In ‘The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck’ by Mark Waid et al, ‘The Book of Destiny‘ from DC comics’ universe makes another prominent re-appearance. I’m ambivalent about the purpose of it cos it’s much ado about nothing to me. It’s a mythological book with the past, present and future written in it. Yes, the supervillains try to get a hold of it, so as to know how to keep ahead of the superheroes, while the latter tries to wrest it back for its legitimate neutral guardian – who pretty much does nothing but hold it. Here’s the catch – nothing in the book is written in stone. For security and dramatic effect perhaps, the book is chained to a godlike character called Destiny, yet even the book can be stolen from him, while no one is ever chained to a fixed destiny. Even the Book of Destiny has no fixed destiny! Even its pages of detailing the past change – when the good and evil time-travel to alter them events in the timeline. (Not that it’s causally possible, for it would render cause and effect convolutedly senseless).
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What then, is the point of snatching the book, of peering into it? If there is any constant truth in it, it is that nothing’s constant. The past might be cast in stone, but how we learn from it is up to us. In that way, it changes. The cynic in me saw the Book of Destiny as a cosmic joke book, maintained in the DC universe for its alluring aura of mystery, when it’s quite useless. Ominously fatalistic as it sounds, the Book of Destiny is but a ‘Book of Changes’! Incidentally, there is a Chinese oracle system called so – about the dynamic nature of so-called destiny! The I-Ching is traditionally a Taoist classic, but there’s an ancient Buddhist master’s interpretation of it with a touch of Zen. Though some might say it can’t be made ‘Buddhist’, it holds true that Buddhism emphasises on the universality of change too. The I-Ching is not only ‘used’, but studied as book dispensing wisdom too. Of course, nothing beats the sutras for us Buddhists!
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