Talk:Pawo

Nenang Pawo

Hi -- I've removed the redirect to Nenang Pawo in order to provide a general discussion. Perhaps a disambiguation page would be warranted; keeping in mind there are many Tibetans with "Pawo" in their names. Arthur chos (talk) 13:37, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

In Tibetan, "Nenang Pawo" is commonly used as are "Tsurphu Gyaltsab", and "Palpung Situ" - with Nenang, Tsurphu and Palpung being the names of their respective monastic seats. In English these important identifiers usually get dropped - so we get just Pawo Rinpoche, Gyaltsab Rinpoche, and (Tai)Situ Rinpoche. This is unfortunate and somewhat confusing as there were several unrelated lines of incarnations with the name Pawo, several with the Chinese title Situ / Tai Situ, and many with the title Gyaltsab ("regent"). Chris Fynn (talk) 16:38, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Proposed merge with Dakini

It is a stub version of Dakini. Ogress _smash! 17:33, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ogress, Arthur chos, and Dakinijones: Yes I think it would make sense to merge this as a sub-section of the Dakini article and have a re-direct from Pawo to there. I don't think this would be a controversial merge. Pawo is not used much in English. Usually we find "daka and dakini" used to translate the Tibetan "pawo khandro" - though according to the dakini article daka is wrong. (I'm not a Sanskritist, so I'm not sure about that). The dakini article also looks like it needs a lot of cleanup and improvement. Chris Fynn (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Daka isn't wrong although people say it is a lot. It's simply a lot rarer. Either way, the confusion arises because the Tibetan usage (entirely in Vajrayana Buddhism) is wildly different than the Indian usages (which straddle multiple religious movements). A dakini in Indian religious history is a cannibalistic ogre (modern forms of the word are used to describe vampires and ghouls), in Mahayana India these were "subdued" like Hariti or Cundi into beneficial deities. However, in Tibet, khandro(ma)s represent sky spirits who are beneficial spiritual beings kind of like angels; they might have horrifying forms like other deities but these are incidental. Hence the confusion is on many levels. Ogress _smash! 19:54, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Oppose. No, it should not be merged with Dakini, because conflating male and female Yidam would be confusing, especially with regard to categorization. Dakini is in a lot of specifically female categories. Daka or pawo should be in the equivalent male categories.

So it's a stub. It needs to be expanded, not merged. Skyerise (talk) 22:21, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

@Skyrise: I'm unclear about expanding it; how would we go about doing that given the incredible rarity of the term? I'd like to hear concrete suggestions. It only appears in the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Buswell, Lopez) in the proper name Dpa' bo Gtsug lag phreng ba and in reference to the Dpa bo incarnations of the Karma Kagyu; the entry ḍāka is defined in one brief paragraph that ends, "In the title [of a bunhc of tantras] , "ḍāka seems to be used as an abbreviation of ḍākinī." It does seem like merge is in order? Ogress _smash! 23:19, 16 April 2015 (UTC)