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The Shadow of the
Dalai Lama – Postscript: Creative polarity beyond
tantrism
© Victor & Victoria
Trimondi
POSTSCRIPT:
CREATIVE POLARITY BEYOND
TANTRISM
As surprising as it may sound
after our critical analysis of Vajrayana, we would in
conclusion like to pose the question of whether Tantric Buddhism
does not harbor a religious archetype the disclosure, dissemination
and discussion of which could meet with great transcultural
interest. Would it not be valuable to discuss as religious concepts
such tantric principles as the “mystical love between the sexes”,
the “union of the male and female principles”, or the unio mystica between god and
goddess?
As we demonstrated at the start
of our study, Tantrism in all its variants is based upon a vision of
the polarity of being. It sees the primary cultic event on the path
to enlightenment in a mystical conjunction of poles, specifically in
the mystical union of the sexes. From a tantric point of view, all
the phenomena of the universe are linked to one another through
erotic love and sexuality, and our world of appearances is seen as
the field in which these two basic forces (Tibetan yab and yum; Chinese yin and yang) act. They manifest
themselves as a polarity in both nature and the realm of the spirit.
In the tantric view of things, love is the great life force that
pulsates through the cosmos, primarily as heterosexual love between
god and goddess, man and woman. Their mutual affection acts as the
creative principle.
“It is through love and in the
face of love that the world unfolds, through love it regains its
original unity and its eternal nondivision” — this statement is also
proclaimed in Vajrayana
(Faure, 1994, p. 56). For the Tantric, erotic and religious love are
not separate. Sexuality and mysticism, eros and agape (spiritual love) are
not mutually exclusive contradictions.
Let us once more repeat the
wonderful words with which tantric texts describe the “holy
marriage” between man and woman. In yuganaddha (the mystic
union) 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). In
this synthesis “egoness is lost and the two polar opposites fuse
into a state of intimate and blissful oneness” (Walker, 1982, p.
67).
A cooperation between the poles
now replaces the struggle between contradictions (or sexes). Body
and spirit, erotic love and transcendence, emotions and reason,
being (samsara) and
non-being (nirvana) are
wedded. In yuganaddha, it
is said, all wars and disputes between good and evil, heaven and
hell, day and night, dream and perception, joy and suffering, praise
and contempt are pacified and stilled. Mirada Shaw celebrates the
embrace of the male and female Buddha 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).
Divine erotic love does not jut
lead to enlightenment and liberation; the tantric view is that
mystic gendered love can also free all suffering beings. All forms
of time originate from the primordial divine couple. Along with the
sun and moon and the “pair of radiant planets”, the five elements
also owe their existence to the cosmogonic erotic love. According to
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 ist famed to be the movement and the Space is the
erotic pleasure” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 134). Language,
emotions, the senses — all have their origin in the love of the
primordial couple. In a world purged of darkness the couple stand at
the edge of darkness, the Kalachakra Tantra itself
says (Banerjee, 1959, p. 24).
Nevertheless, as we have
demonstrated, this harmonious primordial image is misused in tantric
rituals by an androcentric caste of monks for the ends of spiritual
and secular power. We refrain from describing once more the sexual
magic exploitation in Vajrayana, and would instead
like to turn to a philosophical question raised by this topic,
namely the relationship between the ONE (as the male principle) and
the OTHER (as the female principle).
Since Friedrich Hegel, the OTHER
has become a key topic of philosophical discussion. The absolute ONE
or absolute mind is unable to tolerate any OTHER besides itself.
Only when the OTHER is completely integrated into the ONE, only when
it is “suspended” in the ONE is the way of the mind complete. For
then nature (the OTHER) has become mind (the ONE). This is one way
of succinctly describing one of the fundamental elements of Hegelian
philosophy.
In Vajrayana terminology, the
absolute ONE that tolerates no OTHER beyond himself is the
androgynous ADI BUDDHA. The OTHER (the feminine) surrenders its
autonomy to the hegemony of the ONE (the masculine). It is destroyed
with one word. Yet the absolute ONE of the ADI BUDDHA is radically
questioned by the existence of an OTHER (the feminine); his claims
to infinity, cosmocentricity, omnipotence, and divinity are
threatened. “All is ONE or all is the ADI BUDDHA” is a basic maxim
of the tantric way. For this reason the OTHER frightens and
intimidates the ONE. The Buddhist Ken Wilber (a proponent of the ADI
BUDDHA principle) quotes the Upanishads in this connection:
Wherever
the OTHER is, there is dread (Wilber, 1990, p. 174) — and himself
admits that everywhere where there is an OTHER, there is also fear
(Wilber, 1990, p. 280).
