TANTRIC BUDDHISM (INCLUDING CHINA AND JAPAN)dispositional ointment and, at least, follow the moral precepts of the cult to
escape the endless weary round of existence. As Obeyesekere has remarked
( 1981: 35) there is a basic conflict in Buddhist societies between eros and agape,
involvement in the goods of personal family ties and sex versus devotionalism in
the service of all mankind. This comment is particularly apt in terms of the
material we are examining here because A valokitesvara is the embodiment of
universal love. Ambivalence, as a baseline, universal, phylogenetic flaw in the
human psyche reflects the tension between eros and agape.
In psychology, the term ambivalence is used in its most general sense as the
simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, beliefs or affects in ego's
relationship toward an object. Ambivalence is first exhibited as a phase of
normal psychological birth, between the stages of normal symbiosis and the
stage when Oedipal conflict has been resolved. It is the late stages of separation
and individuation, especially the rapprochement crisis, that are ambivalence-
ridden. As children learn to become themselves, to disengage themselves from
their objects of primary identification and engage the rest of the world as indi-
viduals in their own right, they experience an awareness of separation and a con-
current fear of the loss of the good object with whom they are still primitively
identified. Their behavior is characterized by marked separation anxiety in
which they wish for reunion with the love object and simultaneously fear engulf-
ment by it. Often this period is marked by increased aggression and splitting of
the object into good and bad parts. This stage of development is conflict filled;
one's awareness as an individuating entity increases the need for object's love.
This in tum increases a fear of an unsatisfactory return to a state no longer
useful to the growing individuality of the child, and it continues until a positive
maternal image is internalized (Mahler, et al. 1975).
It might also behoove us to take into account the notions of David Bakan
(1966) who fuses our two interests in religion and psychology. For Bakan, man
begins in a state of undifferentiated, self-satisfied, omnipotent, narcissistic bliss.
This is followed by a stage of separation (agency). The agentic is necessary to
the development of a functioning ego whose aim is mastery of the world. The
ego, however, is terminal: one cannot separate forever, and a recognition of
one's separation is also a recognition of one's mortality. Further, as the agentic
reaches its limit and eventually, as it must, comes to despair, problematic intro-
jects are expelled or projected outwards as other phenomenal objects which then
threaten ego as the demonic. The 'das-log literature explicitly recognizes this
when it tells us that all the threatening forms, shapes, lights, sounds, etc., in
Bardo and hell are our own. Mature separation ends and the bliss of primary nar-
cissism is restored by what Bakan calls communion. By giving over his mastery
voluntarily, by substituting for it understanding, and by reconciliation of the
parts engendered in separation, we become whole again, as mature beings in a
wider community of order of both the nomothetic and the cosmological.
The 'das-log's problem is precisely a struggle to attain this maturity. To
begin with; the "dying" process, 'loth in Western and Tibetan terms, is highly