CONTENTS

POSTSCRIPT - CREATIVE POLARITY BEYOND TANTRISM

The "sacrifice" of Maya: the Buddha legend

The meditative dismemberment of women: Hinayana Buddhism

The transformation of women into men: Mahayana Buddhism

The explosion of sexus: Vairayana Buddhism

Mystical love between the sexes and cosmogonical eros

The guru as manipulator of the divine

The appropriation of gynergy and androcentric power strategies

The absolute power of the "grand sorcerer" (Maha Siddha)

The three roles of female sexual partners in Buddhist Tantrism

The "Tantric female sacrifice"

The "law of inversion"

Concurrence with the demonic

Pure Shaktism and Tantric feminism

The "alchemistic female sacrifice"

The seven lower public initiations and their symbolic significance

The four higher "secret" initiations

Sperm and menstruation blood as magic substances

"Ganachakra" and the four "highest" initiations

The inner workings in the mystical body of the yogi

The "drop theory" as an expression of androgyny

The mystical female body

The methods or the manipulation of the divine

The "ten potentates": the mystical body of the ADI BUDDHA

"Star wars": the astral-temporal aspects of the ADI BUDDHA

The "Mandala principle": the spatial-cosmic power realm of the ADI BUDDHA

World domination: the political-social power of the ADI BUDDHA

The kings and the administration of Shambhala

The "raging wheel spinner": the martial ideology of Shambhala

Lethal war machines

The "ultimate battle"

Buddha vs. Allah

The non-Buddhist origins of the Shambhala myth

"Inner" Shambhala and "outer" Shambhala

The "highly despicable book": Albert Grünwedel (German orientalist and translator of the

Kalachakra Tantra)

The manipulation of eros: Giordano Bruno (Renaissance philosopher)

Buddha Amithaba: the sun and light god

The various masks of Avalokiteshvara

The XIV Dalai Lama as the highest Kalachakra master

The world-wide practice of the Kalachakra ritual

Statements of the XIV Dalai Lama on sexuality and sexual magic

The bondage of the earth goddess Srinmo and the history of Tibet

The alchemistic splitting of the feminine: the Tibetan goddesses Palden Lhamo and Tara

The mythological background of the Tibetan-Chinese conflict: Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin

Feminism and Tantric Buddhism

The XIV Dalai Lama and women's rights

The Dalai Lama and the Buddhist state are one

The feigned belief of the XVI Dalai Lama in Western democracy

The "Great Fifth" - Absolute Sun Ruler over Tibet

The predecessors of the V Dalai Lama

Magic as politics - the magic world of the V Dalai Lama

The successors and the legacy of the "Great Fifth"

Incarnation and power

The "Great Fifth" and the system of incarnation

The sacral power of the Tibetan kings and its transfer to the Dalai Lamas

The XIV Dalai Lama and the question of incarnation

The introduction of the doctrine of incarnation in the West

Unification of the Tibetan Buddhist Order under the Absolute Reign of the XIV Dalai Lama

The various orders (Gelugpa, Kagyüpa, Nyingmapa, Sakyapa, Bön)

The role of the orders under the XIV Dalai Lama and the Kalachakra Tantra

The "Karmapa affair"

Western image of Tibet

The structure of ancient Tibetan society

Tibetan criminal law

Clerical commerce

Political intrigue

The grand sorcerers (Maha Siddhas)

The anarchistic founding father of Tibetan Buddhism: Padmasambhava,

From anarchy to discipline of the order: the Tilopa lineage

The pre-ordained counter world to the clerical bureaucracy: holy fools

An anarchistic erotocist: the VI Dalai Lama

"Crazy wisdom" and the West

Ritual regicide in the history of Tibet and the Tibetan "scapegoat"

Ritual murder as a current issue among exile Tibetans

The ritual sacrifice of Tibet

The Tibetan state oracle

Dorje Shugden - a threat on the life of the XIV Dalai Lama?

