zakti [was vajra]

[Stephen Hodge]

Ven. Tantra wrote:

> Prior to Her 'expansion' into Mahaayaana ritual and
> iconography, is Taaraa not considered a zaktis?
I believe that the consensus view is that Taaraa was of Buddhist
origin from the start so she would not have been called a `sakti I
suppose.  Also as far as I can see, in the Buddhist tantric material I
have read, there is quite a difference between a vidyaa/praj~naa and a
`sakti -- the female component is basically "passive" in Buddhism (the
male is active = upaaya) while a `sakti is, as the word suggests,
"active" through this distinction may have got blurred in later
Buddhist yoginii tantras.

> What exactly is meant by "interpretations that are borne out by
traditional
> commentaries"?
Ooops -- as Harunaga noticed, the sentence should read "...that are
NOT borne out by .."
What I was trying to say was that scholars like Walker have presumably
not read mnay or any of the traditional commentaries -- given that he
is writing about Hinduism one suspects that while he may read Sanskrit
etc he probably does not read Tibetan.  There are a decent number of
tantric commentaries available in Skt but I am only aware of about
three or four of these having even been published in edited form let
alone translated, however the bulk of tantric commentaries, especially
the key older ones have only survived, as far as we know, in Tibetan.
May I suggest, echoing Harunaga, that those who wish to make
statements about Buddhist tantrism etc could do well by first learning
the relevent languages and reading the stuff for themselves rather
than relying on the tiny handful of primary sources available in
English etc translation.
Of course, interpretations in any given traditional commentary may not
be true to the original intention of the text it deals with but given
the cultural distance that exists between ourselves and the basic
tantric texts, I feel that the commentary writers being closer to the
source might have soemthing more useful to say -- especially given the
tradition of initiatory transmisson they would have operated within.
Even then there are well known sub-schools of interpretation within
the commentorial tradition.  For example, in the case of the
Mahaa-vairocana-abhisa.mbodhi-tantra there is a striking difference
between the almost contemporaneous commentaries of Buddhaguhya (in
Tibetan) and `Subhakarasi.mha (in Chinese), and, indeed, they both
allude to variant interpretations.  This is also reflected in the two
translations of the root text in Tibetan and Chinese -- the
interpretation guided the translation.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge