Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism, by Miranda Shaw

Reivewed by James George

Parabola

Vol.19 No.4

Pp.92-94

Winter 1994

COPYRIGHT Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition 1994

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            ONLY IN THE PAST DECADE has the Tantric tradition begun to be 
            understood in the West as a valid, disciplined path of spiritual 
            development. Previously, it had been concealed as an embarrassment 
            to Indian culture. For the Tibetans, who emerged on the world scene 
            after China took over their country in 1959, their Tantric texts 
            were considered much too esoteric to share with any but the most 
            carefully prepared Tibetans and a handful of Western pupils sworn to 
            secrecy. Now, as many Westerners are adept practitioners of 
            Vajrayana Buddhism, and as the global spiritual crisis deepens, 
            Tantric Buddhism is a subject of intense interest, fed by a 
            willingness of the holders of the tradition to share it with 
            Westerners. One chosen to expound these teachings is Miranda Shaw, a 
            Harvard Ph.D. who is currently an Assistant Professor of Buddhist 
            Studies at the University of Richmond. Dr. Shaw is interested in 
            what Tantric tradition owes to women gurus, and in the place and 
            role of women in Tantric practice. Are women merely the necessary 
            means for the enlightenment of men, or are they full and equal 
            partners in a joint enterprise aimed at reciprocal enlightenment? 
            Since few women in Tibet could write, most of the Tantric texts were 
            written by men, but when Shaw examined the eighth-to twelfth-century 
            texts in both Sanskrit and Tibetan she found ample evidence to 
            refute the prevalent Western notion that such practices were mainly 
            designed by and for men. Many authors acknowledge that their 
            teachers had been women, and some important early texts were written 
            by women. Almost all regarded women as bestowers of wisdom and 
            showed that women derive equal benefits from tantric practice. Even 
            the great Gelugpa founder, Tsongkhapa, though refraining from 
            Tantric practices out of respect for his monastic vows, averred that 
            it was "extremely difficult" to attain liberation without a partner. 
            In her researches in India and Nepal among Tibetan Tantrics, Shaw 
            also found that, in the current practice of tantra, there is little 
            evidence of male domination or exploitation of the women involved. 
            Shaw's study is a rare combination of serious scholarship enlivened 
            by direct personal experience, and is therefore not just a feminist 
            critique of a male (and Western) view of the Tantric tradition, but 
            a balanced reassessment of a tradition too long misunderstood. 
            Shaw's study has the blessing of the Dalai Lama and is the fruit of 
            the trustful tutelage of other high lamas. This book is not a 
            "how-to-do-it" manual of tantric practice. Shaw knows that only a 
            qualified Tibetan lama could play that role. All that a 
            book--whether it is the delicately passionate teaching of 
            Sahajayoginicinta a thousand years ago, or Shaw's present 
            treatise--can do is to set the mental and attitudinal stage for 
            grasping the most elusive but most important point: tantra is not 
            about sex, but about all the energies that constitute a human being, 
            male or female, in their complementarities and paradoxes. Shaw cites 
            Sahajayoginicinta's description of the loss of ego boundaries which 
            can usher both partners into a nondual mode of experience: In 
            stages, because of the taste of desire, One ceases to know who is 
            the other and What has happened to oneself. The lovers experience an 
            inexpressible bliss They never experienced before. Perhaps Shaw may 
            have somewhat overplayed her case for affirming that the tantric 
            path is the creation of extraordinary women, at least as much as 
            that of extraordinary men, but she has convincingly set straight a 
            previously tilted record. By introducing us to many previously 
            unavailable Tibetan and Indian Buddhist texts, and putting this 
            material before us in an objective manner imbued with vibrant 
            personal experience, she has honorably served her mission to 
            encourage us to look again at Tantric Buddhist wisdom which has 
            until now been known to us mainly in its misinformed distortions.