#im taking all of it and shoving it into my mouth
ok what the hell, i’m making this a full post.
morpho’s new title is “fluttering dream eater.” do kirby lore enthusiasts know what the cultural connection between butterflies and dreams is?
like, there’s butterflies as a personification of the soul, which is a thing in a couple places (including japan), but what about dreams?
check out this super-famous passage from the zhuangzi, an early daoist “philosophical” text:
Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting around happily enjoying himself. He didn’t know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou. Now, there must be a difference between Zhou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things.
(from victor h. mair’s translation, with slight alterations by me)
there are lots of different interpretations of this passage, as one would expect, but let me explain how i understand it thanks to one of my professors.
in daoism (at least, early daoism/what’s in the zhuangzi; i don’t have any authority to speak on later daoism) the main goal is to become close to/become one with the dao, an ever-shifting, omnipresent force that is the origin of all things, and, by nature, impossible to define with human systems of categorization or even language. death is a positive thing that we should all accept, because it returns us to a state of unity with the universe. (quite literally - think rotting corpses!) another thing that everyone should accept is that transformation is the way of life, and what is death but one big transformation?
in this passage, waking and sleeping sort of represent life and death. (the two dichotomies would have been associated in early china.) one could transform into anything after they die! even a butterfly! so this passage is about two things: realizing the illusory nature of both the division between life and death, and the division between oneself and the rest of the world and the creatures within it. (thanks hanshan deqing!)
so how can we apply this to our reading of morpho knight? i mean, first of all, their name evokes both butterfly imagery (morpho butterfly) and the idea of transformation (metamorphosis). what does morpho do? appears to creatures right before/after they die, and ushers them into a new state of being by, uh, literally eating their souls i guess. it’s implied that this isn’t really a bad thing for the souls who get absorbed. galacta knight’s “screams” are apparently what summoned morpho in the first place, and forgo is able to become chaos elfilis (another character with some daoist imagery going on) because of morpho’s interference.
so, if you’re galacta or forgo, what you’re doing is becoming more powerful by quite literally transcending the boundaries between life and death and between self and other. zhuangzi and the butterfly are now one; the butterfly has eaten—absorbed—the dream.
but… hm. isn’t this a bit of a buddhist way of thinking? hanshan deqing, a buddhist monk who wrote a commentary on the zhuangzi, thought the butterfly dream passage would help you break through all these illusions and achieve enlightenment, rather than just recognize that life is a series of transformations. in buddhism, you want to transcend the cycle of samsara (death and rebirth) and enter nirvana (liberation from earthly sufferings, sometimes understood as paradise. HMM.). both life and death are ultimately negative things.
(maybe morpho knight is a bodhisattva, “a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings.” yeah, actually, that kinda tracks.)
here’s the thing about daoism: you don’t eat the dream. the dream is a good thing. as my professor says, you “drowse your way to the dao rather than awaken your way to enlightenment.” you may try to leave normal society, but you don’t try to get out of the world entirely. both life and death are ultimately good things.
do you see where i’m going with this? that’s right. kirby is the real daoist spiritual master here.
(i think that, if you were picking a kirby character to give the title of “lives up most to zhuangzi’s ideals,” it would probably be gooey. but that’s beside the point.)
kirby is by no means a perfect embodiment of early daoist practice (he’s got too many desires!), but he’s got a lot going for him. he’s constantly transforming. he is no thoughts head empty all of the time. he acts spontaneously, according to his instincts and his nature. he sleeps a lot. he doesn’t speak a ton. he rejects rulership and titles. he is baby.
anyway, i think it’s interesting to see the different directions in which kirby and morpho knight take the theme of transformation. i think the main takeaway here is that reading morpho in relation with the butterfly dream in the zhuangzi helps emphasize morpho’s nature as a being beyond life and death / self and other. i really don’t know enough about buddhism to fully go down that rabbit hole any further; all i want to do is point out some fun connections!
