Images above, first by Jerome Raphalen and second by Elizabeth of the yoginis looking out in ceremony to a sacred feminine vulva form in the landscape
Today’s episode is the final part of three parts
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:49 Signs, visions, dreams
00:12:00 Protector land spirits
00:16:00 Tests, conceptual collapse and faith
00:20:00 Meditation boxes
00:23:30 Sky burial
00:28:00 Sri Lanka vipassana reform
00:29:30 Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok and Larung Gar
00:32:00 Modernity, realization and tacit knowledge
00:39:00 Old world preservation
00:43:50 Yidam neuroscience and dilution
00:46:00 Changes in education system
00:49:00 Yogini tulkus and titles
00:57:00 The Gebchak way, peer-pressure and self-responsibility
01:03:00 Becoming a translator
01:07:00 Disrobing
01:10:00 Historical rarity of terms Rigpa and dzogchen
01:12:00 Character of yoginis and aspirations
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Part One here:
On Gebchak’s History & Yogic Activity in the Realm of the Meditators
Part Two here:
On Embodied Practitioners of Tsa-lung Inner Fire & Dzogchen
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About Elizabeth
Elizabeth McDougal, known also as Tenzin Chozom, grew up in Western Canada and then trained as a Buddhist nun in India and on the Tibetan Plateau for seventeen years. Towards the end of her time as a nun – she studied a Masters of Indian philosophy at Banaras Hindu University and then a PhD (2021) at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the modernisation of Tibetan Buddhist practice lineages and on pedagogy as a crucial bridge in translating pre-modern wisdom traditions to the modern world. Elizabeth currently lives in Australia with her human and animal family where she lectures at Nan Tien Institute in applied Buddhist studies. She continues to serve as a Tibetan-to-English translator for Gebchak Wangdrak Rinpoche and other practice lineage lamas. Elizabeth published a book in 2024 called “The Words and World of Gebchak Nunnery: Tantric Meditation in Context.”
Photo by dBang drag rin po che
by Jerome Raphalen
Old shrine hall by Elizabeth
Kaying Wangmo by Olivier Adam
Jogema Dondrub Chomtso by Olivier Adam
By Jerome Raphalen
Rough Transcript, please excuse all errors
Olivia: [00:00:00] I’m Olivia Clementine and this is Love and Liberation. Today our guest is Elizabeth MacDougal, known by her old Dharma friends as Tenzin Chozom Elizabeth grew up in Western Canada and then trained as a Buddhist nun in India and on the Tibetan Plateau for 17 years. She studied a Master’s of Indian Philosophy at Banaras Hindu University, and then a PhD at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the modernization of Tibetan Buddhist practice lineages. and on pedagogy as a crucial bridge in translating pre modern wisdom traditions to the modern world.
Elizabeth currently lives in Australia [00:01:00] with her human and animal family, where she lectures at Nan Tien Institute in Applied Buddhist Studies. She continues to serve as a Tibetan to English translator for Gebchak Wangdrak Rinpoche and other practice lineage lamas.
Elizabeth published a book in 2024 called The Words and World of Gebchak Nunnery Tantric Meditation in Context. Today’s interview is part of a series with Elizabeth on the Gebchak Yoginis, female practitioners in the Nangchen Kingdom of Tibet.
Thank you for being willing to continue our exploration of the Gebchak Yoginis and actually reflecting on something you shared in our previous conversation, where you talked about this kind of [00:02:00] porousness between the mundane and the sacred.
You mentioned that the signs the yoginis pay attention to as being a part of this would you be interested in giving some examples of how the inner outer, sacred mundane interplay shows itself and also some of the signs.
Elizabeth: Signs are really important in the world of the Gebchak nuns and community. And to even talk about like sacred and mundane you know, obviously in, in Buddhist language, in Tibetan Buddhist language, they talk about the world and, the world of enlightenment and the mundane world.
So they do have terms for it, but a t Gebchak It’s not a conversation they’d be having about the difference because for them, it’s just, all one world and, and signs are really, I think, really important for the nuns to kind of continue to be inspired. I mean, it guides them and.
encourages, inspires them in all the rigorous, intensive, lifelong practice that they do. And they’re quite common, like, there’s so many examples of signs, [00:03:00] I mean, one thing that is very common for the Gebchak world is visionary experiences. And I mean, we can see this in any Tibetan Buddhist text that, you know, visionary experiences are, almost just normal. And, you know, all these writings are coming from visions of deities. And in fact, one of the criteria that a master needs to have to write a commentary on Tibetan Buddhism, or like, especially on Buddhist practice, is to have a vision of, your yidam, of your Buddhist deity.
at the end of the summer Drupchen that I attended. This was in July. And at the end of that Drupchen, they went up to the top of the mountain. So if you look at that picture of Gebchak and you’ll see across from the nunnery, there’s a flat top, long mountain.
that they look across the valley to. And that’s called Kijé. Obviously it’s a mountain where a lot of these nomad families have spent their lives and Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and his family would have, he would have grown up at the foot of this mountain. And in [00:04:00] one of his volumes, one of his sixteen volumes, He is talking to all the deities of this mountain
He’s literally just in a conversation with the spirits of the mountain, the mountain gods. and so the ceremony that these nuns did at the end of the Drupchen is called Rito, where they go to the tops of the mountains surrounding the nunnery. So the nunnery surrounded by mountains on all sides, but they kind of look in four directions at them.
And each of these. major mountains is the abode of an important Buddha. So, for example, you have Amitabha, and you have Avalokiteshvara, and then you have Hayagriva, and you have one with a lake at the top, which is Tathara, and then the one that’s flat top, this big one called Kije, that’s special to Hayagriva.
And so that the major ceremony would be up at the top of that mountain and then kind of satellite ceremonies would go to the tops of the other three mountains. So the nuns will leave at like four in the morning and [00:05:00] start walking across the base of the valley. You know, across these sort of grassy plains where they heard their yak.
And nowadays there’s all these little holes in the ground from the pika, these kind of ground squirrels there’s a lot of them nowadays, so it’s kind of pockmarked. And so you’re hopping over these holes, walking across the grass, and then they like hike straight up to the top of this mountain Kije. And then they spent the entire day at the top, they pitched a tent, and there’s a cairn of stones that’s been there, you know, since the nunnery was founded, maybe even before that.
And they do an all day long ceremony, and it’s essentially like a smoke offering, like a big elaborate sang puja, a smoke offering puja to all of the spirits of the land. And as always they’ll be doing some protector practice, some solka protector practices. But it’s mainly a propitiation of the land spirits.
At the end of the ceremony, one of the nuns asked me, did you see the deities? Like it was something that she would have expected I might have seen, you know. [00:06:00] And I said, I said, no, I didn’t see the deities. And I asked her if she had, and she said, no, I didn’t see them.
And I said, do, do other nuns see them? Do many nuns see them? And she said, yeah, yeah, nuns see them. And there are definitely several nuns that I’ve spoken to. They, they don’t talk about it. publicly, but other nuns might talk about them as seeing deities, and then in a more intimate conversation they might talk about an experience they’ve had, like in a, usually in one of these elaborate ritual ceremonies where they have visions, so, like they might have visions of these mountain deities, or they might have visions in, a Drupchen hall, and they have that three dimensional mandala.
That’s always there at any Drupchen that they’re doing, that’s always there as the kind of anchor for their ceremony. And she might see sort of clouds of offerings around this mandala. Or they might, she might see the vase with the nectar that holds the essence of the actual deity, the actual Yidam. She might see that kind of [00:07:00] overflow.
And there’s some kind of, you know, stories that the nuns repeat. And they’ve been telling them over and over again since before the Cultural Revolution. So, sort of famous stories of signs from early days, and one is about the time that the water in the vase, that the bumchoo, boiled over. to the kind of modern English speaking mind, it can just sound really fantastical and far fetched, right?
But, you know, when you spend time in countries like, Bhutan and, And in parts of Nepal and, Tibet, especially like before 2010, Tibet, you know, like Einstein says how, the objects that you see depend on the theory that you hold, right? and you really see that in, in Tibet, that they see the, the sacred in the world around them, and you can see the world around them, show that to them, and you know, really, where can we draw the line?
we can draw a line, but you can also sort of not draw a line, and for the Gebchak nuns, it’s so real, and dreams for the Gebchak nuns are something that they take very much [00:08:00] on the path and the separation of what is real, not necessarily meaning something you can touch with your senses But the same kind of quality of realness as what we experience in waking life They don’t distinguish that between what they might be told or experience in a dream and what they might experience in waking life and so a lot of these nuns would be guided by their dreams and and the lamas of Gebchak are also also guided by their dreams, so I’ve asked a Gebchak Lama, or yogi, sometimes, for like a mo, for a divination.
they wouldn’t take their mala or, or a device and do a mo for me. They would sleep on it and look in their dream and just let me know what the yidam showed them in their dream or what, what the dream told them. And I’ve met a couple of Gebchak nuns. They’re, they’re the kind of senior Gebchak nuns today who would be about 60 years old.
