turning king, and undergo the sorts of adventures and possess powers and abilities worthy of devas or gods. Do kings and gods obey the ethics of ordinary mortals? History and mythology and religion tends to suggest the answer is no; they are more likely to set the ethics for others, often enacting an ethics that descends from higher powers upon them. Superheroes are often considered vigilantes or fascists by their detractors, which in either positive or negative case would also put them outside of “ordinary ethical norms”. After all, when the Golden Age Superman trapped a group of greedy mining company executives in one of their own mines in order to get them to provide better working conditions for their workers, one could hardly argue that he was engaging in acts of forgiveness or turning the other cheek, as laid out in Christian ethics, right? That early Superman often took the law into his own hands, be it beating up a wife beater or going so far as to drag Hitler to the World Court to face charges. Over time, Superman’s morals would take on a softer expression but even the more modern version of the hero in the 1990s knew he had little choice in the end of their confrontation other than to kill Doomsday in order to stop him in the now classic Superman #75 or The Death of Superman issue, a title which tells one what price was paid for making that choice, as the wages of sin are death and killing is a sin against which even Superman wasn’t invulnerable. In 2022, many comics creators and fans across social media shared the image of Batman breaking a rifle from The Dark Knight Returns as a response to the then recent rash of mass shootings in the United States. Images that contrast the various times over his career where Batman wielded a gun, especially in some of his Golden Age adventures. As much as we would like to assume our heroes share our values, there have been times they do not. Such as it is that it is difficult to assume that Ozymandias is operating on a more ‘normal’ moral plane, or, to use the Tantric designation, is an adherent to the values and path of the pashu. The calm ease with which he watches as events and his plans unfold and the actions that he undertakes further suggest that Adrian Veidt may have indeed been following the path of the vira in order to accomplish his intentions.

Now that I’ve set out interpreted explanations of his intent and how it fits within the Tantric Buddhist way of thinking, what are Ozymandias’ actions to which this idea of compassionate violence could be applied?

Let us begin at the beginning with the death of The Comedian. Watchmen opens with the investigations by both the police and Rorschach into the murder of a man who turns out to be the former superhero turned government operative. A murder that puzzles the police but sends Rorschach off into a tour of his former friends and associates in the superhero profession. It serves as a masterful way of introducing the readers to the world of Watchmen. It also serves as a powerful narrative device, especially for 1985, that this series wasn’t the usual superhero fare of the day. After all, the death of a major character in any superhero franchise is usually done for dramatic effect or to reset the status quo of the book. This wouldn’t be the first way this mini-series broke the rules as readers ultimately learn the person who caused the death of The Comedian was none other than Ozymandias, another former hero. How can this be? Within the context of the story, it was simply a case of one man discovering what the other man was doing, the usual fare of mystery novels but not necessarily for superheroes in superhero comics. Under those circumstances this action alone would mark Ozymandias as a murderer and as a superhero turned supervillain. But these are exceptional circumstances in which Ozymandias is taking action and his intention was not personal animus against The Comedian but the need to keep his plan moving forward and a secret. According to Evola,  “Again, in the Buddhist Tantras, Buddha paradoxically upholds the relativity of every moral precept, the uselessness of worship, the insignificance of the five precepts of early Buddhism, and even of the triple homage (triratna) of Buddhist tradition (to the Buddha, to the law [dharma] and to the Buddhist community [sangha], in terms so blunt that at monastic gatherings the bodhisattvas, those who are on their way towards enlightenment, faint, while the tathagatas, the enlightened ones, remain unmoved. Hindu Tantras share a similar perspective: the siddha remains pure and unblemished even while performing actions the mere mention of which would automatically damn anybody else” (Evola 56).       

Surely the death of The Comedian is an action that would damn anyone else both to punishment in the ordinary world and in the afterlife, however one conceives of such. Yet at no point in the course of Watchmen does Ozymandias suffer the typical fate of villains in Western stories or supervillains in superhero stories. Again, namely that the wages of sin are death. The closest to punishment in the ordinary world is the final confrontation with the rest of the primary characters. A confrontation that sees Ozymandias victorious in the end. Not only does Ozymandias not suffer the wages of sin, his plan is ultimately successful, with only a hint at the end of how it could be undone. Now this could be proof of the validity of the tagline “World’s Smartest Man” alone but given the level of his conviction, sacrifice, and dedication to his mission, one has to admit that Ozymandias’s devotion to his plan bordered on the spiritual and religious. Perhaps this is another sign of his spiritual martial training in Tantra.                                                                                                                 

This idea colors the rest of the examples.

