[This article was written years ago, after the end of LOST Season 4. It analyzes and speculates about the story based on the first four seasons and contains major spoilers, so enter at your own risk if you haven't finished them!]
Please read these first:
LOST: The Book of Secrets, Prologue | My Most Dazzling Theory (Okay, I'm Bragging)
LOST: The Book of Secrets, Part I | The Island's True Origins
We’ve finished talking about Atlantis. Now let’s talk about Buddha… o(∩_∩)o…
Based on my earlier speculation, the legend of Atlantis was probably the source of inspiration for the LOST writers as they dreamed up all sorts of plots for the island. That seems reasonably persuasive. The legend of Atlantis itself, along with its extensions—immortality, alchemy, Egyptian civilization, and so on—therefore forms LOST’s Western occult background.
But would the writers be satisfied with just that? Obviously not. They had big ambitions.
So LOST also has an Eastern occult background. In this middle installment, I want to analyze that background. Once this layer rises to the surface, we can use a complete logic to explain most of LOST’s plot so far (though actually, we still can’t do that completely; I’m just hoping to get reasonably close).
What Makes the Island So Fascinating
As I mentioned in the previous installment, the scene in LOST Season 4 that moved me most was neither Desmond and Penelope’s love across time and space nor Sawyer jumping into the sea to make Kate happy. It was Ben sobbing as he moved the island. Why? Because I saw a feverish devotion, and the despair that comes after the object of that devotion is destroyed. I’ve always felt that whatever the object of one’s devotion, devotion itself is a force that moves people. So I started wondering: what exactly is the island’s appeal? Why can it drive people like Ben and Widmore to obsessively scheme to obtain it, and leave them so desperately grief-stricken once they lose it?
What the island can give them must be something so wonderful and powerful that it is hard to put into words. It may even be something humanity has dreamed of throughout its existence. What could it be?
So I asked a friend: what is there in this world that you would try to possess at any cost?
She said that among things that already exist, there didn’t seem to be anything quite that extreme. You might really want something, but not go completely off the rails for it. But if we mean something hypothetical, the answer must be some kind of ability.
I completely agree. Anything that could make someone so obsessed that they would do absolutely anything to obtain it could no longer be merely an external possession like money, power, or status. It would have to be an ability.
Immortality?
It’s perfectly reasonable to put “immortality” on the list of candidates. Immortality has always been one of our deepest dreams. For many people, the ultimate source of all suffering is the impossibility of making life and the soul last forever.
From ancient times to the present, humanity has found all sorts of ways to express its sigh over life’s impermanence and its longing for immortality. Especially in art, immortality is practically an eternal theme. Vampires, zombies, alchemy, becoming an immortal, ghosts, reincarnation—what are these recurring motifs if not projections of humanity’s collective-unconscious dream of immortality?
Our bewilderment at life’s impermanence leads to an eternal pursuit of immortality. The pursuit of immortality is, after all, humanity’s oldest and deepest obsession. If we interpret Ben’s tears as the destruction of this dream of immortality, once so close at hand, that would make perfect sense.
But what about someone like Mr. Widmore? In the ordinary world, he already stands at the summit of money and power. For a person like him, what could possibly drive him so crazy? If he is pursuing immortality, that would make sense too. A man already standing at the top of the world might have only one wish: to stand at the top of the world forever. This is the same psychology that led so many ancient Chinese emperors to become obsessed with alchemy.
—But I’m still not satisfied with this theory.
First, immortality is too narrow a concept. Making it the core of the island’s power can explain Ben and Widmore’s psychological motivations rather neatly, but it has little to do with most of the mysteries. For example, can immortality curse a set of numbers? Obviously not.
So I wondered: is there a force far more powerful than immortality, one that includes immortality but has a much broader meaning and scope?
If there is, then I think it must be a very abstract force.
Second, for someone who wants to stand at the top of the world forever, can immortality guarantee that he will achieve this wish? —I’m not so sure.
Standing at the Top of the World
So I asked my friend again: have you ever wondered whether there might be an ability capable of fulfilling many of your wishes at once? She said her greatest wish was to hide in a crack in time (ever since childhood, she had fantasized about abilities like stopping time).
I said, no, that’s not enough. To fulfill that wish, you would also need a whole bunch of other wishes to support it. For instance, you absolutely couldn’t get into a car accident—otherwise you might have this incredibly cool ability and still die in an accident. You couldn’t come down with SARS, either. And you couldn’t owe money to loan sharks, or you could easily be assassinated by gangsters before ever getting to use your ability. So what you really need is a higher-level ability that can fulfill your wish in one shot.
She said, what if it were immortality?
I said, still not enough. You couldn’t guarantee that someone wouldn’t nail you inside a coffin and bury you underground, leaving you immortal and suffering a fate worse than death. Or lock you in a box and sink you into the Mariana Trench, where you’d spend eternity drinking seawater.
She said, what about an invisible immortal? Or an immortal protected by an Invulnerable Golden Bell, impervious to knives and guns?
I said, still no. You could still encounter a tsunami while taking a stroll on the beach one day and get swept to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
—So as I see it, immortality does not necessarily guarantee that a person will stand at the top of the world forever. Immortality is supposed to be the opposite of life’s impermanence, yet it can’t solve impermanence. There is far too much uncertainty outside of life itself; an immortal person can still fall into hell overnight.
So what is my own answer? It sounds completely ridiculous. So ridiculous that everyone will surely say: How does that even count as an ability? Or they’ll think: if such an ability existed, wouldn’t it be ridiculously powerful—almost shamelessly so?
Because this force is so elusive, we usually don’t regard it as an ability at all, but merely as a belief. What belief? The belief that—you can take your fate into your own hands!
Fate is unpredictable; fortune plays tricks on us. You don’t know when you’ll be hit by a car and die, when you’ll catch SARS, or when a tsunami will suddenly sweep you to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. You don’t know whether you, standing at the top of the world today, will suddenly plunge into a bottomless abyss tomorrow. So in real life, “taking your fate into your own hands” is just a phrase of comfort or encouragement.
