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

This high esteem for the female sexual organs is especially surprising in Buddhism, where the vagina
is after all the gateway to reincarnation, which the tantric strives with every means to close. For this
reason, for all the early Buddhists, irrespective of school, the human birth channel counted as one of
the most ominous features of our world of appearances. But precisely because the yoni thrusts the
ordinary human into the realm of suffering and illusion it has — as we shall see — become a
“threshold to enlightenment” (Shaw, 1994, p. 59) for the tantric. Healed by the mystic sexual act, it is
also accorded a higher, transcendental procreative function. From it emerges the powerful host of
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We read in the relevant texts “that the Buddha resides in the womb of the
goddess and the way of enlightenment [is experienced] as a pregnancy” (Faure, 1994, p. 189).
This central worship of the yoni has led to a situation in which nearly all tantra texts begin with the
fundamental sentence, “I have heard it so: once upon a time the Highest Lord lingered in the vaginas
of the diamond women, which represent the body, the language and the consciousness of all
Buddhas”. Just as the opening letters of the Bible are believed in a tenet of the Hebraic Kabbala to
contain the concentrated essence of the entire Holy Book, so too the first four letters of this tantric
introductory sentence — evam (‘I have heard it so’) — encapsulate the entire secret of the Diamond
Path. “It has often been said that he who has understood evam has understood everything” (Banerjee,
1959, p. 7).
The word (evam) is already to be found in the early Gupta scriptures (c. 300 C.E.) and is represented
there in the form of a hexagram, i.e., the symbol of mystic sexual love. The syllable e stands for the
downward-pointing triangle, the syllable vam is portrayed as a upright triangle. Thus e represents the
yoni (vagina) and vam the lingam (phallus). E is the lotus, the source, the location of all the secrets
which the holy doctrine of the tantras teaches; the citadel of happiness, the throne, the Mother. E
further stands for “emptiness and wisdom”. Masculine vam on the other hand lays claims to reverence
as “vajra, diamond, master of joys, method, great compassion, as the Father”. E and vam together
form “the seal of the doctrine, the fruit, the world of appearances, the way to perfection, father (yab)
and mother (yum)” (see, among others, Farrow and Menon, 1992, pp. xii ff.). The syllables e-vam are
considered so powerful that the divine couple can summon the entire host of male and female
Buddhas with them.
The origin of the gods and goddesses
From the primordial tantric couple emanate pairs of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, gods and demons.
Before all come the five male and five female Tathagatas (Buddhas of meditation), the five Herukas
(wrathful Buddhas) in union with their partners, the eight Bodhisattvas with their consorts. We also
meet gods of time who symbolize the years, months and days, and the “seven shining planetary
couples”. The five elements (space, air, fire, water and earth) are represented in pairs in divine form
— these too find their origin in mystic sexual love. As it says in 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 is famed to be the movement and the Space is the erotic
pleasure” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 134).
It is not just the “pure” elements which come from the erotic communion, so do mixtures of them.
Through the continuous union of the masculine with the feminine the procreative powers flow into the
world from all of their body parts. In a commentary by the famous Tibetan scholar Tsongkhapa, we
read how the legendary Mount Meru, the continents, mountain ranges and all earthly landscapes