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

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: