Cool link! I had not heard of her before but I see the echoes. To summarize some of the resonances I think I see...
I noticed that the Sutra about her is the Heart Sutra, and it arose as part of the Mahayana correction to the early ascetic “small raft” Buddhism, and was claimed to have been the secret teachings of Buddha that couldn’t be taught in the initial version of Buddhism because the people were not ready…
It is claimed to have been technically there at the beginning, but not in an obvious way.
The secret teachings were mythologically kept by the king of the snakes in his underwater kingdom for a full turn of history, until a reincarnation of Buddha arrived named Nagarjuna, where “Naga” means snake and “Arjuna” means something like “bright shining silver” and is the name of the central hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Thus Nagarjuna, the teacher of the lesson, had a name that basically meant “Illuminated Snake Hero”.
The ideas were mythologically acquired by: going underwater, making friends with the snake king, then studying the snake king’s secrets (that he got from Buddha).
These lessons, that Prajnaparamita is the embodiment of, are given the concept handle of “shunyata” (“emptiness”) and basically seems to be a denial of local naive realism? That is to say: there are no permanent things whose meaning and reality are independent of context. So if you take this seriously and ask “But what’s the context?” over and over for anything and everything, recursively, then perhaps eventually you always get to Prajnaparamita as the contextual “Mother of All”.
Epistemically speaking, chasing Prajnaparamita is valuable, because you learn the context of your current naively local truth. However you’ll never get to her and go past her, because she represents the edge of knowledge… she is always “the farther away context of which you are currently ignorant”. As you learn, she always retreats into the background, representing the new edge of knowledge.
Prajnaparamita’s name literally means “perfect wisdom”, and while she is technically unattainable, it is useful to try to approach her :-)
If you look at the emotional differences in the symbolic choice of Tiamat vs Prajnaparamita, then Tiamat pushes all the ideas into a single fundamentally bad kind of watery chaos that must be destroyed in a violent way for goodness and masculine knowledge to triumph. On the other hand Prajnaparamita has all the emotionally negative aspects sublimated into the process of pursuing her (into the watery domain of the snake king), and is seen as fundamentally good in herself.
Both kinds of symbolism are “mixed”, but one valorizes the heroic killing and re-use of “scary female mysteries” while the other justifies “painful exploration” as worthwhile pursuit of the ultimate ineffable female context.
Calling out some of these echoes, I think I see different arrangements of many of the same concepts. Also, the arrangement of the concepts in the “Space Mom” framing seems closer to Prajnaparamita than Tiamat.
A Buddhist friend of mine says that Space Mom is a good match for Prajnaparamita.
I’d never heard of her before, but maybe something resonates there.
Cool link! I had not heard of her before but I see the echoes. To summarize some of the resonances I think I see...
I noticed that the Sutra about her is the Heart Sutra, and it arose as part of the Mahayana correction to the early ascetic “small raft” Buddhism, and was claimed to have been the secret teachings of Buddha that couldn’t be taught in the initial version of Buddhism because the people were not ready…
It is claimed to have been technically there at the beginning, but not in an obvious way.
The secret teachings were mythologically kept by the king of the snakes in his underwater kingdom for a full turn of history, until a reincarnation of Buddha arrived named Nagarjuna, where “Naga” means snake and “Arjuna” means something like “bright shining silver” and is the name of the central hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Thus Nagarjuna, the teacher of the lesson, had a name that basically meant “Illuminated Snake Hero”.
The ideas were mythologically acquired by: going underwater, making friends with the snake king, then studying the snake king’s secrets (that he got from Buddha).
These lessons, that Prajnaparamita is the embodiment of, are given the concept handle of “shunyata” (“emptiness”) and basically seems to be a denial of local naive realism? That is to say: there are no permanent things whose meaning and reality are independent of context. So if you take this seriously and ask “But what’s the context?” over and over for anything and everything, recursively, then perhaps eventually you always get to Prajnaparamita as the contextual “Mother of All”.
Epistemically speaking, chasing Prajnaparamita is valuable, because you learn the context of your current naively local truth. However you’ll never get to her and go past her, because she represents the edge of knowledge… she is always “the farther away context of which you are currently ignorant”. As you learn, she always retreats into the background, representing the new edge of knowledge.
Prajnaparamita’s name literally means “perfect wisdom”, and while she is technically unattainable, it is useful to try to approach her :-)
If you look at the emotional differences in the symbolic choice of Tiamat vs Prajnaparamita, then Tiamat pushes all the ideas into a single fundamentally bad kind of watery chaos that must be destroyed in a violent way for goodness and masculine knowledge to triumph. On the other hand Prajnaparamita has all the emotionally negative aspects sublimated into the process of pursuing her (into the watery domain of the snake king), and is seen as fundamentally good in herself.
Both kinds of symbolism are “mixed”, but one valorizes the heroic killing and re-use of “scary female mysteries” while the other justifies “painful exploration” as worthwhile pursuit of the ultimate ineffable female context.
Calling out some of these echoes, I think I see different arrangements of many of the same concepts. Also, the arrangement of the concepts in the “Space Mom” framing seems closer to Prajnaparamita than Tiamat.