The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 135
insights, visions, supernormal powers, and signs of success, such that
I cannot write them down, they were so many and so extraordinary.
This cascade of contemplative experiences in the Process of Perfection
is the experiential "given" structured by the Tantric texts
and their commentators. This process of refinement was both an
expansion and a selection, for there occured a typically Buddhist
extension of contemplative technique to new areas and an equally
typical schematization of the resultant options. Thus the same
contemplative technique may be used to different ends: "piercing
the vital centers"—the visualization of a HUM moving within the
central channel of the divine and "hollow" body—might serve as
the image to the object of the "mystic heat" and the "four joys," a
gradual approach to the Great Bliss of Emptiness, where the HUM
is simulacrum for the drop of semen, itself homologized to the thought
of enlightenment. But the HUM might also serve as simulacrum
for awareness (the yogin's own or even that of another) and its
motion magically control the transference of that awareness through
the gates of death, to a different body, or directly to a Pure Land;
or the syllable might represent the practitioner's life, and its visualized
immobility—called "planting the magic dagger of life in the
heart"—grant freedom from death: the same visualization and magical
control, but to radically opposite ends.
Again, we find different contemplative exercises and analogies employed
for entering into Emptiness: the divine body may be homologized
to the "illusory" bodies of the dream, a mirror reflection, the
bardo, to gain the "Innate Union of appearance and Emptiness," and
there are further emphases upon different types of "Innate Union,"
a choice of the aspects of Emptiness. Emptiness shines with the
Clear Light, and its experience is Great Bliss, and in the gradual
approach to realization there are different levels of apprehension of
Emptiness, of light, and of joy; the path to enlightenment may
follow the track of any combination, as long as Emptiness is there.
Thus Virupa 195
arranges contemplative experience in a*sequence
of "views" which orders these varied approaches in a hierarchy of
Innate Union; he speaks of "appearance and Emptiness"; "Light
and Emptiness," "Bliss and Emptiness," and the culminating union
of "understanding arid Emptiness." But there is also the possibility
of choice among these paths to enlightenment, granting always that
the final experience includes them all. It is curious, for example,
that though Buddhists and Hindus agree on Bliss as an aspect of