The biggest potential agent who could stop Ozymandias after The Comedian was Dr. Manhattan. The nuclear powered man-god could have easily stopped anything Veidt planned with his powers and abilities. One means mentioned in Watchmen to stop or slow down him was the release of tachyons caused by the teleportation of the creature bomb which confused the good doctor’s ‘normal’ perspective of seeing all events in his timeline past, present, and future. Another tactic of which we learn is Ozymandias arranged for several people associated with Dr. Manhattan— including his former lover, his best friend Wally Weaver, and former foe Moloch—to all contract cancer. This was done to accelerate the natural discomfort Dr. Manhattan caused in people. The putting together and presentation of this revelation at a public interview being conducted with Dr. Manhattan provided an additional impact by going directly to the viewing public, allowing for those fears of a blue nuclear man to come to the fore. In the rush of reporters and people reacting and overreacting to the allegations of cancer, Dr. Manhattan basically removes himself from the playing field and ultimately the Earth. Ozymandias’s actions here worked. In Buddhism, there is a tactic in teaching referred to as expedient means, which I mentioned above. An expedient means is any method that causes a person to take the path to enlightenment. Two of the best examples of Buddhist expedient means comes from the Lotus Sutra and they are The Parable of the Burning House and The Parable of the Skillful Doctor. In the former parable, a wealthy man comes home to find his mansion on fire, with his children playing with their toys inside, oblivious. He yells for them to come out of the mansion to no avail, the children are ignoring him, having fun with their toys. His final option is to offer the children far better toys than the ones they have, if only they will come outside. Intrigued, the children leave the burning mansion just before it burns down. The children, upon seeing no new toys, wanted to be upset but the wealthy man, happy to have his children alive and safe, gives them far, far better toys than he had promised them to celebrate. In the latter, a very skillful doctor learns that his children got into his medicines and consumed poison thinking it was candy. Quickly the doctor worked up an antidote. Some of the children, who were suffering, took the antidote and got better. The rest of the children refused, driven mad by the poison and afraid of taking anything else. The doctor, desperate to save the lives of his other children, devised a scheme where he left the antidote with the children, reminded them it was the only thing that would save their lives, left town, and then sent word from a faraway city that he had died. The children received the message and, driven sane by their incredible grief for their father, finally took the antidote and were cured. The doctor, hearing of this news, hurried back home to his children. In both cases, what was offered represented enlightenment and the way by which the offering was accepted is the expedient means. Now, those coming from a completely Western matrix may object to the means in the latter parable to some extent because it was a cruel trick to play on children, telling them their father was dead. That’s the point. In Buddhism, whatever means deemed necessary to get people to become enlightened is a right or skillful one, meaning it’s an expedient one. Why? For the same reason as was mentioned before in the parable featuring Captain Greatly Compassionate, because the intention wasn’t cruel, it was compassionate. Whether it was the lie the wealthy man told or the one the doctor told, because it came from a pure intention—that of saving the lives of the children in both parables—the lies did not cause demerit, they brought merit to the men in question. Just as with the wealthy man and the skillful doctor, the intention of Ozymandias in giving cancer to each of the aforementioned people—like the rest of his actions plans—was one of compassion, as part of his goal of giving the world the medicine he felt it needed to save itself. Just as with Captain Greatly Compassionate, the action of purposefully infecting a handful people with cancer was a lesser negative karmic action than the possible millions of people who would have had cancers of all sorts in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. A possible war that was only kept at bay by one man-god Dr. Manhattan. A possible war that nearly became reality when the Russians invaded Afghanistan as soon as the good doctor was absent without leave from his function as America’s living nuclear deterrent, further justifying Ozymandias’ actions.

Not that all of Ozymandias’ actions are that easily justified, even by a Tantric Buddhist rubric. One is the assassination attempt Veidt arranged. I will admit upfront that this one is shaky. After all, in the course of the assassination attempt, not only was the assassin killed, which was always part of Veidt’s plan but his secretary was killed as well. Now, I said above that the primary structure of Watchmen is that of a mystery. Mysteries use red herrings as one aspect of the genre. These red herrings—false clues, misdirections, guilty suspects that turn out to have legitimate alibis—are part of what makes mysteries enjoyable reading. Perhaps the sloppiness of the attempt could be chalked up to Veidt having to throw this last minute element into his plans, based on the investigation Rorschach undertook on his own recognizance. If there was a mask killer, as the latter man intimated, then Veidt likely figured on providing him with something along those lines, to give him a blind alley to search down. However it came about, the attempt happened and failed or succeeded, depending on one’s perspective. What’s the most interesting part about this scene is the topic of the dialogue before the attempt. Officials of Veidt’s company wanted to discuss possible additions to the Ozymandias toy line. By the time everything was over, both the assassin and the secretary were dead. At which point, Veidt seemingly answering the query of his officials and commenting on what had just occurred said, in issue 5, page 16, panel 8, “Call the toy people and cancel the extension of the Ozymandias line. If they ask why, just tell them I don’t have any enemies” (Moore & Gibbons). In the end, the secretary wasn’t planned to be a victim. As Veidt said in issue 12, page 9, panel 5 when asked what would he have done if the assassin shot at him, Ozymandias answers “I guess I would have had to catch the bullet, wouldn’t I?” (Moore & Gibbons), a stunt he ends up performing. But in the moment and later on, there is remorse on Veidt’s part over the death of the secretary. As he says in issue 12, page 27, panels 1 and 2, “ Jon… I know people think me callous, but I’ve made myself feel every death. By Day, I imagine endless faces. By night… Well, I dream about swimming towards a hideous… no. Never mind. It isn’t significant… What’s significant is that I know. I know I’ve struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity… But someone had to take the weight of that awful, necessary crime” (Moore & Gibbons). Do these seem like the emotions a cold hearted killer would have felt? It does seem in line with a Buddhist view, that he had inadvertently had caused another suffering. It does sound like the thinking Captain Greatly Compassionate went through in making his own decision to kill the thief. This allowing himself to see the faces of all the people who died because of his action also sounds similar to two different Buddhist meditation techniques. One is the Shava Sadhana. According to tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com, the Shava Sadhana is…