Conjuration of demons

"Voodoo magic"

Magic wonder weapons

Mandala politics

The aggressiveness of the Tibetan tutelary gods (Dharmapalas)

Gesar of Ling - the Tibetan "Siegfried"

The Tibetan warrior kings and the clerical successors

The Dalai Lamas as the supreme war lords

The historical distortion of the "peaceful" Tibetans

Is the XIV Dalai Lama the "greatest living prince of peace"

Tibetan guerrillas and the CIA

Genghis Khan as Bodhisattva

The Mongolian Shambhala myth

The bloodthirsty avenger lama Dambijantsan

The "order of Buddhist warriors"

The XIV Dalai Lama and Mongolia

The Shambhala missionary Agvan Dorzhiev

Bolshevik Buddhism

The Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg

Madame Blavatsky and the Shambhala myth

Nicholas Roerich and the Kalachakra Tantra

The Shambhala warrior Chögyum Trungpa

Other Western Shambhala visions

The XIV Dalai Lama and the Shambhala myth

The former SS-man Heinrich Harrer: teacher of the XIV Dalai Lama

Julius Evola: the "Tantric" advisor of Benito Mussolini

Miguel Serrano: "friend" of the Dalai Lama and chief ideologist of "esoteric Hitlerism"

The relationship of Shoko Asahara to the XIV Dalai Lama

The staged Shambhala war

The rituals of the AUM sect are Tantric

Murder, violence and religion

The Japanese Armageddon

Religion and chemical laboratories

The song of sarin

Mao Zedong: the red sun

Mao Zedong's "Tantric practices"

A spiritual competition between the XIV Dalai Lama and Mao Zedong?

The post-Mao era in Tibet

A pan-Asian vision of the Kalachakra Tantra

Taiwan: a springboard for Tibetan Buddhism and the XIV Dalai Lama?

Are the Chinese interested in the Shambhala myth?

The "Tibet lobby"

The manipulation of the "Greens"

The imaginary world of inter-religious dialogue and ecumenism

Modern science and Tantric Buddhism

The Buddhist cosmology and the new paradigm

The quantum theory of the Dalai Lama

The yogi as computer

Cyberspace and Kalachakra Tantra

Hollywood and Tantric Buddhism

The atavistic pattern of Tibetan Buddhism

Battle of the cultures: the fundamentalist contribution of Lamaism

It may sound surprising after our critical analysis of Vajrayana, but in conclusion we would like to raise the question of whether Tantric Buddhism does not bear in itself a religious archetype the unveiling, dissemination and discussion of which could meet with great transcultural interest. Would it not be valuable to discuss as a religious concept the Tantric principles such as the "mystical love between the sexes", the "union of the male and female principles", the unio mystica between god and goddess?

Tantrism, in all forms of expression - as we have shown at the beginning of our study - rests on a vision of the polarity of being. In a mystical conjunction of poles, concretely in the mystical union of the sexes, it sees the primarily cultural event of the path of enlightenment. All phenomena of the universe are linked together by eros and sexus in the Tantric view, and our world of appearance is the field where these two basic forces are active (Tibetan yab and yum; Chinese yin and yang). They manifest themselves as a polarity in nature just as much as in the realm of the spirit. Love, in the Tantric view, is the great energy of life that pulsates in the cosmos, primarily as the dual-gender love between god and goddess, between man and woman. Their mutual affection is the principle of creation.

"It is through love and in the face of love that the world unfolds, through love it regains its original unity and its eternal non-separateness" - this too is proclaimed in a sentence of the Vajrayana (* Faure, 56). For the Tantrist, erotic and religious love are not separate. Sexuality and mysticism, eros and agape (spiritual love) are not mutually exclusive contradictions.

We repeat once again the wonderful words with which Tantric texts describe the "holy marriage" between man and woman. In the Yuganaddha (the mystical union) there is "neither agreement nor rejection, neither being nor non-being, neither forgetting nor remembering, neither bound nor unbound, neither cause nor effect, neither bringing forth nor that which is brought forth, neither purity nor impurity, neither form nor formlessness; it exists purely in the synthesis of all these dualities" (* Dasgupta, 1974, 114). In this synthesis "the ego is renounced and both polar contradictions are united in a condition of warm and trusting bliss" (* Walker, 85).

In the place of the battle of contradictions (or the sexes), the cooperation of the poles now appears. Body and spirit, eros and transcendence, feeling and reason, being (samsara) and non-being (nirvana) celebrate their marriage. All wars and controversies between good and evil, heaven and hell, day and night, dreams and perception, joy and suffering, praise and contempt are - as stated in the Yuganaddha - pacified and neutralized. The male Buddha embracing the female Buddha is celebrated by Mirada Shaw as "an image of the union and the blissful harmony between the sexes in the state of equilibrium and mutual union. This symbol is a powerful manifestation of the order of original wholeness and completion" (* Shaw, 1994, 200).

