Words
June Campbell writes in her book Traveller in space that Chandra Das in his Tibetan English Dictionary describes twenty synonyms for woman. The words used most often are kyemen (Tibetan: skye.dman) meaning inferior birth and pumo (Tibetan: bu.mo.) meaning female human being. There are others like tsamdenma (Tibetan: mtshams.ldan.ma.), chingchema (Tibetan: bching.byed.ma.), dodenma (Tibetan: bdod.ldan.ma.), gaweshi (Tibetan: dgah.wabi.gshi.) and tobmema (Tibetan: stobs.med.ma.).
Throughout the Mahāyāna world, Avalokiteśvara, who takes on both male and female form e.g., Guan Yin, and Tara, a female Vajrayana yidam, are bodhisattvas who embody karuṇā, and Prajnaparamita is a female buddha who embodies wisdom.
Read more about this topic: Women In Buddhism
Famous quotes containing the word words:
“Those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies, that daily flow
From all her words and actions, mixed with love
And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned
Union of mind, or in us both one soul.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“If I had found the words I was looking for, I would not have read so much.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)