The Double Dorje: Looking at Modern Vajrayana Buddhism.
Dakinis - what the **** are they?
Wed, 06 Nov 2024
In dreams, in the wild, dark woods where reality starts to break apart and become entangled in vision, where fear and ecstasy dance and sing, you may meet the dakini. Is she your mother, your lover, your friend? Will she cast you out or invite you to join the dance? Yeshe Tsogyal Words or phrases you might want to look up: Dakini Daka Khandroma Phawo Chenrezi Amitabha Samantabhadra / Samantabhadri Thomas Traherne Samantabhadra Samantabhadri Vajravarahi Yeshe Tsogyal Guru Rinpoche #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #dakini #Khandroma #Nyingma
Hello, good listeners, good morning, good evening, or good midnight. Welcome to this episode of the Double Doge podcast. I'm Alex Wilding, and this week I'm going to have a shot. It's perhaps a little bit of a Don Quixote shot because a lot of people have tried and not done very well. Anyway, a shot at making the meaning of darkening somewhat clear.
The idea is so complex and subtle, I'm almost bound to fail, but maybe it will be better than nothing. Before that, I must make the usual two comments. Firstly, it really would be helpful to this podcast if you would pause, press the like, follow or subscribe button, whatever there is on your listening platform. And secondly, this episode is being published, first of all, on Podbean.
If you're listening somewhere else, but you do want to see the comments, the picture, the transcript, anything that doesn't appear on your platform, you will find it all on Podbean. It was fairly early in my involvement with Tibetan Buddhism that I first heard about dakinis. The explanations I could find were vague and unhelpful. There were reasons for that.
The idea is really very complex, woven together of a number of quite varied cultural strands, and there is nothing in Western culture that corresponds closely. Maybe Angel is a vague shot, but it does actually miss the mark by quite a long way. I suspect that many of the sources I consulted at that time were themselves out of their depth in this field.
Later in this episode, I'll be mentioning some more specific points, but I think we have to begin by clearing the ground a bit. There are two themes, it seems to me, that it is best to address right at the start. These themes are gender and allegory. Let's take gender first.
Whatever form she takes, young and beautiful, old and worn, dazzlingly divine or seemingly very plain, a darkenie is feminine. In a society where patriarchy is totally dominant and unquestioned, the femininity of the darkenie will also not be questioned. As we, however, push or struggle to move away from such patriarchal attitudes…
And as we see that, at least in some circles, there are just as many female students these days as there are male, it does make sense to ask whether there is a male equivalent. Up to a rather limited point, the answer is yes, for sure. Although it's not perfectly simple. The word dakinis and its Tibetan equivalent, khandroma, has a masculine equivalent in daka.
And we do meet the expression dakinis and dakas. That particular male equivalent, however, is rarely used, and the partners and companions of Dakinis are more often called Veeras, which we can translate as heroes. In Tibetan, this male word is translated as Pao.
All the same, I don't think that it's possible simply to mirror the gender roles and to say that a male partner, such as Yeshe Tsogyal's consort Atsara Saleh, was to her the same as a darkening might have been to him.
If we take it as read that female and male practitioners do have the same value, the same potential for enlightenment and so on, that is not to say that the two genders have exactly the same qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Notwithstanding the variations between individuals, the tradition sees femininity as being more in touch with the mysterious truths and powers that underlie our existence.
An encounter with a dharkini is often described as something that opens the practitioner's mind to things that had been ignored because of the practitioner's narrow focus. As we think about this gendering, we shouldn't forget that in the meditations related to this kind of Buddhism, male and female practitioners may conceive of themselves as male or female deities quite freely.
In at least one system of practice with which I am familiar, almost every meditation deity from the top to the bottom is female. This is no more of an issue for male practitioners than it is for female practitioners when they are conceiving of themselves as a male deity. This leads to the second point for which I'm using the word allegory. I'm trying that word on for size up to a point.
It could be that enactment or embodiment might fit better. I actually just don't know. These days, we find that kind of allegorical thinking hard to understand and tend to settle on the milk and water idea of symbolism. Tibetan Buddhist ritual is obviously fully packed with symbolism.
As an example, we might say that Chenrezig's four arms symbolise the four immeasurables, that is, the loving-kindness, the compassion, the sympathetic joy and the equanimity that we so often hear about. Now, that's not wrong, and I would say it's actually quite good enough for the guide who's taking a group of tourists around a Tibetan-style temple in Tibet or Nepal or anywhere else.
