Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 48

34
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ FEBRUARY, 1931
on a fawn-coloured mule, but she is clad in the skins of dead men and is eating brains from a human skull. Offerings of chang or beer--a substitute for food-are made to her in other human skulls. While as the goddess of battle, she is surrounded by all sorts of weapons. .... Considering the terrible and blood-thirsty nature of the lady, it is curious and amusing to find that the Tibetans believed she was recently incarnate in the world as the late Queen Victoria."
Peden Llamo most probably represents a primitive Tibetan goddess, from whom arose, according to Hirananda Shastri, Origin and Cult of Tara (Mem. Arch. Survey of India, No. 20) the Mahâyâna Buddhist Shaktic Târâ in her twenty-one forms, represented in one or two varieties--pacific and terrible. The Cult of Târâ dates back to the fifth century A.D., on the Tibetan borderland, or perhaps in Indian Tibet, and spread downwards into India, right down to the very South, in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Another view of the Tibetan Tårt has been expressed thus. "She is a principal god. dess, who has twenty-one recognised forms in five colours-white, green, yellow, blue and red-and appears in two principal forms-gracious and ferrible. In her terrible form she is represented as destroying a human being (like the Indian Durga). In her gracious form she was recently held by many Tibetans to be incarnated in Queen Victoria. The Tibetan view of Tara probably arose out of an indigenous goddess Paldan (or Peden) Llamo, who also appears in both forms and whose colour, in terrible form is black, representing mystery and death."
It is possible, however, that she represents the Hindu goddess Durga introduced into Tibet with Shaktic Buddhism. Shaktism was "the cult of female energy in life (Shakti), an extension of that primeval recognition of the mystery of the reproduction of life, which led to the use of the Shaiva emblem of the phallus (linga) as the representation of the god. head. So that the phallus emblem became both male and female (linga and yoni)....i Except as to their cult of Kali or Durga, Devi, Chandi, Kumari and other subsidiary names, as the female form of Shiva, with bloody sacrifices and much gross superstition borrowed from the magic of aboriginal tribes, the Shaktis were in all other respects essentially Shaivas." Eventually they permeated all Buddhism, and the cult "in Tibet became the form in wbich Buddhism has chiefly survived, causing it there to revert practically to the primitive Animism of the people with much degradation infused into it." (The Word of Lalla, p. 65.)
“The idea of the male and female god is visible as far as one can go back into the belief of the Aryans and has been consistently preserved in all branches of their descendants. It is visible also in all primitive religions and in all Animistic beliefs that have been studied. The concept of the god, his wife, his sons, his daughters and his messengers may be taken to be therefore a natural product of primitive human thought, which is necessarily anthropomorphio..... In Vedic times and later, the goddess had no special qualifications separating her from the gods, and attributes peculiar to goddesses do not appear until the rise, still in early times, of the cult of Durgâ the chaste virgin huntress, the Diana of the Vindhya mountains of Central India, the lover of wine, flesh and bloody sacrifice. .... She is clearly a Central Indian aboriginal goddess brought into Hinduism in conneotion with the Krishna cult. ... 1.c., with Vaishnava Hinduism. In the next phase of her cult the Shaivas have captured her, and she has ceased to be regarded as a virgin, being identified with Uma of the Himalayas, the wife of Shiva. She is next found in the Puranas as Chandi, with a daily worship and an autumn festival, still the Durga Paj so well-known in Calcutta. the home of Kali, another name for her, or for an ancient goddess identified with her. And at the same time arose & sect worshipping her as Devi (The Goddess), identified with Brahman, the Absolute, the One Reality, and so above all divinities. Here then in the blood-and-winedrinking expression of limitless power is the earliest appearance of Shakti, the female energy, representing the living productive form of the inactive, unknowable, unapproachable Absolute." (The Word of Lalla, 65-66.)
(To be continued.)