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

is by no means new. In the late 1960s in his book Eros and Civilization, the American philosopher
Herbert Marcuse outlined an “erotic” cultural schema. Unfortunately, his “paradigmatic” (as it would
be known these days) approach, which was widely discussed in the late 1960s has become completely
forgotten. Among the basic joys of human existence, according to Marcuse, is the division into sexes,
the difference between male and female, between penis and vagina, between you and me, even
between mine and yours, and these are extremely pleasant and satisfying divisions, or could be; their
elimination would not just be insane, but also a nightmare — the peak of repression” (Marcuse, 1965,
p. 239). This nightmare becomes real in the alchemic practices of the Buddhist tradition. In that
Vajrayana dissolves all differences, ultimately even the polarity of the sexes, into the androgynous
principle of the ADI BUDDHA, it destroys the “Eros” of life, even though it paradoxically recognizes
this sexual polarity as the supreme cosmic force.
As we were working on the final proofs of our manuscript, the German magazine Bunte, which only a
few weeks before had celebrated the Dalai Lama as a god on earth, carried an article by the cultural
sociologist Nicolaus Sombart entitled “Desire for the divine couple”. Sombart so precisely expressed
our own ideas that we would like to quote him at length. “Why does the human project have a
bipartite form in the divine plan? The duality symbolizes the polarity of the world, the bipolarity that
is the basis for the dynamic of everything which happens in the world. Yin and yang. Apparently
divided and yet belonging together, contradictory, and complementary, antagonistic but designed for
harmony, synthesis and symbiosis. Only in mutual penetration do they complete each other and
become whole. The model of the world is that of a couple eternally striving for union. The cosmic
couple stand by one another in the interaction of an erotic tension. It is a pair of lovers. The misery of
the world lies in the separation, isolation, and loneliness of the parts that are attracted to each other,
that belong together; the joy and happiness lie in the union of the two sexes; not two souls, this is not
enough, but two bodies equipped for this purpose — a pleasurable foretaste of the return to
paradise” (Bunte, 46/1998, p. 40).
It is nonetheless remarkable how unsuccessful mystic gendered love has been in establishing itself as
a religious archetype in human cultural history. Although the mystery of love between man and
woman is and has been practised and experienced by millions, although most cultures have both male
and female deities, the unio mystica of the sexes has largely not been recognized as a religion. Yet
there is so much which indicates that the harmony and love between man and woman (god and
goddess) could be granted the gravity of a universal paradigm and become a bridge of peace between
the various cultures. Selected insights and images from the mysteries of Tantric Buddhism ought to be
most useful in the development of such a paradigm.
Divine couples are found in all cultures, even if their religious veneration is not among the central
mysteries. We also encounter them in the pre-Buddhist mythologies of Tibet, where the two sexes
share their control over the world equally. Matthias Hermanns tells us about Khen pa, the ruler of the
heavens, and Khon ma, the earth mother, and quotes the following sentence from an aboriginal
Tibetan creation myth: “At first heaven and earth are like father and mother” (Hermanns, 1965, p. 72).
In the times of the original Tibetan kings there was a god of man (pho-lha) and a goddess of woman
(mo-lha). A number of Central Asian myths see the sun and moon as equal forces, with the sun
playing the masculine and the moon the feminine role (Bleichsteiner, 1937, p.19). In one Bon myth,
light and darkness are held to be the primordial cosmic couple (Paul, 1981, p. 49).
In Tantric Buddhism, the central Buddhist couple celebrated by the Nyingmapa School,