Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

Sculpture of a Dakini
The dakinis normally only reveal themselves to the Tantric — either as human women in flesh and
blood or as dream figures, or as ghosts. In the bardo state, the time between death and rebirth,
however, they encounter everyone who has died in order to carry out their horrific sacrifices. The
Tibetan Book of the Dead also calls them gauris and many individuals among them are named:
Ghasmari, Candali, Nari, Pukkasi and so forth. They ride upon buffaloes, wolves, jackals and lions;
wear the most varied human bones as jewelry; clasp banners of children’s skin in their hands; their
baldachins are made of human skin; they play their horrible melodies upon the hip bones of a
Brahman girl from which they have fashioned flutes; as scepter one grasps the corpse of an infant,
another rips the head of a man off and consumes it. With this dreadful display the “sky walkers” want
to induce the spirit of the dead person to seek out in fear the protective womb of a human woman so
as to be reborn. But should he courageously resist the frightful images, then he becomes freed from
the “Wheel of Life” and is permitted to enter nirvana.
Consequently, the tantras urge that every adept procure for himself the arts and cunning of
Cakrasamvara, the first Buddhist dakini subduer, in order to conquer and bind these female fiends, as
he can only experience enlightenment by subjugating the demonesses. He then becomes lord over the
feminine in general, precisely because this opposed him in its most terrible form as a death-goddess
and he did not yield to it.
But the process has more than just a psychological dimension. Since the dakinis come from the army
of the black Kali, for patriarchal Tantrism her subjugation is also a “theocratic” act. With every
victory over a “sky walker” the gynocentric cult of the great black goddess is symbolically
overpowered by the androcentric power of the Buddha.
The methods employed in this act of conquest are often brutal. When the Maha Siddha Tilopa met the