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

features. These take the form of unusual markings on his physical body, like, for example, sun-wheel
images on the soles of his feet. The tenth sign, known to Western medicine as cryptorchidism, is that
the penis is covered by a thick fold of skin, “the concealment of the lower organs in a sheath”; this
text goes on to add, “Buddha’s private parts are hidden like those of a horse [i.e., stallion]” (Gross,
1993, p. 62).
Even if cryptorchidism as an indicator of the Enlightened One in Mahayana Buddhism is meant to
show his “asexuality”, in our opinion in Vajrayana it can only signal the appropriation of feminine
sexual energies without the Buddha thus needing to renounce his masculine potency. Instead, in
drawing the comparison to a stallion which has a penis which naturally rests in a “sheath”, it is
possible to tap into one of the most powerful mythical sexual metaphors of the Indian cultural region.
Since the Vedas the stallion has been seen as the supreme animal symbol for male potency. In Tibetan
folklore, the Dalai Lamas also possess the ability to “retract” their sexual organs (Stevens, 1993, p.
180).
The Buddha as mother and the yogi as goddess
The “ability to give birth” acquired through the “theft” of gynergy transforms the guru into a
“mother”, a super-mother who can herself produce gods. Every Tibetan lama thus values highly the
fact that he can lay claim to the powerful symbols of motherhood, and a popular epithet for tantric
yogis is “Mother of all Buddhas” (Gross, 1993, p. 232). The maternal role logically presupposes a
symbolic pregnancy. Consequently, being “pregnant” is a common metaphor used to describe a
tantric master’s productive capability (Wayman, 1977, p. 57).
But despite all of his motherly qualities, in the final instance the yogi represents the male arch-god,
the ADI BUDDHA, who produced the mother goddess out of himself as an archetype: “It is to be
noted that the primordial goddess had emanated from the Lord”, notes an important tantra interpreter,
“The Lord is the beginningless eternal One; while the Goddess, emanating from the body of the Lord,
is the produced one” (Dasgupta, 1946, p. 384). Eve was created from Adam’s rib, as Genesis already
informs us. Since, according to the tantric initiation, the feminine should only exist as a manipulable
element of the masculine, the tantras talk of the “together born female” (Wayman, 1977, p. 291).
Once the emanation of the mother goddess from the masculine god has been formally incorporated in
the canon, there is no further obstacle to a self-imagining and self-production of the lama as goddess.
“Then behold yourself as divine woman in empty form” (Evans-Wentz, 1937, p. 177), instructs a
guide to meditation for a pupil. In another, the latter declaims, “I myself instantaneously become the
Holy Lady” (quoted by Beyer, 1978, p. 378).
Steven Segal (Hollywood actor): The Dalai Lama “is the great mother of everything nuturing and loving.
He accepts all who come without judgement.” (Schell, 2000, p. 69)
Once kitted out with the force of the feminine, the tantric master even has the ability to produce whole
hosts of female figures out of himself or to fill the whole universe with a single female figure: “To
begin with, imagine the image (of the goddess Vajrayogini) of roughly the size of your own body,
then in that of a house, then a hill, and finally in the scale of outer space” (Evans-Wentz, 1937, p.
136). Or he imagines the cosmos as an endlessly huge palace of supernatural couples: “All male
divinities dance within me. And all female divinities channel their sacred vajra songs through me”,
the Second Dalai Lama writes lyrically in a tantric song (Mullin, 1991, p. 67). But “then, he [the yogi]