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© Victor & Victoria Trimondi
The
Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part I – 2. Tantric Buddhism
2. TANTRIC BUDDHISM
The fourth and final phase of Buddhism entered the
world stage in the third century C.E.
at the earliest. It is known as Tantrayana, Vajrayana or Mantrayana: the “Tantra
Vehicle”, the “Diamond Path” or the “Way of the Magic Formulas”. The
teachings of Vajrayana
are recorded in the holy writings, known as tantras. These are secret
occult doctrines, which — according to legend — had already been composed
by Buddha Shakyamuni, but the time was not deemed
ripe for them to be revealed to the believers until a thousand years after
his death.
It is true that Vajrayana basically adheres
to the ideas of Mahayana
Buddhism, in particular the doctrine of the emptiness of all appearances
and the precept of compassion for all suffering beings, but the tantric
temporarily countermands the high moral demands of the “Great Vehicle” with
a radical “amoral” behavioral inversion. To achieve enlightenment in this
lifetime he seizes upon methods which invert the classic Buddhist values
into their direct opposites.
Tantrism designates itself the highest level of the entire
edifice of Buddhist teachings and establishes a hierarchical relation to
both previous phases of Buddhism, whereby the lowest level is occupied by Hinayana and
the middle level by Mahayana. The
holy men of the various schools are ranked accordingly. At the base rules
the Arhat,
then comes the Bodhisattva, and
all are reigned over by the Maha Siddha, the tantric Grand Master.
All three stages of Buddhism currently exist alongside one another as
autonomous religious systems.
In the eighth century C.E., with the support of the Tibetan dynasty of the
time, Indian monks introduced Vajrayana into Tibet, and since then it has
defined the religion of the “Land
of Snows”. Although
many elements of the indigenous culture were integrated into the religious
milieu of Tantric Buddhism, this was never the case with the basic texts.
All of these originated in India.
They can be found, together with commentaries upon them, in two canonical
collections, the Kanjur
(a thirteenth-century translation of the words of Buddha) and the Tanjur (a
translation of the doctrinal texts from the fourteenth century). Ritual
writings first recorded in Tibet
are not considered part of the official canon. (This, however, does not
mean that they were not put to practical use.)
The explosion of sexuality: Vajrayana Buddhism
All tantras are
structurally similar; they all include the transformation of erotic love
into spiritual and worldly power. [1]
The essence of the entire doctrine is, however, encapsulated in the
so-called Kalachakra Tantra, or
“Time Tantra”, the analysis of which is our
central objective. It differs from the remaining tantra
teachings in both its power-political intentions and its eschatological
visions. It is — we would like to hypothesize in advance — the instrument
of a complicated metapolitics which attempts to
influence world events via the use of symbols and rites rather than the
tools of realpolitik.
The “Time Tantra” is the particular secret
doctrine which primarily determines the ritual existence of the living
Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the “god-king’s” spiritual world politics can be
understood through a knowledge of it alone.
The Kalachakra Tantra marks the close of the creative phase of Vajrayana’s history in the tenth century. No further
fundamental tantra texts have been conceived
since, whilst countless commentaries upon the existing texts have been
written, up until the present day. We must thus regard the “Time Tantra” as the culmination of and finale to Buddhist Tantrism. The other tantric texts which we cite in this
study (especially the Guhyasamaya Tantra, the Hevajra Tantra and the Candamaharosana Tantra),
are primarily drawn upon in order to decipher the Kalachakra Tantra.
At first glance the sexual roles seem to have
changed completely in Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayana). The contempt for
the world of the senses and degradation of women in Hinayana, the asexuality and
compassion for women in Mahayana,
appear to have been turned into their opposites here. It all but amounts to
an explosion of sexuality, and the idea that sexual love harbors the secret
of the universe becomes a spectacular dogma. The erotic encounter between
man and woman is granted a mystical aura, an authority and power completely
denied it in the preceding Buddhist eras.
With neither timidity nor dread Buddhist monks now
speak about “venerating women”, “praising women”, or “service to the female
partner”. In Vajrayana,
every female being experiences exaltation rather than humiliation; instead
of contempt she enjoys, at first glance, respect and high esteem. In the Candamaharosana Tantra
the glorification of the feminine knows no bounds: “Women are heaven; women
are Dharma; ... women are Buddha; women are the sangha;
women are the perfection of wisdom”(George, 1974,
p. 82).
The spectrum of erotic relations between the sexes
ranges from the most sublime professions of courtly love to the coarsest
pornography. Starting from the highest rung of this ladder, the monks
worship the feminine as “perfected wisdom” (prajnaparamita), “wisdom
consort” (prajna),
or “woman of knowledge” (vidya). This spiritualization of the woman corresponds,
with some variation, to the Christian cults of Mary and Sophia. Just as
Christ revered the “Mother of God”, the Tantric Buddhist bows down before
the woman as the “Mother of all Buddhas”, the
“Mother of the Universe”, the “Genetrix”, the
“Sister”, and as the “Female Teacher”(Herrmann-Pfand,
1992, pp. 62, 60, 76).
As far as sensual relationships with women are
concerned, these are divided into four categories: “laughing, regarding, embracing,
and union”. These four types of erotic communication form the pattern for a
corresponding classification of tantric exercises. The texts
of the Kriya Tantra
address the category of laughter, those of the Carya Tantra that of the look, the Yoga Tantra
considers the embrace, and in the writings of the Anuttara Tantra (the Highest Tantra) sexual union is addressed. These
practices stand in a hierarchical relation to one another, with laughter at
the lowest level and the tantric act of love at the highest.
In Vajrayana the latter becomes a religious concern of the
highest order, the sine qua non
of enlightenment. Although homosexuality was not uncommon in Buddhist
monasteries and was occasionally even regarded as a virtue, the “great
bliss of liberation” was fundamentally conceived of as the union of man and
woman and accordingly portrayed in cultic images.
However, both tantric partners encounter one
another not as two natural people, but rather as two deities. “The man
(sees) the woman as a goddess, the woman (sees) the man as a god. By
joining the diamond scepter [phallus] and lotus [vagina], they should make
offerings to each other” we read in a quote from a tantra
(Shaw, 1994, p. 153). The sexual relationship is fundamentally ritualized:
every look, every caress, every form of contact is given a symbolic
meaning. But even the woman’s age, her appearance, and the shape of her
sexual organs play a significant role in the sexual ceremony.
The tantras describe
erotic performances without the slightest timidity or shame. Technical
instructions in the dry style of sex manuals can be found in them, but also
ecstatic prayers and poems in which the tantric master celebrates the
erotic love of man and woman. Sometimes this tantric literature displays an
innocent joie de vivre. The
instructions which the tantric Anangavajra offers
for the performance of sacred love practices are direct and poetic: “Soon
after he has embraced his partner and introduced his member into her vulva,
he drinks from her lips which are dripping with milk, brings her to coo
tenderly, enjoys rich pleasure and lets her thighs tremble.” (Bharati, 1977, p. 172)
In Vajrayana sexuality is the event upon which all is
based. Here, the encounter between the two sexes is worked up to the pitch
of a true obsession, not — as we shall see — for its own sake, but rather
in order to achieve something else, something higher in the tantric scheme
of things. In a manner of speaking, sex is considered to be the prima materia,
the raw primal substance with which the sex partners experiment, in order
to distill “pure spirit” from it, just as high-grade alcohol can be
extracted from fermented grape must. For this reason the tantric master is
convinced that sexuality harbors not just the secrets of humanity, but also
furnishes the medium upon which gods may be grown. Here he finds the great
life force, albeit in untamed and unbridled form.
It is thus impossible to avoid the impression that
the “hotter” the sex gets the more effective the tantric ritual becomes.
Even the most spicy obscenities are not omitted
from these sacred activities. In the Candamaharosana Tantra
for example, the lover swallows with joyous lust the washwater
which drips from the vagina and anus of the beloved and relishes without
nausea her excrement, her nasal mucus and the remains of her food which she
has vomited onto the floor. The complete spectrum of sexual deviance is
present, even if in the form of the rite. In one text the initiand calls out masochistically: “I am your slave in
all ways, keenly active in devotion to you. O Mother”, and the “goddess” —
often simulated by a prostitute — answers, “I am called your mistress!”
(George, 1974, pp. 67-68).