And I was asking one of them about her daily recitation, like the text that she reads and what the order of those are. And for her, [00:09:00] it’s developed over her lifetime at the nunnery, and so some of them are the yidam practices that she did in her division, her retreat division. But the order of it all and what she’s included came to her in a dream.
And they really trust that. They know this dream to be trustworthy. And I mean, this, this is something that just distinguishes, pre modern spiritual cultures from modernity, isn’t it? That the world of, the sacred of the world of dreams is just as real as, the world of work might be.
You know, the world of the capitalist economy might be. Like, for them it’s real. another example of signs would be certainly, the rainbows that appear or the visions that project when somebody’s died and there’s that story of the elder nun who died in her retreat division and then it was the middle of summer, she was an elderly nun, she passed away in her meditation box and a few days later one of the nuns was talking about how she expected it would start to smell because it was warm in the summer.
And she thought the body would be smelling and they would have to deal [00:10:00] with the body. And she walked into this retreat division and it smelled very fragrant. Like a incense kind of a fragrance. And as she got closer to it, it smelt more fragrant. And even this Gebchak nun She was really marveling at this.
And she said for her it increased her faith and her devotion to the practice because she could see this in front of her. so there are a lot of little, little stories like that of signs and in a way they kind of play with that line between sacred and mundane. this really funny story that they tell over and over again.
It probably only happened about maybe 20 years ago Maybe 30 years ago certainly in the like revival period so the nuns have their own Sky burial charnel ground where they offer the bodies of the nuns to the vultures And they have sort of a burial ground up there And it’s at the top of the mountain with the Tara Lake so it would take you about 40 minutes to walk up there And there was this one yogi, you know, with the dreadlocks, kind of a modern togden, he was telling everybody that he was going to go up there to do his chod practice that [00:11:00] night.
maybe bragging a little bit about how he was going to go up and spend the night there. So, a few of the other monks had heard about it, so they went up and they dressed in like a bear hide. And they put skins on them and they hid behind the cairns. And then this yogi arrived and he was doing his chod practice and they started to come out from behind the cairns and come towards him.
And then in an actual chod practice in a charnel ground there might be spirits that would appear, but the more you practice, you know, the cutting through. they would dissolve. But these just kept coming closer and closer to him. And, and he just dropped what he was doing. And he ran down the mountain and really didn’t tell people what had happened.
But of course everybody knew what had happened, right? So, yeah, there’s also a lot of sense of humor.
Olivia: And going back to the dream.
And this might be too specific, and I’m sure varies amongst each person, but , because you mentioned the deities, like they go and ask the deities or see what deities arrive. Are they working with their particular [00:12:00] Yidam in the dream world and, and for you know, prophesizing or divination.
Elizabeth: I’m not sure. I think probably they would be that whatever their kind of regular practices that they’ve cultivated would be who they are in the dream as well. that would be my assumption. or protectors and They’re very guided by the protectors.
And I find that really an interesting question, because, you know, these protectors in Tibetan Buddhism, you know, by and large were land spirits that were harnessed to protect the Dharma. And, you know, these Tibetan Buddhist communities, they just do hours and hours of protector practice. And, you know, when I asked the Gebchak nuns about why is it so important, they talk, of course, about, you know, your samaya, and that once you’ve taken a lot of empowerments, it’s so important to keep your samaya when it’s broken
there can be harm to you, or maybe your activities won’t be successful. So you must do a lot of protective practice. But I observe that somehow it’s important for them like psychologically, maybe like psychically. [00:13:00] And I do think there’s something to that connection to, to nature, to the land, to the body.
And something also that I observed when they, when they are doing, the ceremony I described when they went to the top of the, the mountain, and they did a day long sang practice, so offering to the nature spirits. And when they do Soka protector practices, you see the melody of their chanting becomes more music, like more melodious.
So their Drupchens that they spend all that time doing usually just sticks to a few tunes and it’s almost like a little bit like that war, that war chant, you know, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. But when they do more of the nature based rituals, they start to kind of go off script and become more melodious in their chanting.
Yeah, I noticed that.
Olivia: So you’ve also talked about tests that yogins meet during their intensive training, and subtle body refinement, like spirits during the day that show up and during dreams, will you speak a little bit about that?
These tests that they meet [00:14:00] that are a reflection of their, devotion essentially and training.
Elizabeth: So the kind of main way that the nuns would be tested at Gebchak nunnery, and it’s not a nunnery that has any standardized testing. It doesn’t have a standardized, like, classroom learning of any kind, and it doesn’t have standardized testing, but they certainly do have a kind of tradition of testing that they would call Gyutlen or Gyukto.
So they’re sort of showing, they’re demonstrating their practice to a senior teacher. and in those instances, it’s not so much about the Yidam or the visions of the deities, but rather just them either describing their meditative experience and the ways that they’re experiencing the nature of the mind, or showing the yogas to a senior teacher, and then the senior teacher working with them on the basis of that demonstration.
So that’s really how the Gebchak nuns get tested. and then when it comes to visions and signs and like visions of the Yidam, for example, it wouldn’t be so much a test but more like signposts [00:15:00] that sort of affirm to them what they’re doing. And there, there are times too that maybe there are inauspicious signs.
That they might, of course, encounter. And when that happens, it’s usually assigned to them to have sort of a response, maybe a ritual response, or a behavioral response that they need to, pay attention to, or maybe a warning of something to come, that type of thing.
And just a quick kind of footnote on all the rituals that these nuns do, and the Drupchen traditions, that when you look in the the life stories of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and his guru Tsokyni Rinpoche the first, you see that the Drupchens, were so important at the time, because they could see the big change is coming to Tibet and they could see that really intensive rituals were important for that.
Olivia: Thank you for sharing that. And, and about the tests, going back to that, you talk about how, because they’re doing such intensive practice, they’ll actually meet these challenges, perhaps in your book, you, you use the term [00:16:00] tests,
they’re basically, challenges that they face due to their intensive practice, you know, whether it’s like , karmic ruptures, I guess would be my language or something like this, and then they have a rupture. Yeah. Like they have to face that experience, but actually it’s a sign that their karma is ripening, that they’re developing their practice.
Elizabeth: That’s such an interesting, topic, definitely in Nangchen kind of generally you do see this being talked about. because there’s so much yoga practice, or at least there was so much yogic practice happening there. And you do hear conversations sometimes about, you know, people that are doing a lot of deep Vajrayana practice, which involves, at least in Nangchen, would almost always involve some kind of subtle body practice, the yogas.
That for everybody, they do reach these points where, you know, things start to collapse, this sort of world that we’ve constructed conceptually. You know, the whole point of the practice we’re doing is for that to be deconstructed in a way. And so the test can often be something that might be really [00:17:00] scary.
Like one story I heard, there was a monk in his three year retreat, and in the middle of the night, he must have had his own room, and in the middle of the night, there was a knock at his door. And it was a man who said, I’m, he didn’t know the man, but the man introduced himself as from his home region. His nomad village area and said your father has been impaled by a yak horn and he’s he’s on his death’s bed You you need to come home.
And so this monk welcomed him in gave him a kind of boiled him some tea Got his bag ready and was walking out the door to follow this man back to his home village, and he reached the outer boundary of the retreat center, because they set up this ritual boundary of the retreat center, and he reached the kind of gate to that, and he realized he hadn’t asked permission of the retreat master to leave.
And as soon as he remembered to do that, it was like he woke up from a dream, and he was standing on the end of a rushing river, And, and he describes that as, like, one of these tests, you [00:18:00] know. So his dedication to his practice and his retreat, his commitment to his retreat was being tested, there is a yogi in, in Nangchen who unfortunately, Maybe we would say is a bit schizophrenic and he was somebody that was always very earnest in his practice like kind of hell bent for leather type approach like he just had to practice all day long and He wouldn’t eat for himself and he’d give all of this food to the animals around him and and he just went a bit off balance and who knows what else is there in the story, but he was off balance And some monks are talking about him as you know when these tests come up in our practice in our deeper practice And there’s that karmic rupture as you said It’s the devotion It’s the faith and the devotion that gets you through that test. The ones that handle those tests the best, it’s always the faith and the devotion. And something that I read in Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s namtar life story, because he had this sort of pen pal relationship with Jamgon Kongtrul. And Jamgon Kongtrul wrote to him that all of these great yogis of the Rime era None of them [00:19:00] were enlightened because of the quality of their meditation.