“…a Tantric sadhana (spiritual practice) in which the practitioner sits on a corpse for meditation. Shava sadhana is part of the Vamachara (heterodox, Left-hand path) practice of worship, which is followed by the esoteric Tantra.

“Shava sadhana is regarded as one of Tantra's most important, most difficult and most secret rituals. Tantric texts as well as oral tales detail the process of the ritual and also tell its importance. The purpose of practicing the ritual range from knowledge, propitiating a deity, material motives, even dark objectives to gaining control over the spirit of the deceased. There are strict rules that need to be followed in the ritual, even in selection of a suitable corpse for the ceremony.” 

One could imagine Ozymandias adapting this ritual to his purposes, a tactic itself typical of Buddhism, especially given the darker tactics he would be forced to undertake in order to save the world. The other technique is the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra : Meditation Technique No. 79. In this technique, which goes back to the days of the Buddha himself, one is to watch a body being burned in normal funereal rites. Just simply watch for a period of three months. In time, one can imagine seeing themselves or their loved ones’ bodies burning. The point of the meditation technique is to get the person to realize that the only certainty is death. The only real difference, as far as Watchmen was concerned, was whether or not people would die in a potential nuclear war or as a result of his plans to save the world. Ozymandias knew this was the choice that faced him. Ozymandias would have worked to come to grips with how many people were going to die because of his actions and his plans. The two techniques I mentioned could have been adapted and applied for that purpose. After all, just as the longer version of the story of Captain Greatly Compassionate has him going so far as to take the thief out in a lifeboat and explaining the situation to him before the realization that the man’s nature was such that there was no other option, one can imagine that for Ozymandias his plans weren’t as easy for him to execute as it seems.

Or perhaps I’m offering arguments to justify the actions of a sociopath. As the next action of Ozymandias that I will be examining surely does fit the definition of one. And definitely the actions of a villain in a mystery. I will be looking at is the poisoning of his servants as Ozymandias confesses/monologues his origins. Normally, in superhero comics, a character recounting his or her origin story is normally an important story moment. In issue 11 of Watchmen, it was an important story moment that turned rather cold blooded, figuratively and literally, as the hero finished telling his story to the three dead servants and then simply left the arboretum after exposing it to the Antarctic weather. The most interesting question is why would he be doing this retelling this way? Was Ozymandias preparing to pay the wages of sin in the end? Did he have to do this? After all, particularly in mystery stories, it’s the villain that gets rid of their fellow co-conspirators or flunkies en route to executing their master plan. Yet Ozymandias was a hero and was also taking heroic measures to save the world.  However he was also, as he had at various points in the story, getting rid of those who could tell the world what he did, whether it was the Comedian or the scientists and artists who worked on creating the creature or the few servants of Veidt’s Antarctic fortress. That possibility of revelation, which comes up at the end of the story after he has fought with his former superhero allies and peers, is the motivation for his action in this case. After all, a world at peace is a fragile thing. The very end of Watchmen, with its cliffhanger ending involving the possibility of revelation courtesy of Rorschach’s journal, leaves the reader with the feeling that everything Veidt has done and fought for could be brought down by the ravings of a madman published by an outsider political rag. That’s how fragile the peaceful world so many died to achieve likely was. That a such journal which couldn’t be authenticated, published by a radical conservative magazine, could shatter that peaceful world by telling it the truth of how that peace was purchased. That would be a Hell of a way to pay the wages of sin, one could say. One could also quote Mr. Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in this circumstance where “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” as a rationale. It’s just that most people could not and would not think of themselves having to make that sort of decision. Ozymandias was in that position. A position into which he put himself, to be sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that he made the choices he did based on the position he chose to occupy, namely a wheel-turning king or chakravartin. One could also imagine President Truman being in a similar position at the end of World War 2. He was newly minted as president, the war was winding down, yet his commanders informed him of the costs of a land invasion versus using this new fangled weapon, the Atomic Bomb. Truman had and made a choice. Ozymandias also had a choice: do nothing and let the world stumble into a greater, darker war that would have ended with a nuclear war or do something that would prevent that, namely put his plans into action. In Buddhism and in particular Tantric Buddhism, there’s a principle that been mentioned above as changing poison into medicine. For the Tantric practitioner, this principle usually means that he or she could use even the most corrupt means possible to take actions with and through the purity of their intentions make such actions pure and therefore capable of generating merit instead of demerit. This is the principle that applies to the situation of Captain Greatly Compassionate. This is the principle that I’m saying applies to Ozymandias’s actions, at their core. That even an action like murder, no matter how cold blooded it could be in execution, would be elevated to one of generating the most possible benefit through the right intention of the actor. In Watchmen, Ozymandias was that actor of right or skillful intention. Again, his actions were primarily dictated by his response to Captain Metropolis’s pleas for someone to save the world; despite his admiration for Alexander, Veidt had no intentions of ruling the world, ‘merely’ intending to save it, perhaps to guide it. That right or skillful intention purified his actions, making them right or skillful actions, no matter how heinous they would be if done by anyone else. Just as his action against the thief was purified by Greatly Compassionate’s right intention.