But it does rather beg the question, which is to say glides over the question, of why we would particularly want a symbol for those poor virtues at all. For the practising meditator, on the other hand, representations of this sort are intended to engage the imagination, the understanding, the devotion in a much more powerful way. Or at least they should do.
This is to the extent that the meditator, while in no way mistaking those four arms for something just a simple concrete thing in front of him or her, experiences them as something real. Not real in quite the same way as the beads in the meditator's hand, but much more of a living experience than a mere symbol.
Many listeners will, of course, have a background in European culture, for which reason I find it interesting to compare this with the Christian Eucharist.
I myself have never taken communion in any kind of Christian church, but it does seem beyond doubt that when the flock takes the biscuit into their mouths, the taste is not chewy and fleshy like raw pork, nor does the wine have that salty, rather metallic taste of blood. In appearance, the bread and wine are still bread and wine.
Yet to many Christian churches there is something much more going on, often given the name of transubstantiation. It may be that more recent interpretations have lent on the idea of this being simply a symbol or reminder of the Last Supper, as the theologians who are disposed to think in that way, if I may say so, give in to a more physicalist understanding of the world.
I'm not remotely a scholar of Christianity, but I do believe that over the centuries there has been many a dispute about the nature of transubstantiation. Those disputes have, it seems likely, arisen in the attempt to accurately describe the way in which the communion is something much more real than a mere symbol, even while the bread and wine remain apparently, yes, bread and wine.
These material substances could be said to be an allegory for something much deeper and more meaningful. This is why I feel that saying that the bread and wine embody the flesh and blood or that they are an allegory for the flesh and blood is at least a little bit closer to the mark than just saying that they represent or are symbols for the presence of Christ.
If I have managed to make that clear, big if, then it may make more sense if we say that much of the imagery used in Vajrayana Buddhism is to be understood allegorically rather than literally, which in many cases would be ridiculous, or as simply symbolic. That raises the question of why bother?
The same principle can be applied to dakinis, whether they are visualized in a meditation practice, called on in prayers, or described in stories. They embody truths, experiences, and visions. Those truths can perhaps be pointed at through extensive and subtle intellectual analytical thinking, although perhaps even that won't work.
But even if it does, it's still necessary for the mystic or the yogi to bring those truths into living experience. The darkening is one way in which that is embodied. These days we know vastly more about the physics that makes the weather happen than we did, say, a century ago. It has an almost entirely mechanical explanation.
If that modern, scientifically based and unquestionably correct knowledge prevents us from experiencing the wind as the dance of the spirits of nature,
and if our knowledge of the physics of the sun prevents us from seeing the sunrise as hosts of angels, as William Blake might have said, or as hosts of darkenies, as we might say, singing to the morning, if we can't open up to that aspect of life, then perhaps, sadly, Tibetan Buddhism is not for us. We have to see these things as more than just symbolic, otherwise it simply won't quite add up.
Seeing this way of expression as poetry is perhaps one step closer than seeing it as merely symbolic. Okay, I hope that little stroll in rather abstract thought hasn't been too long. Let's take a look at how darkenings appear concretely in the literature and liturgy. As I hope is already clear, a darkenie is always female.
She can take almost any form, sometimes very unpleasant, but to be honest, most often she is attractive or even seductive. I once saw a photo of my teacher in the kitchen of an old lady to whom he had been taking some food and other support. There was a poster or hoarding of some sort showing Jennifer Lopez and which could be seen at the back of the room.
It turned out that it was simply being used to shut out the wind. The teacher had not recognised J-Lo, iconic as she may be to us, but thought that she was simply some kind of kitchen darkening, a case of very pure perception, I think. I was at this point going to say that there are three main types of darkening, but having had a little check-up,
I realised that, surprise, surprise, it's not that clean and simple. There are all sorts of lists, and they don't all agree with one another, but some things do all the same stand out.
Firstly, starting from the top, so to speak, we have the Dakinis who are active expressions of enlightenment, and who inhabit what are known as the Buddha fields, which is why they might be known as field-born Dakinis. These include forms of the Buddha, such as the semi-wrathful Vajravarahi, or the peaceful Tara. Secondly, we have the Dakinis who inhabit cemeteries.
