The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 99
appearance of awareness. Both portions of nonreality—the external
and the internal, the "sign" and the "seeing"—are projections upon
a screen of defiled Emptiness. In perceiving nonreality, the sign
portion is taken as the basis, and the seeing portion is considered to
be its expression; and this relation is precisely what is reversed in
Tantric contemplation.
The Buddhist Tantras inherited and developed this image of
reversal from the preexisting and general yogic cultus; in the Indie
vernaculars of their mystic songs, these yogins called their contemplations
ujana "going against the current," or ulta "regressive."
Even today, in Bengal, the Bauls sing of themselves: 151
The feeler of feeling, the lover of love,
his rites and his path are reversed;
who knows what he will do next ?
In this yogic tradition, says Mircea Eliade, contemplation is a
complete reversal of human behavior; the yogin subjects himself
to petrified immobility, rhythmic breathing and the stoppage of
breath, fixing of the flowing mind, the "arrest" and even the "return"
of semen: "On every level of human experience, he does the opposite
of what life demands that he do." This "return," this "regression"
implies destruction of the enmos and hence "emergence from time,"
entrance into immortality. And immortality, says Eliade, cannot
be gained except by arresting manifestation: "The symbolism of
the 'opposite' indicates both the post-mortem condition and the
condition of divinity. . . . The 'reversal' of normal behavior sets
the yogin outside of life." 152
But here we see the Buddhist Tantric carrying his inherited
symbolism into the world of events by the reality of his contemplative
image; he reverses the process by which the world appears,
and he becomes its master. Thus the yogin begins his evocation by
reversing the entropy of karma and dissolving nonreality back into
Emptiness; he creates a new reality that he possesses in its essence,
and over which he has complete control. The vivid appearance of
the contemplation is a simulacrum both for the appearance of
awareness in nonreality and for the divine appearance in reality:
here the seeing portion is the basis, and the sign portion becomes
o n
ly its expression. In this new reality—this world of the "Innate
Union of appearance and Emptiness"—the yogin is master, and
he
can control it as he will.