Unintentionally, one of the more interesting aspects of Watchmen as a comic book mini-series is how much it is about comics themselves. The obvious aspect of that is the subject matter, superheroes, which was and is the primary stock in trade of DC Comics. But there’s another formative comics company in the history of the American comics industry, and that was EC Comics. A company that is mainly known by the general public for a handful of things: the creation of Mad magazine, being the company highlighted by the book Seduction of the Innocent and congressional hearings on the topic of juvenile delinquency, and the variety of genres the publisher tackled. It’s that last area that concerns us, as another way of looking at Watchmen is to examine how it used the genres and even the design sense of EC Comics to inform its storytelling. The alien monster itself is something straight out of Weird Science or Weird Science-Fantasy, as published by EC. The Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear”, as a similar anthology format television show of the same Atomic Age period, uses a similar conceit. So does the film The Day The Earth Stood Still, wherein the alien Klaatu uses a global blackout to get the attention of the world in order to get his warning message across. It’s no surprise that both of these stories are mentioned in Watchmen. However none of the stories mentioned used the alien threat to unite humanity motif the way that Ozymandias did in Watchmen. Namely using it as a ploy that caused the deaths of millions of people in New York City where the teleported corpse appeared. That’s not including all of those who made the creature, the scientists and artists who helped to construct the creature and its imaginary home world.This collective action is the biggest one in the entire story. It is also the best comparison with the parable of The Skillful Doctor. Why? Because Ozymandias weighed the deaths of a few million people against the deaths of the whole world of nearly five billion, as it was in 1985. That was just as likely an outcome of the inevitable and eventual nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. One could argue though that a nuclear war wasn’t as inevitable as I’m making it sound, given the fact that no one on this planet Earth has nuclear weapons as a part of war, besides the United States. And, depending on the historian and historical theory to which one subscribes, it was probably not as necessary for the US to drop the bombs and Hiroshima and Nagasaki as general US history makes it seem. Yet, in the world of Watchmen, one where a much more adventurous United States held the world in check due to having claims on Dr. Manhattan and had held any adventurism of the Soviet Union in check, the audience is always told that the world exists in a permanent state of ten minutes to midnight on the nuclear war clock. With that situation being part of the background of the story and seeing the USSR go quickly on the march as soon as Dr. Manhattan has left the building, it’s not as far fetched an assumption as it might seem. More importantly, within the story world, Ozymandias would have foreseen this eventuality. Hence why his plans not only included removing one rather powerful blue man-cum-queen from the chessboard but also included a means by which the inevitable nuclear war could be thwarted in such a way as to guarantee a path to world peace, the goal for which Ozymandias strove. As such, that goal was worth any efforts taken to bring it about. Efforts that are in the same ballpark as those taken by Captain Greatly Compassionate, The Skillful Doctor, and The Father of the children in The Burning House. Ozymandias, in many ways, is of a similar mind as that Father, seeing the world of children playing with their toys while the house is burning figuratively all around him, trying desperately to come up with a way to rescue them. It’s just that Ozymandias was a superhero within a superhero story and therefore his actions took on that flavor, that style, that approach. An approach that’s larger than life. A style that’s more dramatic than his companies launching initiatives to save the whales, promote green technologies, and the like. A flavor that includes the possibility of alien invasion and therefore being able to turn such an event to one’s advantage, the way Ozymandias did. In so doing, with his intention of saving the world being the foremost thought behind all of his actions, Adrian Veidt was going to take actions that themselves were going to be more in line with those of a James Bond or a Doc Savage than a Greenpeace, namely something big and dramatic. Thus we have a large, artificially created and programmed, alien bioweapon and psychic bomb, an action straight out of EC Comics as well as DC Comics. And, as we’ve seen with the three Buddhist parables being cited, an action that definitely compassionately violent. Why? Because, even with Alexander the Great being his role model, Ozymandias has no aspirations on ruling the world, merely intentions of saving it. 