The erotic burlesque and the sexual joke have also
long been a popular topic among the Vajrayana monks
and have, up until this century, produced a saucy and shocking literature
of the picaresque. Great peals of laughter are still heard in the Tibetan
lamaseries at the ribald pranks of Uncle Dönba,
who (in the 18th century) dressed himself up as a nun and then spent
several months as a “hot” lover boy in a convent. (Chöpel,
1992, p. 43)
But alongside such ribaldry we also find a
cultivated, sensual refinement. An example of this is furnished by the
astonishingly up-to-date handbook of erotic practices, the Treatise on Passion, from the pen of
the Tibetan Lama Gedün Chöpel
(1895–1951), in which the “modern” tantric discusses the “64 arts of love”.
This Eastern Ars Erotica dates from the 1930s. The
reader is offered much useful knowledge about various, in part fantastic
sexual positions, and receives instruction on how to produce arousing
sounds before and during the sexual act. Further, the author provides a
briefing on the various rhythms of coitus, on special masturbation
techniques for the stimulation of the penis and the clitoris, even the use
of dildos is discussed. The Tibetan, Chöpel, does
not in any way wish to be original, he explicitly makes reference to the
world’s most famous sex manual, the Kama
Sutra, from which he has drawn most of his ideas.
Such permissive “books of love” from the tantric
milieu are no longer — in our enlightened era, where (at least in the West)
all prudery has been superseded — a spectacle which could cause great
surprise or even protest. Nonetheless, these texts have a higher
provocative potential than corresponding “profane” works, in which
descriptions of the same sexual techniques are otherwise to be found. For
they were written by monks for monks, and read and practiced by monks, who
in most cases had to have taken a strict oath of celibacy.
For this reason the tantric Ars Erotica even today awake a great curiosity and throw up
numerous questions. Are the ascetic basic rules of Buddhism really
suspended in Vajrayana?
Is the traditional disrespect for women finally surmounted thanks to such
texts? Does the eternal misogyny and the denial of
the world make way for an Epicurean regard for sensuality and an
affirmation of the world? Are the followers of the “Diamond Path” really
concerned with sensual love and mystical partnership or does erotic love
serve the pursuit of a goal external to it? And what is this goal? What
happens to the women after the ritual sexual act?
In the pages which follow we will attempt to
answer all of these questions. Whatever the answers may be, we must in any
case assume that in Tantric Buddhism the sexual encounter between man and
woman symbolizes a sacred event in which the two primal forces of the
universe unite.
Mystic sexual love and cosmogonic
erotic love
In the views of Vajrayana all phenomena of
the universe are linked to one another by the threads of erotic love.
Erotic love is the great life force, the prana which flows through the
cosmos, the cosmic libido. By erotic here we mean heterosexual love as an
endeavor independent of its natural procreative purpose for the provision
of children. Tantric Buddhism does not mean this qualification to say that
erotic connections can only develop between men and women, or between gods
and goddesses. erotic love is all-embracing for a
tantric as well. But every Vajrayana practitioner is convinced that the erotic
relationship between a feminine and a masculine principle (yin–yang) lies at the origin of all
other expressions of erotic love and that this origin may be experienced
afresh and repeated microcosmically in the union of a sexual couple. We
refer to an erotic encounter between man and woman, in which both
experience themselves as the core of all being, as
“mystic gendered love”. In Tantrism, this
operates as the primal source of cosmogonic
erotic love and not the other way around; cosmic erotic love is not the
prime cause of a mystical communion of the sexes. Nonetheless, as we shall
see, the Vajrayana
practices culminate in a spectacular destruction of the entire male-female
cosmology.
Suspension of opposites
But let us first return to the apparently healthy
continent of tantric eroticism. “It is through love and in view of love
that the world unfolds, through love it rediscovers its original unity and
its eternal non-separation”, a tantric text teaches us (Faure, 1994, p.
56). Here too, the union of the male and female principles is a constant
topic. Our phenomenal world is considered to be the field of action of
these two basic forces. They are manifest as polarities in nature just as
in the spheres of the spirit. Each alone appears as just one half of the
truth. Only in their fusion can they perform the transformation of all
contradictions into harmony. When a human couple remember
their metaphysical unity they can become one spirit and one flesh. Only
through an act of love can man and woman return to their divine origin in
the continuity of all being. The tantric refers to this mystic event as yuganaddha,
which literally means ‘united as a couple’.
Both the bodies of the lovers and the opposing
metaphysical principles are united. Thus, in Tantrism
there is no contradiction between erotic and religious love, or sexuality
and mysticism. Because it repeats the love-play between a masculine and a
feminine pole, the whole universe dances. Yin and yang, or yab and yum in Tibetan, stand at the
beginning of an endless chain of polarities, which proves to be just as
colorful and complex as life itself.
The divine couple in Tantric Buddhism:
Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri
The “sexual” is thus in no way limited to the
sexual act, but rather embraces all forms of love up to and including agape. In Tantrism
there is a polar eroticism of the body, a polar eroticism of the heart, and
sometimes — although not always — a polar eroticism of the spirit. Such an
omnipresence of the sexes is something very specific, since in other
cultures “spiritual love” (agape),
for example, is described as an occurrence beyond the realm of yin and yang. But in contrast Vajrayana shows us how heterosexual erotic love can
refine itself to lie within the most sublime spheres of mysticism without
having to surrender the principle of polarity. That it is nonetheless
renounced in the end is another matter entirely.
The “holy marriage” suspends the duality of the
world and transforms it into a “work of art” of the creative polarity. The
resources of our discursive language are insufficient to let us express in
words the mystical fusion of the two sexes. Thus the “nameless” rapture can
only be described in words which say what it is not: in the yuganaddha, “there is neither affirmation nor
denial, neither existence nor non-existence, neither non-remembering nor
remembering, neither affection nor non-affection, neither the cause nor the
effect, neither the production nor the produced, neither purity nor
impurity, neither anything with form, nor anything without form; it is but
the synthesis of all dualities” (Dasgupta, 1974,
p. 114).
Once the dualism has been overcome,
the distinction between self and other becomes irrelevant. Thus, when man
and woman encounter one another as primal forces, “egoness
[is] lost, and the two polar opposites fuse into a state of intimate and
blissful oneness” (Walker, 1982, p. 67). The tantric Adyayavajra
described this process of the overcoming of the self as the “highest spontaneous common feature” (Gäng, 1988, p. 85).
The co-operation of the poles now
takes the place of the battle of opposites (or sexes). Body and spirit,
erotic love and transcendence, emotion and intellect, being (samsara) and
not-being (nirvana) become
married. All wars and disputes
between good and evil, heaven and hell, day and
night, dream and reality, joy and suffering, praise and contempt are
pacified and suspended in the yuganaddha. Miranda Shaw, a religious scholar of the
younger generation, describes “a Buddha couple, or male and female
Buddha in union ... [as] an image of unity and blissful concord between the
sexes, a state of equilibrium and interdependence. This symbol powerfully
evokes a state of primordial wholeness an
completeness of being.” (Shaw, 1994, p. 200)
But is this state identical to the unconscious ecstasy
we know from orgasm? Does the suspension of opposites occur with both
partners in a trance? No — in Tantrism god and
goddess definitely do not dissolve themselves in an ocean of
unconsciousness. In contrast, they gain access to the non-dual knowledge
and thus discern the eternal truth behind the veil of illusions. Their deep
awareness of the polarity of all being gives them the strength to leave the
“sea of birth and death” behind them.
Divine erotic love thus leads to enlightenment and
salvation. But it is not just the two partners who experience redemption,
rather, as the tantras tell us, all of humanity
is liberated through mystical sexual love. In the Hevajra-Tantra, when the goddess Nairatmya,
deeply moved by the misery of all living creatures, asks her heavenly
spouse to reveal the secret of how human suffering can be put to an end,
the latter is very touched by her request. He kisses her, caresses her,
and, whilst in union with her, he instructs her about the sexual magic yoga
practices through which all suffering creatures can be liberated (Dasgupta, 1974, p. 118). This “redemption via erotic
love” is a distinctive characteristic of Tantrism
and only very seldom to be found in other religions.
Cultic worship of the
sexual organs
What symbols are used to express this creative
polarity in Vajrayana? Like many other cultures Tantric
Buddhism makes use of the hexagram, a combination of two triangles. The
masculine triangle, which points upward, represents the phallus, and the
downward-pointing, feminine triangle the vagina. Both of these sexual
organs are highly revered in the rituals and meditations of Tantrism.
