JFSR 27.

2 (2011) 85108

APPROPRIATION AND ASSERTION OF THE FEMALE SELF Materials for the Study of the Female Tantric Master Laksmi of Uddiyana . ..
Ulrich Timme Kragh

Starting in the sixth century, a new religious notion of the female gradually emerged in Tantric Buddhism. Although the female was raised to an ideal of transcendence, she nevertheless was subject to an androcentric depiction represented as the males Other. The current study breaks away from the confinement of the implications thereof by turning to female-authored Tantric sources. In the frame of feminist and postmodern thought, this article proposes a way of reading womens writings as expressions of an autonomous female Self. The Dangerous Female Space All women in Uddiyana know how to turn themselves by magical art into .. any form they want; they like flesh and blood and have the power to deprive every creature of its vitality and strength.1 These words of male imagination and awe belong to the Tibetan pilgrim Orgyenpa Rinchen Pal,2 who in the thirThe research presented here was supported by a Korean Research Foundation grant (MEST, KRF-2007-361-AM0046). For an earlier article on Laksmi, examining the history of the Tibetan . translation of her *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, see Ulrich Timme Kragh, On the Making of the Tibetan Translation of Laksmis *Sahajasiddhipaddhati: Bro Lotsa ba Shes rab Grags and His Translation . Endeavors, Indo-Iranian Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 195232. The author wishes to thank Leila Ahmed, Ann Braude, Sangyeob Cha, Amy Hollywood, Janet Gyatso, Karen L. King, and Laura Nasrallah. The article is dedicated to Billie Jo Joy, a great contemporary yogi, artist, and political activist, and to Lotte Kragh, an avant-garde social intellectual and humanist. 1 Giuseppe Tucci, On Swa Historical and Archaeological Notes (Rome: Istituto Italiano per t: lAfrica e lOriente, 1997), 29, 54. 2 The Tibetan spelling for Orgyenpa Rinchen Pal (12301309) is o rgyan pa rin chen dpal.

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teenth century visited the land of Uddiyana to experience firsthand the legend.. ary women there. Uddiyana, which is a pre-Islamic name for the Swat valley .. located just north of the Peshawar plain in modern-day Pakistan,3 had become renowned in Buddhist Tantric literature for the spiritual abilities of its female inhabitants. It was a destination where many famous Tantric adepts of the past had gone to receive meditation instructions and to encounter such women for the sake of spiritual advancement. In Buddhist history, Uddiyana did play a unique role, because it was a lo.. cality where several female Buddhist masters and authoresses appeared in the eighth to tenth centuries, in spite of the fact that nameable female masters otherwise have been rare in ancient and medieval Buddhism. Women had already been allowed the status of professional religious practitioners since the early days of Buddhism, in the fourth to third centuries BCE, when nuns were permitted to join the Buddhist order. However, the nuns were strictly subordinated to the monks,4 and given monastic Buddhisms emphasis on the eradication of desire, the bodies of the opposite sexand in particular the bodies of womenhad been portrayed in the all-male-authored contemplation-manuals as filthy, repulsive, decaying, or decomposing.5 Consequently, Buddhist monasticism not only stratified gender roles within a patriarchal hierarchy but at the same time ingrained an ascetic ideal that suggested a gender performativity other than the sexual. With the rise of Tantric Buddhism in the sixth to seventh centuries CE, a novel Buddhist discourse of gender appeared that seems to have had a particularly strong impact in Uddiyana. The valley had been invaded by the Central .. Asian Huns in the sixth century, which had virtually eradicated the Buddhist monastic culture.6 The ensuing civilization provided a fertile ground for a new form of Buddhism to grow. Tantrism represented a turn away from the earlier emphasis on celibacy and was instead written in a tripartite grammar of sexual3 Concerning the location of Uddiyana, see Alexis Sanderson, The Saiva Exegesis of Kash.. mir, in Mlanges tantriques la mmoire dHlne Brunner, ed. Dominic Goodall and Andr Padoux (Pondicherry: Institut franais de Pondichry; Paris: cole franaise dExtrme-Orient, 2007), 26568. 4 For some of the many studies dealing with the formation of the Buddhist order of nuns and the particular rules applied in order to subordinate nuns to the monks, see the bibliography provided in John S. Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 3rd ed. (Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008), 6768. 5 See Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6 The account by the Chinese pilgrim Xunzng (602/3664), who visited Uddiyana after the .. Hun invasion, attests to the destruction and decline of monasticism in the region. Compare Xunzngs description in Samuel Beal, Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (reprint, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1994), 11935, with Faxians (ca. 320420) description, having visited Uddiyana prior to the Hun invasion, in James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (reprint, .. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Co., 1965), 2829.

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ity. The male was the spiritual instrumentality, the agency of awakening, the means of enlightenment. The female was the spiritual receptivity, the space of awakening, the insight of enlightenment. Tantras goal was their unification, an apophatic dissolution transcending the gendered economy of dualism. Many forms of Tantric articulation became inscribed through this phenomenological syntax: iconographically, in mandalas of male and female deities; bodily, in male .. and female cakras, energies, and channels; and performatively, in secret practices of yoga enacted through Tantric sexual union. In spite of their tantalizing appearance of sexual empowerment for both genders, the male-authored Tantraslike their monastic counterpart emulating the ascetic idealwere nevertheless fixed in an androcentric mind-set. Female Tantric practitioners, viewed as feminine embodiments of insight requiring male worship and seduction, were often represented as goddesses called da s, literally meaning capable of flying or those drumming with the . kini sound of da 7 The use of the word da intimates a male fantasy and fear . k. . kini of the female, casting the feminine divine in a sense of la femme dangereuse, because, outside of Buddhism, the da signified ferocious, carnivore, female . kini attendant-deities linked with the cult of Mother-goddesses. Paraphrasing the words of Adelheid Hermann-Pfandt, the da represented the shadow of . kini the patriarchal Indian ideal of the obedient feminine.8 By referring to their female Tantric partners as da s, the male authors of the Tantras projected . kini such women to be outside the norms of patriarchy, and perhaps also outside the conventional patterns of sexual availability. The da s came to be especially associated with the land of Uddiyana, . kini .. which in the Tantras is presented as a seat, or place of assembly, for yoga-practice.9 A yoga-seat denotes the locus for performance, a feminine space for male agency, reminiscent of the underlying female locality for the entirely male verbalization of the Tantras, the vagina in which the Buddha delivers his Tantric teaching, as is seen in the opening sentence of several major Tantras: Thus I have heardat one time the Buddha stayed in the vagina of the adamantine woman, who is the essence of the body, speech, and mind of all buddhas.10
7 For the former etymology, see Adelheid Hermann-Pfandt, The Good Womans Shadow: Some Aspects of the Dark Nature of Dakinis and Sakinis in Hinduism, in Wild Goddesses in India . and Nepal, ed. Axel Michaels, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), 3970, esp. 42. The latter etymology has been proposed by Stephen Hodge on the Indology List. See in particular his message #19376 of November 13, 1999, in the list archives at http://listserv.liv .ac.uk/archives/indology.html. 8 Hermann-Pfandt, The Good Womans Shadow, 63. 9 See Mark S. G. Dyczkowski, The Inner Pilgrimage of the Tantras: The Sacred Geography of the Kubjika Tantras with Reference to the Bhairava and Kaula Tantras, Journal of the Nepal Re search Center 12 (2001): 43100, esp. 61 and map 9. 10 See, for example, the Hevajratantra in David L. Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 2:2.