They were all enlightened because of the quality of their devotion. so that’s their prescription to get through those tests. But definitely do see that that’s almost to be expected in the deeper practice, these types of ruptures.
Olivia: could listen to those all day, these rupture stories, so interesting, yeah.
Elizabeth: Yeah, isn’t it interesting? I mean, now in the West, we talk about spiritual crises and people with spontaneous kundalini and the dark night of the soul and people having adverse meditation experiences, but we don’t necessarily have a cultural conversation or support network for that, or understanding.
Olivia: Yeah, it’s so true. Also I think because there’s not, the kind of intensity of focus that these practitioners historically have been able to have is more rare now too, so it appears to me that it’s more difficult to be surrounded by such a clan of, Practitioners being able to share that language.
What’s so [00:20:00] beautiful also just hearing these stories about the Gebchak Yoginis and just practitioners, pre cultural revolution, is the fact that it was such a shared language and, there’s something really, magnetizing about that, but also as you’ve said in so many different ways, just the inspiration that that gives the younger generation to also devote themselves in that way, because they’re held in that web of, what happens, right when you actually give yourself like what you actually can see through.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. I mean, it’s just, it goes so far and I think so much of the tradition at Gebchak Nunnery because it’s so Dzogchen orientated and yogic orientated, I think so much of what guides them in that tradition is what you’ve just said, this unspoken generational language and, and examples from older generations and previous people.
Olivia: You have also mentioned that the yoginis really like to sleep and die and practice and do everything in their meditation [00:21:00] boxes. And will you talk about just some of the benefits of remaining in a meditation box and, and why they have this commitment.
Elizabeth: Especially if the nuns have joined as younger women and they’ve been training in the yogas, one of the main principles that they describe their pathway is towards in Lung Sem Yermi.
It’s both the way it is, but also what they’re awakening to, and that’s the indivisibility mind and prana, of sem and lung. And so to have the meditation box helps the spine to be straight and helps the And with the spine being straight, then that central channel is more clear. So it definitely supports the meditation and the yogas.
I’ve not stayed in one myself, but I think they look fairly comfortable. I did sit in one for a second, and it’s very deep. And they’ve got lots of, cushions at the bottom, and they have their blankets around them. So it’s probably quite cozy.
You know, if you’re somebody that does a lot of practice, just sort of sitting in your meditation box, you’d almost feel like you’re a bit [00:22:00] in a cocoon or something. You’d probably be quite happy there. And so I think they just feel that’s their seat. so it’s both supports their yoga practice, but it’s very comfortable for them.
And it’s also where they, sit for so much of their practice. So I think as lifelong practitioners, they just feel the sense of refuge there. But certainly you do see the nuns that can’t stay in it. You know, the nuns that are really ill will come out and, and stay in a bed but generally they’re pretty happy
Olivia: and in terms of joints, like knee joints, ankles, is it one of those things where if you’ve been in a box all of these years, those don’t arise for these practitioners or how does it go?
Elizabeth: They seem to be all right, and I think, if they’ve been there since they were young in these boxes, and they’ve been growing up doing so much of the trulkhor, so they’re, you know, they’re moving quite a bit, and kind of greasing the joints with those yogas through the subtle body practices, then at least what I’ve seen is you see a lot of kidney problems.
The nuns complain of a lot of kidney problems, like they [00:23:00] They call it -, which is a lot of lower back pain, and it’s probably, it could be coming from the cold, and so they often wear like sheepskins along their kidney regions. and as they get older, they start to wobble a bit, and they’re walking, but I haven’t seen a lot of joint complaints, with the nuns.
I’m sure they have them, but they’re still walking around, and even when they’re elder.
Olivia: And I imagine that also helps with their dream yoga, not getting in such deep sleep as well.
Elizabeth: I think so, because they’re probably sleeping on average five to six hours. So I think, yeah, they don’t sleep as deeply, because they’re not lying down.
Olivia: You mentioned also that the Gebchak yoginis perform the rituals for the sky burials when a yogini dies.
And will you talk about sky burials, like what happens from the moment a yogini dies until the completion of the sky burial ritual, whatever, you know.
Elizabeth: one of the two, Vajra master nuns.
Is this nun who’s again around like 50s right now and she’s quite tall and she just has a very kind of shamanic look in [00:24:00] her eye. She’s got a lot of Power and she’s incredibly humble and and sweet, but you would at least I feel a little bit You know, I feel a lot of respect commanded in me when I’m in her presence and so she she came in probably the late 70s early 1980s one of that new batch of Revival nuns and Adeu Rinpoche who was really guiding the Gebchak community in that period a lot He had told her he wanted her to learn to perform sky burials, and she was freaked out, like she didn’t want to do it
and then an older yogi, male yogin, helped her, and so eventually he would just start to put some of the blood and, you know, fat from the bodies on her face, and eventually she just kind of got used to it. And, you know, of course, it’s all caught up in their practice as well. And so, what I know is that often Gebchak nun will die.
Or, or it might be a yogin from the community, a male yogin who dies. And, you know, often they’ll leave them in Tukdam for some days. And often you’ll hear [00:25:00] stories that the body will have shrunken. Somewhat as well, so the body’s quite a bit smaller. And that was another story you heard, there was one nun who was quite heavy, like a heavyweight kind of bigger nun.
And then after she’d been in some days of meditation after death, when they packaged her up to carry her up the hill, she was so light. That was another story about, you know, something that happened. But they’ll kind of tie the body up in, usually in a cross legged posture, they’ll sort of bind the body up, and then carry the body up to the top of that mountain.
And there’s this charnel ground. And it’s interesting, when you walk up to the charnel ground, it feels very clean. I mean, the whole area is clean, it’s just in the middle of a highland valley, right? So it’s not, like, dirty in any way, but there’s something very clean that you feel in the air. And it’s very high, and it’s quite green up there in the summer.
and then to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what ritual they do as part of the ceremony, but they talk about how particular rituals need to be done in order for the vultures to descend. And if [00:26:00] those rituals aren’t done, they won’t descend. And you don’t really see the vultures around usually.
But as soon as there’s a sky burial, like suddenly there are just dozens of them that turn up. there’s this one nun that I told you about, and she’s one of the few nuns, there’ll be a few of them now, that will then cut up the body. and then they offer it to the vultures, and at the end of it all, they’ll probably leave it there for the vultures to pick and get at completely, and then with some of the bones that are left, then they usually crush the bones a bit, or else sometimes put the bones in a cairn of stones.
and kind of consecrate the cairn, or at least have it there as a sacred spot for family and loved ones to visit in the future as a memorial. But certainly the nuns all do pray, they request that their body is offered to the vultures as their final act of generosity.
Olivia: So, you also talk about how the transition into these hyper intellectual This, materialistic culture, the transition into that and your concern of these visionary experiences of nuns, like everything we’ve just spoken about, not [00:27:00] being taken seriously in the future and how it actually could impact the well being of the Gebchak community.
Will you speak more about your concern? This shift?
Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, I should just start off by saying, I think around 2010, a lot of people in Tibet were really concerned and it was, very concerning, but actually.
here we are in 2025. I’m not as concerned. I mean, I’m concerned, but I think, you know, these Tibetans, they’re so devoted and they have such a heritage of, devotion and, and spiritual culture that their ability to adapt is really extraordinary.
I think to me, Gebchak one of the reasons why it’s so interesting is because you can see modernization happening. Like for us, you know, we were born into it. We’ve got the enlightenment and the you know, industrial revolution a couple hundred years behind us, but we were born into education systems and ways of seeing in the world that already are modern.
And what do we even mean by modern, right? From the 1980s until today at Gebchak, you can just see it. You can [00:28:00] see it. It’s, it’s really, really interesting. And you see this has happened in Buddhist communities around the world, like in Burma, Sri Lanka, under late stage British colonialism, and this kind of view of scientific materialism that was coming with that.