Actions and intentions that in many ways go back to the origins of the superhero itself. However, by 1985 the superhero genre had long since moved away from such aspirations and designs. As the genre was approaching its 50 anniversary in those days, if we count from Action Comics #1 and ignore various proto-superheroes like the aforementioned Doc Savage and characters like The Phantom, it had evolved into a much more mainstream version of itself, having more in common with professional wrestling than its common man social fiction beginnings. The Never Ending Battle, as I call it, found the superhero being a creature of action adventure entertainments. Something that Watchmen, along with Marvelman/Miracleman also written by Alan Moore, would push the genre back into its original themes but not without paying homage to where the genre was at that point as well. Which brings us to what was the final fight of Ozymandias with Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Nite Owl, and Rorschach at his arctic retreat as they tried to stop and then just deal with the consequences of what The World’s Smartest Man had done. Of course, superheroes fighting amongst themselves had become a stable of genre by that point. The Fantastic Four, as example, established the idea of heroes fighting amongst themselves as an obligatory part of the genre. An obligatory plot element that found itself furthered in those early days of Marvel Comics where the FF met other heroes like the Hulk or the X-Men first on the field of battle before meeting as friends and/or peers. So it’s not surprising to see the others battle with Ozymandias. Again, the heroes fight the villains in the genre. Except, and this is another part of why I approach Watchmen as Ozymandias’ heroic adventure because no matter how powerful Dr. Manhattan was, no matter how skillful Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were with martial arts, no matter how determined and full of righteous anger Rorschach was, in the end Veidt won the final battle.  The recent Avengers movie Infinity War notwithstanding, in the superhero genre, the villains typically don’t win in the end, especially not in what is the climactic battle. Yet in this story, it is Ozymandias who wins the day, which is usually the role of the hero. As a matter of fact, Ozymandias makes a personal heroic sacrifice, in terms of sacrificing his genetically engineered pet Bubastis in his efforts to stop Dr. Manhattan by reenacting the experiment that created him in the first place. Whether it be in mythology or in modern stories, heroes often sacrifice or lose loved ones along the way as a part of their journey. In this case, it’s no different for Adrian Veidt. If anything, he’s made more sacrifices, in both senses of the word, during the course of Watchmen than any other character. Much like Captain Greatly Compassionate, Ozymandias found himself in the position of choosing between letting the world commit various atrocities that would have been associated with a global nuclear war and committing fewer atrocities along the way to saving the world from itself. A choice that indicated operating from a different moral structure than usually found in most superhero comics.

As I mentioned above, superhero stories are generally about the morals of the heroes, if not the society in which they operate. Ozymandias, at least from the viewpoint of this writer, is operating from a Tantric Buddhist moral approach which allows for maximum flexibility of action by those on the path of a vira or is considered a bodhisattva. Most of the other characters in Watchmen are operating from a typical Judeo-Christian morality. The exception to this is the character of Rorschach. In this way, the latter is a perfect foil for the former, especially given the arguments being made by this essay. Rorschach has a very strict black and white morality. Just as I can make the assumption about Ozymandias’s possible moral operating system, Alan Moore made one about Rorschach based on the strict moral views of the creator of his inspiration/analog The Question, that of Steve Ditko. Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, was a fan of Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy. An admiration that would shape some of his later creations, The Question being one of them. The Question and another Ditko creation Mr. A were known for their very strict black and white views of right and wrong. So too is Rorschach. To him, what Veidt has done and even what he has achieved by the end of the story, no matter what good may be coming from it, are the fruits of a poisoned tree. In this way, it may be fair to say that Rorschach’s morality is that of the pashu, or common man, as it is termed in Tantra. This may be one reason why, when presented by the reality of what Ozymandias has done, Rorschach was the one who refused to simply let The World’s Smartest Man off the hook by remaining quiet, lest the world go back onto a path towards way and possible annihilation (Watchmen 12). It took the action of the other major moral actor in the story, Dr. Manhattan, to resolve the potential problem in a rather permanent and bloody fashion (Watchmen 12). As such, that puts the nuclear man at the third vertex of a moral triangle between him, Rorschach, and Ozymandias. As mentioned above, Manhattan had been moving into a kind of moral indifference to events over the course of his transformed life, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective. The incident with the prostitute in Vietnam shows how far he had moved away from “normal” human values, or those of the pashu. The same could be said with his pursuit of Silk Spectre, given that she was 16 when they became a couple. It could even be argued that Dr. Manhattan, despite his name and role as avatar of American nuclear deterrence, wasn’t really a moral actor in Watchmen as his actions seemed to be predetermined for him. Given how he often said that the present and future for him were happening at the same time, he would have no real choice. In other words, he knew that Vietnamese woman would be shot and killed by The Comedian. So not only did he not do anything in that moment, he did nothing that could have averted that moment. This begs the question as to whether Manhattan knew what Ozymandias did/would do; beyond the point in time where the latter had released tachyons to confuse the time sense of the former, Manhattan should have known what was going to happen through the whole course of the events depicted in Watchmen. That may have to be a topic for another essay. Here, it is mentioned to offer a contrast and a complement to the moral behavior of Ozymandias and Rorschach. Rorschach morally saw the world in pure black and white. Manhattan morally saw the world as a fait accompli, saw it in purely deterministic terms. Whereas Ozymandias morally saw the world as something worth doing anything in order to save it. Those two views found themselves resolved by the conversation between the two towards the end of issue 12. After what amounts to his confession of feelings of remorse, Ozymandias find himself wondering if Manhattan understands why he did what he did. To which Manhattan answers, on page 27, panel 3, that “… But yes, I understand, without condoning or condemning.” Then he finally admits to something that readers had started to guess by this point in the story, that “Human affairs cannot be my concern”, meaning that he has finally accepted that his own sense of humanity has flown as a result of the events in the story. Dr. Manhattan is no longer a mere weapon of the US government, or a mutated man, but given that he is contemplating creating his own humans as he exits Earth, he has embraced his nascent godhood at last. And in true divine fashion, Manhattan leaves Ozymandias with an observation meant to cause the latter to think a little more deeply about whether he has truly succeeded or not.

