Buddhist Masters Of Enchantment [Paperback]

 

 

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I had to read this book for a course on Tantric Buddhism and it was so much fun to read. There is a great introduction which explains a bit about Tantra and some of the terminology in the book. The book is about the mahasiddhas or exemplars of this tradition. The book consists of short stories, about two pages each, of the enlightenment and adventures of these religious people. The best part about it is that they all went through these rigorous mental and physical states to reach Enlightenment and none of them got there in quite the same way. There are thiefs, kings, and young women who have interesting and fun tales to read. I would recommend reading some of these stories for children at bedtime but be careful choosing which one, those Tantrics can get a little crazy!

This book is supposed to be a translation of a certain work dating back many centuries, written by this guy named Abhayadatta and relating the biographies of several dozen 'mahasiddhas' -- people who acquired all sorts of fancy superpowers after following various 'spiritual' practices called 'sadhanas'. I honestly don't know what to make of this whole 'mahasiddha' business. The original teachings of the Buddha were concerned with one thing and one thing alone: suffering, and how to get rid of it. The Buddha just couldn't care less about acquiring all sorts of fancy powers (though he acknowledged the possibility of acquiring them) -- he was supposed to have even condemned them. It just makes me angry in this respect how people in later times had to add all sorts of new fancy stuff to the Buddha's original teachings. If you want to assert that the Buddha DID in fact teach such things as what the 'mahasiddhas' practiced, you need to explain why you don't find such things in, say, Thai or Sri Lankan Buddhism. Or if you want to say that people of later times discovered special methods of enlightenment the Buddha didn't know (!!), fine, show me an enlightened 'mahasiddha', or a 'sadhana' I can try, or some articles from respected journals documenting the findings of various scientists or scholars regarding the reality of the 'mahasiddhas' and the efficacy of their 'sadhanas'. Dowman offers none of these. And even if you just want to treat these biographies as fairy tales or fantasy stories, or read them for inspiration, they fail to deliver. Most of them follow a very standard formula: someone has a personal problem, someone else comes along and offers him/her a 'sadhana', s/he practises it diligently, and lo and behold s/he is now a 'mahasiddha', and after years of selfless service to all sentient beings s/he finally leaves the world and enters... no, not Nirvana (!!), but this place called the 'Paradise of the Dakinis'. And you also find repeated use of stock phrases like 'kingdoms with 84,000 households'. It's almost like a children's essay-writing primer for writing your own 'mahasiddha' story. And you honestly end up wondering if these biographies were not all made up by dear uncle Abhayadatta himself. Turning to Robert Beer's illustrations, most of which are airbrush work in full color, they are all very fine and some of them are in fact quite beautiful as well (I like the Nagarjuna portrait very much), but I honestly find most of the 'mahasiddhas' depicted in the illustrations to be positively repulsive to look at. It would seem that good-looking 'mahasiddhas' are in very short supply indeed. To make things worse, one comes across pictures of stark naked females showing you their privates or copulating with men in the air, or cutting off their own heads (!!) with blood spurting everywhere. What a book. Mahasiddhas? I'd rather go for DC superheroes. Ultimately the only thing this book is good for is learning about some of the incomprehensible peculiarities of Indo-Tibetan culture.

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