Then you see these figures, like in, in Burma, you saw people like Lady Sayadaw, who could say, they didn’t really have a political ability to respond to what was happening, but their approach was Reform, ethical and educational reform. And so what we know of as Vipassana today is largely a result of this modernization reform period.
Like a native Burmese reform that they led. And their approach was to educate the lay population in Abhidharma. And to, have, the Vipassana that lay people across Burma are so active in engaging with today. That was a part of this movement. It was about making the lay people literate in Abhidharma.
and having them uphold the Dharma through Vipassana practice and study. in [00:29:00] Sri Lanka you see something similar. And then you look at Tibet like in Nangchen before the Cultural Revolution, there was really just like one shedra, one monastic college, in the way that we would think of a shedra, monastic college today.
There was really just one main one. Today, almost every major monastery in Nangchen has a Shedra, has a master college, and that includes nunneries as well, large nunneries as well. and like Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok is a really interesting person to look at here because he led in a way this movement.
So Larung Gar, also known as Serta. Larung Gar was this hermitage area where yogins used to love going. It was a valley, it was a very sacred area to yogins and yoginis to go and practice. And Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok was this modern day terton, incredible visionary for the modernization of Tibetan Buddhism, he obviously could just see long term, and he could see all of those subtle causes and conditions that needed to be brought together [00:30:00] to preserve Tibetan Buddhism in this passage into What is now modern China?
And so, you know, again, Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok established Larung Gar, which is this academy, really, for monks and nuns to learn, the arts and sciences of Buddhist curriculum, and I think it’s a 13 year program. And of course, you know, Larung Gar, you know, about 10 years ago, it had like 50.
I mean, it’s hard to count, but there were tens of thousands of It was a city, of monks and nuns studying, and getting degrees as Khenpo, and also Khenmo. So Larung Gar, actually, they had Khenmo, female Khenpos, before anybody in India, and they didn’t have Western feminists really there, and they might have had one or two that had visited, but they didn’t have a movement of Western feminism leading them towards that.
So that was Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok and the Khenpos of Larung Gar who could see to modernize and be relevant and to adapt to the value system and the ways of learning of this time. [00:31:00] They needed to do that. They needed to establish this scholastic study program that could both be conversant in the language of modern rationalism and, science, but could also, meet the value system of modernization, of accrediting, of giving you a degree.
degree oriented study, is something that really characterizes, you know, most monasteries and even nunneries of Tibetan Buddhism in India and Nepal and Tibet today. But that’s something that’s just been since the 1980s because when we look at the Rime period and we look at Khenpos in the Rime period, they weren’t the norm Khenpos were usually the masters and they were these Khedrup, they were both Khenpo scholars, but also yogins like a Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo or a Jamgon Kongtrul.
They were masters of of yoga practice. As well as the text. and a Khenpo was kind of a master. Like not everybody was a Khenpo. Not every monk was a Khenpo, but you know, nowadays there are thousands and thousands of Khenpos and Khenmos, and that’s just [00:32:00] meeting the needs of, the time. And so between 2005 and 2010, you just really saw this kind of drive among the Tibetan community.
And you also saw, Tibetans themselves are starting to reject some of the markers of their culture. And you kind of see this in every modernizing Indigenous culture, don’t you? Go through this period where you reject your culture because it’s superstitious, because it seems to be backwards anyhow.
According to the markers of modernity, and like, around 2005 to 2010, if you had a TV in your home in one of these new kind of urban centers, these towns, every night there’d be an hour of a government run and the old is kind of to be gotten rid of, and the new is to be celebrated and, developed. And, you know, modern China is just this, you know, hyper modern world state. And the answer, really, to every problem has been economic development, even social, cultural programs.
It’s, it’s to develop economically. And so what you saw happening, sadly, is that the Tibetans were rejecting [00:33:00] that in themselves, that old world in themselves, and you can see some of the Gebchak nuns, those senior Gebchak nuns who are 60, who grew up in like yak hair tents, herding hundreds of yak, you know, wearing skins and You know, living at Gebchak nunnery in meditation boxes at 4, 500 meters, you know, at minus 20 in the winter
start to then kind of assess themselves and feel that they’re dirty. And can feel themselves in the eyes of modernity, So you saw that among the Tibetans, and then you could see this push towards scholasticism.
So a lot of new nuns were wanting to study, and a lot of the nuns, even at Gebchak, were wanting more study in their program. And we can talk about that kind of tension in the nunnery, and there was a period of time when what you saw happen, interestingly, was that You know, before the Cultural Revolution, Gebchak nunnery was very prestigious.
It was doing these ritual ceremonies for the kings of Nangchen. And they had a very good reputation as being, really the best center of yogic practice in the [00:34:00] region. And then step forward to the late 1980s, 1990s, and Gebchak hadn’t changed anything. They were very deliberately still maintaining their original curriculum.
But they started to be criticized by other Tibetans for not studying and not, not knowing what they were doing. Like, how can they be doing all these ritual and Dzogchen practices when they haven’t studied? They were being criticized. They hadn’t changed anything, but the world around them was changing and that was starting to become the narrative.
that was sort of 2005 to 2010, and then you would see, like, after Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok passed away, of course, you have these, great Khenpos like Khenpo Tsultrim Lodro and Khenpo Sonam Darje, who are not only leading the Tibetan community, but leading huge communities of Chinese, Han Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist followers. so skillfully they’ve brought Tibetan Buddhism into the modern period but you saw Khenpo Tsultrim Lodro saying, [00:35:00] okay, look at us
at the rate that we’re going, in 20 years, we will have our Lung, but we won’t have our Wang and Trika, so these three kind of ways of transmitting practice lineages would be the Wang empowerment, the Lung kind of transmission of text, oral transmission of text. And the Trika, like the Semtri or the Trika meditation teachings.
Which can only be practiced based on experience. you might have a text present when you give Trika or Samtri. But not always, and it’s, it’s really essentially coming from one’s realization through practice. and likewise, Wang, empowerments are coming through that ritual mastery of, of tantric practice.
And so Khenpo Tsultrim Lodro was saying in 20 years, at the rate we’re going, we’re going to just have the lung, we’ll just have the textual transmission, but we won’t have the Wang, and we won’t have the trika. So it was like this really quick, like, back up, back up. Hold your horses here and then again this kind of collecting themselves like they had to do that to [00:36:00] to adapt and to survive Under the state and under the forces of modernization in China, which were massive But they could also see what was happening at the same time and so now you do see this return to full retreat houses and transmission ceremonies of the terma and so that’s, how it’s looked up there.
Olivia: I want to read this quote it’s in your book, but it’s from the Gebchak text. It’s from volume 11.” it is called meditation, but it is not the domain of the conceptual mind. You cannot create awakening with your intellect. No matter how good your meditation may appear, conceptual meditation only obscures your ultimate nature.
How then, is so called meditation to be practiced? Meditation means leaving your mind as it is, uncontrived. If realization could be contrived, all sentient beings would be realized. Even a [00:37:00] positive mental object obscures the essential self arising nature.”
You mentioned that scholarly intelligence is increasing, So, are there fewer realized accomplished practitioners now because of this?
Elizabeth: the quotation that you just read, that’s something so characteristic of Rime texts, you know, that they had this massive push towards textual collections and, and textual study. But it was all within this sort of hermeneutic of Dzogchen or Mahamudra insight. So that would have been at the heart of all of it.
And almost why the Rimé period happened, at least in my analysis, is because that was the ethos. Dzogchen and Mahamudra had allowed for that open minded eclecticism. But I do really feel like the grand challenge of our time for people like you and I, as much as for the Tibetans, is something that is, extremely subtle.
And extremely challenging, and it is the modern headspace and our ways of learning. [00:38:00] so I think in Tibet, well I mean you certainly do, you probably would see fewer full time yogic practitioners. They’re still there, and there’s still quite a lot of them. You know, they still have a value system and a cultural system that so values and supports that, that they’re still out there.
Not as many because there’s a mandatory, nine years of education, primary and secondary education. So young people are going to schools and when they come out of secondary education, which is oriented, again, towards becoming kind of a rational market actor to joining, you know, the economy of China.
most of them are wanting more material comforts and wanting to kind of measure up to those standards of the modern economy and value system. So, you have fewer people wanting to join a full time yogic practice system and, and people that are wanting to become a nun, more often are wanting to join one of these nunneries that have a Shedra program.