In fact, being unable to control our fate is humanity’s greatest pain.
But what if one day you really had the chance to see into and manipulate your own fate?
Those people who are “destined” to die in accidents could see the path of their fate and avoid, one after another, the accidents that were supposed to kill them, keeping themselves forever just one step away from the underworld.
If you were standing at the top of the world and could see in advance the traps buried along the track of fate—the ones that would send you tumbling from the clouds—you could avoid them first and remain at the top of the world forever.
In the Japanese manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, one of the really powerful bosses I like said this: “Everyone experiences ‘ups and downs’ in life. Sometimes they ‘succeed’; sometimes they ‘fail.’ But if you can discover a ‘trap’ waiting in the future before it appears right before your eyes, and successfully avoid it, then your life will never fall into a ‘slump.’ That is why I have always remained at the ‘peak’!”
Isn’t an ability that lets you remain at the top of the world forever more magical than simple immortality? Wouldn’t standing at the top of the world forever be more likely than immortality to make a contemporary titan like Widmore bow before it?
What’s more, the ultimate form of manipulating fate is immortality! If Charlie, who was destined to die in an accident, always had a Desmond beside him telling him where the next accident would happen, what would become of him? —He would never meet the conditions of his “destined” death, and could only go on living in this world forever.
Fate
So could the island’s ultimate power be the ability to see into and manipulate fate?
At first glance, it doesn’t seem so, because this power is simply too strong—so strong that it would make many plot points seem unreasonable. But I think that without limiting conditions, not just “manipulating fate,” but almost any superpower would become absurdly powerful. Take the Death Note in Death Note, for example: the story can only unfold once you impose the two conditions that the killer must know the victim’s face and name.
So as long as we impose some limits on the ability to see into and manipulate fate, it won’t become so powerful that it prevents the plot from unfolding plausibly. For instance, perhaps it cannot be applied to just anyone without restriction; the stronger a person’s sensitivity or connection to the island, the easier it is to see into and interfere with that person’s fate.
With such a condition, couldn’t we explain why the island can keep Michael from dying but cannot simply stop Keamy from landing?
So, the island’s ultimate power may be the ability to see into and manipulate people’s fate within certain conditions and limits.
Are You a Man of Science or a Man of Faith
A lot of friends probably won’t like this explanation involving “fate,” because people who enjoy analyzing LOST’s plot are, to a large extent, Men of Science.
If we want to make every single plot point in LOST fit using one theory, we’ll inevitably run into a problem. This problem is also one of LOST’s ongoing storylines: the conflict between Jack and Locke. One is a Man of Science; the other is a Man of Faith. One believes everything is merely coincidence; the other believes everything is arranged by some kind of force.
If you think “coincidence” is a theory that’s too convenient, this conflict can be extended into a more fundamental question: is everything arranged by people, or by some kind of force? The former is conspiracy; the latter is precisely fate.
Conspiracy or fate—that is the question.
The two would give completely different explanations for the same mystery. Take the “cursed numbers”: did Hurley simply run into a spell of bad luck, or had the Others been monitoring him all along and “arranged” his misfortune?
In LOST, the trouble is that believing exclusively in either conspiracy or fate makes it difficult to explain all the mysteries. Some plot points seem to be arranged by heaven; others seem to be human conspiracies.
A lot of friends must hope the LOST writers ultimately explain everything as a “conspiracy,” because if it’s “fate,” then everything gets lazily handed over to some unknowable force operating in the dark. Isn’t that a bit of a cheat?
Actually, not at all!
Whether it is ‘fate’ or ‘a conspiracy’ is a question of ‘what’. As I’ve said repeatedly, within a particular subject and storyline, almost any ‘what’ can be reasonable. The key question is still ‘why’. For example, if the writers want to use ‘fate’ to explain everything, they can’t just say, ‘The island arranged it,’ and call it a day; they also have to explain ‘why the island arranged it this way’. So if the writers are responsible enough, even explaining everything through fate in the end wouldn’t be easy.
So I’m neither Man of Science nor Man of Faith; I’m Man of Logic. Whether it’s science, fate, or something else, as long as one consistent logic can ultimately explain the mysteries, I’m fine with it. Given the evidence available, though, I lean more toward the ‘fate’ explanation.
Now let’s look at what evidence I have.
Evidence One: The Truth Behind Desmond’s Time-Space Travel
First, let’s bring out LOST’s number-one hunk, Desmond (from the moment he appeared, the best episode of every season was his doing! The most scene-stealing male supporting character in history!), and see what exactly happened to him.
In Season 4, episode 5, ‘The Constant’, Desmond experienced a bizarre episode of time travel while crossing the magnetic field outside the island, with his soul switching repeatedly between the present and the past. So it’s easy to conclude that Desmond must also have experienced time travel when the Swan Station exploded in Season 3. That is surely what most viewers think.
But is that really what happened? I believe Desmond’s experience during the Swan Station explosion was completely different from the soul’s time-hopping in Season 4!
In Season 3, episode 8, after Desmond turned the Swan Station’s failsafe key, it seemed that his soul had traveled into the past. After a temporary bout of craziness, he remembered having gone through all this before. Just as he was preparing to change his fate, a middle-aged woman named Ms. Hawking told him that the universe had its own course, and whenever that course deviated, the universe would perform ‘course correcting’. So Desmond was destined to go to the island and enter that damn string of numbers. In the end, just as she predicted, Desmond still ‘returned’ to the island.
Notice that before Season 4’s ‘The Constant’ aired, hardly anyone called this experience of Desmond’s time travel. Later, Desmond only said that when the Swan Station exploded, his past experiences flashed before his eyes; after he woke up, the images did not stop but continued flashing scenes from the future. And so Desmond acquired the so-called ‘prophetic ability’.
