The Quiet Mind by John E. Coleman

Author:John E. Coleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Pariyatti Publishing
Published: 2016-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

I went to meet the lama at Benares with mixed feelings. He was a scholarly figure, younger than I expected, and he made a thorough study of the Tantric faith with its strange and weird practices of worship and ways of ascending to enlightenment. But I wondered if he was also a protagonist of them and a believer in their value. Somehow I never got around to putting that question to him for he spoke so rapidly, and with such donnish authority, that I felt it would be unreasonable to ask point-blank whether he saw positive qualities in what he was describing or merely found it an absorbing subject from the point of view of a student of religion. He gave me a good deal of his time and went out of his way to help: I couldn’t bring myself to challenge him on his own attitude.

Personally, I couldn’t help feeling that, as in so many of the modern day interpretations of the wisdom of enlightened religious leaders, the Tantric activities originated out of convenience rather than a proper understanding of Buddha’s plea for direct experience.

Tantrism, however, turned out to be a complex and abstruse religion whose intricacies, when I had got to the root of them, defied anything more than the most academic attention in my researches. The worship of phallic symbols and idols representing the male and female generative organs was an outward manifestation of the creed. But my informant was indignant that I should think there was little more to the matter than that.

Besides, he said, the phallic worship was purely allegorical. The marriage of young girls to older, or even old, men is a common feature of some Indian religions and enjoys the full approval of many educated and sincere people. Yet I often think such customs, sanctioned as they are by time and habit, are more the result of convenience and the power of human instincts and natural desires than of any true loyalty to a doctrine.

The Tantras worship God or Brahma the Creator of the Universe. Unlike the conventional Western churchgoer who finds it easier to visualize God as a person or a kind of elder statesman figure residing in heaven, than to experience Him as a creative and life-giving force, the Tantras avoid any attempt to personify God, or to give God a recognizable identity. They do not ascribe He, or She or It to Brahma because Brahma is the one generative and creating being that cannot be a human being or have human form.

On the other hand, all human attributes are attributes of God for everything is God. All experiences, the objects we see, the material things we make, the imaginary objects we invent are divine manifestations of God for God alone creates. Since God has no form, say the Tantras, we are free to label God in whatever way we wish and therefore to assign any sex to God. In fact they identify the Deity with both sexes

The nearest they come to personifying God is to see God as the Mother (Shakti) and Father (Shiva) of all creation.

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