Another highly significant symbol for the
masculine force and the phallus is a symmetrical ritual object called the vajra. As the
divine virility is pure and unshakable, the vajra is described as a
“diamond” or “jewel”. As a “thunderbolt” it is one of the lightning
symbols. Everything masculine is termed vajra. It is thus no surprise
that the male seed is also known as vajra. The Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit word is dorje, which also has additional
meanings, all of which are naturally associated with the masculine half of
the universe. The Tibetans term
the translucent colors of the sky and firmament dorje. Even in pre-Buddhist times the peoples of the Himalayas worshipped the vault of the heavens as
their divine Father.
Vajra and Gantha
(bell)
The female counterpart to the vajra is the lotus blossom (padma) or the
bell (gantha).
Accordingly, both padma
and gantha represent the vagina (yoni). It may come as a surprise to
most Europeans how much reverence the yoni
is accorded in Tantrism. It is glorified as
the “seat
of great pleasure” (Bhattacharyya, 1982, p. 228). In “the lap of the diamond woman” the yogi finds
a “location of security, of peace and calm and, at the same time, of the
greatest happiness” (Gäng, 1988, p. 89). “Buddhahood resides in the female sex
organs”, we are instructed by another text (Stevens, 1990, p. 65). Gedün Chöpel has
given us an enthusiastic hymn to the pudenda: “It is raised up like the
back of a turtle and has a mouth-door closed in by flesh. ... See this
smiling thing with the brilliance of the fluids of passion. It is not a
flower with a thousand petals nor a hundred; it is
a mound endowed with the sweetness of the fluid of passion. The refined
essence of the juices of the meeting of the play of the white and red
[fluids of male and female], the taste of self-arisen honey is in it.” (Chöpel, 1992, p. 62). No wonder, with such hymns of praise, that a regular sacred service in honor of the
vagina emerged. This accorded the goddess great material and spiritual
advantages. “Aho!”, we
hear her call in the Cakrasamvara Tantra,
“I will bestow supreme success on one who ritually worships my lotus [vagina], bearer of all bliss” (Shaw, 1994, p. 155).
This high esteem for the female sexual
organs is especially surprising in Buddhism, where the vagina is after all
the gateway to reincarnation, which the tantric strives with every means to
close. For this reason, for all the early Buddhists, irrespective of
school, the human birth channel counted as one of the most ominous features of our world
of appearances. But precisely because the yoni
thrusts the ordinary human into the realm of suffering and illusion it has
— as we shall see — become a “threshold to enlightenment” (Shaw, 1994, p. 59) for the tantric. Healed by the
mystic sexual act, it is also accorded a
higher, transcendental procreative
function. From it emerges the powerful host of
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We read in the relevant
texts “that the Buddha resides in the womb of the goddess and the
way of enlightenment [is experienced] as a pregnancy” (Faure, 1994, p.
189).
This central worship of the
yoni has led to a situation in which nearly all tantra
texts begin with the fundamental sentence, “I have heard it so: once
upon a time the Highest Lord lingered in the vaginas of the diamond women,
which represent the body, the language and the consciousness of all Buddhas”. Just as the opening
letters of the Bible are believed in a tenet of the Hebraic Kabbala to contain the concentrated essence of the
entire Holy Book, so too the first four letters of this tantric
introductory sentence — evam (‘I
have heard it so’) — encapsulate the entire secret
of the Diamond Path. “It has often been said that he who has understood evam has understood everything” (Banerjee, 1959, p. 7).
The word (evam) is already to be found in the early Gupta
scriptures (c. 300 C.E.) and
is represented there in the form of a hexagram, i.e., the symbol of mystic
sexual love. The syllable e
stands for the downward-pointing triangle, the syllable
vam is
portrayed as a upright triangle. Thus e
represents the yoni (vagina)
and vam
the lingam (phallus). E is the lotus, the source, the
location of all the secrets which the holy doctrine of the tantras teaches; the citadel of happiness, the throne,
the Mother. E further stands for
“emptiness and wisdom”. Masculine vam on the other hand lays claims to reverence as “vajra,
diamond, master of joys, method, great compassion, as the Father”. E and vam together form “the seal
of the doctrine, the fruit, the world of appearances, the way to
perfection, father (yab)
and mother (yum)” (see, among
others, Farrow and Menon, 1992, pp. xii ff.). The
syllables e-vam
are considered so powerful that the divine couple
can summon the entire host of male and female Buddhas
with them.
The origin of the gods and
goddesses
From the primordial tantric couple emanate pairs
of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, gods and demons.
Before all come the five male and five female Tathagatas (Buddhas of meditation), the five Herukas (wrathful Buddhas) in union with their partners, the eight Bodhisattvas with their consorts. We
also meet gods of time who symbolize the years, months and days, and the
“seven shining planetary couples”. The five elements (space, air, fire,
water and earth) are represented in pairs in divine form — these too find
their origin in mystic sexual love. As it says in the Hevajra Tantra: “By uniting the male and
female sexual organs the holder of the Vow performs the erotic union. From
contact in the erotic union, as the quality of hardness, Earth arises;
Water arises from the fluidity of semen; Fire arises from the friction of
pounding; Air is famed to be the movement and the Space is the erotic
pleasure” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 134).
It is not just the “pure” elements which come from
the erotic communion, so do mixtures of them. Through the continuous union
of the masculine with the feminine the procreative powers flow into the
world from all of their body parts. In a commentary by the famous Tibetan scholar
Tsongkhapa, we read how the legendary Mount Meru, the continents, mountain ranges and all earthly
landscapes emerge from the essence of the hairs of the head, the bones,
gall bladder, liver, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, ribs,
excrement, filth (!), and pus (!). The springs, waterfalls, ponds, rivers
and oceans form themselves out of the tears, blood, menses, seed, lymph
fluid and urine. The inner fire centers of the head, heart, navel, abdomen
and limbs correspond in the external world to fire which is sparked by
striking stones or using a lens, a fireplace or a forest fire. Likewise all
external wind phenomena echo the breath which moves through the bodies of
the primeval couple (Wayman, 1977, pp. 234, 236).
In the same manner, the five “aggregate states”
(consciousness, intellect, emotions, perception, bodiliness)
originate in the primordial couple. The “twelve senses” (sense of hearing,
other phenomena, sense of smell, tangible things, sense of sight, taste,
sense of taste, sense of shape, sense of touch, smells, sense of spirit,
sounds) are also emanations of mystic sexual love. Further, each of the
twelve “abilities to act” is assigned to a goddess or a god — (the ability
to urinate, ejaculation, oral ability, defecation, control of the arm,
walking, leg control, taking, the ability to defecate, speaking, the
“highest ability” (?), urination).
Alongside the gods of the “domain of the body” we
find those of the “domain of speech”. The divine couple count as the origin
of language. All the vowels (ali) are assigned to the goddess; the god is the father
of the consonants (kali). When ali and kali (which can also appear as
personified divinities) unite, the syllables are formed. Hidden within
these as if in a magic egg are the verbal seeds (bija) from which the
linguistic universe grows. The syllables join with one another to build
sound units (mantras). Both often
have no literal meaning, but are very rich in emotional, erotic, magical
and mystical intentions. Even if there are many similarities between them,
the divine language of the tantras is still held
to be more powerful than the poetry of the West, as gods can be commanded
through the ritual singing of the germinal syllables. In Vajrayana
each god and every divine event obeys a specific mantra.
As erotic love leaves nothing aside, the entire
spectrum of the gods’ emotions (as long as these belong to the domain of
desire) is to originally be found in the mystical relationship of the
sexes. There is no emotion, no mood which does not originate here. The
texts speak of “erotic, wonderful, humorous, compassionate, tranquil,
heroic, disgusting, furious” feelings (Wayman,
1977, p. 328).
The origin of time and
emptiness
In the Kalachakra Tantra (“Time Tantra”)
the masculine pole is the time god Kalachakra, the feminine the time goddess Vishvamata. The chief symbols of the masculine
divinity are the diamond scepter (vajra) and the lingam
(phallus). The goddess holds a lotus blossom or a bell, both symbols of the
yoni (vagina). He rules as “Lord
of the Day”, she as “Queen of the Night”.
The mystery of time reveals itself in the love of
this divine couple. All temporal expressions of the universe are included
in the “Wheel of Time” (kala means ‘time’ and chakra ‘wheel’). When the time goddess Vishvamata and the time god Kalachakra
unite, they experience their communion as “elevated time”, as a “mystical
marriage”, as Hieros Gamos.
