Alex Wilding

It is beyond ordinary thinking. So please remember to like, subscribe, tell your friends and all that stuff. And remember a saying whose origin I've actually been unable to identify with complete certainty. It may even be slightly apocryphal, but it does have a good ring to it. Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise. Bye.

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.