RYI Symposium - "Reflections on Buddhist Tantric Poetry" by Rangjung Yeshe Institute published on 2023-04-05T03:33:01Z Karl Brunhölzl (Nalandabodhi) Dreadful ḍākinīs, headless housewives, and psycho princesses — awakened women in the dohā tradition: The number of female authors in the Tibetan Tengyur in general is microscopic. However, in the works ascribed to Indian Buddhist mahāsiddhas or anthologies of their songs, the number of preserved utterances of women (even though often short) increases dramatically. In addition, many biographies of male mahāsiddhas show that they had female gurus and female consorts, many of whom were mahāsiddhas in their own right. I will present a few examples of the lives and songs of realization of such women. Julian Schott (Univ. Hamburg) Attributed Authorship? On the nature of spontaneity and compilation in the case of Tillopa’s Apabhramśa song: The Dohā (Toh 2282) attributed to Tillopa appears to have a challenging transmission history without that it is evidently clear which among its elements are authorial or whether authorship, at all, is a meaningful category in view of the nature of the song which, in fact, is easier and more meaningfully to be approached qua the idea of being a compilation. I will attempt to briefly introduce the various sources in which the DK is contained and highlight their differences and relationships in order to paraphrase the importance of the largely ignored aspect of intertextuality and compilation for this text type while challenging the idea of a single authorship. Klaus-Dieter Mathes (Univ. of Vienna) Saraha’s Dohākoṣa (D 2224, P 3068) The Development of its Textual Tradition in Four Steps: Putting together the different pieces of information on the development of Saraha’s songs, the following, still somewhat tentative, sketch, can be given. The first step is represented by the Tokyo manuscript. The second step is marked by the two colophon verses 90–91 in Advayavajra’s Sanskrit commentary. A witness for our third step is the Göttingen manuscript. The fourth step is looking at the standard Tibetan root text. Klaus-Dieter Mathes (Vienna) and Péter-Dániel Szántó (Budapest) argue that the extension of the collection from the third step onward probably happened through the medium of Tibetan language. Julia Stenzel Saraha’s four symbols (brda’ bzhi) and the question of spontaneity: Tantric poetry is often described as the spontaneous expression of the yogi’s and yogini’s realization, yet we discover, in the songs of realization a broad range of codified language and technical terminology. I will discuss this discrepancy between spontaneity and formalism at the example of the four symbols (brda’ bzhi) in Saraha’s Vajragīti.