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

The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part I – 3. The tantric female sacrifice
© Victor & Victoria Trimondi
3. THE TANTRIC FEMALE SACRIFICE
Until now we have only examined the tantric scheme very broadly and abstractly. But we now wish to
show concretely how the “transformation of erotic love into power” is carried out. We thus return to
the starting point, the love-play between yogi and yogini, god and goddess, and first examine the
various feminine typologies which the tantric master uses in his rituals. Vajrayana distinguishes three
types of woman in all:
1. The “real woman” (karma mudra). She is a real human partner. According to tantric
doctrine she belongs to the “realm of desire”.
2. The “imaginary woman” or “spirit woman” (inana mudra). She is summonsed by the
yogi’s meditative imagination and only exists there or in his fantasy. The inana mudra is
placed in the “realm of forms”.
3. The “inner woman” (maha mudra). She is the woman internalized via the tantric praxis,
with no existence independent of the yogi. She is not even credited with the reality of an
imagined form, therefore she counts as a figure from the “formless realm”.
All three types of woman are termed mudra. This word originally meant ‘seal’, ‘stamp’, or ‘letter of
the alphabet’. It further indicated certain magical hand gestures and body postures, with which the
yogi conducted, controlled and “sealed” the divine energies. This semantic richness has led to all
manner of speculation. For example, we read that the tantric master “stamps” the phenomena of the
world with happiness, and that as his companion helps him do this, she is known as mudra (‘stamp’).
More concretely, the Maha Siddha Naropa refers to the fact that a tantric partner, in contrast to a
normal woman, assists the guru in blocking his ejaculation during the sexual act, and as it were
“seals” this, which is of major importance for the performance of the ritual. For this reason she is
known as mudra, ‘seal’ (Naropa, 1994, p. 81). But the actual meaning probably lies in the following:
in Vajrayana the feminine itself is “sealed”, that is, spellbound via a magic act, so that it is available
to the tantric master in its entirety.
The karma mudra: the real woman
What then are the external criteria which a karma mudra, a real woman, needs to meet in order to
serve a guru as wisdom consort? The Hevajra Tantra, for example, describes her in the following
words: “She is neither too tall, nor too short, neither quite black nor quite white, but dark like a lotus
leaf. Her breath is sweet, and her sweat has a pleasant smell like that of musk. Her pudenda gives
forth a scent from moment to moment like different kinds of lotuses or like sweet aloe wood. She is
calm and resolute, pleasant in speech and altogether delightful” (Snellgrove, 1959, p. 116). At another
juncture the same tantra recommends that the guru “take a consort who has a beautiful face, is wideeyed,
is endowed with grace and youth, is dark, courageous, of good family and originates from the
female and male fluids” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 217). Gedün Chöpel, a famous tantric from the