Speaking of having to rethink one’s choices, there are a few counterarguments to my premise I can think of that I would like to tackle before I conclude this essay.

How could Ozymandias’s actions be judged by this rubric? The most obvious answer is this: it’s an interpretation of the author. One of the things I learned about a few decades away from higher education was that in terms of English there had been a movement away from there being a singular way of interpreting a work and towards encouraging readers to develop their own interpretation. I will admit this was a tougher challenge than I had originally thought. Especially since I had learned a lot about the practical aspects of fiction writing during that gap in my learning that runs counter to this. Namely that an author has a number of tools at his or her disposal that are meant to lock in just what meanings a reader should take from any story. In the case of Watchmen, the ending of the story is ambiguous. Even though Ozymandias has won and the world is seemingly moving into a more peaceful, hopeful state as best exemplified by the Millennium perfume/cologne ad from Veidt seen on a billboard, there’s the possibility that Rorschach will have his revenge through his journal. Even though it’s a more peaceful world, the former Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are planning on some sort of adventures, which suggests that the world may not be all that peaceful. Beyond that, the comics world of the day took the success of Watchmen to mean that what the fans wanted was a much more grim and gritty world in which their beloved superheroes operated. Alan Moore in contrast has both rejected that interpretation by creating more hopeful and magical characters like Tom Strong and Promethea, and has said in recent interviews that the superhero is a fascist concept at its core. With all of those differing takes on what Watchmen means and what superheroes are or aren’t, there’s plenty of room for an interpretation coming from a Buddhist perspective in general and a Tantric perspective in particular. That the morality offered by such a view is different or darker than a Judeo-Christian one is merely itself an interpretation. To a Tantric Buddhist, for example, having a rigid moral system like the Ten Commandments would limit the actions a bodhisattva. Both the father in The Parable of The Burning House and the doctor in The Parable of The Skillful Doctor violate the commandment against bearing false witness, for example. By Judeo-Christian standards both men have committed a moral wrong while by Buddhist standards they have committed good actions that earn merit. Captain Greatly Compassionate, no matter how well meaning he is, commits a murder, going against that commandment. And yet he earns merit because of his actions, ultimately being reborn as the historical Buddha. The same actions as seen through different lenses. Therefore this interpretation is not necessarily dismissible merely because it doesn’t fit any ‘standard’ moral view. This is an age of moral relativism, after all, right? Why not consider a moral stance from an obscure branch of Buddhism? An additional consideration is that the inspiration for Ozymandias was an explicitly Buddhist character Peter Cannon. Not just a Buddhist character but a Tibetan Buddhist character. Tantra as a philosophy and practice has flourished in many ways in Tibet. Thinking of Ozymandias as a chip off the block in terms of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, isn’t so far fetched as that was what was supposed to be assumed by those familiar with the history of comics. It wasn’t hidden knowledge per se that the characters in Watchmen were the Charlton superheroes with a new coat of paint and some remodeling work. The original pitch by Moore and Gibbons involved using those characters. It was DC editorial, realizing that this story would essential use up characters the company had then recently acquired, asked for the changes which gave us the characters we know today. All of which means that it is fair to interpret Ozymandias through a Tantric lens. The same way that Rorschach and his morals would be and are best examined from a Randian or objectivist perspective.

How could Ozymandias be considered a hero after what he did? Two major ways. The first involves looking at the Buddhist Parables offered above, especially the story of Captain Greatly Compassionate. Like the good captain, Ozymandias found himself being advised to a dangerous situation where harm would take place unless he took action, no matter how exceptional. Another captain, Captain Metropolis, is the one who lays out the core challenges the world is facing without solution when he talks about the problems of  “promiscuity, drugs, campus subversion” in flashback in issue 2, page 10, panel 2 (Moore & Gibbons). These were the problems that were laid out and in need of a superheroic solution, given that the common day world hadn’t solved such things. In Buddhism, it is the bodhisattva who, having achieved enlightenment, turns away from Nirvana and back towards Samsara or the common day world, vowing not to accept his own reward for his efforts until all beings can become enlightened. That itself is a heroic action by Buddhist standards. Just as the actions of Captain Greatly Compassionate are considered heroic.  By the end of the story, regardless of what he did or rather because of what he did, Ozymandias did save the world from itself. If that’s not a heroic action, let alone superheroic action, what is?

