The Cult of Tara

116
MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
Contemplate the "source of all events,"
visualize the Buddha placed therein. . . .
The great Conqueror Vairocana
is born from the syllable of the Dharma realm;
he arrays the Buddhas in place.
The first limb, says Tsongk'apa, "is the contemplation of the
divine mansion, the place of Buddhahood, arisen from Vairocana:
the reason for this is that the body is the residence of the mind:
Vairocana, too, is the essence of the 'aggregate of form' of the
Tathagatas, and so he generates their residential divine mansion."
The second limb is the actual generation of the deity, here called
"diamond lust." The Diamond Pavilion says:
One should contemplate the five aspects,
first visualizing the person,
then radiating the circle of dakinis.
The gandharva enters
and falls; they melt; thinking of them
the goddesses of the quarters arouse it.
Aroused, they draw in the retinue:
on the eyes Lady Delusion and so on,
and the three Diamonds arrayed in the three places.
This then is "diamond lust":
knowledge enters in actuality.
Tsongk'apa glosses this as follows:
In the second limb one generates the causal Father-Mother
Bearer of the Vajra through the five realizations, empowers the
two "secret places" and performs the pride of lust, produces the
goddesses of the retinue and arrays them in place, arouses the
melted deity with song, arises therefrom, empowers the eyes and
so on and absorbs the knowledge being: there is no one who does
not hold that all these are included under the limb of "lust."
Hence all of these—from contemplating the five realizations
which generate the deity who resides in the residence, through the
perfect generation of the symbolic retinue, empowering and absorbing
the knowledge being—is the performance of Vajrasattva,
the pride of his lust, and the production of the retinue from oneself:
this is the second limb.
The reason for subsuming "lust" under Vajrasattva is because
here one emanates the deities of the retinue from the "thought o
enlightenment" [the union of vajra and lotus] of the Father an
u s
Mother, and therefore the two chief deities must perform "l *
and that is held to be Vajrasattva.