buddhist tantra and relationships

found this interesting interview with Miranda Snow about women in tantric buddhism, in the July 1994 Shambhala Sun magazine. she also wrote the book titled passionate enlightenment. in the interview she posits that the tantric forms of buddhism may have been originated and help primarily by women, only later to become institutionalized and patriarchal in india and tibet. when asked about how these teachings might change how people might relate to each other in relationship, she had said something interesting:

By sharing their emotions, they bring them into conscious awareness and begin to weave emotions into their spiritual path together. Both of them are committed to a relationship that is devoted to mutual enlightenment. Therefore, they’re trying to, in essence, enlighten their emotions together. They move their emotions to a higher range, so that they transform ordinary attachment, which is generally self-centered and causes great suffering, into something that might be called transcendental attachment. In transcendental attachment, the emotions that arise from intimacy - such as please and the joy of communion and the bliss of erotic passion - are cultivated together and deepened and then used as a basis for meditating upon emptiness. They’re recognized as empty and then they’re used as a basis for meditation.

a major theme in my retreat this month has been intensely looking at sense perceptions, emotions, and thoughts so that we can see their inherent empty but luminous nature. normally you would think intensifying would make them more solid, more problematic, or then they would capture the mind as distraction more fervently. but the opposite seems to happen, and that is the tantric approach. by looking at extreme detail, at our experience more and more vividly, increasing the boundaries and the contrast more and more, suddenly we find the boundaries dissolve, we find the experience is really shifty, flickering, darting here and there, fleeting, and ungraspable. the more vivid the experience the more ungraspable we find it. and that’s one way how we discover the impermanence and empty yet luminous (aka. vivid) nature of phenomenon. in fact that’s how we discover that our sense of “self” is also luminous and empty.

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