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One Tantra states that the da s pervade the worlds, and goes on to list . kini twenty-four da s, who constitute the mandalathe concentrically arranged . kini .. visualization of the meditation practiceassociated with a sacred geography of twenty-four holy sites, one of which is Uddiyana and belonging to the four .. most important yoga-seats.11 Exteriorly, these places form twenty-four sites for the peregrination of Tantric mendicants, while interiorly they mark twenty-four spots for yogic visualization within the body.12 Uddiyana is thus as much a space as it is a place, and is accordingly inti.. mately linked with the male representation of the female as space. As space, however, the female amounts to nothing in herself, possessing no voice of her own. She becomes an expanse to be entered and exited at his will. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray has succinctly described the ontology of this form of discourse by comparing womans status to a thing and an envelope:
If traditionally, and as a mother, woman represents place for man, such a limit means that she becomes a thing. . . . Moreover, the maternalfeminine also serves as an envelope, a container, the starting point from which man limits his things . . . since her status as envelope and as thing(s) has not been interpreted, she remains inseparable from the work or act of man, notably insofar as he defines her and creates his identity with her as his starting point or, correlatively, with this determination of her being.13

As man determines the being of the female, he takes that which has no place of its own and makes it his own. Within the entire androcentric structure, the female appears to be nothing but a male appropriation of the female, and in this regard appropriation becomes a fundamental analytical term. Male Memories, Female Departure To appropriate is the act of taking possession of, like the squatters who seize and occupy abandoned spaces for community use. To appropriate also means to assign new purpose to properties or ideas by placing something in a new context and thereby giving it new meaning. In the visual arts, the term appropriation is used of Pablo Picassos application of newspaper clippings in his 1912 painting Composition with Fruit, Guitar and Glass. It is also used of Marcel Duchamps 1917 art exhibition of a urinal on which he had added the
11 See David B. Gray, The Cakrasamvara Tantra (The Discourse of Sri Heruka): A Study and Annotated Translation (New York: The American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York, Columbia Universitys Center for Buddhist Studies, and Tibet House U.S., 2007), 32932. 12 See Dyczkowski, The Inner Pilgrimage of the Tantras, 45. 13 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10.

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signature R. Mutt, or his 1919 Mona Lisa postcard on which he had drawn a moustache. Appropriation is to render something ambiguous, like Andy Warhols painting of the Campbells Tomato Soup can, or Roy Lichtensteins appropriation of styles and motifs from comic books. In music, appropriation is the use of borrowed elements, like Edward Griegs adaptation of Norwegian folk-melodies in his classical compositions, or the modern use of sampling in hip-hop and electronica. In anthropology, appropriation is one groups absorption of characteristics originally belonging to another group, thereby revaluing and often devaluing its symbolization, like the mass-marketing of alternative lifestyles, the commercialization of punk fashion, or the Western popularity of Chinese tattoos. In legal-economic terms, appropriation means setting aside by prescribing to a specific purpose, such as the annual budget that the U.S. Congress passes in the form of an appropriations bill, whereby the available assets are allocated in a value-structure of priorities. The male appropriation of the female is likewise an act of taking possession of, placing the female in his own context and ascribing her new meaning. He revalues and devalues the feminine, circumscribing her in a strictly male sense of worth and utility. He sets her aside, allocating her worth, expropriating her for his own consumption. This was a point underlined by June Campbell in her book Traveller in Space, which has provided one of the few feminist critiques of Tantric Buddhism baring the dissymmetries of its male and female sexual roles:
Furthermore, in the context of the social and iconographical structures, the exclusion of the female in worldly terms, and the appropriation of the female in transcendental terms, can only be seen to be of benefit to the ruling classthe priesthood of incarnate lamasand the lineage system.14

In this passage, Campbell discusses the religious politics of gender. Although appropriation is here used in a nontechnical, nonphilosophical sense, it nevertheless sheds light on the intrinsic debasement of designating the female as transcendence. The feminine is at once exalted and written off. However, mans attempt to render the female utterly transcendent is inhibited, as he can never reach the point where this is accomplished. In reality, he is ceaselessly confronted with women in mundane terms and must perpetually relate to the manifest female. Hence, it must be kept in mind that the notion of the female as space is a male abstraction that is in constant need of renegotiation. The male fantasy of the female is disrupted by her being-in-the-world, and he cannot successfully reduce the feminine to the abstract, in view of the fact

14 June Campbell, Traveller in Space: Gender, Identity and Tibetan Buddhism, rev. ed. (London: Continuum, 2002), 157.

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that he must relate to and reappropriate the women he encounters in history and the present. The hitherto most comprehensive study of the existence of female adepts in the history of Tantric Buddhism is Miranda Shaws monograph Passionate Enlightenment, which demonstrates that the pertinent literature de facto contains numerous traces evidencing the active participation of women and their bearing on male figures.15 This is also paralleled in the historical study of many other religions, such as the medieval Christian womens movement of beguine female mystics, who had a subtle yet significant influence on the authoritative tracts of the male mystics, like Meister Eckhart and others, as argued by Herbert Grundmann and elaborated by Amy Hollywood.16 Similarly, the efforts and writings by women in the formative period of Tantric Buddhism had to be reckoned with. Particularly, in medieval India, the Tantric community of Uddiyana in.. cluded several female teachers and authoresses. Among them, Laksmi became . the most outstanding individual, whose stature reverberates to the modern time.17 Believed to hail from the ruling family of Uddiyana, her activities as a .. guru and commentator date back to the ninth or tenth century, and three works attributed to her are still extant.18 Her first text is a little treatise on Tantric practice entitled The Accomplishment of Non-Duality.19 Due to its value, it was later included in a prin15 Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For an unfounded objection to Shaws view, claiming that medieval Indian women did not participate in Buddhism and most particularly in esoteric Buddhism, see Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 9198. 16 Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 45. 17 The form Laksmi is how her name appears in the colophons of her major texts, including . the Advayasiddhi and the *Sahajasiddhapaddhati. A longer form of her name, Laksmimkara, occurs . . in the colophon of one of her texts, namely the Vajrayogini sa dhana. In later Indian and Tibetan sources, she is invariably known by the longer form of her name. For the sake of simplicity, I shall here only refer to her by the shorter form of her name, Laksmi, regardless of which form is used in . the source in question. 18 Aside from the writings by Laksmi, there is also one more text by another female teacher . from Uddiya na, named Da kini Vajravati. Her text is entitled *Uddiya ra dhana, .. . . nakramata devi sa . Method for Accomplishing the Goddess Tara According to the Uddiyana-Procedure, and is pre .. served in a Tibetan translation (Peking 2582, Derge 1711), consisting of four folios. It is a meditation-ritual on the goddess Ta ra . There is still no modern translation into English or any other language. 19 In Sanskrit, *Advayasiddhi. It is extant in Sanskrit and in a Tibetan translation (Peking 3064, Derge 2220). For the Sanskrit text, see Malati J. Shengde, Advayasiddhi (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1964), 1523; and Samdhong Rinpoche and Vrajvallabh Dwivedi, Guhya di-As. asiddhi.t . Sangraha (Sarnath: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1987), 15964. For English translations, see Shengde, Advayasiddhi, 2430; and Ramprasad Mishra, Advayasiddhi: The Tantric View of Laksmimkara (Delhi: Kant Publications, 1993), 3136. . .

