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.
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Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“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)
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