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

already recorded in the Buddhist pantheon. In this regard the cult of inana mudra worship has much
in common with Christian mysticism surrounding Sophia and Mary and has therefore often been
compared with, for example, the mater gloriosa at the end of Goethe’s Faust, where the reformed
alchemist rapturously cries:
Highest mistress of the world!
Let me in the azure
Tent of Heaven, in light unfurled
Hear thy Mystery measure!
Justify sweet thoughts that move
Breast of man to meet thee!
And with holy bliss of love
Bear him up to greet thee!
(Faust II, 11997–12004)
Here, “the German poet Goethe … unsuspectingly voices expresses the Buddhist awareness of the
Jñānamudrā [inana mudra]” notes Herbert Guenther, who has attempted in a number of writings to
interpret the tantras from the viewpoint of a European philosopher (Guenther, 1976, p. 74).
It should however be noted that such Western sublimations of the feminine only correspond to a
degree with the imaginings of Indian and Tibetan tantrics. There, it is not just noble and ethereal
virgins who are conjured up in the yogis’ imaginations, but also sensuous “dakinis” trembling with
lust, who not uncommonly appear as figures of horror, goddesses with bowls made of skulls and
cleavers in their hands.
But whatever sort of a woman the adept imagines, in all events he will unite sexually with this
spiritual being during the ritual. The white and refined “Sophias” from the realm of the imagination
are not exempted from the ritual sexual act. “Among the last phases of the tantrik’s progress”,
Benjamin Walker tells us, “is sexual union on the astral plane, when he invokes elemental spirits,
fiendesses and the spirits of the dead, and has intercourse with them” (Walker, 1982, p. 74).
Since the yogi produces his wisdom companion through the imaginative power of his spirit, he can
rightly consider himself her spiritual father. The inana mudra is composed of the substance of his
own thoughts. She thus does not consist of matter, but — and this is very important — she
nonetheless appears outside of her imagination-father and initially encounters him as an autonomous
subject. He thus experiences her as a being who admittedly has him alone to thank for her being, but
who nevertheless has a life of her own, like a child, separated from its mother once it is born.
In all, the tantras distinguish two “types of birth” for imagined female partners: firstly, the “women
produced by spells”; secondly, the “field-born yoginis”. In both cases we are dealing with so-called
“feminine energy fields” or feminine archetypes which the tantric master can through his imaginative
powers render visible for him as “illusory bodies”. This usually takes place via a deep meditation in
which the yogi visualizes the inana mudra with his “spiritual eye” (Wayman, 1973, pp. 193–195).
As a master of unbounded imagination, the yogi is seldom content with a single inana mudra, and
instead creates several female beings from out of his spirit, either one after another or simultaneously.
The Kalachakra Tantra describes how the imagined “goddesses” spring from various parts of his