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cipal Tibetan anthology of Indian Tantric treatises.20 Her second writing, entitled Method for Accomplishing Vajrayogini, is a manual on the goddess Chinnamunda Vajrava hi.21 It seems that Laksmi was the originator of this ra .. . goddess practice, which later became the basis for the Hindu goddess Chinnamasta 22 Her third work, entitled Guide to the Accomplishment of the Inborn, . is an extensive philosophical commentary written on the basis of a short tract attributed to her elder brother, King Indrabuddhi.23 All these writings were preserved by later traditions and are today found partly in the Sanskrit heritage of Nepalese Buddhism and fully in the Tibetan canon. In the context of Tantric Buddhism, the legacy of every female master has invariably been transmitted to posterity through a male reception. In this process, past women became embedded in an androcentric perception of history, subject to male appraisal, and often downplayed to relative insignificance. The male appropriation of the past, which is meant to record the saga of his own subjectivity, is an appropriation of the very performativity of the female gender, because the female spiritual experience is recast in male memories and retold by male voices. The issue of the male reception of womens religious lives has previously been covered in the volume Gendered Voices, edited by Catherine M. Mooney, which discusses the portrayal of female Christian saints in male-authored vitae. The vitae of several medieval female saints were narrated in biographies written by men, and the study shows that the male authors were not just male observers but male interpreters.24 In the case of Laksmi, the most popular and well-known version of her . life-story is found in the twelfth-century North Indian anthology of Tantric hagiographies called Stories of the Eighty-four Great Adepts, written by the male author Abhayadattasri.25 His anthology incorporates the lives of four women, wherein marriage forms the common denominator. His narration of the female
20 This anthology is known in Tibetan as grub pa sde brgyad, meaning The Eight Accomplishment Works. See Bu ston Rin chen grub, Collected Works, vol. la, bstan gyur gyi dkar chag yid bzhin nor bu dbang gi rgyal poi phreng ba (Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, W1934), folio 47a3. . See also Samdhong and Dwivedi, Guhya di-As. asiddhi-Sangraha. .t 21 In Sanskrit, *Vajrayogini sa dhana. It is preserved in a Tibetan translation (Peking 2255, Derge 1547). There is a variant of the same text entitled *Chinnamundavajrava hi sa ra dhana, .. Method for Accomplishing the Severed-Headed Vajrava ra hi, where the authoressess name is given as *Laksmimati Devi. That text, too, is only preserved in a Tibetan translation (Peking 2262, . Derge 1554). Neither text has yet been translated into a modern language. 22 See Elisabeth Anne Benard, Chinnamasta The Aweful Buddhist and Hindu Tantric God: dess (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1994), 1215. 23 In Sanskrit, *Sahajasiddhipaddhati. It is likewise preserved only in a Tibetan translation (Peking 3108, Derge 2261). There is still no modern translation. 24 Catherine M. Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 25 *Caturas ti-siddha-pravrtti, extant in a Tibetan translation (Peking 5091). English translai . tions are by James B. Robinson, Buddhas Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas (Berkeley:

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saint Manibhadra is the tale of a woman who achieved enlightenment while . devotedly serving her husband. His biography of Mekhala and Kanakhala from Devikota describes how these sisters overcame the hardship of bad marriages . through their inner religious devotion.26 Abhayadattasris rendering of Laksmis story likewise hinges on the issue . of marriage. As a young princess at the Uddiyana court, Laksmi received many .. . Tantric teachings. At some point, her brother, the king, decided to marry her to a prince of another kingdom. When Laksmi arrived at her new home before . the wedding, she realized that her husband-to-be was a non-Buddhist who enjoyed hunting, which went against the Buddhist ethical principle of nonharm to animals. Laksmi therefore decided to escape the marriage by feigning insanity . and thereby fled from the palace to devote herself to her religious practice. The following is a translation27 of Abhayadattasris rendition:
The story of Guru Laksmi: [She] was the sister of Indrabodhi, the king . of the city of Sambola with 250,000 inhabitants in the land of Uddiyana. . .. Since her childhood she displayed many good qualities of having an awakened potential. She listened to numerous [Buddhist] teachings from the great adept Kambala and others, and also knew many Tantras. Yet she had been chosen as the Sambola-citys bride for the son of Jalen. . dra, the king of Lanka, and her brother King Indrabodhi had agreed to this. As the escort arrived to take her there, [King Jalendra] sent [her a dowry of] innumerable treasures accompanied by many persons familiar . with Buddhism. When she arrived at the city of Lankapura, she was told that there was a bad astrological constellation and while she waited [for some days] to be invited into the capital, she noticed that all the people . [of Lanka] were non-Buddhists, which made her feel downhearted. At that point, the prince returned from a hunt, his retinue carrying a lot of meat, and as they passed her going down [to the city], the princess asked: Who are all these people, and why have they killed [the animals]? Where have they come from and what is this? [Someone] told her, They went hunting. They were sent out by your husband, the king, to kill deer, and just like when someone speaks of food when one has a full stomach, she felt completely repulsed. She thought to herself, My brother is a king who protects the [Buddhist] religion, but now he is giving me to such barbaric persons, and she fainted. When she came to, she gave her wealth to the people of that city, returned the jewelry [of her dowry] to the court, and sent her attendants back home. She ordered that she would see no one for the following ten days, and then went
Dharma Publishing, 1979); and by Keith Dowman, Masters of Maha mudra Songs and Histories of the Eighty-Four Buddhist Siddhas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). 26 See Dowman, Masters of Maha mudra 31321. , 27 Translated from the Tibetan text in the Narthang Tanjur, rgyud grel, vol. lu, folios 62a3 63a5 (pp. 12325); and Golden Manuscript Tanjur, rgyud grel, vol. lu, folios 99b1100a2 (pp. 196 99). For another English translation, see Dowman, Masters of Maha mudra 37275. ,