The circle or wheel (chakra)
indicates “cyclical time” and the law of “eternal recurrence”. The four
great epochs of the world (mahakalpa) are also hidden within the mystery of the
tantric primal couple, as are the many chronological modalities. The texts
describe the shortest unit of time as one sixty-fourth of a finger snap.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, the entire complex
tantric calendrical calculations, all emerge from
the mystic sexual love between Kalachakra and Vishvamata. The four heads of the time god correspond to
the four seasons. Including the “third eye”, his total of 12 eyes may be
apportioned to the 12 months of the year. Counting three joints per finger,
in Kalachakra’s
24 arms there are 360 bones, which correspond to the 360 days of the year
in the Tibetan calendar.
Kalachakra and Vishvamata
Time manifests itself as motion, eternity as
standstill. These two elements are also addressed in the Kalachakra Tantra.
Neither cyclical nor chronological time have any influence upon the state
of motionlessness during the Hieros Gamos. The river of time now runs dry, and the
fruit of eternity can be enjoyed. Such an experience frees the divine couple from both past and future, which prove to be
illusory, and gives them the timeless present.
What is the situation with the paired opposites of
space and time? In European philosophy and theoretical physics, this
relationship has given rise to countless discussions. Speculation about the
space-time phenomenon are, however, far less popular in Tantrism.
The texts prefer the term shunyata (emptiness) when speaking of “space”, and point
out the secret properties of “emptiness”, especially its paradoxical power
to bring forth all things. Space is emptiness, “but space, as understood in
Buddhist meditation, is not passive (in the western sense). ... Space is
the absolutely indispensable vibrant matrix for everything that is” (Gross,
1993, p. 203).
We can see shunyata (emptiness) as the most central term of the
entire Buddhist philosophy. It is the second ventricle of Mahayana Buddhism. (The first is karuna,
compassion for all living beings.) “Absolute emptiness” dissolves into
nothingness all the phenomena of being up to and including the sphere of
the Highest Self. We are unable to talk about emptiness, since the reality
of shunyata
is independent of any conceptual construction. It transcends thought and we
are not even able to claim that the phenomenal world does not exist. This radical negativism
has rightly been described as the “doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness”.
In the light of this fundamental inexpressibility
and featurelessness of shunyata, one
is left wondering why it is unfailingly regarded as a “feminine” principle
in Vajrayana
Buddhism. But it is! As its masculine polar opposite the tantras nominate consciousness (citta) or compassion (karuna). “The
Mind is the Lord and the Vacuity is the Lady; they should always be kept
united in Sahaja [the highest state of
enlightenment]”, as one text proclaims (Dasgupta,
1974, p. 101). Time and emptiness also complement one another in a polar
manner.
Thus, the Kalachakra divinity (the time god) cries emphatically
that, “through the power of time air, fire, water, earth, islands, hills,
oceans, constellations, moon, sun, stars, planets, the wise, gods,
ghosts/spirits, nagas (snake demons), the fourfold animal
origin, humans and infernal beings have been created in the emptiness” (Banerjee, 1959, p. 16). Once she has been impregnated
by “masculine” time, the “feminine” emptiness gives birth to everything.
The observation that the vagina is empty before it emits life is likely to
have played a role in the development of this concept. For this reason, shunyata may
never be understood as pure negativity in Tantrism,
but rather counts as the “shapeless” origin of all being.
The clear light
The ultimate goal of all mystic doctrines in the
widest variety of cultures is the ability to experience the highest clear
light. Light phenomena play such a significant role in Tantric Buddhism
that the Italian Tibetologist, Giuseppe Tucci, speaks of a downright “photism”
(doctrine of light). Light, from which everything stems, is considered the
“symbol of the highest intrinsicness” (Brauen, 1992, p. 65).
In describing supernatural light phenomena, the
tantric texts in no sense limit themselves to tracing these back to a mystical
primal light, but rather have assembled a complete catalog of “photisms” which maybe experienced. These include
sparks, lamps, candles, balls of light, rainbows, pillars
of fire, heavenly lights, and so forth which flash up during meditation.
Each of these appearances presages a particular level of consciousness,
ranked hierarchically. Thus one must traverse various light stages in order
to finally bathe in the “highest clear light”.
The truly unique feature of Tantrism
is that this “highest clear light” streams out of the yuganaddha, the Hieros Gamos. It
is in this sense that we must understand the following poetic sentence from
the Kalachakra Tantra:
“In a world purged of darkness, at the end of darkness awaits a couple” (Banerjee, 1959, p. 24).
Summarizing, we can say that Tantrism
has made erotic love between the sexes its central religious theme. When
the divine couple unite in bliss, then “by the force of their joy the
members of the retinue also fuse”, i.e., the other gods and goddesses, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their wisdom consorts (Wayman, 1968, p. 291). The divine couple is
all-knowing, as it knows and indeed itself
represents the germinal syllables which produce the cosmos. With their
breath the time god (Kalachakra)
and time goddess (Vishvamata)
control the motions of the heavens. Astronomy along with every other
science has its origin in them. They are initiated into every level of
meditation, have mastery over the secret doctrines and every form of subtle
yoga. The clear light shines out of them. They know the laws of karma and
how they may be suspended. Compassionately, the god and goddess care for
humankind as if we were their children and devote themselves to the
concerns of the world. As master and mistress of all forms of time they
determine the rhythm of history. Being and not-being fuse within them. In
brief, the creative polarity of the divine couple produces the universe.
Yet this image of complete beauty between the
sexes does not stand on the highest altar of Tantric Buddhism. But what
could be higher than the polar principle of the universe and infinity?
Wisdom (prajna) and method (upaya)
Before answering this, we want to quickly view a
further pair of opposites which are married in yuganaddha. Up to now we have
not yet considered the most often cited polarity in the tantras,
“wisdom” (prajna)
and “method” (upaya).
There is no original tantric text, no Indian or Tibetan commentary and no
Western interpreter of Tantrism which does not
treat the “union of upaya
and prajna”
in depth.
“Wisdom” and “method” are held to be the outright
mother and father of all other tantric opposites. Every polar constellation
is derived from these two terms. To summarize, upaya stands for the
masculine principle, the phallus, motion, activity, the god, enlightenment,
and so forth; prajna
represents the feminine principle, the vagina, calm, passivity, the
goddess, the cosmic law. All women naturally count as prajna, all men as upaya. “The
commingling of this Prajna and Upaya [are] like the mixture of water and milk in a
state of non-duality” (Dasgupta, 1974, p. 93).
There is also the stated view that upaya becomes a fetter when it is not joined with prajna; only both together grant
deliverance and Buddhahood (Bharati,
1977, p. 171).
Prajna and Upaya
This almost limitless extension of the two
principles has led to a situation in which they are only rarely critically
examined. Do they stand in a truly polar
relation to one another? Why — we ask — does “wisdom” need “method”?
Somehow this pair of opposites do not fit together
— can there even be an unmethodical, chaotic “wisdom”? Isn’t prajna
(wisdom) enough on its own; does it not include “method” as a partial
aspect of itself? What is an “unmethodical” wisdom? Even if we translate upaya — as is
often done — as ‘technique’, we still do not have a convincing polar
correspondence to prajna.
This combination also seems far-fetched — why should “technique” and
“wisdom” meet in a mystic wedding? The opposition becomes even more absurd
and profane if we translate upaya (as it is clearly intended) as “cunning means” or
even “trick” or “ruse” (Wilber, 1987, p. 310). [2]
Whereas with “wisdom” one has some idea of what is meant, comprehending the
technoid term upaya presents major
difficulties. We must thus examine it in more detail.
“At all events”, writes David Snellgrove,
a renowned expert on Tantrism, “it must be
emphasized that here Means remains a doctrinal concept, serving as means to
an end, and in no sense can this concept be construed as an end in itself,
as is certainly the case with perfection of wisdom [prajna]” (Snellgrove,
1987, vol. 1, p. 283). “Method” is thus an instrument which is to be
combined with a content, “wisdom”. “Wisdom”, Snellgrove adds, “can be seen as representing the
evolving universe” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 1, p.
244). Due to the distribution of both principles along gender lines this
has a feminine quality.
The instrumental “method”, which is assigned to
the masculine sphere, thus proves itself — as we shall explain in more
detail — to be a sacred technique for controlling the feminine “wisdom”. Upaya is
nothing more than an instrument of manipulation, without any unique content
or substance of its own. Method is at best the means to an end (i.e.,
wisdom). Analytical reserve and technical precision are two of its
fundamental properties. Since wisdom — as we can infer from the quotation
from Snellgrove — represents the entire universe,
upaya
is the method with which the universe can be manipulated; and since prajna
represents the feminine principle and upaya the masculine, their
union implies a manipulation of the feminine by the masculine.
To illustrate this process, we should take a quick
look at a Greek myth which recounts how Zeus
acquired wisdom (Metis).
