One of the most important periods in the life of Padmasambhava is the time he spent in the eight great cremation grounds of India. When he was banished from the Kingdom of Uddiyana, he was sent in exile to the cremation ground called ‘Chilly Grove’. Far from being a hardship, Padmasambhava saw this as a place to intensify spiritual practice, so it became a place of vision and initiation. From Chilly Grove he went from one cremation ground to another throughout India and its adjoining lands.
In 1972, in the course of his lecture series Creative Symbols of Tantric Buddhism, Sangharakshita gave the seminal lecture The Symbolism of the Cremation Ground and the Celestial Maidens, which explores the significance of Padmasambhava’s time in the cremation grounds. He says of this period in Padmasambhava’s life —
“According to reports that were circulating in India at that time, he spent his time in the cremation grounds with the ḍākinīs, with the celestial maidens, singing, dancing, drinking wine and so on… The picture of Padmasambhava in the cremation ground, surrounded by the celestial maidens, seems rather to have captured the imagination of later generations of followers of the Tantric Path. And this picture of Padmasambhava in the cremation ground with the ḍākinīs became, with the passing of time, richer and richer in spiritual content. Indeed, we can say that the symbol of the cremation ground and the symbol of the celestial maidens assumed, as time went on, greater and greater significance.”
Sangharakshita’s vivid description of Padmasambhava in the cremation grounds with the celestial maidens and his ‘reading’ of the symbolism plays an important part in the spiritual life of the Triratna Order and Movement to this day.
“There are skulls, there are bones, there are corpses, there are burning funeral pyres. And against this macabre background, one sees the yogis and the ḍākinīs meditating, dancing, embracing, drinking and so on. Now, the fact that there are cremation grounds in all eight directions is significant: all eight directions of space, in a sense, everywhere, it suggests that there are cremation grounds everywhere, suggests the whole earth, in fact, is one vast cremation ground, that the whole universe is a cremation ground, that the whole of conditioned existence is a cremation ground, because it's a place of death, a place of fear, a place where we are confronted by death, a place where we are confronted by fear, a place where we have to evolve or perish. It seems that this symbolises, is telling us, life itself, which is death in life, if you like, life in death, life itself, is the crucial situation, a situation into which we thrust ourselves, as it were, when we take birth as a human being.”
Sangharakshita, Extracts from The Symbolism of the Cremation Ground and the Celestial Maidens (FBA 107)
In this “crucial situation deliberately sought out”, the ḍākinīs arise. They symbolise the inspirations that arise, or descend, when we enter fully into these crucial situations where the choice is to grow in the direction of Enlightenment — or die.
Skull cup
Sangharakshita brought this back from India in 1964
In the lecture Sangharakshita describes Sarvabuddhaḍākinī, the ḍākinī of all the Buddhas, who represents the energies that have carried all the Buddhas — past, present and future — to Enlightenment —
“Sarvabuddhaḍākinī is red, the colour of love, passion and total emotional arousal. She is totally involved in the spiritual life. Her hair is dishevelled. It flies to the winds. She doesn't care anymore about anything. She doesn't care about what people may say or think. She just abandons herself, throwing herself into the spiritual life just as a passionate woman flings herself into the arms of her lover.
“She is naked because she is concerned only with the truth. She has nothing to hide and is completely honest and open. She wears an enormous garland of human skulls. Her head is thrust up through this garland, which represents the whole cycle of one’s previous lives. Sarvabuddhaḍākinī is bursting through this cycle. There is a volcanic upsurge of energy, and this energy bursts through the vicious circle of self-created and self-induced problems and leaves them all hanging there, like a garland of skulls, dead.
“She is drinking blood from a skull-cup. She pours it into her open mouth. This blood represents great bliss, the supreme spiritual ecstasy, the ecstasy of Enlightenment. The skull cup filled with blood epitomizes the whole symbolism of the cremation ground and the celestial maidens. The skull cup is the cremation ground itself. And the blood is the ḍākinī. The skull cup represents death, represents the voidness, which is death to the ego. The blood represents the great bliss, which arises in the heart of the Tantric when he faces death, when he plunges into the void, meets spiritual death, experiences reality…
“From the Tantric point of view this living in the cremation ground with the ḍākinīs is the essence of the spiritual life. And hence the popularity of this scene, the scene of Padmasambhava and other yogis living in the cremation ground with the ḍākinīs, the popularity of this scene in Tantric art. But when Padmasambhava is depicted in this way, he is not depicted in his most familiar form. We don't see him wearing his princely robes, or wearing his lotus cap, etc. He is depicted in what is called his Heruka form, he is depicted, that is to say, as a naked yogi. And he is seated, perhaps, on a carpet of human skin, or perhaps on a pile of human bones.
