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

the spirit) down to a lower evolutionary level. Human life in all its weakness is thus a lean period to
be endured along the way to the infinite (“It were better I had never been born”), and woman, who
brings forth this wretched existence, functions as the cause of suffering and death.
Maya dies shortly after the birth of the Sublimity. As the principle of natural life — her death can be
symbolically interpreted this way — she stood in the way of the supernatural path of enlightenment of
her son, who wished to free himself and humankind from the unending chain of reincarnation. Is she
the ancient primeval mother who dies to make place for the triumphant progress of her sun/son? In
Ken Wilber’s evolutionary theory, the slaying of the Great Mother is considered the symbolic event
which, in both the developmental history of the individual (ontogenesis) and the cultural history of
humanity (phylogenesis), must precede an emancipation of consciousness. The ego structure can only
develop in a child after the maternal murder, since the infant is still an undifferentiated unity within
the motherly source. According to Wilber, a corresponding process can be observed in human history.
Here, following the destruction of the matriarchal, “typhonic” mother cult, cultural models have been
able to develop patriarchal transcendence and male ego structures.
On the basis of this psychoanalytically influenced thesis, one could interpret Maya’s early death as the
maternal murder which had to precede the evolution of the male Buddha consciousness. This
interpretation receives a certain spark when we realize that the name Maya means ‘illusion’ in
Sanskrit. For a contemporary raised within the Western rationalist tradition, such a naming may seem
purely coincidental, but in the magic symbolic worldview of Buddhism, above all in Tantrism, it has a
deep-reaching significance. Here, as in all ancient cultures, a name refers not just to a person, but also
to those forces and gods it evokes.
Maya — the name of Buddha’s mother — is also the name of the most powerful Indian goddess
Maya. The entire material universe is concentrated in Maya, she is the world-woman. In ceaseless
motion she produces all appearances and consumes them again. She corresponds to the prima materia
of European alchemy, the basic substance in which the seeds of all phenomena are symbolically
hidden. The word maya is derived from the Sanskrit root ma-, which has also given us mother,
material, and mass. The goddess represents all that is quantitative, all that is material. She is revered
as the “Great Mother” who spins the threads of the world’s destiny. The fabric which is woven from
this is life and nature. It consists of instincts and feelings, of the physical and the psyche, but not the
spirit.
Out of her threads Maya has woven a veil and cast this over the transcendental reality behind all
existence, a reality which for the Buddhist stands opposed to the world of appearances as the spiritual
principle. Maya is the feminine motion which disturbs the meditative standstill of the man, she is the
change which destroys his eternity. Maya casts out her net of “illusion” in order to bind the
autonomous ego to her, just as a natural mother binds her child to herself and will not let it go so that
it can develop its own personality. In her web she suffocates and keeps in the dark the male ego
striving for freedom and light. Maya encapsulates the spirit, her arch-enemy, in a cocoon. She is the
principle of birth and rebirth, the overcoming of which is a Buddhist’s highest goal. Eternal life
beckons whoever has seen through her deceptions; whoever is taken in will be destroyed and reborn
in unceasing activity like all living things.
The death of Maya, the great magician who produces the world of illusions, is the sine qua non for the
appearance of “true spirit”. Thus, it was no ordinary woman who died with the passing of