One day the father of the gods swallowed the female Titan Metis. (In Greek, metis means “wisdom”.) “Wisdom”
survived in his belly and gave him advice from there. According to this
story then, Zeus’s sole
contribution toward the development of “his” wisdom was a cunning swallow.
With this coarse but effective method (upaya) he could now present
himself as the fount of all wisdom. He even became, through the birth of Athena, the masculine “bearer” of
feminine prajna.
Metis,
the mother of Athena, actually gives birth to her
daughter in the stomach of the father of the gods, but it is he who brings
her willy-nilly into the world. In full armor, Athene, herself a symbol of
wisdom, bursts from the top of Zeus’s
skull. She is the “head birth” of her father, the product of his ideas.
Here, the swallowing of the feminine and its
imaginary (re)production (head birth) are the two techniques (upaya) with
which Zeus manipulates wisdom (prajna, Metis, Athene) to his own
ends. We shall later see how vividly this myth illustrates the process of
the tantric mystery.
At any rate, we would like to hypothesize that the
relation between the two tantric principles of “wisdom” and “method” is
neither one of complementarity, nor polarity, nor
even antinomy, but rather one of androcentric
hegemony. The translation of upaya as ‘trick’ is thoroughly justified. We can thus in
no sense speak of a “mystic marriage” of prajna and upaya, and unfortunately we must soon
demonstrate that very little of the widely distributed (in the West) conception
of Tantrism as a sublime art of love and a
spiritual refinement of the partnership remains.
The worship of “wisdom” (prajna) as a
embracing cosmic energy already had a significant role to play in Mahayana Buddhism. There we find an
extensive literature devoted to it, the Prajnaparamita texts, and it
is still cultivated throughout all of Asia.
In the famous Sutra of Perfected
Wisdom in Eight Thousand Verses (c. 100 B.C.E.)
for example, the glorification of prajnaparamita (“highest transcendental wisdom”) and the
description of the Bodhisattva way are central. “If
a Bodhisattva wishes to become a Buddha, […] he must always be energetic
and always pay respect to the Perfection of Wisdom [prajnaparamita]”, we read
there (D. Paul, 1985, p. 135). There are also instances in Mahayana
iconography where the “highest wisdom” is depicted in the form of a
female being, but nowhere here is there talk of manipulation or control of
the “goddess”. Devotion, fervent prayer, hymn, liturgical song, ecstatic
excitement, overflowing emotion and joy are the forms of expression with
which the believer worships prajnaparamita.
The guru as manipulator of the divine
In view of the previously suggested dissonance
between prajna
and upaya, we must ask ourselves who this
authority is, who via the “method” makes use of the wisdom-energy for his
own purposes. This question is all the more pertinent, since in the visible
reality of the tantric religions — in the culture of Tibetan Lamaism for
instance — Vajrayana
is never represented as a pair of equals, but almost exclusively as single
men, in very rare cases as single women. The two partners meet only to
perform the ritual sexual act and then separate.
It follows conclusively from what has already been
described that it must be the masculine principle which effects the
manipulation of the feminine wisdom. It appears in the figure of the
“tantric master”. His knowledge of the sacred techniques makes him a
“yogi”. Whenever he assumes the role of teacher he is known as a guru (Sanskrit) or a lama (Tibetan).
How does the tantric master’s exceptional position
of power arise? Every Vajrayana follower practices the so-called “Deity yoga”,
in which the self is imagined as a divinity. The believer distinguishes between
two levels. Firstly he meditates upon the “emptiness” of all being, in
order to overcome his bodily, mental, and spiritual impurities and “blocks”
and create an empty space. The core of this meditative process of
dissolution is the surrender of the individual ego. Following this, the
living image (yiddam)
of the particular divine being who should appear
in the appropriate ritual is formed in the yogi’s imaginative
consciousness. His or her body, color, posture, clothing, facial expression
and moods are described in detail in the holy texts and must be recreated
exactly in the mind. We are thus not dealing with an exercise of
spontaneous and creative free imagination, but rather with an accurate
reproduction of a codified archetype.
The practitioner may externalize or project the yiddam, so
that it appears before him. But this is just the first step; in those which
following he imagines himself as the deity. Thus he swaps his own personal
ego with that of a supernatural being. The yogi has now surmounted his
human existence and constitutes “to the very last atom” a unity with the
god (Glasenapp, 1940, p. 101).
But he must never lose sight of the fact that the
deity he has imagined possesses no autonomous existence. It exists purely
and exclusively as an emanation of his imagination and can thus be created,
maintained and destroyed at will. But who actually is this tantric master,
this manipulator of the divine? His consciousness has nothing in common
with that of a ordinary person, it must belong to
a sphere higher than that of the gods. The texts and commentaries describe
this “highest authority” as the “higher self” or as the primeval Buddha
(ADI BUDDHA), as the primordial one, the origin of all being, with whom the
yogi identifies himself.
Thus, when we speak of a “guru” in Vajrayana,
then according to the doctrine we are no longer dealing with an individual,
but with an archetypal and transcendental being, who has as it were
borrowed a human body in order to appear in the world. Events are not in the
control of the person (from the Latin persona
‘mask’), but rather the god acting through him. This in turn is the
emanation of an arch-god, an epiphany of the most high
ADI BUDDHA. Followed to its logical conclusion this means that the
Fourteenth Dalai Lama (the most senior tantric master of Tibetan Buddhism)
determines the politics of the Tibetans in exile not as a person, but as
the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,
whose emanation he is. Thus, if we wish to pass judgment on his politics,
we must come to terms with the motives and visions of Avalokiteshvara.
The tantric master’s enormous power does not have
its origin in a Vajrayana
doctrine, but in the two main philosophical directions of Mahayana Buddhism (Madhyamika
and Yogachara).
The Madhyamika
school of Nagarjuna
(fifth century C.E.) discusses the principle of emptiness (shunyata)
which forms a basis for all being. Radically, this also applies to the
gods. They are purely illusory and for a yogi are worth neither more nor
less than a tool which he employs in setting his goals and then puts aside.
Paradoxically, this radical Buddhist perceptual
theory led to the admission of an immense multitude of gods, most of whom stemmed from the Hindu cultural sphere. From now on
these could populate the Buddhist heaven, something which was taboo in Hinayana. As they were in the final instance
illusory, there was no longer any need to fear them or regard them as
competition; since they could be “negated”, they could be “integrated”.
For the Yogachara school (fourth century C.E.), everything — the
self, the world and the gods — consists of “consciousness” or “pure
spirit”. This extreme idealism also makes it possible for the yogi to
manipulate the universe according to his wishes and plans. Because the
heavens and their inhabitants are nothing more than play figures of his
spirit, they can be produced, destroyed and exchanged at whim.
But what, in an assessment of the Vajrayana
system, should give grounds for reflection is the fact, already mentioned,
that the Buddhist pantheon presented on the tantric stage is codified in
great detail. Neither in the choreography nor the costumes have there been
any essential changes since the twelfth century C.E., if one is prepared to
overlook the inclusion of several minor protective spirits, of which the
youngest (Dorje Shugden
for example) date from the seventeenth century. In current “Deity yoga”,
practiced by an adept today (even one from the West), a preordained heaven
with its old gods is conjured up. The adept calls upon primeval images
which were developed in Indian/Tibetan, perhaps even Mongolian, cultural
circles, and which of course — as we will demonstrate in detail in the
second part of our study — represent the interests and political desires of
these cultures. [3]
Since the Master resides on a level higher than
that of a god, and is, in the final instance, the ADI BUDDHA, his pupils
are obliged to worship him as an omnipotent super-being, who commands the
gods and goddesses, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The
following apotheosis of a tantric teacher, which the semi-mythical founder
of Buddhism in Tibet,
Padmasambhava, laid down for an initiand, is symptomatic of countless similar prayers
in the liturgy of Tantrism: “You should know that
one’s master is more important than even the thousand buddhas
of this aeon. Why is that? It is because all the buddhas of this aeon appeared
after having followed a master. ... The master is the buddha
[enlightenment], the master is the dharma [cosmic law], in the same way the
master is also the sangha [monastic order]”
(Binder-Schmidt, 1994, p. 35). In the Guhyasamaja Tantra we
can read how all enlightened beings bow down before the teacher: “All the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout the past, present
and future worship the Teacher .... [and] make
this pronouncing of vajra
words: ‘He is the father of all us Buddhas, the
mother of all us Buddhas, in that he is the
teacher of all us Buddhas’” (Snellgrove,
1987, vol. 1, p. 177).