As already indicated, behind this
existential fear of the OTHER lies a fundamental gender issue. This
has been taken up and developed primarily by French feminists. In
the “otherness” (autruité) of the female
Simone de Beauvoir saw a highly problematic fixing of the woman
created by the androcentric persective. Men wanted to see women as
the OTHER in order to be able to control them. The woman was forced
to define her identity via the perspective of the man. Beauvoir’s
successors, however, such as the femininst Luce Irigaray, have lent
“gender difference” and AUTRUITÉ (otherness) a highly positive
significance and have made it the central topic of their feminine
philosophy. Otherness here all but becomes a female world unable to
be grasped by either the male perspective or male reason. It evades
any kind of masculine fixation. Female subjectivity is inaccessible
for the male.
It is precisely the OTHERNESS
which lets women preserve their autonomy. They thus escape being
objectified by men (the male subject) and develop their own
subjectivity (the female subject). Irigaray very clearly articulates
how existing religions block women’s path to a self-realization of
their own: “She must always
be for men, available for their transcendence” (quoted by June Campbell, 1996,
p. 155) — i.e., as Sophia, prajna, as the “white
virgin”, as a “wisdom dakini” (inana mudra). In the male
consciousness she lacks a subjectivity of her own, and is a blank
screen (shunyata) onto
which the man projects his own imaginings.
Yet the autonomy of the OTHER
does not need to be experienced as separation, fragmentation, lack,
or as an alienating element. It can just as well serve as the
opposite, as the prerequisite for the union of two subjects,
complementarity, or copula. The masculine and the feminine can
behave in completely different ways toward one another, either as a
duality (of mutually exclusive opposites = annihilation of the
OTHER) or as a polarity (mutually complentary opposites = encounter
with the OTHER). It is almost a miracle that the sexes are
fundamentally permitted to meet one another in love without having
to renounce their autonomy.
Buddhist Tantrism, however, is
not about such an encounter between man and woman, but purely the
question of how the yogi (as the masculine principle of the ONE) can
integrate the OTHER (the feminine principle) within himself and
render it useful by drawing off its gynergy. Occult feminism
involves the same phenomenon in reverse: how can the yogini (here
the feminine principle of the ONE) appropriate the androenergy of
the man (here the OTHER) so as to win gynandric
power.
The appropriation of the OTHER
(the goddess) by the ONE (the ADI BUDDHA) is the core concept of
Buddhist Tantrism. This makes it a phenomenon which, at this level
of generality, also shapes Western cultures and religions: “Male
religiosity masks an appropriation,” writes Luce Irigaray. “This
severs the relationship to the natural universe, its simplicity is
perverted. Certainly, this religiousness symbolizes a social
universe organized by men. But this organization is based on a
sacrifice — of nature, of the gendered body, especially that of the
woman. It impels a spirituality cut off from its natural roots and
its surroundings. It can thus not bring humanity to perfection.
Spiritualization, socialization, cultivation require that we set out
from what is there. The patriarchal system does not do this because
it seeks to obliterate the foundations upon which it is based”
(Irigaray, 1991, p. 33).
The solution to the riddle of its
mysteries that Tantrism poses is obvious. It can only involve the
union of the two poles, not their domination of one another. On its
own the (masculine) spirit is not sufficient to become “whole”,
instead nature and
spirit, emotions and
reason, logos and eros, woman and man, god and goddess, a masculine and a feminine Buddha as two
autonomous beings must wed mystically (as yab and yum, yin and yang) as two subjects that
fuse together into a WE. The ADI BUDDHA of the Kalachakra Tantra, however,
is a divine SUBJECT (a SUPER EGO) that tries to consume the OTHER
(the goddess). Not until ONE SUBJECT forms a copula with ANOTHER
SUBJECT can a truly new dimension (WE) be entered: the great WE in
which both egos, the masculine and the feminine, are truly
“suspended”, truly “preserved”, and truly “transcended”. Perhaps it
is this WE that is the cosmic secret to be discovered in the
profoundest sections of the tantras, and not the ADI
BUDDHA.