Divine eros leads not only to enlightenment and liberation; the mystical love between the sexes can - also in the Tantric view - liberate all suffering beings. Time and all its expressions have their origin in the archetypal divine pair. Sun and moon and the "radiant planetary pair", just as the five elements, owe their appearance to the cosmogonic eros. "By means of the union of the male and female sex organs the unity of eros is created", according to the Hevajra Tantra. "From the contact in this erotic union, from the quality of its firmness, the element earth arises; water comes from the liquid of the sperm; fire from the friction during copulation; air arises from the movement and the spatial element in erotic joy" (* Farrow, 134). Language, feeling, the senses - all have their origin in the love of the archetypal pair. "In the world purged of darkness the couple stands at the end of darkness", according even to the Kalacakra Tantra (* Banerjee, 1959, 24).

Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated at length, this harmonious primordial image is misused by Tantric ritual for the spiritual and profane power hunger of an androcentric caste of monks. We refrain from once again describing the sexual-magical exploitation by the Vajrayana but will instead discuss a philosophical question that deals with this subject, namely the relationship between the ONE (as the male principle) and the OTHER (as the female principle).

The subject of the OTHER has been a major issue in philosophical discourse since Friedrich Hegel. The absolute ONE or the absolute spirit can tolerate no OTHER beside itself. Only when the OTHER is completely integrated into the ONE, only when it is "transcended" (aufgehoben) in the OTHER is the course of the spirit completed. Then nature (the OTHER) becomes spirit (the ONE). This is one way of briefly describing a fundamental idea of Hegelian philosophy.

In the terminology of the Vajrayana the androgynous ADI BUDDHA represents the absolute ONE that tolerates no OTHER (feminine) outside of himself. The OTHER (feminine) loses its autonomy under the rule of the ONE (masculine). It is destroyed with a word. The OTHER (feminine) radically calls into question the absolute ONE of the ADI BUDDHA; its claim to infinity, cosmocentricity, supreme power and divinity would be threatened. "All is ONE or all is the ADI BUDDHA!" is a basic maxim of Tantrism. For this reason the OTHER drives fear and fright into the ONE. The Buddhist Ken Wilber (a proponent of the ADI BUDDHA principle) quotes the Upanishads in this connection: "Wherever the OTHER is present there is fear" (* Wilber, 1990, 174) - and confesses himself: "But wherever there is an OTHER there is also anxiety" (* Wilber, 1990, 280).

Behind this existential fear of the OTHER there lies - as we have indicated - a fundamental gender issue. This has been taken up and developed especially by French feminists. In the "otherness" (autruité) of the female Simone de Beauvoir saw a lingering, highly problematic fixation of woman by the androcentric view. Man wanted to see woman as the OTHER in order to rule over her. She was forced to define her identity through the perspective of the man. Feminists after Beauvoir, however, such as Luce Irigaray, have given the "difference of the sexes" and AUTRUITÉ (otherness) a very positive meaning and have made it the central idea of their feminine philosophy. Otherness here becomes a feminine world which cannot be grasped by the masculine perspective or by masculine reason. It is removed from any kind of masculine fixation. Female subjectivity is not accessible to male subjectivity.

It is precisely the OTHERNESS that enables woman to preserve her autonomy. She thus escapes being made into an object by the man (the male subject) and develops her own subjectivity (the female subject). Irigaray clearly describes how existing religions prevent woman from developing her own self: "She must always be accessible to man as his own transcendence!" (quoted in June Campbell, 155) - that is as sophia, prajna, as "white virgin", as a "wisdom dakini" (Inana Mudra). For the male consciousness she is without her own subjectivity, an empty screen (shunyata) onto which man projects his own imaginations.

The autonomy of the OTHER must by no means be experienced as division, fragmentation, deficiency or as a moment of alienation. It can just as well serve as the opposite, as the prerequisite for the union of two subjects, as mutual augmentation or as copula. Male and female have the completely opposite choices of relating to each other as a duality (mutually exclusive contraries = destruction of the OTHER) or as a polarity (mutually augmenting contraries = encountering the OTHER). That the sexes are able to encounter each other in love without having to renounce their autonomy is a manifestation of grace.

Buddhist Tantrism does not involve such an encounter between man and woman but rather the question of how the yogi (as the masculine principle of the ONE) can integrate the OTHER (the feminine principle) in himself and make it useful by sucking out its gynergy. The same phenomenon in reverse is found in occult feminism: how can the yogini (here as the feminine principle of the ONE) appropriate the androenergy of the man (here as the OTHER) for the accumulation of gynandric power.

