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:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)