Even Desmond himself realized at the time that he had not truly returned to the past, but had experienced an incredibly realistic hallucination.
Did the microwave chime Desmond used to hear really sound exactly like the Swan hatch’s later alarm? When Desmond went to find Widmore, did he really meet a courier who said, ‘Delivery to Room 815’? These details actually feel more like a dream. Even Ms. Hawking was simply something Desmond invented in his own mind. Her appearance came from a photograph on Brother Campbell’s desk at the monastery. Desmond had glimpsed that photograph before, so the force making him experience this hallucination ‘created’ Ms. Hawking using that image from his memory. Desmond experienced nothing more than an incredibly realistic ‘flashback-style dream’.
Now look again at his ‘prophetic ability’. If time travel explains it, then he should have gone crazy as often as he did during that Season 4 trip: his soul would travel to some moment in the future, see a scene, and then return to the present (and, correspondingly, the Desmond at that future moment would often be ‘possessed’ by his soul from the past). But in reality, Desmond never went crazy; he simply ‘saw’ images of the future directly. Also, Dan (Daniel Faraday) said in Season 4 that the ‘side effect’ caused by crossing the magnetic field was random, making it impossible to predict what time one would travel to, while Desmond’s prophecies were extraordinarily regular! Time travel cannot explain that either.
Besides, the time travel in Season 4 threatened the traveler’s life if no ‘constant’ had been found, whereas Desmond in Season 3 showed none of these symptoms.
So what exactly did Desmond experience after the Swan Station exploded?
When the Swan Station exploded, Desmond was exposed to a magnetic field of extremely high intensity. As I described the island’s powers in the previous installment, the island’s various forces may essentially all operate through magnetic fields. At that moment, Desmond became more closely connected than ever to the island’s power. His connection to the island may well have been stronger than Locke’s, since under normal circumstances Locke was the person most sensitive to the island.
You could say that, in that instant, Desmond connected with the island. The island’s secrets were fully exposed before him. So Desmond himself failed to realize that after waking from this bizarre dream, he had grasped the island’s ultimate secret.
After waking up, Desmond could foresee the future—but was he really seeing the future? Think back: apart from one speech by Locke, every one of his prophecies concerned Charlie’s fate.
What he saw was not the future, but the trajectory of fate!
The thing is, Desmond was not the island itself, nor was he Jacob. He had merely acquired part of the island’s abilities through an accidental intimate contact, so his power was incomplete; he could see the fate of only a very limited number of people. Why was it mainly Charlie’s fate? Don’t forget that Charlie was actually inside the Swan Station when it exploded! For some unknown reason, Desmond’s ability reacted particularly strongly to Charlie, who was very close to him at the time. (Of course, Desmond could also see his own trajectory of fate. For example, foreseeing Naomi falling from the sky was a glimpse of his own fate.)
Let’s go back and look at what happened in Desmond’s dream. In the dream, Ms. Hawking foresaw someone being crushed to death and did not go to stop it. She said his death was fated, and no one could change fate. If she tried to save him, he would still die soon in some other accident. If someone managed to encounter fate, the universe would find a way to perform ‘course correcting’ and put everything back on track. Put Ms. Hawking’s words into terms we know: ‘Heaven’s decree cannot be defied’; ‘If the King of Hell says you die at the third watch, how could you survive to the fifth?’
Given the abilities Desmond later acquired, the reason the island made him have this dream was obviously to warn him not to use those powers after waking up. The island (or Jacob) already knew that Desmond would inevitably gain some ability to glimpse the trajectory of fate, and was terrified that an outsider with such power could create a huge security risk for the island. So it had to patch things up after the fact, arranging this dream for Desmond. The entire dream kept warning him: don’t try to change fate; it’s useless.
In fact, Ms. Hawking was clearly not telling the whole truth, because her words and her own actions contradict each other logically. If changing the universe’s course were truly useless and the universe corrected itself automatically, she would not need to worry about Desmond altering the course, nor would she need to anxiously urge him to go back and press the button.
The fact is, what cannot be changed is only the very specific kind of fate represented by ‘life and death’. Such fate will certainly be ‘corrected’ in the end—for example, Charlie may ultimately be unable to escape death. But if the King of Hell says I die at the third watch, I can still wriggle my way to the fifth. There’s plenty I can do between the third and fifth watches. Haven’t I changed some ‘fate’ then? The ‘fate of the island’, for example. If changing fate truly had no effect at all, the island (or Jacob) would have had no reason to intimidate Desmond in this way.
Another example showing that ‘changing fate is actually useful’ is Michael. In Season 4, Michael was someone who should have died long ago. According to Tom, the island had clearly been delaying the time of Michael’s death. What the island did here was exactly what it told Desmond not to do. So the island obviously knows that manipulating fate rationally can be useful. It simply does not want an outsider unfamiliar with this power using it recklessly and threatening the island’s safety.
But Desmond did not heed the warning, and the island (or Jacob)’s fears eventually came true. Desmond’s continual attempts to alter Charlie’s fate ultimately led directly to the island being exposed to the threat posed by Keamy and his gang.
After all that, what I ultimately want to make clear is that Desmond cannot foresee the future; he can see the trajectory of fate. He acquired this ability through intimate contact with the island’s magnetic field, and the island is deeply worried that this power might be abused.
Whether the fate one foresees can ultimately really be changed is also a huge question. As I said earlier, if Desmond kept helping Charlie eliminate the accidents that would kill him, what would Charlie become? He would brush past death forever. And if his fate were ‘to die in an accident’, then unless those conditions were met, he could never die. He couldn’t die of old age, couldn’t die of illness, couldn’t die in any other way not determined by fate, because he was ‘destined’ not to die that way. So wouldn’t he soon become immortal? Could this be the mechanism of immortality?
