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.ssall being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.Vajracchcdika ("The Diamond Cutter"), 17; ibid., p.134.138 INITIATION APOTHEOSIShis face is gold.While in his towering crown of gems stands a the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings ofBuddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." 8|' the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgy-In China and Japan this sublimely gentle Bodhisattva is rep- nous-which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, be-resented nut only in male form, but also as female.Kwan Yin of fore the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form.AndChina, Kwannon of Japan the Madonna of the Far East is among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermesprecisely this benevolent regarder of the world.She will be and Aphrodite),wtl but Eros too, the divinity of love {the first offound in every Buddhist temple of the farthest Orient.She is the gods, according to Plato),89 were in sex both female and male.blessed alike to the simple and to the wise; for behind her vow"So God created man in his own image, in the image of Godthere lies a profound intuition, world-redeeming, world-sustaining.created he him; male and female created he them.""0 The ques-The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to foregotion may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God;until the end of time (which never ends) immersion in the un-but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough.troubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the dis-"When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, Hetinction between eternity and time is only apparent made, per-created him androgynous.'"-11 The removal of the feminine intoforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledgeanother form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfec-of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites.What istion into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discoveryunderstood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the sameof the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where Godexperience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e.,walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall ofthe jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om maniParadise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites,""2 by whichpadme hum.Man (now man and woman) is cut oft' from not only the visionbut even the recollection of the image of God.The first wonder to be noted here is the androgynous charac-ter of the Bodhisattva: masculine Avalokiteshvara, feminine KwanThis is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands.ItYin.Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth.represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery ofThey emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conductcreation: the devolvcment of eternity into time, the breaking ofthe mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm wherethe one into the two and then the many, as well as the generationduality is left behind.Awonawilona, chief god of the pueblo ofof new life through the reconjunction of the two.This imageZuni, the maker and container of all, is sometimes spoken of ashe, but is actually he-she.The Great Original of the Chinesesa"To men 1 am Hermes; to women I appear as Aphrodite: I bear the em-chronicles, the holy woman T'ai Yuan, combined in her person theblems of both my parents" {Anthoiogia Graeca ad Fidem Codices, Vol.II).masculine Yang and the feminine Yin."' The cabalistic teachings of"One part of him is his sire's, all else he has of his mother" (Martial, Epi-grams, 4, 174; Loeb Library, Vol.II, p.501).Ovid's account of Hermaphrodites appears in the Metamorphoses, IV, 288 (T.SfiAmilayur-Dkyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp.182-183.87Tang, the light, active, masculine principle, and Tin, the dark, passive, and Hampton Young
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