The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1413 page)

An ancient Indian language. It is chiefly important as the language employed by the Mauryan court of
A
oka
and particularly in the rock edicts of that king. M
gadh
is a Prakrit, its most widespread script being Br
hm
.
The kingdom of M
ghad
was one of sixteen N. Indian states mentioned in Buddhist sources. It was in an area centred in what is now Bihar.

 
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(Jap., ‘
kami
of misfortune-force’). In Shinto, divine beings which bring about sin, pollution, disaster, and evil. They belong to the land of Yomi, the netherworld. Related terms are
magatsuhi-no-kami which means ‘Great Magatsuhi Kami’ and Yaso-magatsuhi-no-kami which means ‘Countless Magatsuhi Kami’.

 
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(10th/11th cent. CE)
. Prominent Tibetan Buddhist yogin and teacher, who formalized the
Chöd
(Gcod) meditational practice. She was early noted for her lack of regard for personal appearance, an attitude which she encouraged in practitioners of Gcod. When she explored Indian yogic methods, she was attacked for repudiating her vows, and after moving with her family, she then went into retreat for the rest of her life.
Gcod (‘cutting’) has the aim of cutting through the apparent dualities created by the process of thought. The purpose of Gcod is to bring about the complete realization that nothing in reality exists. The path to this realization is one of making the five aggregations (
skandha
) of one's appearance into a sacrificial offering to the best of one's hopes and the worst of one's fears in personified forms, passing in one of the rituals through four stages:

(i) 
dkar ’gyed
, ‘white sharing’, imagining one's body as sweet honey offered to the
Three Jewels
;
(ii) 
khra ’gyed
, ‘multicoloured offering’, imagining one's body as desirable objects like gardens and gifts;
(iii) 
dmar ’gyed
, ‘red sharing’, imagining the flesh and blood of oneself offered to the demons;
(iv) 
nag ’gyed
, ‘black sharing’, the gathering up of one's own faults and the faults of others into oneself and the offering of it to the demons as an act of reparation. Of course, neither she nor the demons have any reality outside the construction of the mind: the purpose of Gcod is to visualize the best and the worst in order to cut off one's belief that they have some reality: hence the importance of vivid pictures and rituals

.