Love and Liberation by Sarah H. Jacoby

Author:Sarah H. Jacoby [Jacoby, Sarah H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS008000, HISTORY / Asia / China, REL007050, RELIGION / Buddhism / Tibetan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

5

LOVE BETWEEN METHOD AND INSIGHT

A haṃ. I am the supreme method, the great bliss Heruka.

You are the great mother of insight into the ultimate sphere of emptiness.

By the contemplation of engaging in nondual union,

in the immense buddhafield in which the three—appearances, sounds, and awareness—are purified,

the expanse of indivisible form and primordial wisdom,

may we attain the fully awakened youthful vase body of buddhahood

as Hayagrīva and Vajravārāhī in indestructible union.1

With his final breath, Drimé Özer spoke these words to Sera Khandro before he passed away into buddhahood, according to his biography. The image of Drimé Özer as the supreme method and Sera Khandro as the insight realizing emptiness, united inseparably in the form of the Tantric deities Hayagrīva and Vajravārāhī, embodies the Tantric Buddhist vision of complete buddhahood. The roots of this gendered two-in-one symbolism stem from Mahāyāna Buddhist conceptions of bodhisattva training involving a set of perfections, first six and later ten. Method (Skt. upāya, Tib. thabs) refers to the skillful means by which one seeks enlightenment for oneself and others, encapsulating the first five perfections: generosity, morality, patience, discipline, and meditation. More generally, the supreme method is compassion (karuṇā, snying rje). The sixth perfection, insight (prajñā, shes rab), is the realization of emptiness (śūnyatā, stong pa nyid), or the realization that all people and phenomena do not exist as separate and permanent entities but rather are conditional, impermanent, and subject to change. Already in Mahāyāna scriptures such as the Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra, insight and method appear as a gendered dyad, mirroring their respective genders according to Sanskrit grammar: “Wisdom [i.e., insight] is the bodhisattva’s mother, expedient means [i.e., method] his father.”2 Later Indian Tantric Buddhist scriptures that formed bedrocks of Tibetan Buddhism built upon this symbolism to depict the union of method and insight in the form of male and female deities in sexual union, called yab yum. Tibetan Buddhist scriptures are pervaded with this imagery that conveys wholeness as the conjoining of complementary male and female principles. Beyond texts, sexual symbolism is impossible to miss in Buddhist temples throughout Tibet and the Himalayas, where temple walls and shrines are replete with scroll paintings and statues of deities in yab yum embrace, serving as visual insignia of the nondual union of male method and female insight.

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