A bizarre anecdote from the early stages of Tantrism makes this deification of the gurus even more
apparent. One day, the famous vajra master, Naropa, asked
his pupil, Marpa, “If I and the god Hevajra appeared before you at the same
time, before whom would you kneel first?”. Marpa thought, “I see my guru every day, but if Hevajra
reveals himself to me then that is indeed a quite extraordinary event, and
it would certainly be better to show respect to him first!”. When he told
his master this, Naropa clicked two fingers and
in that moment Hevajra appeared with his entire retinue.
But before Marpa could prostrate himself in the
dust before the apparition, with a second click of the fingers it vanished
into Naropa’s heart. “You made a mistake!” cried
the master (Dhargyey, 1985, p. 123).
In another story, the protagonists are this same Naropa and his instructor, the Kalachakra Master Tilopa. Tilopa spoke to his
pupil, saying, “If you want teaching, then construct a mandala!”. Naropa was unable to find
any seeds, so he made the mandala out of sand.
But he sought without success for water to cement the sand. Tilopa asked him, “Do you have blood?” Naropa slit his veins and the blood flowed out. But
then, despite searching everywhere, he could find no flowers. “Do you not
have limbs?” asked Tilopa. “Cut off your head and
place it in the center of the mandala. Take your
arms and legs and arrange them around it!” Naropa
did so and dedicated the mandala to his guru, then he collapsed from blood loss. When he regained
consciousness, Tilopa asked him, “Are you
content?” and Naropa answered, “It is the
greatest happiness to be able to dedicate this mandala,
made of my own flesh and blood, to my guru”.
The power of the gurus — this is what these
stories should teach us — is boundless, whilst the god is, finally, just an
illusion which the guru can produce and dismiss at will. He is the
arch-lord, who reigns over life and death, heaven and hell. Through him
speaks the ABSOLUTE SPIRIT, which tolerates nothing aside from itself.
The pupil must completely surrender his individual
ego and transform it into a subject of the SPIRIT which dwells in his
teacher. “I and my teacher are one” means then, that
the same SPIRIT lives in both.
The appropriation of gynergy and androcentric power strategies
Only in extremely rare cases is
the omnipotence and divinity of a yogi acquired at birth. It is usually the
result of a graded and complicated spiritual progression. Clearly, to be
able to realize his omnipotence, which should transcend even the sexual
polarity of all which exists, a male tantric master requires a substance,
which we term “gynergy” (female energy), and which we intend to examine in more detail in the
following. As he cannot, at the outset of his path to power, find this
“elixir” within himself, he must seek it there where in accordance with the
laws of nature it may be found in abundance, in women.
Vajrayana is therefore — according to the
assessments of no small number of Western researchers of both sexes — a
male sexual magic technique designed to “rob” women of their particularly
female form of energy and to render it useful for the man. Following the
“theft”, it flows for the tantric adept as the spring which powers his
experiences of spiritual enlightenment. All the potencies which, from a
Tibetan point of view, are to be sought and found in the feminine sphere
are truly astonishing: knowledge, matter, sensuality, language,
light — indeed, according to the tantric texts, the yogi perceives
the whole universe as feminine. For him, the feminine force (shakti) and
feminine wisdom (prajna)
constantly give birth to reality; even transcendental truths such as
“emptiness” (shunyata)
are feminine. Without “gynergy”, in the tantric view of things none of the
higher levels along the path to enlightenment can be reached, and hence in no
circumstances a state of perfection.
In order to be able to acquire the primeval
feminine force of the universe, a yogi must have mastered the appropriate
spiritual methods (upaya),
which we examine in detail later in this study. The well-known investigator
of Tibetan culture, David Snellgrove, describes
their chief function as the transmutation of the feminine form into the
masculine with the intention of accumulating power. It is for this and no
other reason that the tantric seeks contact with a female. Usually, “power
flows from the woman to the man, especially when she is more powerful than
he”, the Indologist Doniger
O’Flaherty (O’Flaherty, 1982, p. 263) informs us. Hence, since the powerful
feminine creates the world, the “uncreative” masculine yogi can only become
a creator if he appropriates the creative powers of the goddess. “May I be
born from birth to birth”, he thus cries in the Hevajra Tantra, “concentrating in myself the
essence of woman” (Snellgrove, 1959, p. 116). He
is the sorcerer who believes that all power is feminine, and that he knows
the secret of how to manipulate it.
The key to his
dreams of omnipotence lies in how he is able to transform himself into a
“supernatural” being, an androgyne who has access to the
potentials of both sexes. The two sexual energies now lose their equality
and are brought into a hierarchical relation with each other in which the
masculine part exercises absolute control over the feminine.
When, in the reverse situation, the feminine
principle appropriates the masculine and attempts to dominate it, we have a
case of gynandry.
Gynandric rites are known from the Hindu tantras. But in contrast, in androcentric
Buddhism we are dealing exclusively with the production of a “perfect”
androgynous state, i.e., in social terms with the power of men over women
or, in brief, the establishment of a patriarchal monastic regime.
Since the “bisexuality” of
the yogi represents a precondition for the development of his power, it
forms a central topic of discussion in every highest tantra.
It is known simply as the “two-in-one” principle, which suspends all
oppositions, such as wisdom and method, subject and object, emptiness and
compassion, but above all masculine and feminine (Snellgrove,
1987, vol. 1, p. 285). Other phrases include “bipolarity” or the
realization of “bisexual divinity within one’s own body” (Herrmann-Pfand, 1992, p. 314).
However, the “two-in-one” principle is not
directed at a state beyond sexuality and erotic love, as modern
interpreters often misunderstand it to be. The tantric master deliberately
utilizes the masculine/feminine sexual energies to obtain and exercise
power and does not destroy them, even if they are only present within his
own identity after the initiation. They continue to function there as the
two polar primeval forces, but now within the androgynous yogi.
Thus, in Tantrism we are
in any case dealing with an erotic cult, one which recognizes cosmic erotic
love as the defining force of the universe, even if it is manipulated in
the interests of power. This is in stark contrast to the asexual concepts
of Mahayana Buddhism. “The state
of bisexuality, defined as the possession of both masculine and feminine
sexual powers, was considered unfortunate, that is, not conducive to
spiritual growth. Because of the excessive sexual power of both masculinity
and femininity, the bisexual individual had weakness of will or inattention
to moral precepts”, reports Diana Paul in reference to the “Great Vehicle”
(D. Paul, 1985, pp. 172–173).
But Vajrayana does not let itself be intimidated by such
proclamations, but instead worships the androgyne
as a radiant diamond being, who feels in his heart “the blissful kiss of
the inner male and female forces” (Mullin, 1991, p. 243). The tantric androgyne is supposed to actually partake of the lusts
and joys of both sexes, but just as much of their concentrated power.
Although in his earthly form he appears before us as a man, the yogi
nonetheless rules as both man and
woman, as god and goddess, as
father and mother at once. The initiand is instructed to “visualize the lama as Kalachakra in
Father and Mother aspect, that is to say, in union with his consort” (Dalai
Lama XIV, 1985, p. 174), and must then declare to
his guru, “You are the mother, you are the father, you are the teacher of
the world!”(Grünwedel, Kalacakra II, p. 180).
The vaginal Buddha
The goal of androgyny is the acquisition of
absolute power, as, according to tantric doctrine, the entire cosmos must
be seen as the play and product of both sexes. Now united in the mystic
body of the yogi, the latter thereby believes he has the secret birth-force
at his disposal — that natural ability of woman which he as man principally
lacks and which he therefore desires so strongly.
This desire finds expression in, among
other things, the royal title Bhagavan (ruler or regent), which he acquires after the
tantric initiation. The Sanskrit word bhaga originally designated the female
pudendum, womb, vagina or vulva. But bhaga also means happiness, bliss, wealth, sometimes emptiness. This
metaphor indicates that the multiplicity of the world emerges from the womb
of woman. The yogi thus lets himself be revered
in the Kalachakra Tantra as
Bhagavat
or Bhagavan,
as a bearer of the female birth-force or alternatively as a “bringer of
happiness”. “The Buddha is called Bhagavat, because he possesses the Bhaga, this characterizes the quality of his rule” (Naropa, 1994, p. 136), we can read in Naropa’s commentary from the eleventh century, and the
famous tantric continues, “The Bhaga is according to tradition the horn of plenty in
possession of the six boons in their
perfected form: sovereignty, beauty, good name/reputation, abundance,
insight, and the appropriate force to be able to achieve the goals set” (Naropa, 1994, p. 136). In their introduction to the Hevajra Tantra
the contemporary authors, G. W. Farrow and I. Menon,
write, “In the tantric view the Bhagavan is
defined as the one who possesses Bhaga, the womb,
which is the source” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p.
xxiii).
