Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism

·期刊原文
Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism
By Miranda Shaw
Reivewed by James George
Parabola
Vol.19 No.4
Pp.92-94
Winter 1994
COPYRIGHT Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition 1994

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ONLY IN THE PAST DECADE has the Tantric tradition begun to be
understood in the West as a valid, disciplined path of spiritual
development. Previously, it had been concealed as an embarrassment
to Indian culture. For the Tibetans, who emerged on the world scene
after China took over their country in 1959, their Tantric texts
were considered much too esoteric to share with any but the most
carefully prepared Tibetans and a handful of Western pupils sworn to
secrecy. Now, as many Westerners are adept practitioners of
Vajrayana Buddhism, and as the global spiritual crisis deepens,
Tantric Buddhism is a subject of intense interest, fed by a
willingness of the holders of the tradition to share it with
Westerners. One chosen to expound these teachings is Miranda Shaw, a
Harvard Ph.D. who is currently an Assistant Professor of Buddhist
Studies at the University of Richmond. Dr. Shaw is interested in
what Tantric tradition owes to women gurus, and in the place and
role of women in Tantric practice. Are women merely the necessary
means for the enlightenment of men, or are they full and equal
partners in a joint enterprise aimed at reciprocal enlightenment?
Since few women in Tibet could write, most of the Tantric texts were
written by men, but when Shaw examined the eighth-to twelfth-century
texts in both Sanskrit and Tibetan she found ample evidence to
refute the prevalent Western notion that such practices were mainly
designed by and for men. Many authors acknowledge that their
teachers had been women, and some important early texts were written
by women. Almost all regarded women as bestowers of wisdom and
showed that women derive equal benefits from tantric practice. Even
the great Gelugpa founder, Tsongkhapa, though refraining from
Tantric practices out of respect for his monastic vows, averred that
it was "extremely difficult" to attain liberation without a partner.
In her researches in India and Nepal among Tibetan Tantrics, Shaw
also found that, in the current practice of tantra, there is little
evidence of male domination or exploitation of the women involved.
Shaw's study is a rare combination of serious scholarship enlivened
by direct personal experience, and is therefore not just a feminist
critique of a male (and Western) view of the Tantric tradition, but
a balanced reassessment of a tradition too long misunderstood.
Shaw's study has the blessing of the Dalai Lama and is the fruit of
the trustful tutelage of other high lamas. This book is not a
"how-to-do-it" manual of tantric practice. Shaw knows that only a
qualified Tibetan lama could play that role. All that a
book--whether it is the delicately passionate teaching of
Sahajayoginicinta a thousand years ago, or Shaw's present
treatise--can do is to set the mental and attitudinal stage for
grasping the most elusive but most important point: tantra is not
about sex, but about all the energies that constitute a human being,
male or female, in their complementarities and paradoxes. Shaw cites
Sahajayoginicinta's description of the loss of ego boundaries which
can usher both partners into a nondual mode of experience: In
stages, because of the taste of desire, One ceases to know who is
the other and What has happened to oneself. The lovers experience an
inexpressible bliss They never experienced before. Perhaps Shaw may
have somewhat overplayed her case for affirming that the tantric
path is the creation of extraordinary women, at least as much as
that of extraordinary men, but she has convincingly set straight a
previously tilted record. By introducing us to many previously
unavailable Tibetan and Indian Buddhist texts, and putting this
material before us in an objective manner imbued with vibrant
personal experience, she has honorably served her mission to
encourage us to look again at Tantric Buddhist wisdom which has
until now been known to us mainly in its misinformed distortions.