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
Full Episode
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.
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