Buddhist Books and Their Cultic Use by Jinah Kim

“In today’s ritual worship of a Buddhist scripture performed in Kwā Bāhā, or the Golden Temple, in Patan, Nepal, a Vajrācārya priest invokes the goddess Prajñāpāramitā to come into a book (fig. 1–1). The contemporary ritual that takes place around a treasured thirteenth century black-paper manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Verses) sūtra, henceforth AsP, may not date back to the inception of the Buddhist book cult in the early centuries of our Common Era.1 But it reveals an intriguing issue regarding the relationship between the goddess and the book. In this twentieth-century version of pustaka pūjā, or the ritual worship of the book, the book serves as a vessel for the goddess to come into, and it becomes an icon of the deity throughout the ritual. There is almost a promiscuous absence of the goddess Prajñāpāramitā, the personification of the famed Mahāyāna philosophical text of the same name. Of course, her presence is clearly palpable through the sound of the text recited loudly and through physical communications that occur between her and her devotees. It is her form that is absent in this ritual. As a personification of the perfected (pāramitā) wisdom (prajñā) that embodies the profound Mahāyāna concept of emptiness (śūnyatā), perhaps the absence..”

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Author: Jinah Kim

What I mean by
The Symbolic Life

This website makes liberal use of classical Indian visual art and refers mostly to traditional Indian texts (for example, the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras) in the courses, seminars, and discussions on offer. However, I am not presenting lessons in Hinduism; in fact, teaching mainstream Hinduism is neither my area of interest nor expertise. Rather, my interest in Yoga and Tantra is grounded in the concrete situation in which we find ourselves, in the places where we arrive and from which we depart. Beginning in the here and now, we will explore the underlying meaning of the symbols, stories, images, philosophies, and techniques found in Indian philosophical texts and practice, in light of our world and our current circumstance. We will excavate the meaning of the aphorisms and teaching stories; the symbolic figures of gods, people, and nature; and the sometimes terse, sometimes poetic, philosophy of the texts. Thus, in referring to the Symbolic Life of Yoga and Tantra, I mean not just the symbols themselves, but the rich explication of life that the symbols represent.

Our lived, concrete situation is wonderfully captured in the Sanskrit word loka, whose ancient meaning is “the world.” The root meaning of both the Sanskrit loka and the English locate (and local, locale, and location) is identical. In the ancient Indian mind, the world is where we are located, in our current circumstance. Thus, the meaning of the symbols of Yoga and Tantra can occur only in the now, in the places where we find ourselves, and not in any imagined ancient and/or foreign world.

To emphasize our place of origin and return, I use the terms “archetypal” and “symbolic” quite frequently. Archetypal meaning is associated with the universal and collective aspects of human experience—what we intimately share with all others regardless of culture or era or epoch—while symbolic language forms a bridge between the realms of the universal with the culturally specific and local. Symbols are the scaffolding upon which human beings build a world and imbue it with meaning.

Think for a moment of pain and pleasure, sorrow and joy, hatred and love, and greed and generosity—universal experiences that ancient Indian thinkers called the dvandva-s. This Sanskrit term is a combination of two words, or rather, one word spoken twice: the word dva (meaning the same as the English “two”) duplicated. Dvandva is commonly translated as “the pair of opposites” or literally “the two-twos” (dva–dva). The ancients who coined this compact symbol gave voice to an archetypal human experience that can be further unpacked to reveal deep insights into the human condition. Once we gain an understanding of the various symbols of Yoga and Tantra, we can further excavate their meaning and the archetypes they convey, and thus gain access to, in a practical and meaningful way, the vision of life experienced by the sages. These insights are available to us and are still relevant today, as are the resilient and adaptable techniques and forms of practice that can help us lead richer and more fulfilling lives