Why explore this interpretation? As mentioned throughout this essay, it is the Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt link as well as the references to “… gathering martial wisdom as I went” from China and Tibet by Ozymandias that open the door to this interpretation. In addition I mentioned my desire to reconcile the ideas of superhero fiction with Buddhist concepts for a long stalled project—a project that’s finally lumbering its way into reality; although, given the rate it has gone so far, as compared to the long time this particular essay took, is still a long ways off—that started me on a quest to see how does the Buddhist path to enlightenment compare and contrast with power and wish fulfillment power fantasy. That quest led me to studying Tantra is ways that went beyond thinking it’s all about sex. For even to a true Tantric practitioner, sex is just a pathway, not the end goal. That study led me to ideas such as wrathful deity practice, where the practitioner visualizes themselves as a deity in order to use the influence of such an entity to transcend their own limitations. There was even one article that suggested one could think of the wrathful deities as the superheroes of enlightenment or even could visualize themselves as someone like the Hulk or the Punisher tackling the enemies of enlightenment as a way to achieve that very same enlightenment. In learning more about this form of Buddhism, not only did I solve some of my narrative problems but saw new ways to see heroes like Ozymandias in Watchmen and Aknaton in Jim Starlin’s Metamorphosis Odyssey and the actions they took. Ways that were outside of the usual Judeo-Christian view or any other modern morality. As I also mentioned at the beginning, my only real concern was how this mode of thinking was or could be dangerous. That is something that even Evola mentions in his book, that the path of the Tantric is not for the faint of heart. From rituals involving sex to involving corpses to outright black magic and human sacrifice, whether these things actually happen or were metaphorical ideas used in their texts, Tantrism, like any other Left Hand Path approach, is not simple or easy or sweetness and light. Yet that is its core argument in a nutshell. That just as it is the intention of a person that determines the merit or demerit of an action, there is no practice or action that can’t be used to foster one’s quest for enlightenment, that can’t produce merit. By the end of Watchmen, the world has been saved, Ozymandias is taking the lead behind the scenes, Dr. Manhattan has left to seek his destiny elsewhere, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are in love and off seeking adventures, and Rorschach is dead and hopefully at peace. Those results are positive ones, meaning that Ozymandias has earned merit for his actions. No matter how poisonous his plan was, it turned into the medicine the world needed. That end result is enough of a reason to explore the hows and whys of such a conclusion via this interpretation.

Was Ozymandias’ intention truly compassionate? First of all, the simple desire to save the world demonstrates some form of compassion. It demonstrates that the person behind the desire wants a better world for those around him. That was what Adrian Veidt, the once and future hero known as Ozymandias, wanted. At the bare minimum, he was answering Captain Metropolis’s plea, “… Somebody has to save the world…” in the best way that he could devise. Another way to look at it, Veidt had no one in this world he was connected to, except Bubastis, his genetically engineering pet. His parents had been long dead. He had no other relatives, no wife and/or children. So why would he want to save the world, if not out of compassion? In true bodhisattva fashion, as news of the world flooded across his wall of TVs in his Antarctic base, Ozymandias says to the other superheroes present, in issue 12, page 20, panel 1, “I saved earth from Hell. Next, I’ll help her towards Utopia” (Moore & Gibbons). Not for any selfish reasons but out of a desire to save the world was the intention behind all of his actions, out of compassion. I think what may be concerning to any readers is even considering the motivation behind such actions as mass murder to be compassion. But as mentioned above numerous times, the Tantric Buddhist view allows for such a thing as compassionate violence. All of Ozymandias’s actions are compassionate violence in Watchmen because every moment of violence is in the service of saving the world. Even within their own different moral frameworks, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre are forced by the results, a world determined to become united and therefore peaceful and saved, to accept the validity of Veidt’ expedient means. Only Rorschach, with his rigid black and white morality, cannot accept what has occurred. While I’ve been examining the actions of Ozymandias through a Tantric lens, Dr. Manhattan has his compassionate violence moment when he kills Rorschach because he threatened the newly minted world peace. In many ways, Rorschach, contrary to his view of himself, had more in common with the thief in the Captain Greatly Compassionate parable in the sense that he would not be dissuaded from his choice of action. He differed from the thief, at least as far as the parable goes, because he knew he could not be allowed to live and understood what Dr. Manhattan had to do. In that case it was the life of one man versus the lives of the billions that could die or suffer in a world that would have followed the path towards nuclear war.

