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

ate include four women, one of whom, Lakshminkara, is considered to be the founder of a teaching
tradition of her own. In the more recent history of Vajrayana as well, “enlightened women” crop up
again and again: the yoginis Niguma, Yeshe Tshogyal, Ma gcig, and others.
As evidence for the hypothesized power of women in Buddhist Tantrism the feminist side likes to
parade the Candamaharosana Tantra with those passages in it in which the man is completely
subordinate to the dictates of the woman. But the hymn to the goddess quoted in the following is still
no more a sequence in the tantric inversion process, despite its depiction of the servitude of the male
lover: as usual, in this case too it is not the female deity but rather the central male who is the victor in
the guise of a guru. Here are the words, which the goddess addresses to her partner:
Place my feet upon your shoulders and
Look me up and down
Make the fully awakened scepter (Phallus)
Enter the opening in the center of the lotus (Vagina)
Move a hundred, thousand, hundred thousand times
in my three-petaled lotus
of swollen flesh.
(Shaw, 1994, pp. 155-156)
Shaw comments upon this erotic poem with the following revealing sentences: “The passage reflects
what can be called a 'female gaze' or gynocentric perspective, for it describes embodiment and erotic
experience from a female point of view. ... [The man] is instructed not to end the worship until the
woman is fully satisfied. Only then is he allowed to pause to revive himself with food and wine —
after serving the woman and letting her eat first, of course! Selfish pleasure-seeking is out of the
question for him, for he must serve and please his goddess” (Shaw, 1994, p. 156). But the tantra is in
fact dedicated to a wrathful and extremely violent male deity and differs from other texts solely in that
the adept has set himself the difficult exercise of being completely sexually subordinate to the woman
so as to then — in accordance with “law of inversion” — be able to celebrate an even greater victory
over the feminine and his own passions. The woman’s role as dominatrix, which Shaw proudly cites,
must also be seen as an ephemeral moment along the masculine way to enlightenment.
Yet Miranda Shaw sees things differently. For her it was women who invented and introduced
Tantrism. They had always been the bearers of secrets. Thus nothing in the tantras must be changed in
the coming “age of gynandry” other than that the texts once more lay the foundations for the
supremacy of the woman, so that she can take up her former tantric post as teacher and grasp anew the
helm which had slipped from her hands. From now on the man has to obey once more: “Tantric texts
“, Shaw says, “specify what a man has to do to appeal to, please and merit the attention of a woman,
but there are no corresponding requirements that a woman must fulfill” (Shaw, 1994, p. 70). At
another point we may read that, “the woman may also see her male partner as a deity in certain ritual
contexts, but his divinity does not carry the same symbolic weight. She is not required to respond to
his divinity with any special deference, respect, or supplication or to render him service in the same
way that he is required to serve her.” (Shaw, 1994, p. 47). In place of the absolute god, the absolute
goddess now strides across the cosmic stage alone and seizes the long sought scepter of world
dominion.
Such feminist rapprochements with Vajrayana Buddhism, however, prove on closer inspection to