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into a room. She smeared her body with oil and charcoal, destroyed her hair, stripped naked, and remained there acting insane, all the while not wavering from the innermost meaning. The king of that [city] was overwhelmed with despair and made his physicians and so forth prescribe her medicines, but she furiously threatened anyone approaching her to beat them and knock them over. They sent a messenger to her brother, but he remained at ease thinking that his sister had reached the sense of aversion with samsa From then on, the princess remained in the aus. ra. . terity of madness; she ate the leftovers of food in Lankapura and slept in a cremation ground, while remaining in the experience of the innermost meaning. After seven years she attained accomplishment, and when a sweeper from the kings court showed respect to her, she imparted her religious instruction to him and he achieved good qualities. At the time when the sweeper still was the only one who knew her qualities, King Jalendra went out on a hunt accompanied by his court. Forgetting the time, evening fell, and the king went to sleep out there. Having left that place, he lost the road. When he could not make it home the following evening, he had no place to camp. He came upon the cave where Laksmi was living, and wondering how this crazy woman . was doing, he went to look. He saw Laksmi sitting in the cave with a . luminous light shining on her, surrounded on all sides by innumerous celestial girls worshipping her. With this sight, genuine faith arose in him. He stayed there for the night and went to the city the following day. Later he returned to the cave and bowed down in front of her. She asked him, Why do you show respect to a woman like me? I request your religious instruction, he said. To this, she stated: Well, all sentient beings who dwell in samsa suffer without the slightest hap. ra piness. Even gods and humans, the most fortunate of beings, are struck by birth, aging, sickness, and death. In the three lower worlds,28 there is nothing but misery. They eat each other, are always afflicted by hunger, and their suffering due to heat and cold is endless. For this reason, the king should strive for the happiness of liberation. Having said this, she added: You are not my student. A sweeper at your own royal court is a student of mine, who has achieved accomplishment. He will be your spiritual teacher. But I have many sweepers, the king said, How will I know which one? You can recognize him by the sign that he is the one who having finished cleaning gives food and drink to sentient beings. The king then observed his sweepers and called for the one who acted in this manner. He placed the sweeper on the throne, prostrated before him, and requested his religious instruction. The sweeper gave him initiation transferring blessing and taught him the generation and completion stages of the Vajravarahi goddess practice. After the sweeper . and the princess had displayed [this] miracle in Lankapura, they went

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28

The three lower worlds are the rebirths as an animal, hungry ghost, or hell-being.

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to the celestial abode in their very own bodies. The end of the story of Guru Laksmi. .

In Abhayadattasris version, Laksmis escape from marriage by feigning in . sanity marks the dramatic climax, while the kings encounter with her in the no-mans land and his subsequent conversion constitutes the plots resolution. Abhayadattasri thereby makes the conflict of marriage versus female spirituality the storys central theme, whichas it turns outis the motif of all his womenbiographies. A similar male emphasis on women and marriage is also known from medieval male portrayals of Christian female saints, where nuptial imagery often was used by the male biographers to describe the soul and in extension thereof also the female mystics as the bride or wife of Christ.29 Unlike his Christian counterparts, however, Abhayadattasri does not portray marriage in inner spiritual terms, but casts it in a secular sense as something obstructing female religiosity. Such male retellings of womens vitae render the feminine primarily in terms of her relationship to himself, as a breakaway from her marital submission, which fascinates him. By characterizing her quest as socially extreme, requiring insane behavior to be tolerated, the male interpreter dramatizes her spirituality as being outside regular social bounds and consequently nearly impossible to emulate. Female Other, Female Self Appropriation takes over something and gives it new meaning by placing it in a new context, but this still leaves the original intact in its own setting, just like Andy Warhols painting of the Campbells tomato soup can does not remove the actual cans from the supermarket shelves. Female Self-representation exposed in womens own writings differs from the male imagination, and there is accordingly a feminine dimension that still has not been disclosed. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray indicates an opening, a possibility, for female subjectivity by speaking of the need for both genders to envelop each other.30 At the same time, however, she argues that woman cannot become a container for herself, and formulates the female only as the males Other.31 The consequence is that Irigaray seems to leave little room for an independent female Self. While she briefly mentions the necessity for woman to find herself

29 See Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 8485, 145, 150, 152. See also Catherine M. Mooney, Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity, in Mooney, Gendered Voices, 115, esp. 1011. 30 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 3940, 9293. 31 Ibid., 41, 8788.

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in her own images deposited in history instead of on the basis of the history of man, she does not elaborate the nature of this project.32 In light of this, to allow for the possibility of a female Self, it is rudimentarily indispensable to move away from the insistence by French feminism, as formulated by Simone de Beauvoir and embraced by Irigaray, that the female being invariably and always is the males Other.33 An ontology followed by a readingstrategy that suspends the female being under that of the male may account for the male appropriation of the female, but cannot bring out the females own being in her world rather than in his world. Hence, it is vital to understand female subjectivity in a way that transcends its imposed mode of gender: a subjectivity of Self-representation rather than an Other-representation of the Self. To accomplish this, a new hermeneutics of the female Self must be soughta hermeneutics that rests on an adequate philosophical model of subjectivity and a corresponding literary method highlighting the significance of female writing from within its own horizon of interpretation. The former must address the females being-in-the-world on her own terms and her relationship with the Other made possible by this being. The latter must disclose her Self-representation in female-authored religious and biographical literature as well as the dialogue in which she participates with others, whether male or female. Since the SelfOther alterity makes possible two interchanges from the Other to the Self and from the Self to the Other, the hermeneutical approach must account for both. In the movement flowing from the Other to the Self, an ontology of the female Self may be shown by analyzing her literary Self-representation. In the movement flowing from the Self for the Other, a sociology of the female Self may be revealed by determining her literary Self-genderization. From the Other Philosophically, although Self-representation is directed toward the Other, the articulation of the Self depends on the Other. In an ontology of alterity, the Self is nothing in itself, but owes its being solely to its relation to the Other. Selfrepresentation therefore also describes a movement from the Other to the Self, in that the Self takes on chosen properties of the Other in order to articulate its own being. This, however, does not mean that a female Self unalterably is defined in relation to a male Other. Rather, woman may constitute her Self in relation to any kind of Other, whether male, female, or otherwise. This relation is born by her being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world means being-in-the-body. It is through embodiment
Ibid., 910. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), of Le Deuxime Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
32 33

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that first consciousness arises, then signification, followed by the subjectivity of the Self. Embodiment as the basis for the Selfs encounter with the Other can, to be begin with, be interpreted through Emmanuel Levinass notion of la exposition, exposure. For Levinas, the corporeality of the Self, its existence through the body, sets the Self in a relation to the Other, even before the Self has come into being. Exposure means vulnerability, and it is through the bodily experience of vulnerability that subjectivity arises.34 The bodys exposure to the Other is given signification through identification and grasping. Levinas says of this process:
In the relationship with beings, which we call consciousness, we identify beings across the dispersion of silhouettes in which they appear; in selfconsciousness we identify ourselves across the multiplicity of temporal phases. . . . To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said.35