If this reasoning holds, then isn’t ‘glimpsing and manipulating fate’ a kind of ‘power’ that encompasses immortality while possessing a far broader meaning and scope than immortality itself?
Evidence Two: The Real Purpose of the Dharma Initiative
What is the purpose of the Dharma Initiative?
Alvar Hanso says in the LOST Experience that the purpose of the Dharma Initiative is to postpone the end of humanity. That purpose sounds pretty melodramatic. Do you really believe the people in the Hanso Group, and in the Widmore Group closely connected to them, are a bunch of people who have made humanity’s survival their personal responsibility?
I tend to think this purpose was merely a smokescreen for recruiting scientists and staff. And when recruiting staff and scientists of different ranks, they would surely use different smokescreens as circumstances required. Beneath those smokescreens, the Dharma Initiative was actually pursuing some private objective of Hanso and his crowd—not the melodramatic goal of saving humanity.
What was that private objective? Let’s look for clues in the Dharma Initiative itself.
1. The Valenzetti Equation
The Dharma Initiative’s grand blueprint was something called the Valenzetti Equation, which was supposedly able to calculate humanity’s end. The result was determined by certain parameter values in the equation, whose arrangement at the time was 4 8 15 16 23 42. The Dharma Initiative’s overall goal was to find a way to postpone humanity’s end by researching how to change those parameter values.
If such an absurd equation really existed, what would it express? Obviously, the rules governing human society. A series of variables represents the various factors affecting how human society operates, while a series of parameters constrains those variables. Together, the variables and parameters form an equation expressing the rules governing human society.
‘Rules’—the first occurrence.
2. The Bagua
Now look at the Dharma Initiative’s logo. The Dharma Initiative actually uses the Taoist bagua as its emblem. What does its research have to do with the bagua?
It’s simple: the bagua represents the rules governing the world as summarized by ancient Chinese philosophers—the Tao!
‘Rules’—the second occurrence.
3. The Name
Let’s take another look at the name of the DHARMA Initiative. In the explanation given in LOST Experience, DHARMA is an acronym for Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications. Translated literally, that would be “Department of Heuristic and Research on Material Applications”—an absurdly clunky and nonsensical name. However you look at it, it still seems to be one of the smokescreens.
Actually, if Dharma weren’t an acronym, then it would be one of the many Buddhist symbols woven into the whole project. Apart from the bagua, which is a Taoist symbol, the DHARMA Initiative is practically surrounded by Buddhist symbols. For example, its staff members use the añjali, a gesture shared by Buddhism and Hinduism. Dharma is a technical term in both Buddhism and Hinduism, and its most important meaning is “the rule or law governing all things in heaven and earth.”
Initiative can mean both “taking the initiative” and “opening” or “launching.” Put together, DHARMA Initiative should really be translated as “Opening the Rules” or “Taking Hold of the Rules”!
In fact, the overall symbol of the DHARMA Initiative (shown below) has Taoist “rules” on the outside and Buddhist and Hindu “rules” on the inside. Its meaning could hardly be any clearer.
“Rules”—for the third time.
4. Rules
Let’s pause here. At this point, I can make a guess: was the DHARMA Initiative’s real purpose to discover and master the rules of the world? In other words, to discover and master “the course of the universe”? And isn’t that exactly the kind of power Ms. Hawking (the Island) has demonstrated?
If this guess is correct, then Hanso and the others were really trying to discover and master the Island’s powerful ability to glimpse the course of the universe. And as I said earlier, “the course of the universe” isn’t meant in the broadest possible sense here—it refers specifically to human fate.
If this guess holds up, then doesn’t the ultimate goal pursued by Hanso and the others line up perfectly with the Island’s ultimate power? Could it be that they first learned the Island’s core secret was the ability to control fate, and only then thought of carrying out research on the Island to reveal the rules—the “course”—by which the world operates? Could “revealing the rules governing human society and postponing the end of humanity” have merely been the cover story used to recruit scientists from every field, so that under the DHARMA Initiative they could approach the Island’s final secret from every possible direction?
This is entirely plausible. Let’s not forget that the DHARMA Initiative knew Jacob, the Island’s core figure, existed. They also knew how to control Jacob—the cabin was built by them. Jacob was under Dharma’s control for a time. Judging from the nauseatingly hypnotic line “God loves you as he loved Jacob,” they must have communicated with Jacob at least as extensively as the Island’s natives did. They knew exactly who Jacob really was and exactly what he could do. So Hanso’s faction once had the opportunity to get extremely close to the Island’s core power. They absolutely knew what the Island’s ultimate power was. Their research here was intended to unlock that ultimate mystery. And that mystery, it seems, was the ability to glimpse and grasp the rules governing the world.
5. The Upside-Down Buddha
If Hanso and the others’ ultimate goal was to uncover the Island’s power to glimpse fate, then it’s not hard to explain why the project is packed with Buddhist symbols. When it comes to something like “fate,” perhaps no religion or philosophy throughout history has been more interested in it or understood it more deeply than Buddhism. To a great extent, the Buddha’s path to enlightenment began with his confusion about the impermanence of life. And theories such as the cycle of cause and effect that followed enlightenment were also ways of explaining fate.
Buddhist teachings often describe the power of Karma and how impossible it is to change, and isn’t that basically the same idea as the line in LOST that “the universe always finds a way to correct its course”? Doesn’t Desmond repeatedly trying to stop Charlie’s fated death, only to keep seeing Charlie die anyway, look remarkably similar to the Hong Kong film Big Man (Daai jeung foo), in which the Big Man repeatedly saves Li Fengyi but still cannot change her fate?
On the office wall of Mr. Widmore, who was deeply connected to the DHARMA Initiative, there is a painting of an upside-down Buddha alongside a backward “Namaste.” Buddhist symbols are so important to the DHARMA Initiative—but why is the statue upside down and the Namaste written backward here? The Buddha has been turned on his head, and right beside it is one of the DHARMA Initiative’s polar bears. Should we read this as, “Buddha, you may be powerful, but I’m going to use the DHARMA Initiative to knock you down”? Or perhaps, “You say life is impermanent, but I’m going to manipulate fate just to show you I can”?
6. Room 23’s Brainwashing Video
I believe that, besides using scientific research to approach the Island’s core power through its various peripheral forces, the DHARMA Initiative also tried to understand the Island’s power through Buddhist theory. That’s why, in the Hydra’s Room 23, we see that brainwashing video.
Room 23’s brainwashing video:
In this video left behind by the DHARMA Initiative, every line apart from “God loves you as he loved Jacob”—which comes from the Bible—comes from Buddhism! (Unless otherwise noted, the quotations below are all taken from Wikipedia.)—
(1) Plant a good seed and you will joyfully gather fruit.
This line comes from the Sutta Nipata! It can roughly be translated as: Sow good causes, reap good results.
The original text is: “The kind of seed sown / will produce that kind of fruit. / Those who do good will reap good results. /Those who do evil will reap evil results. / If you carefully plant a good seed, / You will joyfully gather good fruit.”
This line is a vivid description of the Buddhist theory of dependent origination, one of the foundations of Buddhist thought. “The theory of dependent origination holds that all phenomena in the world arise and exist through causes and conditions. Nothing in the world exists independently of other things; everything comes together through causes and conditions. Nothing can remain unaffected by other things, and nothing can have no effect on anything else. Everything has causes that come before it and consequences that follow it, and this causal relationship forms a chain with neither beginning nor end.”
(2) Everything changes.
This is the Samudaya, or “origination of suffering,” one of the Four Noble Truths at the heart of Buddhist teachings—in other words, impermanence.
“Buddhism holds that no one living in this world can avoid the many sufferings of birth, aging, illness, and death. These sufferings do not end when a person dies, because death is not a complete disappearance; one continues endlessly through the cycle of rebirth in the six realms. Whether in heaven, hell, or the human world, suffering is always present, differing only in degree. Buddhism also holds that everything in the world is constantly changing and that nothing is eternal. This is called impermanence. For sentient beings, this ceaseless change is itself a form of suffering.”
(3) Help each other / on the way.”
This seemingly unremarkable line also comes from the Buddha’s teachings.
The Buddha once told his followers: “You should do your own work, for I can teach only the way.” Here, “way” doesn’t mean an ordinary road; it means the process of attaining enlightenment. The Buddha later asked his followers to “help each other on the Way.”
(4) We are the cause of our own suffering.
This is the Samudaya, or “origination of suffering,” one of the Four Noble Truths at the heart of Buddhist teachings—in other words, karmic retribution. “Buddhism holds that there is no effect without a cause and no cause without an effect. Sentient beings suffer because, throughout the endless cycle of rebirth, they perform countless actions driven by the three poisons of greed, anger, and delusion. These actions accumulate and become the causes of future suffering.”
(5) Think about your life.The extinction of desire is Nirvana.
These two lines correspond to the Magga and Nirodha, the Path and the Cessation, among the Four Noble Truths. The first is really saying that you must experience your life, seek insight, and practice—the Path. The second says that only by extinguishing desire can one attain Nirvana—the Cessation. Logically, the latter should come first.
“The Cessation: Buddhism holds that as long as one remains in the cycle of rebirth through the six realms, suffering is unavoidable. For sentient beings to gain true and complete liberation from suffering, there is only one solution: escape the cycle of rebirth.”
“The Path: To escape the cycle of rebirth, one must undertake spiritual practice. The Buddha’s method consists primarily of the three trainings in discipline, meditation, and wisdom. By progressing from the Four Foundations of Mindfulness through the Noble Eightfold Path—in all, the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment—one can attain Nirvana, gain eternal release from the cycle of rebirth, and become an arhat.”
(6) Divest your ordinary nature and find your true nature.
This line is a further explanation of the Path, specifically the concrete practice leading to Nirvana. In Buddhism, the Path includes a set of practices that teaches you how to realize your “true nature.” The phrase “ordinary nature” in this line is the Buddhist term for the “ordinary mind,” while “true nature” means the “nature of mind.”
Buddhism holds that “the mind has many levels, two of which are particularly prominent.” The first is the ordinary mind: “the mind that thinks, plans, desires, and manipulates; the mind that becomes enraged; the mind that creates and wallows in negative emotions and thoughts.” The ordinary mind “is constantly changing and is always influenced by external factors, habitual patterns, and behavioral constraints.” But alongside the ordinary mind, we also have the nature of mind—“the mind’s essential nature, its underlying ground, which is never touched by change or death. At present, it lies hidden within our minds, obscured in the ordinary mind by our rapidly changing thoughts and emotions. Just as a strong wind can blow away the clouds and reveal the radiant sun and the vast sky, under certain circumstances, some kind of inspiration can also allow us to uncover and glimpse this nature of mind.” (From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.)
Moreover, the “nature of mind” is not something “that exists only in our minds. In fact, it is the essence of all things. … To realize the nature of mind is to realize the essence of all things.” This passage forms the theoretical basis for Buddhism’s emphasis on using meditation to break through the interference of the ordinary mind, realize the nature of mind, and thereby realize the essence and rules of everything in the world!
(7) Overdoing things cannot lead to happiness.
This line further emphasizes the Cessation: excessive material desire cannot bring genuine happiness; only “looking inward” can lead to true liberation.
(8) God loves you as he loved Jacob.
This is the only line that does not come from Buddhism. It comes from the biblical Books of Malachi and Romans. In Romans, Saint Paul quotes this line from Malachi to explain that God blessed Jacob and cursed Esau not because of whether the two brothers were righteous, but entirely according to God’s will. We all know that the name Jacob comes from Jacob in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, and here the DHARMA Initiative also uses a biblical line to describe Jacob. So I suspect that the Jacob on the Island may originally have been a nameless nobody. He was simply the only being on the Island who maintained an especially close connection with God, much like the biblical Jacob, who enjoyed God’s favor. At some point, then, the people on the Island may have started using Jacob as a name for this mysterious man with no name.