Although this male usurpation of the Bhaga first
reaches its full extent and depth of symbolism in Tantrism,
it is presaged by a peculiar bodily motif from an earlier phase of
Buddhism. In accordance with a broadly accepted canon, an historical Buddha
must identify himself through 32 distinguishing features. These take the
form of unusual markings on his physical body, like, for example, sun-wheel
images on the soles of his feet. The tenth sign, known to Western medicine
as cryptorchidism,
is that the penis is covered by a thick fold of skin, “the concealment of
the lower organs in a sheath”; this text goes on to add, “Buddha’s private
parts are hidden like those of a horse [i.e., stallion]” (Gross, 1993, p.
62).
Even if cryptorchidism
as an indicator of the Enlightened One in Mahayana Buddhism is meant to show his “asexuality”, in our
opinion in Vajrayana
it can only signal the appropriation of feminine sexual energies without
the Buddha thus needing to renounce his masculine potency. Instead, in
drawing the comparison to a stallion which has a penis which naturally
rests in a “sheath”, it is possible to tap into one of the most powerful
mythical sexual metaphors of the Indian cultural region. Since the Vedas the stallion has been seen as
the supreme animal symbol for male potency. In Tibetan folklore, the Dalai
Lamas also possess the ability to “retract” their sexual organs (Stevens,
1993, p. 180).
The Buddha as mother and
the yogi as goddess
The “ability to give birth” acquired through the
“theft” of gynergy transforms the guru into a
“mother”, a super-mother who can herself produce gods. Every Tibetan lama
thus values highly the fact that he can lay claim to the powerful symbols
of motherhood, and a popular epithet for tantric yogis is “Mother of all Buddhas” (Gross, 1993, p. 232). The maternal role
logically presupposes a symbolic pregnancy. Consequently, being “pregnant”
is a common metaphor used to describe a tantric master’s productive
capability (Wayman, 1977, p. 57).
But despite all of his motherly qualities, in the
final instance the yogi represents the male arch-god, the ADI BUDDHA, who
produced the mother goddess out of himself as an archetype: “It is to be
noted that the primordial goddess had emanated from the Lord”, notes an
important tantra interpreter, “The Lord is the beginningless eternal One; while the Goddess, emanating
from the body of the Lord, is the produced one” (Dasgupta,
1946, p. 384). Eve was created from Adam’s rib, as Genesis already informs
us. Since, according to the tantric initiation, the feminine should only
exist as a manipulable element of the masculine,
the tantras talk of the “together born female” (Wayman, 1977, p. 291).
Once the emanation of the mother
goddess from the masculine god has been formally incorporated in the canon,
there is no further obstacle to a self-imagining and self-production of the
lama as goddess. “Then behold yourself as divine woman in empty form”
(Evans-Wentz, 1937, p. 177), instructs a guide to meditation for a pupil.
In another, the latter declaims, “I myself instantaneously become the Holy
Lady” (quoted by Beyer, 1978, p. 378).
Steven
Segal (Hollywood actor): The Dalai Lama “is the great mother of everything nuturing and loving. He accepts all who come without judgement.” (Schell, 2000, p. 69)
Once kitted out with the force of the feminine,
the tantric master even has the ability to produce whole hosts of female
figures out of himself or to fill the whole universe with a single female
figure: “To begin with, imagine the image (of the goddess Vajrayogini)
of roughly the size of your own body, then in that of a house, then a hill,
and finally in the scale of outer space” (Evans-Wentz, 1937, p. 136). Or he
imagines the cosmos as an endlessly huge palace of supernatural couples:
“All male divinities dance within me. And all female divinities channel
their sacred vajra
songs through me”, the Second Dalai Lama writes lyrically in a tantric song
(Mullin, 1991, p. 67). But “then, he [the yogi] can resolve these couples
in his meditation. Little by little he realizes that their objective
existence is illusory and that they are but a function. ... He transcends
them and comes to see them as images reflected in a mirror, as a mirage and
so on” (Carelli, 1941, p. 18).
However, outside of the rites and meditation
sessions, that is, in the real world, the double-gendered super-being
appears almost exclusively in the body of a man and only very rarely as a
woman, even if he exclaims in the Guhyasamaja Tantra, “I am without doubt any figure. I am woman
and I am man, I am the figure of the androgyne” (Gäng, 1998, p. 66).
What happens to the woman?
Once the yogi has “stolen” her gynergy using sexual magic techniques, the woman vanishes from the
tantric scenario. “The feminine partner”, writes David Snellgrove,
“known as the Wisdom-Maiden [prajna] and supposedly embodying this great perfection
of wisdom, is in effect used as a means to an end, which is experienced by
the yogi himself. Moreover, once he has mastered the requisite yoga
techniques he has no need of a feminine partner, for the whole process is
re-enacted within his own body. Thus despite the eulogies of women in these
tantras and her high symbolic status
, the whole theory and practice is given for the benefit of males” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 1, p. 287).
Equivalent quotations from many other Western
interpreters of Tantrism can be found: “In ... Tantrism ... woman is means, an alien object, without
possibility of mutuality or real communication” (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p.
7). The woman “is to be used as a ritual object and then cast aside” (also
quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7). Or, at another point: the yogis had “sex
without sensuality ... There is no relationship of intimacy with an
individual — the woman ... involved is an object, a representation of power
... women are merely spiritual batteries” (quoted by Shaw, 1994, n. 128,
pp. 254–255). The woman functions as a “salvation tool”, as an “aid on the
path to enlightenment”. The goal of Vajrayana is even “to destroy
the female” (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7).
Incidentally, this functionalization
of the sexual partner is addressed — as we still have to show — without
deliberation or shame in the original Vajrayana texts. Modern
Western authors with views compatible to those of Buddhism, on the
contrary, tend toward the opinion that the tantric androgyne
harmonizes both sexual roles equally within itself, so that the androgynous
pattern is valid for both men and women. But this is not the case. Even at
an etymological level, androgyny (from Ancient Greek anér ‘man’ and gyné ‘woman’) cannot be applied to both sexes. The term
denotes — when taken literally — the male-feminine forces possessed by a
man, whilst for a woman the respective phenomenon would have to be termed “gynandry” (female-masculine forces possessed by a
woman).
Androgyny vs. gynandry
Since androgyny and gynandry
are used in reference to the organization of sex-specific energies and not
a description of physical sexual characteristics, it could be felt that we are
being overly pedantic here. That would be true if it were not that Tantrism involved an extreme cult of the male body,
psyche and spirit. With extremely few exceptions all Vajrayana gurus are men. What
is true of the world of appearances is also true at the highest
transcendental level. The ADI BUDDHA is primarily depicted in the form of a
man.
Following our discussion of the “mystic”
physiology of the yogi, we shall further be able to see that this describes
the construction of a masculine body of energy. But any doubts about
whether androgyny represents a virile usurpation of feminine energies ought
to vanish once we have aired the secrets of the tantric seed (semen)
gnosis. Here the male yogi uses a woman’s menstrual blood to construct his
bisexual body.
Consequently, the attempt to create an androgynous being out of a woman
means that her own feminine essence becomes subordinated to a masculine
principle (the principle of anér). Even when she exhibits the outward sexual
characteristics of a woman (breasts and vagina), she mutates, as we know
already from Mahayana Buddhism,
in terms of energy into a man. In contrast, a truly female counterpart to
an androgynous guru would be a gynandric
mistress. The question, however, is whether the techniques taught in the
Buddhist tantras are at all suitable for
instituting a process transforming a woman in the direction of gynandry, or whether they have been written by and for
men alone. Only after a detailed description of the tantric rituals will we
be able to answer this question.
The absolute power of the “Grand Sorcerer” (Maha Siddha)
The goal of tantric androgyny is the concentration
of absolute power in the tantric master, which in his view constitutes the
unrestricted control over both cosmic primal
forces, the god and the goddess. If one assumes that he has, through
constant meditative effort, destroyed his individual ego, then it is no
longer a person who has concentrated this power within himself. In place of
the human ego is the superego of a god with far-reaching powers. This
superhuman subject knows no bounds when it proclaims in the Hevajra Tantra,
“I am the revealer, I am the revealed doctrine and I am the disciple
endowed with good qualities. I am the goal, I am the master of the world
and I am the world as well as the worldly things” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 167). In the tantras
there is a distinction between two types of power:
- Supernatural power, that is,
ultimately, enlightened consciousness and Buddhahood.
