PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

284Pacific World. . . gazes into unfathomable space, and her body itself is luminous,empty of solidity. She embodies the teachings of emptiness in auniquely Vajrayana way: she is the manifestation of coemergentwisdom, the all-inclusive wisdom generated in meditation. Shecaptures the totality of the practitioner’s mind, bringing bothpoles of attraction and revulsion directly to the path of realization.She cannot be conceptualized or categorized. She stops themind (p. 132).She is the ∂åkin∆ of the charnel ground who, as a witness to death anddecay, embodies the transformational truth of meditations on impermanence.Where much of our thinking around human behavior at suchhorrific sites tends to be of the “fight or flight” school, ∂åkin∆-s are of the“tend and befriend” school. According to tantric lore many ∂åkin∆-s wereborn in the charnel ground or reared there. Simmer-Brown tells the storyof Kalasiddhi, a female infant who was left at the charnel ground with themother who had died giving birth to her, as was the custom when womendied in childbirth where the issue was a female child. The yogin∆ Ma√∂åravå,disguised as a tiger, found this child suckling at her dead mother’s breast,and gave her to suckle her own tiger’s breast milk. Feeding herself and theinfant off of the dead mother’s corpse, the child grew, became a weaver,was initiated into the ma√∂ala of Vajrasattva, and became a ∂åkin∆ herself.Charnel grounds are seen as powerful places of Vajrayåna practicebecause the practitioner may use them to transform terror and fear of deathinto awakening. Simmer-Brown cites Padampa Sangye, Machik Labdron’smentor, as saying, “At first, to be fully convinced of impermanence makesyou take up the dharma, in the middle, it whips up your diligence, and inthe end it brings you to the radiant dharmakaya” (p. 124). In Vajrayånapractice, when the practitioner stays present and maintains disciplinethrough fear and terror, releasing self-cherishing, it is then that Simmer-Brown says that the inner ∂åkin∆ is at work providing nourishment andsupport. The inner ∂åkin∆ is a symbol of transmuting pain and fear.Simmer-Brown points out that coemergent wisdom that arises out of theactivity and experience of the inner ∂åkin∆ is the great bliss of collapseddichotomies. This wisdom is inner, inherent in each of us, the naturalquality of nondual awareness.The Outer Îåkin∆The outer ∂åkin∆ manifests subtly, energetically in the physical bodiesof real live, flesh and bones, men and women. Tibetan Buddhist views ofthe body and embodiment differ in significant ways from those currentlycirculating in biology, medicine, social science, theology, and feministthought in the West. Simmer-Brown explains the view of the human body