(9) Be the awakened one.
May you attain liberation (Buddhahood)! “Awakened one” is another way of saying Buddha; it can also be called “Enlightened one.”
—Has anyone considered this possibility: perhaps the video we’ve defined as “brainwashing” wasn’t actually meant to brainwash people at all within the DHARMA Initiative?
Judging from its content, this video is less about brainwashing than about guiding people toward awakening. It’s a bit like hypnosis in psychology, where the person being hypnotized might be given headphones playing very low-frequency sounds, shown flickering candlelight, or shown a video simulating the driver’s subjective view on a high-speed road, helping them enter a hypnotic state. This brainwashing video seems to help people enter a certain trance-like state—somewhat resembling the Buddhist state of meditation—while also implanting Buddhist ideas about impermanence, fate, and the path to liberation. Could this, like the DHARMA Initiative’s scientific research, be one of the keys to unlocking the Island’s ultimate mystery?
At the very least, through this video and the other Buddhist elements in the DHARMA Initiative, we can be sure that besides its scientific research, the DHARMA Initiative also treated Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and other Eastern mystical theories as an important area of study. We can also see that most of what the DHARMA Initiative borrowed from these Eastern traditions concerned the rules governing how the world operates (the Way and cause and effect) and fate (impermanence). This fits with my earlier guess about the DHARMA Initiative’s real purpose.
Evidence Three: Michael the Immortal
In Season 4, Tom said the island wasn’t planning to let Michael die yet, and sure enough, Michael couldn’t die no matter how hard he tried to kill himself. There are at least two theories that might explain why Michael couldn’t die.
Theory one: the island kept Michael under constant surveillance. Whenever he wanted to die, the island intervened—for instance, when he drove into a wall, it put up some kind of protective shield around his vital organs; when he tried to shoot himself, it made the gun jam.
Theory two: the island didn’t actually need to spend all day watching Michael. It simply postponed Michael’s fate of death, much as Desmond repeatedly postponed Charlie’s death. The first theory involves constant intervention in the process; the second simply sets the outcome and lets the process happen automatically.
By Occam’s razor, I accept the second theory: the island really did delay Michael’s fate of death.
Evidence Four: The Mystery of the Numbers Curse
As I said earlier, the ability to peek at and control fate would be unimaginably powerful without limits. So I think the island’s ability to control fate is actually very limited. It probably only works within the island, and its effects vary greatly from person to person. The scope of what it can manipulate may also be narrow—for example, it may only be able to delay or advance the time of death, the time someone falls ill, and so on (birth, aging, illness, and death are all part of fate, after all).
Could this power possibly be applied beyond the island?
Yes!
Take a magnet. It can’t directly magnetize an iron bar very far away. So what do you do? First magnetize another iron bar, then use that magnetized bar to magnetize the one farther away. That’s indirect influence. Perhaps the island’s power can indirectly affect people outside the island in the same way.
There are at least two examples of this.
The clearest is the Numbers Curse.
Let me step outside my logic for a moment and look at what happened to Hurley. Does it look more like fate or a conspiracy?
If it was a conspiracy—if the supposed bad luck was all arranged by people—then the power and price required to arrange it seem far too enormous.
First, the sequence of numbers was accidentally intercepted in 1988 by two U.S. military signal-intelligence men stationed in the Pacific, and only then passed around until it reached Hurley. The numbers’ leak from the island was clearly accidental (since nobody in charge of the island would want anyone but themselves to know about it), so this can’t have been a preplanned conspiracy.
Second, even if they only thought of running an experiment after the numbers accidentally leaked, how could they have traced the numbers back to those two signal-intelligence men? The interception itself was a complete accident.
And even if they eventually tracked down Hurley, their first move would have been to dump more than a hundred million dollars on him! They would also need the ability to summon a meteor (remember how Hurley’s fast-food restaurant was flattened). Is that possible?
And even if they had the money and the ability, and wanted to do it, they still couldn’t. The numbers leaked in 1988, when the DHARMA Initiative still controlled the island. By the time Hurley was cursed, the others had taken control again. No single force could manipulate a conspiracy spanning more than a decade.
So I still lean toward the assumption that the numbers themselves really carried a curse.
The sequence of numbers that sent countless LOST fans researching was not actually cursed at first. Otherwise, the DHARMA Initiative that came up with it would have been cursed into total collapse from day one (in reality, DHARMA collapsed only after the Numbers became cursed). Originally, the Numbers were a set of parameters in the DHARMA Initiative’s research—the overall outline of the research. But more often they were turned into a symbol and emblem: carved onto the hatch door at the Swan station, used as the code for releasing excess electromagnetic energy, and recorded in the signal tower to be broadcast over and over…
You can imagine that before the DHARMA Initiative was wiped out, the Numbers filled its workers’ lives just as thoroughly as the word “Namaste.” They served, to some extent, a religious-ritual function—or something like the ideological education and motivational slogans we’re familiar with, constantly reminding DHARMA workers that “the revolution isn’t over; comrades still have work to do.” In short, there must once have been one rule: wherever there was DHARMA, there were the Numbers.
Later, DHARMA got into a fight with the island’s indigenous inhabitants, and at one point they even managed to bring Jacob into it. We know Jacob was a pretty lousy god. He was unimaginably powerful in some respects, yet in others he depended heavily on “people with a connection” to help him. So being imprisoned wasn’t all that contradictory. I always think Jacob is a lot like the crippled Mr. Wuyazi in Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils: a useless man, yet powerful enough that everyone wanted his strength. So Jacob was hardly a harmless pushover. He could always strike back in his own peculiar ways—for example, when he later became unhappy with Ben, he could give Ben a tumor; when he didn’t want Jack to take people away, he could give Jack appendicitis.