It’s connecting you to a nunnery where you’re training and getting educated in the language of modern society. And Gebchak nunnery, in my [00:39:00] assessment, is not doing that. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. In a way it’s preserving something from an old world that is so important to preserve, but the nuns are also not necessarily connecting to a modern conversation.
that’s not to say that they won’t and that they’re not in the process of doing it, but that’s their challenge. let me just read you this quotation from another Gebchak Tulku, Ngaksam Tulku. You know, there were all these lamas of Gebchak in the early days that were reincarnated as tulku, and this is Nawang Samten, who’s known as Ngaksam Tulku, he’s a younger tulku there in Nangchen today at Gebchak Nunnery , and he’s just talking about this concern.
And he’s saying a lot of lamas in Tibet and around the world nowadays have this concern. But in Tibet he’s saying, “these days, if a nunnery or a monastery offers an education of sacred vision, and of those, he’s using the word pal-yon, which is how you might translate English civilization, but what he’s referring to is these inner, abundant qualities of the inner world, of inner [00:40:00] cultivation.
of subtle body cultivation. He’s saying if you offer a system that’s training these really deeply internal qualities of sacred vision and cultivation, of experiential learning, no one comes, he says. But if you offer arts and sciences education, you know, a modern Buddhist curriculum, everyone wants that nowadays.
So in the cities of Tibet nowadays, he’s saying, like in, in Yushu, in Chengdu, in Lhasa, and so on, the inner subtle body qualities of our minds are projecting outwards to objects of learning, to objective learning systems, and those, the inner cultivation is fading. That, he’s saying, this is the real danger of Tibetan culture being lost.
With these modern ways of learning and values instilled in our education systems, the kind of economic currents. So you can look at Tibetan Buddhism on the Tibetan Plateau today, and you can see the most [00:41:00] exquisite, extraordinary monasteries and nunneries have been built. You know, and some of them are enormous, huge complexes.
There’s a lot of financial support, you know, coming from Han Chinese, and there’s this enormous fusion. There’s a very positive hybrid of, of Tibetan and kind of Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist practice, which is a really good, good thing. But again, this challenge, it’s something really subtle.
It’s about our ways of processing information, our ways of consuming information, and our ways of making sense. You know, our pedagogy, when we’re not embodying our knowledge, and we don’t have ways of learning that are fully embodying our knowledge, then without knowing it, without recognizing it’s happening, we just start to see things through a kind of scientific materialist viewpoint.
One of my favourite scholars, her name is Vanessa Andreotti, and she’s got a book called “Hospicing Modernity”, which to me is like one of the best books for trying to articulate what is [00:42:00] modernity, and it’s like the air we breathe, it’s very hard to put your finger on it, but she says like, modernity, we index knowledge in words.
And data, right? You know, it’s almost hard to imagine knowledge that we can’t articulate in words and data nowadays, especially with AI, and tacit, embodied knowledge that cannot be tested by any standard, or at least like explicit testing system.
you know, that gets lost In this ethos that we live in modernity, that can easily get overlooked and undervalued and lost, just simply lost. and so, that’s the danger for all of us. And, I mean, I look at Western Tibetan Buddhism and the Yidam traditions, I think, are really kind of fading, I think, because it’s so hard for a modern English speaking mind to want to practice a deity.
You know, for many of us, not everybody, but for, I think, generally speaking, it just feels very uncomfortable to be doing a deity practice. It’s hard to make sense of that. because of the way we translate a deity practice, but also because of our, European [00:43:00] Christian heritage. But when you look at, you know, the, the Rime and the Tantric systems of Tibet and the Gebchak community and you see the Yidam practice, the role of the Yidam practice in bringing about the subtle body accomplishment, you know, the Drupa, the generation and completion stage are so integrated, so to dilute a yidam practice does seem like a loss to me. And I know it’s suitable for a lot of modern followers of Tibetan Buddhism to approach it differently, so I’m not sure, if there’s a right or wrong here, but I do feel it’s a loss to dilute yidam practice because, to me it’s just the most extraordinary creative method of accessing the qualities of Buddha nature, and I think the Yidam practice can absolutely be adapted to a modern audience,
Olivia: How are you seeing it diluted?
Elizabeth: You know, in Tibetan Buddhism, there’s the taplam and the drolam.
So the Drolam is the path of liberation, which is going towards kind of like a Mahamudra or Dzogchen practice, cultivating Dzogchen or cultivating [00:44:00] Mahamudra without much of the yoga and the yidam. So just going, you know, you might be doing a lot of shamatha and vipassana and then getting semtri, getting a lot of pointing out instructions and just going right into nature of mind practices, which absolutely works for a lot of people.
But in Tibet, when they talked about drolam, where you, you don’t do the yogas, you just do the Mahamudra or the Dzogchen, they would still be doing yidam. They would be getting the blessings of the yidam. but nowadays I do see quite a lot of the Western audience not doing as much yidam and just doing nature of mind, which is wonderful.
Listen, I’m sure there are a lot of people that were going to get liberated before I do not doing yidam practice, right? But when I look at the Gebchak community and I look at what came from the Rime time in Tibet, and I look at what that has to offer. I do feel it’s a loss to not have the generation stage there.
And, you know, I did some work with Maria Kozhevnikov, who’s this cognitive neuroscientist, and her work is extremely interesting, and, when she did some work [00:45:00] with, Gyaltsen Tulku’s Yogins in Bhutan, and with some in the Nangchen community, and with the Gebchak nun.
And if you look at those who are doing Mahamudra with the Yidam practice beforehand, a. k. a. generation stage, and then you look at the Mahamudra without the generation or Yidam practice beforehand, it looks very different in the brain. And how it looks different is what leads to focused attention in cognitive neuroscience terms, which is different than this framework in meditation that contemplative science has had, but focused attention and the kind of metacognitive heightened awareness that neuroscience thinks of as the higher states of consciousness or the potential.
generation stage simply generates energies in the body that can lead to higher states of awareness according to experiments, and it’s very hard to get qualified Tibetan or Bhutanese participants. So I think she had about nine or maybe twelve, and then, you know, processed that data, and this is how it looks.
But of course, Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana, since India has understood this, even without doing cognitive neuroscience [00:46:00] studies, it just knows that there is this generation of subtle body energy and experience that can lead to that Dzogchen and Mahamudra experience, or facilitate it.
Olivia: So fascinating. so you were saying that because of the schooling system now and the requirements in China now women and girls aren’t able to be continuously at the nunnery any longer.
They have to go to school maybe for nine years, and then afterwards return to the nunnery. And will you talk about the impact of that? Like what is happening in terms of people’s practice or level of commitment? You already said. There’s more desire for comfort and material items.
Elizabeth: so there’s this mandatory nine years of, state education. I think it starts when they’re around age seven or eight, and it goes to the equivalent of like a grade 12.
And this has been in place in China since the early 1900s, that people wouldn’t become a monk or a nun until they were 18 in China. And, you know, we can see that it might be a good thing, you know, when you’ve [00:47:00] got your own autonomy as a young adult to make that decision, , it seems like only a good thing.
So what you see happening around Gebchak is, you see these young little, I call them nunlets, these young little girls who might be five or six years old, who get sent up to Gebchak to live with their aunts or their cousins or sisters, and they wear the robes, they shave their head, and they live at Gebchak for two or three years, maybe a little bit more, they learn to read the prayers, the Drupchens, they just jump in and do the Drupchens with the older nuns and they hang around and they learn some of the practices and they kind of absorb, you know, the Buddhist blessings. I think the parents are probably sending them there to absorb the cultural blessings of the nunnery because they know that they’ll need to go to
to state school when they’re eight or whatever. So you do see a bunch of these little nunlets hanging around the nunnery, and then they kind of disappear when they’re around eight or nine, because they’ll go back to town, and then they’ll go to school, and then by the time that young people have graduated from secondary school when they’re around 18, you know, [00:48:00] you might have young women that just have a karmic disposition and do really want to become a nun. That does definitely happen. Certainly not as much as it probably would have without that schooling system.
a lot of women are probably going on to do extraordinary things in a different way. young women who are wanting to become a nun, so they, again, might want to join one of these Shedras, one of these monastic colleges for nuns, and become a Khenma or a Loponma, these scholarly degrees for nuns.
Because connects them this kind of cultural conversation of Buddhism in the modern world, and they They learn a lot and they can cultivate their study and their practice. Because a lot of these modern nunneries and monasteries, in Nungchen at least, would have both. And you know, the whole ethos is, we need to have study and practice.
