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

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where (at least in the West) all prudery has been superseded — a spectacle which could cause great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 nonseparation”,
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