The appropriation of the OTHER (the goddess) by the ONE (the ADI BUDDHA) is the basic philosophical idea of Buddhist Tantrism. It is thus a phenomenon which in this generality also determines Western cultures and religions. "Masculine religiosity masks an appropriation," writes Luce Irigaray. "This severs the relationship to the natural universe, its simplicity is perverted. To be sure this religiousness symbolizes a social universe organized by men. But this organization is based on a sacrifice: that of nature, that of the sexual body, especially that of the woman. It impels a spirituality that is cut off from its natural roots and its environment. It can thus not help bring humankind to perfection. Spiritualization, socialization, cultivation require that we set out from what is there. The patriarchal system does not do this because it seeks to obliterate the foundations it is based on" (* Irigaray, 1991, 33).

The solution to the riddle of mysteries that Tantrism poses is obvious. It can only involve the union of the two poles and not their mutual domination. The (masculine) spirit is not alone sufficient to become "whole", but nature and spirit, feelings and reason, logos and eros, woman and man, god and goddess, a masculine and a feminine Buddha as two autonomous beings must celebrate a mystical marriage (as yab and yum; yin and yang), as two subjects that melt together into a WE. The ADI BUDDHA of the Kalacakra Tantra, however, is a divine SUBJECT (a SUPREME EGO) that seeks to devour the OTHER (the goddess). Not until ONE SUBJECT forms a copula with ANOTHER SUBJECT can a truly new dimension (in WE) be entered: the great WE in which both EGO's, the masculine and the feminine, are truly "transcended", truly "preserved", truly "surpassed". Perhaps this WE is the cosmic secret which is to be discovered in the profoundest parts of the Tantras and not the ADI BUDDHA.

In the WE all polarities of the universe melt together, the subjective and the objective, ruling and serving, union and division. The unio mystica with the male or female partner dissolves the individual and the transpersonal subjectivity (the human ego and the divine ego). Both poles, the masculine and the feminine, experience their spiritual, psychic and physical unity as intersubjectivity, as exchange, as WE. They combine into a higher dimension without destroying each other. The mystical WE thus forms a more comprehensive experiential quality as the mystical EGO of the ADI BUDDHA that seeks to swallow the OTHER (the goddess).

If man and woman were to experience each other as cosmic centre, as god and goddess - as can be read in the Tantric texts - they would together experience each other as religious authority; then the androgynous guru as the supreme god of "mysteries of the love between the sexes" would vanish. The India expert Doninger O'Flaherty, in an essay on Tantric practices, describes several variations of androgyny and supplements these - not without a tone of irony - with an additional "androgynous" model which is basically no model at all. "A third psychological 'androgyn', less closely associated with any doctrine, is not found in a single individual but in two: in the man and the woman who are bound together in perfect love - Shakespeare's animal with two backs. This is the image of ecstatic union, another metaphor for the mystical union of the godhead. This is the romantic ideal of the perfect mixture, the one with the other so that each one experiences the joy of the other and no longer knows whose hand it is that caresses or whose skin it is that is being caressed. In this condition man and woman experience the joy and pain of the other in the 'Tantric' experiment. This is the divine hierosgamos (the mystical marriage), and in its various manifestations - as yab and yum, yin and yang, animus and anima - it is certainly the most widespread 'androgynous' concept (* O'Flaherty, 1982, 292).

Together - as Tantrism teaches us despite everything - man and woman concentrate power in themselves; divided they are powerless. The WE means both a gain in power and a renunciation of power. In the WE the two archetypal powers of being (masculine - feminine) intensify. In this respect the WE is absolute, the omnipotence. But at the same time the WE limits the power of the parts as soon as they appear separated or claim the cosmos for themselves as an individual gender (as androgynous supreme god or as gynandric supreme goddess). In this respect, the WE is relative at its core. It is only effective when the two poles act complementarily. The WE, as the highest principle, is certainly not able to abuse the OTHER or to manipulate it for its own purposes since every OTHER is by definition an autonomous part of the WE. In political terms the WE is a fundamental principle of democracy. It overcomes all xenophobia and all war. The traditional dualism of up and down, white and black, bright and dark are unified in the WE as a creative polarity.

The androgynous principle of Buddhist Tantrism - as we have demonstrated both from the ritual logic of the Vajrayana and empirically from the history of Tantric Buddhism (especially Lamaism) - unavoidably leads to human sacrifice and wars. At the beginning of every war is a battle of the sexes - this sentence from Greek mythology applies especially to Tantrism that derives world events from eros. Can we not draw the opposite conclusion, that peace between the sexes can bring forth peace in the world? Global responsibility arises from mutual recognition and respect of the position of the partner as the other half of the whole. Sympathy, sensitivity for everything that is other, understanding, harmony - all this has its origin here. Ludwig Klages sees in the cosmogonic eros between two people a revolutionary power that even has the strength of transcending "history". "If in the meantime the impossible were to happen, if only between two in a hundred million, the curse of the spirit would be broken, the dreadful nightmare of 'world history' would dissipate, and 'an awakening would blossom in streams of light'" (* Klages, 198). The end of history from the love of man and woman, god and goddess: a concept that is certainly reconcilable with a Tantric philosophy if it were not for the ultimate masculine usurpation by the yogi.

