La Deesse sGrol-ma (Tara): Recherches sur la nature et le statut d'une divinite du bouddhisme tibetain.

• Author: Guenther, Herbert
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

La Deesse sGrol-ma (Tara): Recherches sur la nature et le statut d'une divinite du bouddhisme tibetain. BY PIERRE ARENES. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, vol. 74. Louvain: PEETERS, 1996. Pp. 449. FB 2900.

This study, almost encyclopedic in character, is devoted to one of the most cherished image-ideas of the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon, in popular diction, the goddess Tara in her multifaceted aspects. The work consists of two major parts. The first part is a critical assessment of Western sources that on the whole are reductionistic due to the thingifying tendency of the Western languages and their inbuilt inability to distinguish between a noun-thing proper and a descriptor-qualifier. In all fairness it must be stated that the author is at pains to avoid the traps language is constantly setting up by using italics in connection with the word "Buddha" (buddha) that only Westerners and their Eastern imitators conceived of as a thing-person, while actually it was a past participle used as an adjective or descriptor for the experience of having become (mentally-spiritually) awake. It is a pity that the author does not apply his caution when dealing with other technical terms such as bodhicitta, paramita, etc., and continues using outworn, so-called "translations," some of which are, to say the least, mechanistic nonsense.

The second part deals with the Indian and Tibetan sources, in the latter case, both canonical and non-canonical, of this image-idea. Here, the author reverts...