Consciousness of the Self thus emerges in its relationship to the Other, through the ontological grip of linguistically identifying the spatial appearance of the Other and the temporal appearance of the Self. In this way, Levinass concept of exposure allows for an understanding of the Self as grasping, which is not unlike the Buddhist philosophical idea of the Self as a tmagra ha, self-grasping, and of consciousness as gra haka, the grasper or subject, existing only relatively to the gra hya, the object that is grasped. To speak of a Self is consequently to speak of grasping. Yet, Levinass and Buddhist notions of grasping require a further nuance to be applicable to a gender analysis. To this end, the term grasping needs to be substituted with appropriation. In other words, Self means to appropriate, for to say that the constitution of the female Self involves grasping is the same as saying that the female appropriates characteristics of an Other to constitute her Self. Appropriation is consequently not purely a male activity inflicted on the female Other, but it is the fundamental process by which any Self, male or female, comes into being. To explain the females being-in-the-world is therefore to speak of female appropriation. Literarily, uncovering the female Self requires a methodological move, away from the male-authored sources providing only male representations of the female over to female-authored sources expressing womens own subjectivity. It is in the latter that the hermeneutics of the female Self can reveal how her Self is pronounced through a mode of Other-appropriation. Excessive reliance on male-authored sources is a universal problem in the existing work on women in Buddhist Tantra. This has earlier been pointed out
34 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 5456, 6870, 77. 35 Ibid., 99.

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by Danielle Lefebvre in relation to Miranda Shaws Passionate Enlightenment, when she argued that Shaws evidence for the presence of female Tantric masters was based primarily on sources that might as well be read as only providing a male objectification of the female.36 It is, verily, an insight that applies to the majority of modern studies on women in Buddhism. The problem ought to be avoided first by recognizing and critically assessing the male representation of the female in male-authored sources using what Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza calls a hermeneutics of suspicion.37 The most important task, however, would be to rely chiefly on female-authored sources, also including pseudepigrapha attributed to women as well as sources written in a female voice, to interpret the female Self-representation within the Tantric tradition. In her own writings, Laksmi produces a self-image that constitutes her lit. erary subjectivity. She presents herself as a highly learned and capable Buddhist master, a guru commanding male readers, and a holder of a religious lineage. Historically, these are all roles that predominantly have been reserved for men in the Buddhist tradition. In The Accomplishment of Non-Duality, she gives a series of normative instructions on religious behavior to male yogis. In her large philosophical commentary Guide to the Accomplishment of the Inborn, she validates her explanations on the highest nature of the mind with quotations from the Sandhivya karana-, Hevajra-, and Cakrasamvara-tantras, thereby revealing . . her erudition in Buddhist scripture.38 In the same work, she also sanctions her religious authority by invoking the Tantric lineage to which she belongs and from within which she writes. This she accomplishes by describing her lineage through a series of short biographies of her religious ancestors, disclosing the presence of a unique female heritage.39 The first human figure in her spiritual ancestry is the female master Lalita Devi, who, accompanied by a retinue of five hundred women, re ceived Tantric instruction from a magical apparition of the male deity Vajrapani, . where after Lalita became the guru for Viravajra, the king of Uddiyana. From .. Lalita, the lineage continued with ten subsequent members, two of whom like wise were women. There is the story of the female bar-owner Sahajavajra, who received teachings from the male master Padmavajra and became a guru her36 Danielle Jean Lefebvre, Conceptualizations of Gender in Buddhist Tantra (MA thesis, University of Alberta, 2003), 1152, 8182; see also Danielle Jean Lefebvre, The Challenge of Defining a Womans Tantric History, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 38, no. 2 (2009), 24762, esp. 25354, 25859. 37 For the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 27, 53, 5762, 17778, and Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 17577. 38 *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folios 4a, 14b, and 19b. 39 Ibid., folios 6a14a.

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self for a male weaver named Anandavajra. There is the tale of the priest-wife Vajravati Brahman , who obtained teachings from Anandavajra and bestowed .i them on her male disciple, the barber Siddhavajra.40 Having told the vitae of her eleven predecessors, Laksmi narrates her own life-story,41 first as part of the . story of her brother Indrabuddhi, followed by a her own vita in brief:
The ruler Indrabuddhi42 had become very distracted by the riches of the kingdom and I, Laksmi, therefore instructed him to renounce the riches . of the kingdom and become a sakya-monk.43 He then abandoned the riches of the kingdom, as if they were drops of spittle, took ordination as a fully ordained monk, donned in good manner the religious robes dyed with dregs of dye, and studied perfectly with the preceptors and instructors. Nevertheless, the ministers, priests and so forth still honored and followed the king around, and were therefore an obstacle to his practice of goodness. At that time, I was staying at the place called Sri Parvata,44 when a voice resounded in the sky, saying: Look, Laksmi! Look at the ruler! Look at [your] elder brother, the . ruler, the lord of men! The ruler is still obstructed [in his] yoga by the riches of the kingdom. I immediately went to the glorious land of Uddiyana, to where the ruler.. monk was. Unbeknownst to others, he bowed down to my feet and said, Oh, dear Laksmi, strewing flowers with joy in his face. I then said . to him: Listen, Indrabuddhi, you must give up completely the situation, whichdue to the riches of the kingdomhas led you into the great abyss of samsa Although I instructed you to take up the life of . ra. a monk, why is it that you still have not given this up in spite of having become a monk? The monk then said to me: Alas, little sister, although I abandoned the kingdom, as if it was a drop of spittle, now this large group of men follow me aroundplease tell me, what should I do in order to reach spiritual accomplishment! I then instructed him: Go to
40 As for Vajravati Brahman, she is probably the same Vajravati who authored the extant text .i mentioned in footnote 18. 41 Translated from the Tibetan text in the Derge Tanjur 2261, folios 12a612b7, 13b714a3, Narthang Tanjur, rgyud grel, vol. tsi, folios 13a213b3 and 14b314b5. 42 In the Tibetan translation, the name of this king is consistently given as dbang poi blo, which would correspond to Sanskrit *Indrabuddhi, but the name is in other texts usually given as Indrabhu the famous Tantric king of Uddiyana, of whom many stories are told, and there may also ti, .. have been several kings by this name. 43 That is, a Buddhist monk following in the steps of the founder of Buddhism, Sakyamuni. 44 Sri Parvata, meaning Glorious Mountain, is a famous hermitage, and may be the name of several different locations. In the story of the great Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna, Sri Parvata is a mountain in South India, where he spent his last days. Sri Parvata was also the abode of the Tantric master Saraha, who hailed from the Bengal area in East India. In the current story, it might be the name of a place in or near Uddiyana. ..

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the cremation ground and focus your mind on that-ness45! The monk took my advice to heart. Fearing that the preceptor and the monastic community might cause obstacles for him in the cremation ground, he rose at midnight and went to where the preceptor, instructors and so forth were resting in deep sleep. There, he touched [his head] to their feet so gently that they could not feel it, and then went to the cremation ground, free from [any] temple, where he lived focusing his mind on that-ness. . . . 46 In a similar way, I too sought this meditation of the inborn, the entry to the domains of all buddhas, unfathomable, unobstructed, called the repository of the sky-treasure, which causes realization of the mind-stream of all sentient beings. I heard that the yogi Cittavajra was an expert in the nature of this meditation and went to him. I then served respectfully at the feet of this supreme yogi for several years, where after he finally granted me this meditation. I focused my mind [on it] on Sri Parvata and actualized it. I then taught the ruler Indrabuddhi in various ways, leading him to realization. Having been freed from the riches of the kingdom, he actualized it by relying on47 the cremation ground.