For in WE all the polarities of
the universe fuse, subjectivity and objectivity, rule and servitude,
union and division. The unio
mystica with the partner dissolves both the individual and the
transpersonal subjectivity (the human ego and the divine ego). Both
poles, the masculine and the feminine, experience their spiritual,
psychic and physical unity as intersubjectivity, as exchange, as WE.
They join into a higher dimension without destroying one another.
The mystic WE thus forms a more encompassing quality of experience
than the ADI BUDDHA’s mystic EGO which seeks to swallow the OTHER
(the goddess).
Were man and woman to understand
themselves as the cosmic center, as god and goddess — as the tantric
texts proclaim — were they to experience themselves together as a
religious authority, then the androgynous guru in his role as the
supreme god of “the mysteries of gendered love” would vanish. In an
essay on tantric practices, the Indologist Doninger O’Flaherty
describes several variants on androgyny and supplements these — not
without a trace of irony — with an additional “androgynous” model
which is basically not a model at all. “A third psychological
androgyne, less closely tied to any particular doctrine, is found
not in a single individual but in two: the man and the woman who
join in perfect love, Shakespeare’s beast with two backs. This is
the image of ecstatic union, another metaphor for the mystic
realization of union with godhead. This is the romantic ideal of
complete merging, one with the other, so that each experiences the
other’s joy, not knowing whose is the hand that caresses or whose
the skin that is caressed. In this state, the man and the woman in
tantric ritual experience each other’s joy and pain. This is the
divine hierogamy, and, in its various manifestations — as yab–yum, yin and yang, animus and anima — it is certainly the
most widespread of androgynous concepts” (O’Flaherty, 1982, p.
292).
When together — as Tantrism
teaches us despite everything — power is concentrated in man and
woman; divided they are powerless. WE equally implies both the
gaining of power and its renunciation. In WE the two primal forces
of being (masculine—feminine) are concentrated. To this extent the
WE is absolute, the Omnipotent. But at the same time WE limits the
power of the parts, as soon as they appear separately or lay claim
to the cosmos as individual genders (as an androgynous Almighty God
or as a gynandric Almighty Goddess). To this extent, WE is
essentially relative. It is only effective when the two poles behave
complementarily. As the supreme principle, WE is completely unable
to abuse any OTHER or manipulate it for its own ends since every
OTHER is by definition an autonomous part of WE. In political terms,
WE is a fundamental democratic principle. It transcends all concepts
of an enemy and all war. The traditional dualisms of upper and
lower, white and black, bright and gloomy unite in a creative
polarity in the WE.
As we have been able to
demonstrate on the basis of both the ritual logic of Vajrayana and, empirically,
the history of Tantric Buddhism (especially Lamaism), the
androgynous principle of Buddhist Tantrism leads ineluctably to
human sacrifice and war. The origins of every war lie in the battle
of the sexes — this aphorism from Greek mythology is especially true
of Tantrism, which traces all that happens in the world back to
erotic love. Doesn’t this let us also conclude the reverse, that
peace between the sexes can produce peace in the world? Global
responsibility arises from mutual recognition and from respect for
the position of the partner, who is the other half of the whole.
Compassion, sensitivity towards everything that is other,
understanding, harmony — all have their origin here. In the
cosmogonic erotic love between two people, Ludwig Klages sees a
revolutionary power that even has the strength to suspend “history”.
“Were the incredible to happen, even if were only between two out of
hundreds of millions, the power of the spirit’s curse would be
broken, the dreadful nightmare of ‘world history would melt away’,
and ‘awakening would bloom in streams of light’” (Klages, 1930, p.
198). The end of history via the love between man and woman, god and
goddess: the concept would definitely be compatible with a tantric
philosophy if it were not for the yogi’s final act of masculine
usurpation.
Perhaps, we would like to further
speculate, mystic gender love might provide the religious mystery
for a universal “culture of erotic love” built upon both sensual and
spiritual foundations. Such an idea is by no means new. In the late
1960s in his book Eros and
Civilization, the American philosopher Herbert Marcuse outlined
an “erotic” cultural schema. Unfortunately, his “paradigmatic” (as
it would be known these days) approach, which was widely discussed
in the late 1960s has become completely forgotten. Among
the basic joys of human existence, according to Marcuse, is the
division into sexes, the difference between male and female, between
penis and vagina, between you and me, even between mine and yours,
and these are extremely pleasant and satisfying divisions, or could
be; their elimination would not just be insane, but also a nightmare
— the peak of repression” (Marcuse, 1965, p. 239). This nightmare becomes real in
the alchemic practices of the Buddhist tradition. In that Vajrayana dissolves all
differences, ultimately even the polarity of the sexes, into the
androgynous principle of the ADI BUDDHA, it destroys the “Eros” of
life, even though it paradoxically recognizes this sexual polarity
as the supreme cosmic force.