Perhaps - let us further speculate - the mystical love of the sexes could represent the mystery of a universal "culture of eros" built on both sensual and spiritual foundations. Such an idea is by no means new. At the end of the 1960s, the American philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his book Eros and Civilization sketched out an "erotic" cultural plan. Unfortunately, his "paradigmatic" approach - as we would call it today - that was widely discussed in the 1960s is completely forgotten today. Among the basic joys of human existence, according to Marcuse, is "the separation in sexes, the difference between male and female, between penis and vagina, between the 'you' and the 'I', even between mine and yours, and it is a division that is highly pleasing and satisfying, or it can be so; its elimination would not only be madness, it would be a nightmare - the pinnacle of suppression"^* (* Marcuse, 239).

As we were working on the final corrections of our manuscript, the German illustrated magazine Bunte, which only a few weeks before had celebrated the Dalai Lama as a god on earth, carried an article by the cultural sociologist Nicolaus Sombart entitled "Desire for the divine pair". Sombart expressed our own ideas with great precision so we would like to quote him at length. "Why does the project humankind appear in a bipartite form in the divine plan? The duality is symbolic of the polarity of the world, the bipolarity on which the dynamics on all world history rests. Yin and yang. Seemingly divided and yet belonging together, contradictory, and complementary, antagonistic but designed for harmony, synthesis and symbiosis. Only in mutual penetration do they complete each other and become a whole. The world model is the couple eternally striving for union. It is a pair of lovers. The misery of the world lies in the separation, isolation, and loneliness of the parts that are attracted to each other, that belong together. Joy and happiness lie in the union of the two sexes; not two souls, this is not enough, but two bodies equipped for this purpose - a pleasurable foretaste of the return to paradise" (* Bunte, No. 46/98, 40).

It is remarkable, however, how unsuccessful the mystical love of the sexes has been in establishing itself as an archetypal image in human cultural history. Although the mystery of love between man and woman is and has been practised and experienced by millions, although most cultures have male and female deities, the unio mystica of the sexes has not been granted recognition as a religion. Yet there is much to be said for giving the harmony and love between man and woman (god and goddess) the weight of a universal paradigm. Selected insights and images from the mysteries of Tantric Buddhism should be very helpful in forming such a paradigm.

Divine couples are found in all cultures, even if their religious veneration is not among the central mysteries. We also encounter them in the pre-Buddhist mythologies of Tibet, with both sexes equally dividing the rulership over the world. Matthias Hermanns speaks of Khen pa, the ruler of the heavens, and Khon ma, mother earth, and quotes the following sentence from the native Tibetan creation myth: "At first heaven and earth are like father and mother" (* Hermanns, 1965, 72). Among the primordial Tibetan kings there was a god of man (pholha) and a goddess of woman (mo-lha). Several central Asian myths see sun and moon as equal forces, with the sun having the masculine and the moon the feminine role (* Bleichsteiner, 19). In a wondrous myth, light and darkness are considered the cosmic archetypal pair (* Paul, 49).

In Tantric Buddhism, the central Buddhist pair celebrated by the Nyingmapa School, Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri - which translated means the "highest male good" and the "highest female good" - is such a potential archetypal couple. This Buddha couple is depicted in a yab-yum position. Both partners are naked, that is pure and free. None of them bears any symbol that could point to some hidden religio-magical intention. Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri are beyond the world of symbolism - as their nudity could be interpreted - and are thus an image of polar purity, free from the gods, myths and insignia. Only the colour of their bodies could be interpreted as a metaphor. Samantabhadra is clear blue and open as the heavens, Samantabhadri is white as the light.

If the vision of the religious veneration of the couple were to be described in Buddhist terminology, the four Buddha pairs of the four directions could emanate from the original Buddha pair without this mystical pentad being appropriated by a Tantra master as an androgynous ADI BUDDHA. In a Nepalese Tantra text, however, the ADI BUDDHA ("supreme consciousness") and the ADI PRANJNA ("supreme wisdom") are venerated as the primordial father and the primordial mother of the world (* Hazra, 21). According to this text, all female beings in the universe are emanations of the ADI PRAJNA, all male beings of the ADI BUDDHA.