99

Laksmis autobiographical portrayal is entirely different from Abhayadattasris . later rendition. Her story makes no mention of marriage, and instead emphasizes her own enterprise to become a Tantric master and her subsequent activities and authority as the guru of her elder brother, the king of Uddiyana. Her .. Self-representation thus offers another model of female sanctity than the one found in Abhayadattasris male sketch and may be understood as an instance of female appropriation. Her literary Self is constructed through her appropriation of the Buddhist tradition to which she belongsits discourse, vocabulary, and rhetoricand is in the biography validated by her religious heritage. In consequence, Laksmis appropriation describes a movement from Other to Self, . in that her Self takes on properties of the Other, which here is the Buddhist tradition, and makes them her own in order to consolidate her subjectivity.

45 That-ness (Skt. tattva, Tib. de nyid) is an Indian word for truth, the absolute, ultimate reality, the nature of the mind. 46 This first part of Indrabuddhis story is followed by a longer segment giving the remainder of Indrabuddhis vita, which does not involve Laksmi, followed by the stories of two male mas. ters named Sarvajagannatha and Cittavajra. The latter was Laksmis own teacher. In the piece that . now follows, Laksmi tells her own life-story, which chronologically precedes the above story of . Indrabuddhi. 47 Or, living in.

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The female Self-representation also gives rise to a second movement, flowing from her Self to the Other. Her Self does not remain silent in its own appropriated being but reaches beyond itself through its verbalized expression. She exists not only from the Other but also for the Other. While appropriation is the mode whereby the adopted Self is made, its assertionthat is, its confident, authoritative Self-expressionis the creative interchange through which the Selfs meaning and value unfold. Comparably, in Duchamps postcard, his use of Mona Lisa is a plagiarized appropriation, but the added moustache is his own innovation, thereby asserting a new connotation. Philosophically, significance is determined by Self-assertion. There exists no other value for assessing the Self, because what is apart from its expression does not pertain to Self-representation. Such declarations inevitably remain Other-representations, merely derived intertextually through appropriation between one discourse and another. In other words, Self-signification emerges only from within the intra-textuality of its own assertion. Given its radical intra-textual determinability, the signification of the Self is essentially not circumscribed by any outer limit and can accordingly be forever supplemented and substituted. Its boundless possibilities may, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, be described as play, since it has no fixed point of reference, no center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.48 Value emanates from the Self-expressions own flow of signification, an endless play of reciprocal meanings, wherein there are only differences without positive terms.49 Derridas concept of play as a sheer decentering of discourse is parallel to the Buddhist notion of lalita, display. In Buddhism, this word is used to express the paradox of acting willfully for the benefit of others with full awareness of the nonexistence of an independent Self or Other, hence also eroding the notion of action itself as a veritable interchange between the two. For instance, the acts of the Buddha are referred to as such in a major male-authored Buddha-hagiography entitled Lalitavistara, The Grand Display. A similar usage occurs in a female-authored source, when Laksmi in her Guide to the Accomplishment of . the Inborn explains the connotation of the female saint Lalitas name, meaning playful, by saying: Being playful means that she performs a display of actions to benefit the world, a great wave of bodily and verbal activities.50
48 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 289. Moreover, for Gadamers discussion of play as a movement not predefined by a subject, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 10134. 49 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 120, original emphasis. 50 *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folio 6a.

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Still, for these notions of play and display to be useful for feminist theory, they need to be linked to the issue of the Selfs gender-signification. Female assertion signifies a genderization, here referring to the Self-expression of a gender role, which is play, because it is solely determinable by its own assertion and hence deliberate. Like Duchamps moustache intentionally genderizes Mona Lisas femininity in male terms, an authoress writing from within a predominantly male tradition may genderize that heritage in female terms. To consider female assertion to be genderizing is linked with, but not identical to, Judith Butlers notion of gender performativity. While Butler, using the more passive term gendering, considers it to be a fundamental aspect of subjectivity, she does not admit gendering as a deliberate Self-expression:
Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the I neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves. . . . The activity of this gendering cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or expression, a willful appropriation, and it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition. In this sense, the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the human.51

Butlers refusal of a preexisting Self does not stand in contradiction to the notion of assertion as a play of signification having no external, preexisting center of reference. Unlike Butlers thesis, however, this does not need to lead to a denial of deliberation, which would make gender a value passively imposed upon the person. The necessity of considering deliberation to be essential is particularly true for the study of literary selves having neither body nor social upbringing as imposing factors. Rather, assertion always entails an intentional purpose that genderizes the Self in its social relation to the Other. A purpose requires no preexisting agent to be significant, but only an outcome. Analogously, Duchamp cannot be said to exist as an artist prior to his artistic oeuvre, but the effect of his creative deliberation is nevertheless that his postcard fulfills the purpose of suggesting a regenderized signification of Mona Lisa to the spectator. Therefore, even though no Self exists apart from its own expression, its assertion involves a deliberate genderization that is determinable through the specific value it generates for the Other. Since value arises through the Selfs relation to the Other, genderization is not only a social but also an ethical issue. The appropriated Self is shaped in response to its exposure, making appropriation an act of taking or receiving. Yet, in the view of Levinas, the Self is not only exposed, but it simultaneously
51 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7.

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exists in proximity to the Other, with a closeness allowing the Self to sense the Others vulnerability, which, for Levinas, demands a strict responsibility for the Self to care.52 This is not unlike Irigarays metaphor of the need for the female and male to envelop each other. As an outcome of proximity, the Selfs assertion is thus an act of giving. Literarily, an authoress aims her words at the Other, which here signifies her readers, and this creative assertion is what gives signification to her Self. The literary study of female Self-representation must therefore also consider the significance of female assertion and the value it generates for the Other. An authoress is not a woman first, who consequently writes as a woman. Her femininity only comes to be through the play of her own genderized expression, revealed by looking at the textual passages of her writings exhibiting genderizing values. The ensuing significance, in turn, needs to be critically assessed in feminist terms, discerning whether it verily is Self- and Other-empowering. Laksmis Method for Accomplishing Vajrayogini begins with a verse of sup . plication to the goddess, who is described as the eminent mother, the seed for the world, who cares for all beings.53 A similar perception of womanhood is conveyed by the imaginative steps of the meditation that follows. Emphasizing a female origin of everything, the meditator begins by visualizing the naked goddess within his or her own body, standing in dance below the navel, inside a hollow tetrahedron with a downward-facing vertex called the source of things, which represents the womb. She is flanked by two attendant goddesses, one standing on each side, insinuating an alterity between the central goddess and a double female Other. In a highly dramatic sequence signifying ego-transcendence, the central goddess decapitates herself using a knife she wields in her right hand, but continues to stand while holding her own severed head in her left hand. From her open neck, three nourishing streams of blood spout out, flowing into the mouth of her own severed head as well as into the mouths of the two attending goddesses, thereby displaying an activity flowing from the transcendent Self to the female Others. After several ritualistic steps, Laksmi ends the manual by indicating the . outer circumstances for its practice: the meditation should be performed in a solitary place, such as in the wilderness, at a river confluence, in a cremation ground, beneath a tree, or in a temple devoted to a god or mother-goddess.54 Moreover, it is said that the practitioner should be naked with loose hair, must maintain silence, and should let go of all apprehension.55 The gender of the practitioner is not specified. Nonetheless, given that the manual was composed
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 7581, 8389. *Vajrayoginisa dhana, Derge 1547, folio 195b. 54 For a partial scriptural parallel to this list of places, see Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra, 1:63 (verse I.vi.6), 2:18. 55 *Vajrayoginisa dhana, Derge 1547, folio 196a.
52 53