So when the Gebchak nuns were being criticized around 2010, like I was saying, other nuns in Nangchen would say, we need study and practice. It can’t just be practice, we need study and practice, right? but at Gebchak Nunnery, you know, in my eyes, they do have study. It’s just not there. the modern kind of study.
[00:49:00] It’s a different kind of study. They do know what they’re doing. They know very well what they’re doing. It’s just maybe not in, in certain terms. So these young nuns want to join a Shedra or sometimes women who haven’t done very well in high school, they become a nun because they don’t have other options.
for work and life. and so simply what’s happening at a place like Gebchak which is so remote and so high altitude, you just have fewer and fewer young women joining. So most of the nuns there would be in their 40s, 50s and early 60s.
Olivia: The nunnery is completely run and organized by the nuns, yet they rely on male lamas for empowerments and lungs.
And do they want to be able to offer empowerments and lungs?
Elizabeth: Great question. So they’re very autonomous in their daily life. These nuns do run and organize themselves, but they’re not entirely organized by just the nuns that the male lamas of the tradition have a lot to do with anything [00:50:00] administrative So anything that might relate to government policy or anything that?
For example, every few years when their roles are re elected, like the disciplinarian nuns and the manager nuns and the, the ritual leader nuns, every three years there’s a re election and nuns get rotated through those positions. So when that happens, along with Tsechu Gompo, which is where the first Tsoknyi Rinpoche lived, where the king of Nangchen lived, that’s another Drukpa Kagyu monastery in Nangchen, that has a very close brotherly relationship with Gebchak Nunnery.
So every three years there’ll be a big meeting at Tsechu Monastery and 16 nuns from Gebchak Nunnery, one from each of the retreat divisions, form a committee, and then a couple of monks from Tsechu Monastery and the lamas, the male lamas. of Gebchak nunnery, will have a meeting to reelect those roles, for example.
But on a day to day basis, the nuns can handle everything, and I don’t think they want to give empowerments. Maybe some of them secretly [00:51:00] do, but I imagine it would be like a bit of a small poppy syndrome, or a tall poppy syndrome, if they were saying they wanted to give an empowerment, it might come across as ego and nuns would, it wouldn’t be acceptable or something, so I’ve never heard a nun say that.
I have asked the nuns if they think that they should have their own female tulkus. Because you had these extraordinary nuns in like the 1920s that were masters and everybody, all the male lamas, the whole region recognized them as master nuns. And they passed away and in at least one case they were recognized as a monk in their second life.
as a male. And so I’ve asked the nuns, you know, do you think that the nuns should be recognized as tulkus, as reincarnate masters? And, one of them has said, I do think it would be good. I think we should take that responsibility. Because one of the point of great sorrow for the Gebchak nuns these days is that their male lamas don’t reside at the nunnery.
They don’t live there anymore. And I think a lot of Tibetan Buddhism, they always had their lamas living there in [00:52:00] the Gompas and it was like the root But nowadays a lot of the Lama’s responsibilities is fundraising and teaching much more broadly around the world So they’re not living there and the nuns really really yearn for that so they think maybe having a nun tuku could help but other nuns have said no I think that would just create problems in the nunnery I’ve never actually asked them if they wanted to give an empowerment, but actually they do help to give empowerment.
So at the end of some of the ceremonies, when there’s the last day of a Drupchen and you go around with the substances from the mandala, that those Vajra masters and the head nuns in the rituals will participate with the male lamas and they’ll wear the hats and they’ll be doing the main rituals for that empowerment.
So it’s kind of like in, in practice they do it all, but I don’t think they’re that keen on having the position of the titles and those two Vajramasters do sit on high thrones in the Drupchens these days, but they were forced to do that by the male Lama. They didn’t want to, but the male Lama made them do it.
Olivia: [00:53:00] So what kind of problems are they concerned would arise if they had a female Tulku residing on the land?
Elizabeth: I am not sure. I am not sure.
Olivia: I mean, also, it’s interesting because now there’s all these Khenmos and, they’re going to be more, literate and publishing female practitioners, in this century.
I don’t know if they’re all going to be great practitioners. Let’s hope that many of them are, but in a way they could be gifted this opportunity to have some very capable female representatives holding those roles. –
I also see it’s a beautiful thing to have that relationship, to not just have women in that space to have men there as well, holding some of that responsibility, but it
is an interesting moment just thinking of all of these Khenmos that are coming into play now and, maybe that is an opportunity.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I think it really could be actually like there’s actually at a branch, one of the larger Branch Nunneries of , they have a khenmo who [00:54:00] studied at Larung Gar and is now back in Nangchen at the branch nunnery and, and they’ve just built her house and she’s living there now.
So I think there’s a lot of reason to be optimistic. for the preservation of these traditions. It’ll just maybe be smaller and maybe be different, but I think these Khenmos, if they come back to the Gebchak community and, and they’re really working with the, you know, the traditional texts and, lineage practices of the Gebchak community, and helping through language and through organization, it could be an incredible moment.
But what you see happening with Gebchak, in fact, what you see happening across Nangchen is with the movement to Shedras, to the monastic college, and the modern economy becoming more lower altitude to like trade like a monetary economy. These big monasteries in Nangchen that used to be quite high altitude like Gebchak, quite a lot of them have rebuilt themselves at lower altitudes and left the older one to nuns in practice.
So the nuns are doing more practice than the monks nowadays. [00:55:00] You probably wouldn’t hear that, you probably wouldn’t be told that, but if you go and you do your whole ethnography around Nangchen, you’re going to probably find more nuns doing practice than monks. Not a lot more, but just because they’re not as involved in public discourse, I think they’re doing more practice, maybe.
But I think, like, Gebchak Nunnery actually has this branch that’s been developed down across the river from Nangchen Town, and it’s been kind of developed as the future hub, or one of the future hubs of the broader Gebchak community, which again has like 40 branches. And so, I do wonder if in the future Gebchak Nunnery might be one of these important hermitages, but some of these new lower altitude hubs might form more of the centers.
Simply because they’re more accessible, you know, your food comes from lower altitude now, the health care centers, your families, conversations are happening at lower altitude, but also again the nuns are getting altitude sickness and their, their health is really suffering at higher altitudes. So there could be this shift that happens.
Olivia: And in terms of modernity, and I mean, you’ve said a little [00:56:00] bit about it, but just want to ask, in case there’s more in there that you wanted to disclose, how do you see modernity affecting motivation?
Elizabeth: I mean, all of the distractions of modernity, like the phones for one.
Olivia: Yeah. How do they relate to that? I mean, so curious.
Elizabeth: So, there were these businessmen that were going up and trying to, to sell a, a cellular tap, like a phone, cellular tower to the Gebchak nunnery for years, around 2005 to 2010. And the, the male lamas kept, shutting them down, like, sending them away.
And, you know, generally at Gebchak things are done, on consensus, or in large group decision making. But when it came to these offers from businessmen, the male llamas were just like sending them away and shutting them down. But eventually they had to put it to the nuns. You know, do you want phones or not?
But the thing is, the nuns families, their loved ones, their relationships are and all have phones [00:57:00] and they want to be connected in the ways of, so they, most of the nuns wanted phones. So they got phones. And I think it was inevitable anyway. And I, what was it, 2014 maybe, that they got a tower installed and then the nuns got phones.
So what you see, the nuns all have phones and they’re all on WeChat, but their relationship to WeChat is, they’re mostly just sending, you know, Dharma stuff. Like if I ever get anything from a gift check, none, it’s always Dharma, you know, and it’s little videos of the land around them with some like Tibetan music and maybe some of the smoke offering or it’s, you know, somebody’s edited a recording of a, teaching from a Lama, or it’s pictures of Gebchak Nunnery.
And they love their land. They love their land. So that’s pictures of the land. So I think there’s some distraction there, but their, dedication to the practice is so strong that I’m not too worried. And then, as I was saying before, in the Drupchens, they have the phones, but they’re not talking on them.
They’re just using them to take photos and videos. You [00:58:00] do see the Chure, that wet sheet ceremony in January, that in 2010 when I was there, you were not allowed to video it or take any photos, because somehow it dilutes it to do so. Nowadays it’s videoed and you see it on WeChat, even the Gebchak wet sheet, so they’re the distractions of the phone, they’re distractions of, modern, conveniences, so I think all of that reduces your motivation to practice.
But if I had to place a bet, I would bet that you’re still going to have very rigorous intensive cultivation of yoga practice in Tibet. It’s going to be maybe a little bit more, marginal. And I don’t think the population will ever be what it was in, like, the Rimé period, for example.
