BUDDHISM IN THE TIBETAN CULTURAL AREA 295In the ordinary uses of ritual power, one generated the deity once again,
this time in front of one, and then directed it into an object (say, a flask of
water to be used for its ritual power), a person (such as a new initiate), or the
sky (as when one wanted to drive away a hailstorm). These ordinary uses of
power came in three levels: high, medium, and low. The high-level attain-
ments were particular abilities that sprang spontaneously from one's karmic
background; the medium attainments covered all the classic powers of Indian
yoga-such as clairvoyance, the ability to read minds, and so forth-plus prac-
tices from traditional Tibetan shamanism; and the lower attainments covered
the four functions of pacifYing (for example, a quarrel, a disease), increasing
(for example, crops), subjugating (for example, a person whose affections one
wants to win, an obstreperous spirit), and destroying (for example, crops,
buildings, roads). The last category includes the subcategory ofliberating, that
is, eliminating an enemy and arranging for his/her rebirth in a heaven or Bud-
dha-realm.
The potential for these powers to be grossly misused was one of the rea-
sons why compassion was so emphasized in the preliminary vows and the
framework of each ritual performance. A text by Ngawang Lozang (Ngag-
dbang bLo-bzang) argued that there were certain cases in which "liberation"
could be viewed as a compassionate act, but the Hevajra Tantra (see Section
6.3.3) forbade all destructive applications ofTantric power. Tibetan folklore
added its own restraints against the unwise or uncompassionate use of such
power, stating that anyone who mastered and used Tantric powers without
the proper motivation was doomed to a long and miserable rebirth as an angry
demon. On occasion, troubles afflicting a particular village might be attrib-
uted to such a demon, which indicates that the misuse of Tantric powers was
not unknown. -
Because the Three Basic Ones contained such a wide range of personali-
ties, different deities were regarded as appropriate for different ritual uses. For
instance, Tara was used primarily in rituals with a directly compassionate pur-
pose; her fierce aspect, Kurukulla, was called on for more aggressive purposes,
such as the subjugation of spirits. Thus a monk on retreat would try to master
the mantras of as many deities as possible; when he left retreat, he continued
to collect initiations, as he could afford, from wandering monks visiting his
monastery or from lamas he sought out on his own. This was so that he could
have rituals for as many purposes as possible in his personal arsenal. The re-
mainder of his life would be devoted to finding a balance between the ordi-
nary and extraordinary uses of his powers; that is, weighing his supporters'
needs for his ritual help against the time he needed to devote to his own pur-
suit of Awakening.
Life in a Tibetan nunnery was organized around lines similar to those for a
monastery, with the same division between ordinary nuns and those on re-
treat. The main monastic orders all had affiliated nunneries, although there
were also independent nunneries run by highly regarded female tiilkus (Strong
EB, sec. 7. 7). As is the case with their sisters in Southeast Asia, Tibetan nuns
do not ordain as bhik~ul).iS. With few exceptions, nuns tended to have less