- Worldly power such as wealth,
health, regency, victory over an enemy, and so forth.
But a classification of the tantras
into a lower category, concerned with only worldly matters, and a higher,
in which the truly religious goals are taught, is
not possible. All of the writings concern both the “sacred” and the
“profane”.
Supernatural power gives the tantric master
control over the whole universe. He can dissolve it and re-establish it. It
grants him control over space and time in all of their forms of expression.
As “time god” (Kalachakra)
he becomes “lord of history”. As ADI BUDDHA he determines the course of
evolution.
Worldly power means, above all, being successfully
able to command others. In the universalism of Vajrayana those commanded are
not just people, but also beings from other transhuman
spheres — spirits, gods and demons. These can not
be ruled with the means of this world alone, but only through the art of
supernatural magic. Fundamentally, then, the power of a guru increases in
proportion to the number and effectiveness of his “magical forces” (siddhis).
Power and the knowledge of the magic arts are synonymous for a tantric
master.
Such a pervasive presence of magic is somewhat
fantastic for our Western consciousness. We must therefore try to transpose
ourselves back to ancient India,
the fairytale land of miracles and secrets and imagine the occult ambience
out of which Tantric Buddhism emerged. The Indologist
Heinrich Zimmer has sketched the atmosphere of this time as follows: “Here
magic is something very real. A magic word, correctly pronounced penetrates
the other person without resistance, transforms, bewitches
them. Then under the spell of involuntary participation the other is porous
to the fluid of the magic-making will, it electrically conducts the current
which connects with him” (Zimmer, 1973, p. 79). In the Tibet of
the past, things were no different until sometime this century. All the
phenomena of the world are magically interconnected, and “secret threads
[link] every word, every act, even every thought to the eternal grounding
of the world” (Zimmer, 1973, p. 18). As the “bearers of magical power” or
as “sorcerer kings” the tantric yogis cast out nets woven from such
threads. For this reason they are known as Maha Siddhas, “Grand Sorcerers”.
Lamaist “sorcerer” (a Ngak’phang gÇodpa)
When we pause to examine what the tantras say about the magical objects with which a Maha Siddha is
kitted out, we are reminded of the wondrous objects which only fairytale
heroes possess: a magical sword which brings victory and power over all
possible enemies; an eye ointment with which one can discover hidden
treasure; a pair of “seven-league boots” that allow the adept to reach any
place on earth in no time at all, traveling both on the ground and through
the air; there is an elixir which alchemically transforms base metals into
pure gold; a magic potion which grants eternal youth and a wonder cure to
protect from sickness and death; pills which give him the ability to assume
any shape or form; a magic hood that makes the sorcerer invisible. He can
assume the appearance of several different individuals at the same time, can suspend gravity and can read people’s
thoughts. He is aware of his earlier incarnations, has mastered all
meditation techniques; he can shrink to the size of an atom and expand his
body outward to the stars. He possesses the “divine eye” and “divine ear”.
In brief, he has the power to determine everything according to his will.
The Maha Siddhas control the universe through their spells,
enchantment formulas, or mantras. “I am aware”, David Snellgrove
comments, “that present-day western Buddhists, specifically those who are
followers of the Tibetan tradition, dislike this English word [spell,] used for mantra and the rest
because of its association with vulgar magic. One need only reply that
whether one likes it or not, the greater part of the tantras
are concerned precisely with vulgar magic, because this is what most people
are interested in” (Snellgrove, 1987,vol. 1, p.
143).
“Erotic” spells, which allow the yogi to obtain
women for his sexual magic rituals, are mentioned remarkably often in the
tantric texts. He continues to practice the ritual sexual act after his
enlightenment: since the key to power lies in the woman every instance of
liturgical coition bolsters his omnipotence. It is not just earthly beings
who must obey such mantras, but female angels and grisly inhabitants of the
underworld too.
The almighty sorcerer can also enslave a woman
against her will. He simply needs to summon up an image of the real,
desired person. In the meditation, he thrusts a flower arrow through the
middle of her heart and imagines how the impaled love victim falls to the
ground unconscious. No sooner does she reopen her eyes than the conqueror
with drawn sword and out-thrust mirror forces her to accommodate his
wishes. This scenario played out in the imagination can force any real
woman into the arms of the yogi without resistance (Glasenapp,
1940, p. 144). Another magic power allows him to assume the body of an
unsuspecting husband and spend the night with his wife incognito, or he can multiply himself by following the example
of the Indian god Krishna
and then sleep with hundreds of virgins at once (Walker, 1982, p. 47).
Finally, we draw attention to a number of
destructive Siddhis
(magical powers): to turn a person to stone, the Hevajra Tantra recommends using crystal
pearls and drinking milk; to subjugate someone you need sandalwood; to
bewitch them, urine; to generate hate between beings from the six worlds,
the adept must employ human flesh and bones; to conjure up something, he
swings the bones of a dead Brahman and consumes animal dung. With buffalo
bones the enlightened one slaughters his enemies (Snellgrove,
1959, p. 118). There are spells which instantly split a person in half.
This black art, however, should only be applied to a person who has
contravened Buddhist doctrine or insulted a guru. One can also picture the
evil-doer vomiting blood, or with a fiery needle boring into his back or a
flaming letter branding his heart — in the same instant he will fall down
dead (Snellgrove, 1959, pp. 116–117). Using the
“chalk ritual” a yogi can destroy an entire enemy army in seconds, each
soldier suddenly losing his head (Snellgrove,
1959, p. 52). In the second part of our analysis we will discuss in detail
how such magic killing practices were, and to a degree still are, a
division of Tibetan/Lamaist state politics.
One should, however, in all fairness mention that,
to a lesser degree in the original tantra texts,
but therefore all the more frequently in the commentaries, every arbitrary
use of power and violence is explicitly prohibited by the Bodhisattva oath
(to act only in the interests of all suffering beings). There is no tantra, no ceremony and no prayer in which it is not
repeatedly affirmed that all magic may only be performed out of compassion
(karuna).
This constant, almost suspiciously oft-repeated requirement proves,
however, as we shall see, to be a disguise, since violence and power in Tantrism are of a structural and not just a moral
nature.
Yet, in light of the power structures of the
modern state, the world economy, the military and the modern media, the
imaginings of the Maha Siddhas
sound naive. Their ambitions have something individualist and fantastic
about them. But appearances are deceptive. Even in ancient Tibet the
employment of magical forces (siddhis) was regarded as an important division of Buddhocratic state politics. Ritual magic was far more
important than wars or diplomatic activities in the history of official
Lamaism, and, as we shall show, it still is.
The tantric concept, that power is transformed
erotic love, is also familiar from modern psychoanalysis. It is just that
in the Western psyche this transformation is usually, if not always, an
unconscious one. According to Sigmund Freud it is repressed erotic love
which can become delusions of power. In contrast, in Tantrism
this unconscious process is knowingly manipulated and echoed in an almost
mechanical experiment. It can — as in the case of Lamaism — define an
entire culture. The Dutch psychologist Fokke Sierksma, for instance, assumes that the “lust of
power” operates as an essential driving force behind Tibetan monastic life.
A monk might pretend, according to this author, to meditate upon how a
state of emptiness may be realized, but “in practice the result was not voidness but inflation of the ego”. For the monk it is
a matter of “spiritual power not mystic release” (Sierksma,
1966, pp. 125, 186).
But even more astonishing than the magical/tantric
world of ancient Tibet
is the fact that the phantasmagora of Tantrism have managed in the present day to penetrate
the cultural consciousness of our Western, highly industrialized
civilization, and that they have had the power to successfully anchor
themselves there with all their attendant atavisms. This attempt by Vajrayana to
conquer the West with its magic practices is the central subject of our
study.
Footnotes:
[3] This cultural
integration of the tantric divinities is generally denied by the lamas.
Tirelessly, they reassure their listeners that it is a matter of
universally applicable archetypes, to whom
anybody, of whatever religion, can look up. It is true that the Shunyata
doctrine, the “Doctrine of Emptiness”, makes it theoretically possible to
also summon up and then dismiss the deities of other cultures. “Modern”
gurus like Chögyam Trungpa,
who died in 1989, also refer to the total archetypal reservoir of humankind
in their teachings. But in their spiritual praxis they rely exclusively
upon tantric and Tibetan symbols, yiddams and rites.
Next
Chapter:
3. THE TANTRIC FEMALE SACRFICE
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