As we were working on the final
proofs of our manuscript, the German magazine Bunte, which only a few
weeks before had celebrated the Dalai Lama as a god on earth,
carried an article by the cultural sociologist Nicolaus Sombart
entitled “Desire for the divine couple”. Sombart so precisely
expressed our own ideas that we would like to quote him at length.
“Why does the human project have a bipartite form in the divine
plan? The duality symbolizes the polarity of the world, the
bipolarity that is the basis for the dynamic of everything which
happens in the world. Yin
and yang. Apparently
divided and yet belonging together, contradictory, and
complementary, antagonistic but designed for harmony, synthesis and
symbiosis. Only in mutual penetration do they complete each other
and become whole. The model of the world is that of a couple
eternally striving for union. The cosmic couple stand by one another
in the interaction of an erotic tension. It is a pair of lovers. The
misery of the world lies in the separation, isolation, and
loneliness of the parts that are attracted to each other, that
belong together; the joy and happiness lie in the union of the two
sexes; not two souls, this is not enough, but two bodies equipped
for this purpose — a pleasurable foretaste of the return to
paradise” (Bunte,
46/1998, p. 40).
It is nonetheless remarkable how
unsuccessful mystic gendered love has been in establishing itself as
a religious archetype in human cultural history. Although the
mystery of love between man and woman is and has been practised and
experienced by millions, although most cultures have both male and
female deities, the unio
mystica of the sexes has largely not been recognized as a
religion. Yet there is so much which indicates that the harmony and
love between man and woman (god and goddess) could be granted the
gravity of a universal paradigm and become a bridge of peace between
the various cultures. Selected insights and images from the
mysteries of Tantric Buddhism ought to be most useful in the
development of such a paradigm.
Divine couples are found in all
cultures, even if their religious veneration is not among the
central mysteries. We also encounter them in the pre-Buddhist
mythologies of Tibet, where the two sexes share their control over
the world equally. Matthias Hermanns tells us about Khen pa, the ruler of the
heavens, and Khon ma, the
earth mother, and quotes the following sentence from an aboriginal
Tibetan creation myth: “At first heaven and earth are like father
and mother” (Hermanns, 1965, p. 72). In the times of the original
Tibetan kings there was a god of man (pho-lha) and a goddess of
woman (mo-lha). A number
of Central Asian myths see the sun and moon as equal forces, with
the sun playing the masculine and the moon the feminine role
(Bleichsteiner, 1937, p.19). In one Bon myth, light and darkness are
held to be the primordial cosmic couple (Paul, 1981, p.
49).
In Tantric Buddhism, the central
Buddhist couple celebrated by the Nyingmapa School, Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri — in
translation the “supreme male good” and the “supreme female good” —
are such a potential primal couple. This Buddha couple are depicted
in a yab–yum posture.
Both partners are naked, i.e., pure and free. Neither of them is
carrying any symbols which might point to some hidden
magicoreligious intention. Their nudity could be interpreted as
saying that Samantabhadra
and Samantabhadri are
beyond the world of symbolism and are thus an image of polar purity,
freed of gods, myths, and insignia. Only the color of their bodies
could be interpreted as a metaphor. Samantabhadra is blue as
clear and open as the heavens, Samantabhadri is white as
the light.
Were one to formulate such
visions of the religious worship of the couple in Buddhist
terminology, the four Buddha couples of the four directions might
emanate from a primal Buddha couple, without this mystical pentad
needing to be appropriated by a tantric master in the form of an
androgynous ADI BUDDHA (or by a sexual magic mistress as a gynandric
Almighty Goddess). In one Nepalese tantra text, for instance, the
ADI BUDDHA (“supreme consciousness”) and the ADI PRANJNA (“supreme
wisdom”) are revered as the primordial father and the primordial
mother of the world (Hazra, 1986, p. 21). According to this text,
all the female beings in the universe are emanations of the ADI
PRAJNA, and all males those of the ADI BUDDHA.
Annex:
CRITICAL FORUM
KALACHAKRA TANTRA
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