The Cult of Tara

124 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
LA VA DA DHA), making forty, "possessed of menstrual blood."
These are divided into Means and Wisdom—Emptiness and Bliss
—making eighty, the number of the bodily "secondary signs of
Buddhahood," and for that reason the consonants too are doubled.
Of course, not all texts double the vowels and the consonants, nor
is there any strong agreement upon which produces the moon and
which the "second moon" or "sun." 184
But the basic core of symbolism
is clear: the syllable enters between the semen and the blood,
and the practitioner enters the womb. Then "from the appropriate
seed between the two moons (or the moon and the sun), one contemplates
the transformation into the emblem marked with the seed."
In many of these rituals this emblem is a five-pronged vajra; as the
Clusters of Traditions explains in one place, its five prongs are the
feet, hands, and head of the embryo, and in another place that its
five prongs are the five fingers and toes on each hand and each
foot, and the five sense-organs on the head: "anything, in fact," says
Tsongk'apa, "classified into a group of five." Hevajra's emblem
may be a skull bowl, and that of the Red Slayer of Death a stick:
"accordingly we believe that anything which can symbolize the
development of the body in the womb is permissible."
On the other hand, if the deity "melts" and is "aroused with
song," then the causal Bearer of the Vajra perfected from the five
realizations is like the father and mother; from the entry of the
fcardo-being up to but not including the perfection of the deity's
body, everything is correlated with the state of being in the womb.
Thus the retinue enters into the causal deity and traverses the vajra
path; Abhayakaragupta distinguishes two traditions of interpretation:
one maintains that this descent through the penis into the
womb symbolizes the obscuring with greater degrees of lust in the
bardo as one descends toward a womb; the other maintains that it
serves to symbolize the lust for the Bliss that is the essence of the
Means and Wisdom—the semen and blood—which come from the
future father and mother.
Again, how does the feardo-being enter into the causal deity?
Abhayakaragupta says:
For that same reason the Blessed One expounded intentionally
in the Tantras, teaching to some deities that the sentient being
—the gandharva—enters through the "golden gate," to some
that it enters through the mouth, and to some that it enters "in
another way."