But it’ll still be there, and people will still value it. you’ve got this landscape that’s just imbued with the blessings of their history, and you’ve got people and the language. So hopefully it will stay, and as you’re talking about these Khenpos, and the opportunities for Preservation and, connection there.
Is there anything [00:59:00] that the Gebchak community is doing to prepare for modernization so there are some boundaries?
So there are some prophecies in the early Gebchak text that Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s lineage will spread around the world, or that it’ll thrive. And some of these kind of visionary nuns talk about they can see there are going to be major bumps in the road, but they see it lasting a long time.
Elizabeth: But they are well aware that if that happens or not depends on them. I’m really amazed at how these nuns have handled, the criticisms of them not studying enough, and the kind of peer pressure of moving towards a more Shedra model. there was this period in 2000, what was it, 15, where they had a huge gathering at Gebchak nunnery of a lot of the branches that came together to train.
It was like a summer camp to train, especially in the rituals, but a little bit in the yogas of the Gebchak tradition. And the Gebchak nuns led that, but you had a lot of the, like, Togden yogins from other branches and a lot of the male lamas were there. And it’s, as you were saying before, like, you have this real harmony of the male [01:00:00] and of the nuns and the male participation in Gebchak nunnery.
There’s no real feminist issue there. in terms of them supporting each other, but in this training ceremony, you had some nuns coming from branches that wanted to have at the end of the two months, like a kind of intellectual debate about whether their tradition of rituals was coming from the Mindrolling tradition, or the Nam Chö tradition, or which Nyingma lineages these mudras were coming from.
They wanted to, like, have a really good kind of indexed, modern debate. And I overheard this conversation with some Gebchak lamas and some older Gebchak nuns talking about, but this isn’t, this isn’t the Gebchak way. Our Gebchak way, we don’t do that kind of study. You actually don’t need to do that kind of study to realize, to get it, to get the whole intent of this lineage.
they made a decision to not do that. Because for them it was about that embodied, sacred, Vajrayana cultivation. And so the Gebchak nuns have managed to kind of say no to a lot of peer pressure. And they’re still doing their 18 [01:01:00] drubchens a year. They’re the only community in Tibet doing that many drubchens.
And, again, against all this peer pressure. So I think especially these senior nuns, I think they have a very, very deep connection to their lineage and to whatever the future of that lineage. might be, and I think they have probably very strong prayers, very strong intentions, very strong practice, and visions about somehow preserving and holding it.
And I, and I know a lot of these nuns pray to be reborn at Gebchak,
and you do see quite a revival of the branches of Gebchak, and especially the male lamas, joining together with male leadership and other branches to try and bring all of those branches together and to keep it strong.
It looks promising,
Olivia: how about the younger generation in terms of their commitments?
Elizabeth: Yeah. So there actually were quite a few Gebchak nuns that did actually leave. So when a lot of those conversations and the tension was there, Especially between 2005 to 2013 or something.
I don’t know how many, maybe not a lot, but certainly some did leave [01:02:00] to study elsewhere. so the, the younger nuns that stayed, they’re just as dedicated in the Drupchens. You see them doing the selfies and maybe being a little bit more distracted, but I think that’s just because of their age.
They’re in the back rows in the Drupchen, but I think if they’re still there, you get sort of caught up in this momentum of the nunnery, of the inspiration of the nunnery. and it just goes pretty deep for them. So they’re, they’re very impressive. there’s this quality of a Gebchak nun that I had not seen in any of the Indian nunneries where I spent some time.
There’s a real gravitas about a Gebchak nun. And even the younger ones that are still there have that. They’re not sweet, like, they’re not sweet and giggly nuns. They’ve got a great sense of humor, but they, they really have something They’re very proud of what they have.
I haven’t been in Nangchen since 2019.
Elizabeth: And so it’s been a while for me since I’ve observed much, but, you know, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned, and I think there still are, but I think there A lot of reasons to, to feel quite optimistic as well.
Olivia: [01:03:00] And so you’re a translator and, how did you learn Tibetan and what style of learning worked for you? Because you’ve spoken about how, for instance, the Gebchak Yoginis when they’re young, nunlets.
Elizabeth: learn how to speak Tibetan. So what’s worked for you and do you speak the Kham dialect in Nangchen?
You know, you had your kind of Ani Jimpas, you know, translators for Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, they had no dictionaries, they had no textbooks to help them learn.
Elizabeth: Right. And then today’s generations, you’ve got a lot of digital tools and books and incredible teachers out there teaching translation. And I was somewhere in between, so I had the Chandra Das dictionary and I started learning to speak Tibetan when I was living in this Drukpa Kagyu nunnery and my role was kind of like a matron.
I was like living in the nunnery with these nuns and so I just started to learn to speak basically Lhasa dialect, what Tibetans in India are speaking, just by having lunch and living with these nuns. And then after a few years, I think I realized If I was going to be a Western nun, I needed a job, like I needed to have something to offer, to be able to [01:04:00] receive what I received as a nun, I had to be able to give something, so I felt very important to learn Tibetan, so after four years of learning just to speak Tibetan, just kind of living with these nuns, then I went to Sarnath and I joined the university, the Tibetan university there in Sarnath, the Central Institute, and I took a year of, Lekshi Junwang and the kind of grammar texts, and I learned, started to learn to write Tibetan.
I had a friend that I met there, my friend Lamotso from Amdo, and she’s one of my dearest friends, so I have to give her credit because she’s really one of my main Tibetan teachers. And for the first two years of our friendship, I couldn’t understand a word she said. She couldn’t understand a word I said.
I was this Inji who kind of spoke Lhasa, and she was from Amdo. But we started writing letters to each other. So she helped me to learn to, to read and write. And then I went to South India and I joined the, the nunnery, Tsogyal Shedrup Ling Nunnery in Namdroling. I was auditing the shedra program for, two to three years there.
That’s in South India, and that was the best for me because I was in a Shedra. I [01:05:00] was in a nunnery Shedra, and you have to memorize the texts. my advice to anybody learning Tibetan is always Just learn to read first. If you don’t have access to friends and Tibetan friends to help you learn to speak it Just learn to read because I think it really Blesses the subtle body and then if you start to memorize some Tibetan as well I think it really sinks into your body and then eventually you make your relationships with Tibetan speakers And you can learn to speak it and so in South India, you know, it was a shedra so you’re learning to memorize and I think memorization is totally underrated nowadays in terms of how how much of a role it has in cultivation.
and so by that point, by around 2009, I, I think I, I felt pretty fluent in speaking Tibetan. you know, I had all these Tibetan teachers, Tibetan nuns teaching me, and friends. They were both my teachers and my friends. And then I went to Nangchen, right? Like, so 2006, I went to Nangchen for the first time, and I thought, okay, I’m pretty fluent here in Tibetan.
I’m going to go to Tibet. And I could hardly [01:06:00] understand a word they were saying in Nangchen, and the first time I went to Giechak, and you know, again, I fancied myself kind of fluent, and I would speak with them and they would just stare at me, like, I couldn’t understand what I was saying.
Even when I just said Tashi Delek, they would just stare at me, because I was this foreigner, like, they’d hardly seen any foreigners. It just couldn’t connect it. So, I can definitely understand Kamkei, if I’m at Gebchak and I’m one on one with a Gebchak nun, especially the ones that I know better, I can usually understand most of what they say, but I struggle to speak the Nangchen dialect because it’s so down to earth.
And it’s quite different, like in Lhasa, you would say, Kala Saro che, like, please eat. And in Nangchen, they might say, like, Samaso, Samaso, like, they have a very different way of, it’s a very earthy, visceral way of speaking, and it doesn’t come naturally to me, so.
Olivia: And so, when you disrobed, what have you kept, after disrobing?
Like, what parts of your nun life have you maintained, and what parts [01:07:00] were you happy to let go of, not so happy to let go of?
Elizabeth: For me, disrobing is such a funny, such an unsavory term, disrobing, you know. I took about five years to make that decision. Probably three years longer than I really needed to, but my main reasons for not staying a nun was I could see myself coming back to, you know, the West.
I thought it was going to be Canada where I grew up, but it turned out to be Australia where my opportunities were at the time, and that’s where I am now. And I knew that I would be a nun here in Australia. You know, you don’t really have a community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in Australia, so I would be holding the robes on my own.
