Categories
Wrathful deities can be divided into several categories:
- The Herukas (Tb. khrag 'thung, lit. "blood drinker"), which are enlightened beings who adopt fierce forms to express their detachment from the world of ignorance.
- The Wisdom Kings (Sanskrit vidyarāja), known particularly as the protectors of the Five Dhyani Buddhas; more a feature of Japanese than Tibetan Buddhism
- The Protectors (Sanskrit pāla), usually subdivided into three categories:
- Lokapālas or "Protectors of the World" are guardians of the four cardinal directions
- Kṣetrapālas or "Protectors of the Region"
- Dharmapālas or "Protectors of the Law" which vary in the level of realization attributed to them. This can be anything from fully enlightened to an oath-bound worldly spirit. Most of the major Dharmapalas are said to be enlightened.
Read more about this topic: Wrathful Deities
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of “trashy,” sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the “cliché” in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)