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by a woman and later passed on through a male reception, the practice may be assumed to have been performed not only by male yogis but also by female Tantrikas. Its underlying assertion is an emphasis on a female origin of existence entailing a goal of ego-transcendence resulting in nurture of a female Other. On that account, unlike many other Tantric meditations, this manual does not stress a male-female alterity.56 In Laksmis The Accomplishment of Non-Duality, the authoress provides . a series of brief injunctions for Tantric practice. She directs the yogi to shun village customs, avoid mere outer worship, and not to engage in austerities, but instead to pursue the inner practices of Tantric offerings and sexual yoga. Since some of her verses paraphrase the Hevajratantra, a comparison with this anonymous but most probably male-authored scripture is in order. Unlike the Tantras instruction for the male adept to find a young and pretty woman for the performance of the sexual practice,57 Laksmi enjoins him to have the highest . respect for the female gender in general and to choose a socially low or shunned woman as his partner:
[The adept] should always worship crippled women, forsaken women, craftswomen, and outcast women. . . . [He] can have no dislike for a woman from any caste, for she is truly Divine Insight dwelling mundanely within a body.58

Though Laksmi employs the Tantric argument that women represent insight, . she does not allow this transcendent connotation to mean that women can be written off as other-worldly, because she declares women from all social castes to be this-worldly embodiments of Bhagavati Praja, the goddess of insight. Her exhortation to seek a socially less attractive partner is, on the one hand, surely intended for the sake of overcoming any selfish fastidiousness on the part of the male adept. On the other hand, it concurrently may imply her eagerness to welcome such women into the Tantric fold, given the fact that Tantra obligates the male adept to provide the pertinent religious instructions to his female consort before he may perform the sexual rite with her.59 The Guide to the Accomplishment of the Inborn contains Laksmis most .
56 The related question of whether the female-authored Tantric manuals from Uddiyana gen.. erally differ significantly in their outlook, rituals, symbolism, and values from male-authored Tantric practice-texts of the same period and region cannot be addressed within the limits of this article, since this not only demands a critical edition, translation, and thorough study of the female-authored texts but also of the several pertinent male-authored sources, which are still wanting. 57 See the Hevajratantra, II.ii.17; Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra, 1:90, 2:46; and G. W. Farrow and I. Menon, The Concealed Essence of the Hevajra Tantra, with the Commentary Yogaratnama la (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1992), 158. See also verse I.vi.8. 58 Advayasiddhi, verses 5 and 22. For the Sanskrit text, see Shendge, Advayasiddhi, 1519; . and Samdhong and Dwivedi, Guhya di-As. asiddhi-Sangraha, 16163 (verses 6 and 23). .t 59 See the Hevajratantra, II.ii.1819; Snellgrove, The Hevajra Tantra, 1:90, 2:46; and Farrow and Menon, The Concealed Essence of the Hevajra Tantra, 158.

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profound explanations dealing directly with the innermost nature of meditation experience. She distinguishes her contemplative tradition from village shamanism and intellectual philosophizing, as well as from a large range of bodily and breathing yoga-techniques.60 She states directly that she has actualized mystical insight in her own meditative practice,61 and speaks of having the full support of a community of accomplished yogis, saying that they never oppose her, though perhaps thereby implying that other segments of the local religious establishment did censure her.62 Further, she asserts her capacity of being a guru, describing in particular how she served as the spiritual guide to her elder brother, the king of Uddiyana, who upon her advice first became a monk and later took .. up the life of a Tantrika.63 Her underlying assertion is thus that the Tantric community of Uddiyana fully accepted her as a female practitioner in her own right .. and that she was able to achieve its highest ideal, as a meditator and as a teacher, in an openhanded expression of spiritual liberality for the Other. The Religious Gender By its act of giving, the Self is exposed to the repression or acceptance that the Other inflicts or grants, and it is through a renewed appropriative assertion that the Self must respond. Self and Other are wrapped around each other, locked in an ontological embrace enduring through time. Time generates mutual cycles of action and reaction, and the stratified layers of their intimacy and estrangement may be excavated by the archaeology of this affair. What the Self asserts, the Other appropriates; what the Other asserts, the Self appropriates. With each cycle, metamorphoses of both Self and Other occur, leading to reappropriated beings reexpressed in reasserted re-presentations. If one mode of play is repelled by the Other, the Self, in its ceaseless struggle for unity and wholeness, displays another. When man suppresses the female Self, she reasserts herself transfigured in categories Other than man. In this array of manifold Selves, woman is not reducible to woman. She is so much more than the second sex and cannot be fathomed solely within the malefemale dichotomy. The search for the female Self must now reach beyond the confinement of duality, whose undoing in the field of Buddhist studies has been begun by Janet Gyatsos important contribution on third gender in Buddhism, discussing the theoretical significance of persons without clearly definable maleness or femaleness in the context of monastic rules that require a definite

60 For the shamanistic traditions, see *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folio 22a22b. For the philosophical traditions, see folio 20a. For the yoga-techniques, see folios 19a and 21b22a. 61 Ibid., folio 14a. 62 Ibid., folio 18a18b. 63 Ibid., folios 12a, 14a.

