When Western scholars and spiritual seekers have encountered partial artifacts of the esoteric traditions of ḍākinīs, the potential for confusion and projection has proliferated, following orientalist habits that appropriate the ḍākinī for Western agendas. Those who longed for a sacred feminine seized on the gender of the ḍākinī as being most significant, indiscriminatingly appropriating her meaning as a divine savioress or a construction of patriarchal fantasy. The earliest gendered interpretations of the ḍākinī were influenced by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who wrote “psychological commentaries” on newly discovered Tibetan tantric texts implying that the ḍākinī is like the anima. The overt associations between the ḍākinī of Tibet and the Jungian anima were not explicit until 1963, when Herbert Guenther (1963, ii–iii) commented on the appearance of the ugly hag to the scholar Nāropa, surmising, “all that he had neglected and failed to develop was symbolically revealed to him as the vision of an old and ugly woman,” remarking in a footnote that “this aspect has a great similarity to what the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung calls the ‘anima’.” In critique of this depiction of the “fantasy of opposites,” neo-Jungian James Hillman (1985, 7) reflected that there was a rich trade in which “smuggled hypotheses, pretty pieties about Eros, and eschatological indulgences about saving one’s soul through relationship, becoming more feminine, and the sacrifice of the intellect” provided fertile ground for New Age appropriation of ḍākinīs for orientalist agendas. (…)
(…)A second feminist perspective identified the ḍākinī as a goddess figure in an Indian gynocentric cult in which females were the primary cult leaders and males were their devoted students, asserted by Miranda Shaw (1994). She suggested that in India, women served as gurus and ritual specialists, but as Buddhism spread to Tibet, this role changed and women no longer played ritual or teaching roles. She argued that Tibetan patriarchy shaped the ḍākinī symbol into an abstract patriarchal ideal which serves the spiritual paths of male yogins only, betraying her Indian historical roots. Both of these feminist critiques drew from orientalist agendas, seeking a sacred feminine to meet Western longings and measuring the ḍākinī against her relevance for the spiritual lives of Western practitioners.
(…)Dakini’s Warm Breath followed the construct of phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur (1967, 9, 237) who identifies three levels of a symbol, important for interpretations of meaning: primary, secondary, tertiary. The primary level is experienced preverbally through dreams and visions or through meditative realization and constitutes what Ricoeur called symbol. In this, her most essential aspect, the ḍākinī is called the formless wisdom-nature of the mind itself at the heart of all Vajrayāna practice, overtly associated with her Indian roots in the Prajñāpāramitā literature. In its “tantric phase” (Conze 1973, 201), the sūtra called Perfect Wisdom in One Letter distills the entire teaching into the syllable A. This Sanskrit syllable becomes the representation of the formless ḍākinī, called by Nyingma master Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpa Nyima (1865–1926) (Gyatso 1992, 185 n. 😎 the “empty letter door that displays emptiness.” Sādhanas often invoke this meaning of the ḍākinī through the syllable A. Twentieth-century Nyingma teacher Chagdüd Tülku Rinpoche (1930–2002) explained, “Knowing the nature of emptiness nondualistically is liberation. Whether you call it emptiness, the absolute, or the ḍākinī makes no difference. All are liberating” (Chagdud, 1989). On a primary level, ḍākinī also refers to the yogic subtle body network of channels and winds activated in the inner practices of Tantra. The esoteric name for the subtle body is ḍākinījāla, the invisible network of the ḍākinīs. Synchronizing body and mind through the subtle body(…) manomaya-kāya) in tantric meditation generates powerful realization of the true nature (Simmer-Brown 2001, 172–176, 290).
When Western scholars and spiritual seekers have encountered partial artifacts of the esoteric traditions of ḍākinīs, the potential for confusion and projection has proliferated, following orientalist habits that appropriate the ḍākinī for Western agendas. Those who longed for a sacred feminine seized on the gender of the ḍākinī as being most significant, indiscriminatingly appropriating her meaning as a divine savioress or a construction of patriarchal fantasy. The earliest gendered interpretations of the ḍākinī were influenced by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who wrote “psychological commentaries” on newly discovered Tibetan tantric texts implying that the ḍākinī is like the anima. The overt associations between the ḍākinī of Tibet and the Jungian anima were not explicit until 1963, when Herbert Guenther (1963, ii–iii) commented on the appearance of the ugly hag to the scholar Nāropa, surmising, “all that he had neglected and failed to develop was symbolically revealed to him as the vision of an old and ugly woman,” remarking in a footnote that “this aspect has a great similarity to what the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung calls the ‘anima’.” In critique of this depiction of the “fantasy of opposites,” neo-Jungian James Hillman (1985, 7) reflected that there was a rich trade in which “smuggled hypotheses, pretty pieties about Eros, and eschatological indulgences about saving one’s soul through relationship, becoming more feminine, and the sacrifice of the intellect” provided fertile ground for New Age appropriation of ḍākinīs for orientalist agendas. (…)
(…)A second feminist perspective identified the ḍākinī as a goddess figure in an Indian gynocentric cult in which females were the primary cult leaders and males were their devoted students, asserted by Miranda Shaw (1994). She suggested that in India, women served as gurus and ritual specialists, but as Buddhism spread to Tibet, this role changed and women no longer played ritual or teaching roles. She argued that Tibetan patriarchy shaped the ḍākinī symbol into an abstract patriarchal ideal which serves the spiritual paths of male yogins only, betraying her Indian historical roots. Both of these feminist critiques drew from orientalist agendas, seeking a sacred feminine to meet Western longings and measuring the ḍākinī against her relevance for the spiritual lives of Western practitioners.
(…)Dakini’s Warm Breath followed the construct of phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur (1967, 9, 237) who identifies three levels of a symbol, important for interpretations of meaning: primary, secondary, tertiary. The primary level is experienced preverbally through dreams and visions or through meditative realization and constitutes what Ricoeur called symbol. In this, her most essential aspect, the ḍākinī is called the formless wisdom-nature of the mind itself at the heart of all Vajrayāna practice, overtly associated with her Indian roots in the Prajñāpāramitā literature. In its “tantric phase” (Conze 1973, 201), the sūtra called Perfect Wisdom in One Letter distills the entire teaching into the syllable A. This Sanskrit syllable becomes the representation of the formless ḍākinī, called by Nyingma master Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpa Nyima (1865–1926) (Gyatso 1992, 185 n. 😎 the “empty letter door that displays emptiness.” Sādhanas often invoke this meaning of the ḍākinī through the syllable A. Twentieth-century Nyingma teacher Chagdüd Tülku Rinpoche (1930–2002) explained, “Knowing the nature of emptiness nondualistically is liberation. Whether you call it emptiness, the absolute, or the ḍākinī makes no difference. All are liberating” (Chagdud, 1989). On a primary level, ḍākinī also refers to the yogic subtle body network of channels and winds activated in the inner practices of Tantra. The esoteric name for the subtle body is ḍākinījāla, the invisible network of the ḍākinīs. Synchronizing body and mind through the subtle body(…) manomaya-kāya) in tantric meditation generates powerful realization of the true nature (Simmer-Brown 2001, 172–176, 290).
Click “Save” ; Public channels are public to the internet, regardless of whether or not they are subscribed. A public channel is displayed in search results and has a short address (link). The administrator of a telegram group, "Suck Channel," was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for seven counts of incitement yesterday. The Standard Channel Earlier, crypto enthusiasts had created a self-described “meme app” dubbed “gm” app wherein users would greet each other with “gm” or “good morning” messages. However, in September 2021, the gm app was down after a hacker reportedly gained access to the user data.
from us
