Conclusion

In my conversations with Drakpa Gyatso, the expert scholar monk under whose mentorship I produced my translations of Ngorchen’s body mandala writings, we often encountered problems with translating the locative (la don) particle in the context of these elaborate tantric ritual acts of imagination. Was the practitioner imagining the goddesses “in,” “on,” or “as” the body? Was imagination a little less about the “as if” and more about the process of knowing the reality of the body to be such that the goddesses, for example, ARE the channels of the vajra body? The perspectival orientation of the Sakyapas underlies this