“And on all sides there are dead bodies, on all sides there are blazing funeral pyres, and he rattles in one hand a small hand drum, the symbol of fearlessness. And he drinks wine from a skull cup, symbol of the great bliss. And all around him are the ḍākinīs, some are dancing, some are singing, some are flying through the air, some are encircled by rainbows, some are embracing him. And the atmosphere of the place, the atmosphere of the cremation ground is awe-inspiring and sublime. And the mood of the yogi, the mood of the naked yogi, is fearless and heroic. And he is the human consciousness itself. He is the human consciousness deliberately seeking out the crucial situation, the human consciousness face-to-face with death, face-to-face with fear, face-to-face with reality. He is the human consciousness surrounded by its newly awakened energies, the human consciousness aware of its own strength, the human consciousness determined to follow the Tantric Path, the human consciousness determined to gain Enlightenment.”
Sangharakshita, Extracts from The Symbolism of the Cremation Ground and the Celestial Maidens (FBA 107)
Sarvabuddhaḍākinī thangka
From Sangharakshita’s personal collection
Sangharakshita and the ḍākinīs
You will notice that in these passages, Sangharakshita refers to ḍākinīs in different ways. It is important to distinguish the different usages of the word here and in all his writings. In speaking about the ḍākinī in different ways, Sangharakshita is following a long (Tantric) Buddhist tradition. The ḍākinī has always been, and always will be, impossible to pin down. There are different kinds of ḍākinī, and it is important to know which kind we are dealing with.
A little etymology first: ḍākinī is derived from the Sanskrit root ḍīyate, meaning ‘to fly’ or ‘move through the air’, the root ḍī meaning ‘to fly’ or ‘to soar’. In Tibetan ḍākinī is translated as khandroma, which means ‘she who moves through space’ or ‘sky goer’. Another Sanskrit term, used as an epithet for the ḍākinī, is: khechari, which means ‘she who moves in the sky’.
These etymologies are well known and are applied to the ḍākinī when she is seen as a symbol of Enlightened inspiration and energy soaring through the vast space of śūnyatā.
In his seminar on The Buddha’s Law Among the Birds, Sangharakshita described this in a different, but very expressive way: “ḍākinīs are represented as flying through the air, flying through the sky. They're like ripples travelling across the surface of the ocean of higher consciousness, one could say.”
The figure of Sarvabuddhaḍākinī that Sangharakshita describes in The Symbolism of the Cremation Ground and the Celestial Maidens, is this kind of ḍākinī. Sangharakshita says that she is the ḍākinī of all the Buddhas, she represents the energies that have carried all the Buddhas, past, present, and future, to Enlightenment.
In a lecture on Padmasambhava given in London in 1979, a different kind of ḍākinī is evoked. In this lecture, Sangharakshita reads aloud passages from The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava describing Padmasambhava’s sojourns in the cremation grounds. Here, the ḍākinīs that appear to him take strange and terrifying forms and clearly want to frighten and harm him. These ḍākinīs are sometimes called the ‘worldly ḍākinīs’. They are flesh-eating ogresses and not inspiration surging through the vastness of space. (In some modern Indian languages, if you use the word ḍākinī, people think you are talking about malevolent demonesses.) Sangharakshita sees these ḍākinīs as “primordial forces within ourselves .. which have to be subdued, which doesn’t mean just crushed …but integrated into our conscious attitude so that our conscious attitude, our conscious being … can be enriched so that our spiritual life isn’t just some pale anaemic thing, so that it is glowing and throbbing with the energy of the ḍākinīs, with the energy of the gods and the demons that have been tamed and transformed.” In The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava, this taming of primordial forces is enacted by Padmasambhava. He is described as seated, leaning against a central stupa, turning bright red, and turning the wheel of the Dharma for these ḍākinīs for years on end.
Perhaps the message for us is that we need to know what kind of ḍākinī we are dealing with. Is she inspiration rippling through the vastness of the space of Reality, in which case we must open to her fully; or is she, in fact, a malevolent ogress, who needs transforming through intensive and ecstatic practice of the Dharma?
There are other kinds of ḍākinī to which Sangharakshita refers. Dākinī in the highest sense is prajñā, the wisdom aspect of Enlightenment. There is also ḍākinī as the esoteric Sangha Refuge, the ḍākinī who is generated by communication, by the deepest spiritual friendship and intimacy. The meanings of ‘ḍākinī’ are endless and elusive…
Yeshe Tsogyal thangka
One of Padmasambhava's two chief disciples and the composer of his life story. This standing form is from a practice called "The Dākinī Heart Creative Seed" by Dudjom Rimpoche. The figure in the sky above is a Saṃbhogakāya form of Guru Rimpoche. From Sangharakshita’s personal collection
