A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

12. Life-Giving Images in Vajrayana Buddhist Ritual

Life-Giving Images in Vajrayana Buddhist Ritual T o discuss women changing ritual and ritual changing women, I will return to a problem that has haunted me for years. This issue concerns the visual forms that are central to Vajrayana Buddhist sadhana meditation -rituals. First, some words about ritual in Buddhism and about which rituals I could comment on as a woman insider discussing how women might change these rituals and be changed by them. As a historian of religions, I am sensitive to the centrality of ritual in religion and in no way sympathetic to the usual Western rationalist disregard for ritual. Nevertheless, both as a religious studies scholar and as a Buddhist, I must begin by saying that ritual is not as central to Buddhism as it is to most other religions, though many colorful rituals have developed in all traditional forms of Buddhism. Any coffee table picture book on Buddhism will quickly dispel the misimpression of many Westerners that Buddhists meditate but do not practice rituals. In fact, the relationship between meditation and ritual itself becomes an interesting question, especially for the Tibetan Vajrayana sadhanas I will be focusing on. However, from my perspective as a Western feminist Buddhist, many Asian traditional rituals are not the appropriate focus for my discussion of how women might transform Buddhist ritual. That is an arena for Asian Buddhist women and feminists. I will confine myself to rituals that I know well and firsthand—rituals in which I have participated for 198 chapter 12 Gross_Ch12 10/17/08 17:44 Page 198 many years. These rituals are definitely Asian; they are practiced in the same way in Tibetan communities as among Western convert communities , except that we Westerners usually perform them in English. The question of whether meditation is a ritual is very interesting. Meditation per se, by which I mean the silent focus upon the breath that most people think of as meditation, is not exactly a ritual. Nevertheless, to the observer, and even to the practitioner, it has some kinship with ritual. One observes people in a very specific posture, often in very precise spatial arrangements vis-à-vis each other and a shrine. Sometimes meditators engage in verbal utterances and predetermined, very precise movements. From the outsider’s point of view, such behavior might well look like ritual, although meditation would be an unusually boring ritual to watch. From the insider’s point of view, however, what counts is the mental state of one-pointed concentration, the calm, abiding, and clear awareness that ideally accompany the verbal utterances and the movements. This emphasis on the mental state of the meditator is what makes meditation only akin to ritual, rather than just another ritual. In ritual, the major emphasis is on the correct performance of the movements, not on the mental state of the ritual performers, even though an important side effect of ritual is social and individual transformation of consciousness .1 Several classical ritual settings will demonstrate this claim. For example, in a traditional Jewish synagogue, it only matters that the service is proceeding correctly; individuals often come and go as they need to and converse with each other during nonessential parts of the service. (In fact, in some situations, women, who previously did not read Hebrew and couldn’t participate in the service fluently, often spent the majority of the time chatting when they infrequently attended synagogue services.) In Vedic-inspired dimensions of Hinduism, correct performance is paramount and, again, individuals may come and go, so long as the ritual goes on. Most decisively, one of the many controversies in early Christianity concerned whether the state of mind of the officiating priest determined the efficacy of the Mass. The winners were those who claimed that it did not, so long as the Mass was correctly celebrated. I am most familiar with Buddhist meditation and ritual in the Vajrayana traditions associated with Tibet. In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are two types of meditation—formless and with form. Formless meditation is the silent focus on the breath discussed above and found in all forms of Buddhism. Meditation “with form,” which is much less well known to the general public, means that not only the mental Images in Vajrayana Buddhist Ritual 199 Gross_Ch12 10/17/08 17:44 Page 199 stability of the meditator is emphasized. This meditation involves many forms—liturgies, visualizations, hand gestures—which means that meditations with...