To understand that, I think we need to remember the Indian origins of this line of thought, in which cemeteries are frightening, dangerous places, haunted by carrion-eaters, and some of those carrion-eaters may even have been human beings. Hmm...
So let's remember that if darkness of that sort are described in our visualization practices, they embody a dangerous and terrifying force, even if modern Western cemeteries are peaceful, tidy, and almost pretty. Somewhat similar to that are the dakinis of the 24 power places that are believed to have existed in India. These dakinis too may be invoked in some tantric visualizations.
There are dakinis who become dakinis by successfully taking up Vajrayana practice and achieving the results, who are then known as mantra-born dakinis. Then again, some dakinis just appear spontaneously. And it should not be forgotten that dakinis may also take human form.
In any event, when they appear in tantric liturgies, or for that matter in life stories, they do embody an insight or a way of being that might previously have been closed to the yogi. Darkini might give a great meditator a teaching that she has been guarding in Darkiniland, written in Darkini's script. If the practitioner is capable of deciphering it, this may be a great treasure.
One of the most famous human Darkinis was Yeshe Tsodyal. She was Guru Rinpoche's main consort when he was in Tibet and is remembered with great fondness today. And having mentioned the word consort, I think it's important to underline again that much of this material comes from cultures with a totally, totally, totally different mindset where sex is concerned.
Deities or significant human beings, like Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal for that matter, in sexual union, are perceived as beautiful, inspiring and pure. I suppose we could say holy. As I think I mentioned in a previous episode, such an image is not particularly seen as sexy.
Nor does it necessarily imply that followers have to practice concrete sexual yogas, although they do exist, in order to get anywhere on the path to enlightenment, any more than Christians are expected to nail themselves to a cross to become Christ-like. They might do that, of course, but that's another story. Of course, People are human. I guess you knew that.
Whether we're thinking of monastics who've taken vows of celibacy, or yogis who have not, sexual desire can disturb the balance. Imagine a yogi sitting in his retreat, appearing very holy and receiving offerings from the faithful.
If such offerings one day are brought by an attractive young woman, and if he immediately then imagines that she is his destined darkening, and tries it on, there and then, he becomes nothing but a figure of fun, to Tibetans as well as to Westerners. I suppose it's what we might call the male gaze gone wrong again.
And when a lama, surrounded by Western students, focuses on a pretty young woman and calls her a dharkini, what are we to think? It can be a Tibetan Buddhist equivalent to the way Joey Tribbiani in Friends would meet a young woman and come out with something like, Well, hello there, and how are you today? People are people.
Finally, I'd like to pay a bit of attention to those cycles of practice whose deities are all female and all, in a sense, forms of the dharkini. The ultimate primordial Buddha cannot really be represented, but that doesn't stop us from doing that. Most often, this Buddha is shown in male form. In the Nyingma tradition, this will be Samantabhadra. He is shown naked and dark blue.
dark as the night sky, to represent being beyond conceptual coverings. But in the cycles I'm talking about here, the primordial Buddha is shown as Samantabhadri. Note the change to the final syllable, Samantabhadri rather than Samantabhadra, and is female. The visionary realms that emerge from this very abstract level
are very often populated by well-known Buddhas, such as the Red Amitabha or Chenrezig, Buddha of Compassion. In the systems I'm now talking about, such a visionary figure may be seen as the Red Darkini Vajravarahi.
And on the concrete level, where we might meet Enlightenment, if we are extremely fortunate, in physical form, she may well appear as Yeshe Tsogyal rather than a male form such as Guru Rinpoche. Another aspect of the darkening is a close association with activity.
And we may be called on to see boundless darkenings, millions and billions emanating throughout the universe, in fact underlying the universe or even being this universe, if we can just overcome our conceptual grasping and purify our perception. It's a vision of reality that brings us back to the visions known to mystics across the world.
Those of us who are old enough to recall the relatively early days of the Incredible String Band may remember the words of Thomas Traherne. We might or might not want to go along with his Christian framework of thinking, but the sentiment, I think, is something we can appreciate. When he said,
You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. That's the frame of mind to understand darkenies. Well, gosh, that was a bit of a flight, wasn't it? I hope it did make sense. Please remember, once again, to like, subscribe and so on, and whatever you do, keep an eye open for the darkenies. Bye.