But this analysis does not express our experience, in which there is exquisite, radiating sensation that can detect heat, proximity, pressure, and weight. When we contemplate in this kind of analytic manner, we are merely deconstructing a scientific materialistic view, and we see the naïve assumptions involved in the experience of the hand. Life

For both male and female practitioners, a recurring theme in the appearance of the ḍākinī is the ambiguity of her identity.

Her characteristics closely resemble her worldly sister’s, but she has distinguishing marks that are hers alone. The wisdom ḍākinī has three eyes,

Rid your mind of the habit of thinking of things as either this or that, and abandon all wandering and critical thought. Strip your mind of mental fiction.”

In Hindu tantra, this type of iconography of sexual union does not generally appear. Instead, the feminine is usually designated as active and the masculine as passive. Iconographic depictions of divine union have the ferocious feminine deity standing over the supine masculine, frozen in stasis. But in Tibetan Buddhist iconography, the feminine and

But often her transmissions are quite unusual, tracing the pattern of characteristic feminine imagery of the sort found in other religious traditions. In this pattern she draws on the experiences of women in conventional roles, inverting them and utilizing them to dramatize the emptiness of all phenomena.

June Campbell’s Traveller in Space critiqued Tibetan Buddhist patriarchal monastic and religious systems, demonstrating that women have been systematically excluded from Tibetan religion,

Rita Gross, carefully laying theological ground, suggested that in Buddhism the concept of goddess appears against a background of nontheism, which means that there is no external supreme being, and further that “religious symbols and doctrines have utility rather than truth.”

This book may be sympathetic to certain feminist concerns, but it does not follow feminist methodology.