The Cult of Tara

130
MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
certainly a part of the basic intention (many rituals prescribe that
the knowledge being be asked to depart the yogin, who "dwells
steadfastly with the ego of the symbolic being" to apply the power of
the deity upon public nonreality). But in the most profound of the
high rituals, the self-generation ends with the special visualizations
of the Process of Perfection, the "gathering in and arising" that
plunges the deity into a divine Emptiness and allows the now pure
knowledge body to "leap forth" from the Clear Light as the "Innate
Union of the Clear Light and Emptiness."
Thus the answer to the question, "What does the yogin do with
his divinity?" is simply this: he does anything he wishes. He may
control the events of public nonreality with the power of the mantra,
or as a Buddha he may immerse himself in a Buddha's Emptiness,
controlling his own apprehension through the simulacrum of his
divine body. Thus the ritual of Cakrasamvara, whose Process of
Generation we have reviewed above, concludes its section of selfgeneration
with the following Process of Perfection: 188
The vowels and consonants, with five-colored light, radiate forth
from my right nostril, bearing on their tips the deities of the three
circles of the mandala; they purify the triple world and make it
into their own essence; and the entire world—now the same as
those dakas and yoginls, innately divine—enters through my left
nostril and reaches the level of my navel.
Then from the vowels and from the consonants appears a moon
of white and red radiance, and from those dakas and yoginis I see
a white and red HL T
M; and that again becomes the two-armed
Blessed One, Father and Mother doing the sport of lust; and by
the sound of their experience of Spontaneous Bliss, the symbolic
mandala is aroused and satiated with Great Bliss.
From the cremation grounds inward, the entire mandala [including
myself in the center] is gathered in due order into the
Father and Mother at my navel; and those two again dissolve
into light and are retransformed into the moon and its HUM. The
moon dissolves into the HUM, the U vowel into the HA, that into
the head stroke, that into the crescent, that into the dot, and that
dissolves into Pure Sound.
The Pure Sound grows fainter and fainter, until finally I enter
into the inconceivability that is free of all objectification.
This is the Process of Perfection in one of its simplest forms, and we
shall see a very similar contemplation in the ritual service of Tara
given in chapter iii. But the process is not yet finished, for the
practitioner must still arise in the Body of Innate Union, "like a