One clarification: birth, aging, illness, and death are all fate. So when the island suddenly restores someone’s health or makes someone ill, it isn’t actually curing disease or “planting” illness. It is merely moving forward or postponing an illness already written into that person’s fate. Even if it disliked Ben, it couldn’t just infect him with Ebola and kill him. Ben’s fate only included developing a tumor sometime in the future, and all Jacob could do was move that illness earlier. Likewise, although he really didn’t want Jack to leave, all he could do was give him appendicitis.
Back to the point: how would Jacob deal with these DHARMA Initiative people?
He cursed them!
To curse them, in this case, means manipulating the fate of the DHARMA Initiative’s people and bringing misfortune down on them. When DHARMA was at its height, with people everywhere, was Jacob going to curse them one by one? That would obviously be too much trouble, just like constantly watching Michael to keep him from dying. If I were Jacob, I definitely wouldn’t do that. Too exhausting. I would think of something simpler: curse something strongly connected to DHARMA, something that would be present wherever DHARMA was. That way, I could curse all the DHARMA people in one stroke.
What could meet those conditions? The Numbers!
You might say: the island had a transmitter broadcasting the Numbers, so wouldn’t that curse its own people too? I think that would be easy to avoid, because Jacob could protect his own people with a similarly simple condition. All he needed was one more rule exempting people who met a certain condition—for example, “people wearing primitive clothing are not cursed.” Problem solved. That might even be why the others wore matching ragged uniforms, haha. Maybe that’s also how the black smoke told friend from foe: the others had to change into tattered clothes as soon as they entered the jungle, or who knows when they might run into the black smoke, that elusive dragon-like thing, and get killed by mistake.
So this ordinary-looking sequence of numbers was cursed just like that. Later, when DHARMA was purged, perhaps the Numbers’ curse helped enormously in the shadows. And even before then, the curse on the Numbers may already have left DHARMA tearing its hair out.
Sometime in 1988, something probably happened on the island resembling the later explosion at the Swan station. The island briefly became visible to the outside world, and its radio transmissions escaped at that instant. Since the radio was broadcasting the Numbers, the curse on the Numbers escaped with them. And so the “indirect influence” of the island’s power on people outside it, which I mentioned earlier, came into effect! The curse on the Numbers in that radio signal was the other iron bar.
At that moment, the scientific expedition led by Danielle Rousseau, sailing nearby, received the numerical signal and followed its source into the island. Under the curse’s influence, the crew members who should have become healthier on the island all fell ill, so Rousseau had no choice but to “mercifully” kill them.
At the same time, the two U.S. military signal-intelligence men stationed in the nearby waters also intercepted the sequence. Later, one killed himself and the other went insane. The one who went insane told Hurley the Numbers, and the curse passed to Hurley.
From Rousseau’s and Hurley’s experiences, this curse seems to mean “centered on one person, sucking away the good luck of everyone nearby.” Clearly, Rousseau and Hurley were the unlucky “centers”: everyone around them was killed, while Rousseau and Hurley themselves were fine. Isn’t the essence of this curse also the manipulation of fate?
In fact, some people who had previously had direct or indirect contact with Hurley later “coincidentally” ended up on Flight 815. To a large extent, this may also have resulted from the curse’s repeated indirect influence. It was this accidentally leaked thread of fate that strung together all the “people with a connection” who came into contact with it, then dragged them all onto the island. Of course, this god of fate probably has more than one such thread.
Evidence Five: The Death of Juliet’s Ex-Husband
The second example of the island indirectly influencing the fate of people outside it is the death of Juliet’s ex-husband.
Richard was someone profoundly affected by the island’s power. When he left the island on official business, he would, like the leaked Numbers Curse, unwittingly apply the island’s power in him indirectly to people he came into contact with.
During her interview, Juliet told Richard that unless her ex-husband was hit and killed by a bus, he wasn’t going to let her go. And then her husband really was hit and killed by a bus right in front of her. Everyone probably imagined that Richard hired a killer to pose as a bus driver and run over Juliet’s ex-husband. But have you ever thought about how easy it is to hire a killer to eliminate someone, while hiring one to kill someone with a bus would require an absurd number of coincidences? Even if you could manufacture all those coincidences, why bother? After all, Juliet’s “hit by a bus” was only a figure of speech. Killing her husband would have been enough. There were plenty of simpler methods. Was it really necessary to fulfill her “prophecy” literally?
I think what was actually at work here was the ability to control fate that Richard had “brought” out of the island with him. At this point Richard was serving the island, and his will was aligned with the island’s will. So when he heard Juliet’s words, the island’s power may have begun operating through a trigger in Richard’s subconscious. If the island’s power could postpone Michael’s fate of death, it could also bring a similar fate forward. Juliet’s ex-husband may have been fated to “die in an accident,” so the power naturally searched his future for an intersection with a bus, then pulled that far-off death forward to this intersection.
And so this poor ex-husband was strangled by the island’s “hand of fate” simply because of one careless remark from Juliet.
Evidence Six: Richard Malkin & Isaac of Uluru
Apart from the “indirect influence” discussed above, are there any other ways people outside the island could sense the island’s power?
Yes!
If the island’s power is to peer into and manipulate fate, what kind of people would be most likely to sense and understand it? People with similar powers, of course.
So, outside the island, what kind of people also have the ability to peer into and influence fate?
Fortune-tellers, obviously!
Isn’t that exactly what they do—peer into a client’s trajectory of fate, then teach them how to seek good fortune and avoid disaster in advance? So if the island’s power is to peer into and manipulate fate, then outside the island, the people most likely to sense and understand that the island’s power exists would be fortune-tellers and mediums with similar abilities. And since the island’s power is the ultimate form of their own kind of power, they must stand in profound awe of the island’s power once they sense it.
