Spiritual Cowgirl

I was at an amazing retreat last week with the teacher Kali Ma, where she told this story about Saraha, a Buddhist monk in the 8th century from Bengal, eastern India. I was first told this story when I was living in India studying Tibetan Buddhism, but hearing it again, many red-filled years later, I had a brand spanking new appreciation for it.

Saraha was a renunciate. He lived in a monastery, shut away from work, family, women, sex, chocolate and so on. He couldn’t talk, touch, or even look at women - they were forbidden to encounter in anyway as they were seen as distractions on the Buddhist path. At this time in Buddhist history, women were thought to be incapable of achieving enlightenment, they had to wait to be reincarnated as men in order to go for the gold.

But, as we know in the red realm, “religious traditions” while wonderful and helpful and wise, represent just one view of reality. They do not necessarily reflect reality itself. They do not represent the whole divine cherry pie.

So the story goes that one day perfectly spiritually-studious, always on time, robes always ironed, mind always clean, majorly meditative Saraha was outside of the monastery running some basic errands in town for his fellow monks, when suddenly, a group of wild women surrounded him as he walked and started teasing him about his Buddhist practice, touching him, calling him pet names, giggling, rubbing themselves up against him and getting all sorts of close encounters with him.

This event was beyond awful for poor Saraha, and as mentioned, downright forbidden in his tradition (and not just his tradition - many conservative Christians would refer to this event as “sinful,” many orthodox Hindus and Jews would see it as most definitely “impure,”) and something that could for sure get his lily-white pure Buddhist ass kicked out of the monastery. Saraha begged the crazy women to stop harassing him, he said he would do anything if they would go away and let him go back to his monastery and life in peace.

The sexy troublemakers told him they would only leave him alone for good if he spent one night with them in the jungle. He thought: “hey, this can’t be so bad. One night in a jungle teaching the dharma to these strange, undisciplined, unspiritual women and then I can go back to my life as a simple Buddhist monk”. Yeah. Uh huh. That’s what makes for a good story.

So off Saraha went into the deep dark jungle with the seductive women who were actually tantric dakinis – female beings who manifest enlightened activity free from conventional perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. They often show up in red. These enlightened feminine beings usually pay a man a visit when he’s become stuck in his spiritual reality. Dakinis like to shake things up and set our previous existence on fire in order for us to taste “true” enlightenment.

In the jungle, Saraha soon found himself drinking wine and dancing and getting it on with the ladies in a manner he never, ever, expected of himself. He felt honey-soaked, electric, intoxicated, like he was in some sort of alternate reality, a dream, and participating in some very unorthodox “spiritual” practices. As Kali Ma oh so beautifully commented about these “inner” Tantric traditions: “Welcome to the Jungle”.

At one point in the heated tangly evening Saraha had a powerfully vivid vision of a woman in red who gave him an address of a place in a nearby town and told him that was where his Teacher could be found. The next morning Saraha left his passionate playmates and went to the address the red lady of his vision had given. When he arrived at the address there was no temple or monastery or house with ornaments or flags or ceremony or pomp that announced a great teacher lived there. There was nuthin’ but a rambly old hut with a lower caste woman outside making arrows (btw, “lower caste” back in Saraha’s day was equated with trash, impurity, karmic over-load. Although the caste system is illegal nowadays in India, there is still a great deal of prejudice practiced).

Saraha assumed the red goddess who had danced through his visions the night before had been wrong, dead wrong, so he asked the poor lowly woman where he could find an esteemed Teacher of the dharma that lived nearby. The woman’s profound answer caused him to fall on the floor at her feet and beg to be her disciple. The woman agreed to take him on as her student, and later she took him on as her consort (tantric sexual partner). While these two were quite unorthodox and wild and even considered dangerous to the Buddhist traditionalists, the government, and local wine-merchants, they are now known as two of the greatest teachers of Tantric Buddhism.

So… do you have any spiritual rituals, practices, beliefs that might need a release? A shake down? A strip tease? A renewal? What might your “dakinis” look like/act like if they showed up for you today? Try inviting these red ladies into your spiritual reality and see what happens. It might be time for an all-night drunken slumber party with hotties in a jungle. It might be time for a silent meditation retreat. After all, one woman’s dakini is another woman’s Catholic nun. They show up in ways that are perfect for each one of us. If they’re doing their job right, they will totally freak us out so we become better at letting Love In.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under funky spiritual stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.