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sex to permit ordination as either monk or nun.64 Still, Gyatsos work remains concerned with gender conceived particularly as a bodily based sex, rendering gender into a linear continuum whose bipolarity lacks any strict separation.65 To behold woman, who out of sheer necessity in her struggle against male suppression has ascended male-defined femaleness and taken on another Self, it is necessary to rise with her above the two-dimensionality of gender andadding infinite dimensionsto think of gender in the x power, genderx. Here, gender is not the bodily sex; instead, it is a sexual behavior that genderizes the Self, which need not be defined solely in male-female terms. To think of gender in a three- or even multi-dimensional structure does not mean that the first and second dimensions of male-female dichotomy are abolished. On the contrary, it enriches the notion of gender, allowing for a model of the Self with more facets, just like a three-dimensional cube still contains six two-dimensional rectangular surfaces. The feminist fight for overcoming the Others repression and misappropriation of the female gender is therefore still on; the extra dimensions only serve to explain this struggle more adequately. The metamorphosis of the Self that allows it to transcend gender-duality is, however, still based in appropriation. To the extent that the female Self, although evolving unrestrictedly within her own play, craves and chooses to appropriate the Others assertion, she adopts borrowed elements that may at once enhance and even so diminish her. For a loan to be meaningful in a new expression, it cannot be altered beyond recognition without losing its significant semblance. As Duchamp, while adding the innovative moustache, had to leave Mona Lisa recognizable for his appropriation to work, an authoress, who derives her influence from the distinction of the tradition she has inherited, must likewise write from within its premises. When these premises are androcentric and the authoress resists them, her assertion may be critically assessed as being feministically significant. In the concrete case of Laksmi, her fruitful appropriation of the Bud. dhist tradition led to her fame as a female Tantric master and writer. In so far as this prompted a male reception of her figure, for example, in the form of Abhayadattasris posthumous portrayal, the story of her male reception is con ceptually little different from earlier feminist religious reception-studies, such as Hollywoods and Mooneys works cited above on the male reception of female saints.66 Yet, Laksmi affords a special circumstance in that her writings include . her response to a male appropriation that occurred within her own lifetime, reflecting her struggle for recognition and her reassertion of her Self. At some point after his discipleship under Laksmi, thus signifying his ap.
64 See Janet Gyatso, One Plus One Makes Three: Buddhist Gender, Monasticism, and the Law of the Non-Excluded Middle, History of Religions 43, no. 2 (2003): 89115. 65 Ibid., 104. 66 See footnotes 16 and 24.

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propriation of her teaching and guidance, Indrabuddhi composed the tract The Accomplishment of the Inborn,67 whose authorship by her brother is attested to by Laksmis own testimony.68 Therein, Indrabuddhi paid homage to his spiritual . lineage and asserted his own realization. Nonetheless, he failed to make any mention of Laksmi and conspicuously omitted her in a list of the teachers of his . lineage by inserting his own nickname guru sleeping monk,69 while sidestepping her:
The guru sleeping monk as well as other divine ones, Sarvajagannatha and the eminent Cittavajra.70

With Sarvajagannatha being Cittavajras mentor, and Cittavajra being Laksmis . teacher, her name ought to have figured right after his. Indrabuddhis neglect of Laksmi did, however, not go unanswered. Subse. quently, perhaps after her brothers death, Laksmi composed a commentary to . her students text, that is, her Guide to the Accomplishment of the Inborn, which consequently represents her reappropriation of his male assertion, wherein she rectified her exclusion. She not only stated repeatedly that she was Indrabuddhis guru and revealed the story of his discipleship in full; what is more, she underscored how his realization had depended solely on her instruction. This effort is particularly pronounced in her remarks on the verse wherein Indrabuddhi announced his spiritual attainment, to which she responded, speaking of herself in the third person, which is not unusual in Sanskrit literature:
He realized the inborn great bliss only by the articulation of the instructions on the precious inborn nature as pronounced by his sister Laksmi, a female master of yoga.71 .

Elsewhere, her narration discloses the struggle for recognition she must have undergone as a woman, which probably was what led her brother to leave his studies under her unmentioned. Her above description of the manner in which he paid her respect when she returned to give him further guidance illustrates the privacy of the situation:
Unbeknownst to others, he bowed down to my feet and said, Oh, dear Laksmi, strewing flowers with joy in his face.72 .

She further described that when he accepted her advice to enter the life of a
67 *Sahajasiddhi, Derge 2260, which in turn became the root-text for Laksmi s commentary . Guide to the Accomplishment of the Inborn (*Sahajasiddhipaddhati). 68 *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folio 14a. 69 That guru sleeping monk refers to Indrabuddhi is made clear in Laksmi s commentary; . see Ibid., folios 12a13a. 70 *Sahajasiddhi, verse 3, Derge 2260, folio 1b. 71 *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folios 23b24a. 72 Ibid., folio 12b.

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Tantrika, he feared that his male monastic teachers and fellow monks might prevent him from doing so, for which reason he fled the monastery at night.73 It thus seems that the women of Uddiyana did not generally hold positions of .. great respect, and this is indeed confirmed by one of Indrabuddhis own verses, saying with a certain misogyny that women, simple-minded persons, cow herders, tribal people, those of low caste, . . . , etc., do not understand the inborn nature.74 Laksmis Self-representation was therefore made in the face of repression, . and her reassertion accordingly gained its ascendancy outside of her womanhood. Hence, she chose not to confront Indrabuddhis depreciating statement, but simply left it be, providing it only with a gloss of another synonym for woman.75 Rather than a female reassertion, her transformed Self claimed its authority on the grounds of her religious achievement as a yogini living beyond secular norms. Beginning in antiquity, there have been men and women who placed themselves outside conventional sexual behaviors by adopting a religious, ascetic ideal and conduct. Living apart from society, often following a code of chastity, and usually referred to by religious titles or kinship terms, such as sister, auntie, or brother, to indicate a social relation not imbued with any sexual connotation, such individuals were considered to be above the secular hierarchy of class and gender relations. Though these renunciant communities were structured along an internal patriarchy, all their members commanded respect and veneration from people of the mundane sphere. Inasmuch as religious nonsexuality also constitutes a form of sexual behavior, religiosity genderizes the Self. In this sense, a renunciant, whether monastic or Tantric, is not genderized as a woman or a man, but is genderized as a religious person, a venerable one, whose genderx is a religious gender. Whereas Laksmis appropriation of the religious gender gave her the free. dom to create her significance, this also meant that she had to take the predominantly male paradigm of this tradition as the point of departure for her female Self-assertion and thereby had to work from within its norm. The dilemma this posed for the female and religious dimensions of Laksmis . gender materializes in The Accomplishment of Non-Duality, when she addresses the issue of male sexual behavior. In view of the Tantric scriptures androcentric directions for how the male adept should seek a female partner for sex, she neither suggested how a female adept might actively search for a male partner for herself, nor did she elaborate any possible female adaptation of the actual sexual techniques. While religiously following the scriptural paradigm of only focusing on the male sexual activity, she nevertheless employed her status as a
73 74 75

Ibid. *Sahajasiddhi, Derge 2260, folio 2b. *Sahajasiddhipaddhati, Derge 2261, folio 17a.

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27.2

female guru to instruct her male disciples to uphold a deep sense of veneration for all women. Laksmi thereby deftly asserted her Self as both a woman and a religious . master, fusing her female and religious genders, turning her Selves into one. Returning to the alarmed yet mesmerized words of the male Tibetan pilgrim Orgyenpa Rinchen Pal, the women of Uddiyana indeed knew how to turn .. themselves by magical art into any form they want, at least as asserted within the bewitched bounds of their appropriated tradition.

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