And in LOST, the two people who sensed the island’s power from outside the island just happen to be a fortune-teller and a medium!
One was Richard Malkin, who read Claire’s fortune. He sensed that the island’s will seemed to be calling Aaron, the baby in Claire’s arms, and was terrified of going against that will. So he paid for Claire’s ticket on Flight 815 out of his own pocket, so she could follow the island’s will.
The other was Isaac of Uluru, who was originally supposed to treat Aunt Rose. He said it wasn’t that he couldn’t cure Aunt Rose’s illness; rather, he had sensed that another power would cure her. Clearly, he had foreseen Aunt Rose’s fate and sensed that it was the island’s power and arrangement at work.
Evidence Seven: Why Is Ben Special Too?
This probably doesn’t count as evidence so much as a point of doubt.
In Season 4, Hurley once summed up why only those particular people on the island could see Jacob’s cabin. His conclusion was that they were the craziest people on the island. And he wasn’t wrong: Hurley was mentally ill—the opposite of mentally normal—while Locke was a superstitious, faith-centered fanatic—the opposite of someone focused on the secular world. Calling those two the craziest people on the island was perfectly fair.
But what about Ben? Ben was neither crazy nor otherworldly. In fact, he was a highly rational, worldly schemer who was good at playing power games. He was nothing like Hurley or Locke. So why was he also one of the special people able to communicate with Jacob?
I think it was precisely his talent for “playing power games” that brought him and the island’s power to the same destination by different routes—and made them recognize each other. Ben was extraordinarily good at manipulating other people’s fates in his own way. In this area, he was practically a once-in-a-generation genius. So far, there have been almost no people he wanted to play who he failed to play. Even Jacob must have been left speechless by that ferocious ability, right? Things Jacob needed supernatural powers to accomplish, Ben could manage with a few casual tricks!
Could that be why the island chose this thoroughly worldly man, who seemed to have nothing to do with the divine, as its apostle?
Another Source of Inspiration
In the previous installment, I speculated that one major source of inspiration for the writers of LOST was the legend of Atlantis. Now I can suggest another. It was the final novel published during the lifetime of that celebrated Huxley who wrote Brave New World—Aldous Huxley. The novel was called Island! (See this: Island ( 1962 ) by Aldous Huxley)
There are plenty of novels set on islands. For instance, people used to say that LOST was inspired by another famous island novel, Lord of the Flies. So why this Island in particular? Why should it be the writers’ source of inspiration?
For one thing, in his later years Huxley became intensely interested in parapsychology, philosophy, and mysticism, especially Eastern philosophy and Eastern mysticism. He went into great detail imagining a utopian society based on Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucian thought, and putting those ideas into practice. That lines up perfectly with the many symbols of Eastern mysticism in LOST’s Dharma Initiative. What’s more, the novel actually mentions “Destiny Control.”
I believe the elements of Eastern mysticism in LOST drew heavily on Huxley’s ideas and works.
In fact, besides this novel, Huxley’s own life and other works were also “borrowed” by the writers and folded into LOST. Huxley wrote another novel called Jacob’s Hands, in which a man named Jacob could heal illnesses in people and animals with his hands. What are the odds?!
The Dharma Initiative’s anxiety about the end of the world in LOST also comes from the same lineage as Brave New World. Huxley became addicted to psychedelics late in life, and he had a close friend at Harvard who researched psychedelics. Guess what his name was? Richard Alpert! The eternally youthful guy from LOST!
The Supreme Treasure
In short, I believe that if the legend of Atlantis was the Western-mysticism foundation of LOST, then Eastern philosophy and religion centered on Buddhism formed its Eastern-mysticism foundation. I believe these were the writers’ two great sources of inspiration when they first conceived the story.
Have you noticed that the core of Western mysticism is a fairly direct expression of the pursuit of eternal life—Atlantis’s crystal, alchemy, the Bible’s repeated promise that “all who believe in Him shall have eternal life,” and so on? Eastern mysticism, meanwhile, seeks to grasp the laws governing the world and the laws governing fate—impermanence, dependent origination, karma, the Dao—with immortality merely as one result of that pursuit, such as Buddhist nirvana or Taoist alchemy and becoming an immortal. Could this have something to do with the Western tradition of valuing practicality and directness, versus the Eastern tradition of valuing subtlety and relationships?
Based on my own understanding alone, Eastern mysticism has a much broader meaning and scope when it comes to exploring the laws governing the world and fate.
So the writers of LOST, ambitious and impressively audacious, unified the core content of Eastern and Western mysticism within a single framework. From Atlantis’s crystal they borrowed electromagnetism, time-space travel, telepathy, climate control…and behind all these powers was an even deeper power: the ability to peer into and master the rules governing the world and fate, borrowed from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.
As a result, in this story immortality is merely an outcome, while the means of achieving it is the Eastern art of peering into and manipulating fate.
I think that, in their story, the ambitious men like Widmore and Hanso aren’t merely pursuing immortality. They are pursuing a far more powerful force: the power to control fate! This is a power fit only for a god!
If immortality merely makes someone a “perfect human,” then the power to control fate turns a person into a god. If that is the island’s ultimate secret, doesn’t its soul-stealing allure far exceed mere “immortality”? Is there anything in this world more addictive than “becoming a god”, or anything more devastating than missing out on the chance to “become a god”?
So LOST is really a story about whether a human being can become a god, and I suspect this religious meaning won’t fully emerge until the story is nearing its end.
The island’s ability to peer into and manipulate fate is pretty clumsy; it can affect particular people to varying degrees, and only within a limited range. But once that power is developed perfectly, it becomes the power of a god. Whoever possesses it will stand forever at the summit of the world. That is the ultimate happiness humanity can imagine!
And so the island became the supreme treasure at the summit of the world!
Everyone who knows the island’s ultimate secret longs to possess this supreme treasure in their own way.
And so, amid this battle for the treasure, a magnificent saga slowly began to unfold.
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