Couldn’t have Ozymandias used his resources and acumen to save the world without taking the actions he did? Getting a bit metafictional about the matter, Watchmen is a superhero story, first and last. Therefore the story would be told by and every character would operate within the tropes and conventions of the genre, no matter how deconstructed they were. Just as a mystery requires a detective to solve the crime, whether it be a police detective or mystery writer or simply a person blamed for a crime they didn’t commit. That person would be the one to solve the crime. Or a horror story requires a monster of some form by which to scare the victims in the story. Even though there’s a significant lack of a quality rogues’ gallery for any of the heroes, beyond the mentions of a few pitiful examples that themselves were deconstructions of the concept of a supervillain, we know the major characters in Watchmen are superheroes. We see them in action, albeit mostly in flashback. We see them deal with their secret identities when they had such things. In recent years there has been a trend towards trying to see the actions of superheroes through a realist lens. For example, there was a Buzzfeed article that actually gave what a real world body count would have been in the movie Man of Steel as a result of Superman’s actions, particularly the battles of Smallville and Metropolis. I think such a piece came into being partly because this world is a post 9/11 world and partly because the director Zack Snyder ended up upsetting many more Superman fans than pleasing them with his interpretation of the classic hero. Gone was the friendly character that the late Christopher Reeve portrayed. In his place was a darker, seemingly more callous take, who killed his enemies, especially General Zod. It was natural to want to examine the side effects of having such a character hanging around as if they were real. However it is unnatural to expect a character to act in ways that don’t fit the genre in which they operate. Sherlock Holmes isn’t necessarily going to be having a torrid romance with a beautiful female vampire. The Fantastic Four isn’t necessarily going to have an Ordinary People kind of storyline in their regular book; a mini-series or graphic novel, perhaps, but not as a regular part of their continuity. Ozymandias was created to be a superhero and thus his actions were going to fit in with that genre, no matter how deconstructed they may have been. As mentioned above, in the Golden Age of superhero comics, Superman himself was known for actions like breaking into the governor’s mansion, dragging Hitler to the World Court, and so on. Superman even impersonated people in order to fix their problems, which conveniently would have a criminal component attached. How truly different, adjusted for the times, were the approaches of Golden Age Superman and Ozymandias in Watchmen? One of the aspect of the superhero genre that developed over time, speaking of Superman, is the characters becoming reactive, as opposed to the proactive beginnings. Superman, within the first few years of his adventures, went from things like beating wife beaters to foiling the latest plot of yet another mad scientist, if Lex Luthor or the Ultra-Humanite weren’t available. By this standard, Ozymandias is a harkening back to the original proactivity superheroes possessed as much as he’s a Tantrika enacting the expedient means to save the world.

And in the end, that’s what superheroes are supposed to do: save the world. In the standard, modern superhero story saving the world generally consists of facing and foiling the latest plot by one of many supervillains hellbent on ruling or devastating or destroying the world. Phases One, Two, and Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe put that sort of storytelling on display for all the world to see in ways they hadn’t outside of the comics. The superhero genre is an entertaining one and that’s what it’s meant to do, entertain. Occasionally, stories, even superhero stories, can enlighten or can tackle topics or philosophies beyond mere entertainment value. The famous Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams Green Lantern Green Arrow Hard Traveling Heroes stories earned that fame by tackling real world topics, such as drug abuse, overpopulation, religious cults, and the like in the early 1970s. In many ways, that set of stories are both a harkening back to the social consciousness of the Golden Age Superman comics and a precursor for comics like Watchmen.

Everybody wants to save the world. If there’s any real problem with this desire, it’s that there’s no one size fits all solution that everyone wants to apply. Why did I write this? I wrote the above roughly 13 thousand words because I was on a quest. A quest to try to unite in a story two of my greatest loves and interests: Buddhism and superheroes.  How could I mix the peaceful quest for enlightenment with the classic adolescent wish fulfillment power fantasy? It was a quest that led to my learning about Tantra and Tantrism, as well as concepts like compassionate violence and wrathful deity practice. Tantra, with its focus on power, seemed perfectly suited to apply to superheroes. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, superhero graphic novels. Its impact on mainstream superheroes has been long lasting, if not occasionally troubling. Watchmen helped to usher in a grim and gritty approach to superheroes that aimed towards the same level of maturity of the original but more often than not failed. Watchmen also features a character that is willing to kill anyone along the way towards saving the world, Ozymandias. Not necessarily the approved approach a superhero would take. But I wondered if his actions could be seen through a Tantric lens. After all, with a saved world as his end result, Ozymandias’s actions could be seen as expedient means, especially since his motivations appear to be saving the world for its own merit. I think I’ve done that. More importantly, if the events in Watchmen are an example of what one supposed Tantric Buddhist superhero would do to save the world, then what sorts of actions would a more openly Tantric Buddhist superhero do towards the same worthy goal?

And any good What If? is all a writer needs to inspire their writing.

Whew!

Well, folks, this column, essay, rant, what have you took far, far longer than I intended (pardon the pun) to write but it ran about as long as I thought. Big thanks and congratulations to any of the two readers who made it through. I know I barely did.

Maybe next time I will tackle something easier.

Like politics.

Until next time, folks!

Namaste, y’all!