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Once when I was talking to my wife and mentioned Mara, she seemed embarassed by the word, so I asked her what is the matter. She told me that “mara” is a vulgarism for “vagina” in Japanese (so, like the C-word in English). I wonder if the two words are connected. A wild guess: the celibate monks who were tempted by the feminine, started using the demonic word as an euphemism for the female sexual organ (also: Japan was a very patriarchal society).
Interesting thought; although “Māra” had been around a lot longer before it reached the shores of Japan.
Yes, no doubt it predates its emergence in Japan. I just thought maybe it influenced that Japanese term. Sanskrit’s influence on Japanese language is much bigger than I once thought. So Japan was already influenced by Indo-European civilization before they met with “the West” (ie. UK/USA/Netherlands/Portugal, etc.) – What totally blew my mind was discovering that hiragana/katakana (the phonetic alphabet Japanese uses) was actually based on the siddham script for Sanskrit! Kukai created it. So the Japanese writing system is a mix of some derived Indian script and Chinese letters.
Also, etymologically for our purposes, we shall see that the term is closer to Pali and Sanskrit words indicating “death”. Hence the one causing death itself. Perhaps the Japanese had an interesting spin on the term–the vagina that brings both life AND death (samsara) into being.
I have always thought Mara to be closer, in an ontological sense, to the Gnostic Demiurge. That which fashions and maintains the illusion of the samsaric universe whilst being both part and product of the illusion it continually produces.