And I did stay a nun my first few years of graduate studies at University of Sydney, and I wore the robes. And I, my experience was like, basically, when you wear the robes, you’re kind of a symbol. You’re like a living symbol of something. And when you live in a world where, you don’t necessarily have that cultural ethos, people can maybe have a lot of expectations of what you are as a Buddhist [01:08:00] nun, and people maybe expect you to have answers to things or expect you to be this kind of paragon of virtue.
I just didn’t feel I could, hold that all. And then when I was at university, I had a couple of experiences where I found people expected that I had certain views of things because I was a religious figure. And I started to feel that it was becoming a barrier. And I’ve always, even in my early years as a nun, I’ve always had quite a strong calling or feeling to, try and bring Buddhism beyond Buddhism, like to try and bridge Buddhism with
the modern world and to help to share Buddhism , so it felt like for me to be able to make that bridge, I was more flexible and happier not wearing the robes. I just felt more relaxed not wearing the robes.
And also, you know, financially. Over the years it worked well when I was living in India, and I could continue to extend my Indian visa. But then I couldn’t keep getting a five year visa for India, and I knew I would have to come back to Canada or Australia and get a job and be working to make money and then also being a nun it wouldn’t have been [01:09:00] comfortable.
So I have no regrets and I also feel like for me it’s about adapting, to the world, to my environment. In the first few years that I had disrobed, were actually really joyful for me because suddenly I was able to like have wine, like have a sex life and stuff. And, there were energies in myself that I was able to work with and, explore and I had a lovely group of friends that helped me along with that. And people used to ask me, Oh, don’t you find it difficult to have disrobed?
and I would say, no, actually it’s, it’s not difficult. But what I’m finding is. As the years go by, it’s that subtle level of modernity, that subtle level of culture that is actually becoming more difficult, like just the world of work, you know, needing to work full time and what it does to your body when you work for an institution so I think what I’ve maintained I feel it in my navel and, and it’s my faith and my devotion that is, it’s just unbreakable.
It’s a joy and it’s a devotion to a spiritual path that for me is most anchored in the Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism. this just can’t change and that’s [01:10:00] always powering me, but what I feel is lost is the benefits of being a nun and being immersed in that cultural world and being supported by, like you were talking about, people around you that speak that language and that understand what you’re doing and having the time to practice.
You know, I’ve lost that and I got to get it back somehow.
Olivia: a Gebchak Yogini told you that 30 years ago, the words rigpa and dzogchen were not often spoken. And what are your thoughts on the outcome of these words becoming more common?
Elizabeth: Interesting. Yeah. this was a nun from a Kagyu nunneries in Nangchen. And she’d be about my age, so she’s in probably her late 40s, early 50s. And she had grown up as a nun from a young age, in a Kagyu tradition. So also, she’d done a three year retreat a couple of times, and had a lot of transmission of Mahamudra and Dzogchen from these great Rime masters.
And she said that when she was growing up, like as a young adult, you wouldn’t hear the word Dzogchen said very much, and you wouldn’t hear the word Rigpa said very [01:11:00] much. These transmissions of Dzogchen teachings were happening. year by year, but somehow these terms were not reified and they weren’t being spoken very much.
Which I think is really interesting and helps us maybe put our finger a little bit on what is modernity. materialism doesn’t just happen in physical matter, it happens in our heads, the way we conceptualize and reify ideas and terms and language. and knowledge. so she had just noticed that nowadays in the modern period in Tibet that people talked about Rigpa in conversation, used the term a lot more in ways that they didn’t used to.
Olivia: Do you think though it’s changed people’s abilities to actually connect with these words? Like they’ve lost meaning or lost again that sacred aspects. there any loss or gain from becoming more common?
Elizabeth: That’s a really good question. I think would depend on individual people maybe. I think in Tibet, I’m not sure it does very much because they still have such a strong tradition of practice. So you get these lamas coming through who can teach [01:12:00] them. You know, in very embodied ways, how to connect with the experience of the nature of mind, you know, like in these big transmission ceremonies, you’ll see thousands of monks and nuns shouting Phet and like falling back on the ground and, you know, being able to connect with the experience because of their traditional ways of transmitting it.
I do wonder sometimes in English speaking mediums or in non Tibetan environments or non kind of intensive environments, if we just hear about Rigpa and we think that we’re trying to experience Rigpa, but we think about Rigpa too much, then it might become a barrier, rather than coming at it from a more embodied way, like a more holistic cultural way or something.
But again, I think that depends on an individual, maybe.
Olivia: So after having formed close relationships with the Gebchak Yoginis, and you’ve spent a lot of time around them, will you talk about their character? Like, what is it like to be around these women who are drenched wholeheartedly in dharma?
Elizabeth: They’re very [01:13:00] warm, and they’re quite cheeky.
They pinch your bum. You know, that’s something that Nangchen people do. It’s a very intimate gesture, it’s not sexual, it’s just like I’m with you. So a couple of these older nuns that I spent time with, you know, they’re just very warm and they’re very nurturing and caring and they’re, they’re very intuitive. So, I would go up year by year to Gebchak and usually I would go up by myself.
Maybe I’d drive up with a Lama or with a jeep full of people and then I would stay longer by myself. And I would be hanging out with the nuns, they might be, drying some herbs in the sun and I’d be hanging out And almost always. A nun, and it was always a different nun of a different age, would ask me if I felt lonely.
And, to be honest, I often did feel a bit lonely. I was sort of this Canadian who joined Tibetan Buddhism and was a nun, and I loved what I was doing, but I did feel sometimes kind of lonely. maybe culturally lonely, because I wasn’t really a part of their culture.
So they would always pick up on that. and then they would just be kind of very with you in that. And if you go for [01:14:00] walks with the nuns, you know, I’ve talked about how they don’t always have a rational explanation for your questions. They just don’t see it that way. If I was asking them questions about, what does this mean, what does this passage in this text mean here, can you explain that to me?
Or, you know, again, is this, is this head on the visualization meant to be red or facing north or south? They wouldn’t always really have the answer or want to answer that, because In one of the nuns explained it’s like for us all of the knowledge the whole point in all of this is it’s like a vase emptying its water into another vase.
It has to be fully embodied and until I’ve really embodied my knowledge of this teaching I wouldn’t really know what to say anyway. but when you spend time with the nuns and you walk around and you go for like a walk around the nunnery and, they start asking you a lot of questions about maybe your family or about your life.
They’re really good at diagnosing psychology. So you might talk about a relative, and they can pick up on what the issues are, and they’ll say, Oh, I think this relative, really [01:15:00] benefit from like a, Vajrakilaya practice or a Hayagriva practice or something. So they can kind of really intuit really well, and they have a great sense of humor.
When we were at that puja on the top of the mountain where they did the smoke offering to the land spirits all day, when we hiked up and it had just poured rain from four in the morning until the end of the ritual at like five p. m. It just poured rain the entire time. And I was so excited about getting up to the top to see the view of the whole valley and I’d be able to see like all of these mountaintops.
I was so looking forward to that and we got to the top and it just kept raining and raining and raining. And the reality is that. Twice in that eight hour long puja, we had to get out of the tent, step out of the tent, and go up to the cairn, and they would place, like, these, arrows with rainbow colored scarves attached to them, and do this whole ritual ceremony on the stone cairn.
We had to leave the tent, and step out, and do that twice in the day. And both times that we did that, it stopped raining. Anyway, it could have been a coincidence. And then we got back in the tent, and at one point, [01:16:00] I was looking out, and the clouds started to disperse, and I could see, I could see, and I was bumping the nun next to me, and I was like, Look, tell me what that is.
What mountain is that? And she just started laughing, because it was a donkey’s arse. it was just a donkey that had come to the door. oh, another thing that happened was I was staying in a guest room and I had been there by myself and then a group of monks had come up to participate in a Drupchen, so they threw the monks in the room with me and they never blink.
They don’t have this thing where they separate men and women. They’re very comfortable, like they’ve, they grew up in yak hair tents with whole family sleeping together, so they just throw, you know, monks in a room with a nun and they’re not bothered. And one of the monks was quite young.
And quite handsome, to be honest. And the next morning, we were around the stove in the kind of eating area of the guest house. And everybody was sitting there. And one of the nuns across the way was introducing to a visitor saying, Oh, this is Ani Chonzom, which was my name. As a nun saying, Oh, this is Ani Chonzom.
Oh, she’s nice. She’s a good person. However, I don’t know, she was in that room last night with that young monk. So, [01:17:00] you know, like joking around all the time.
Olivia: Just thinking of another story you shared that I really enjoyed reading about was about a nun that barged into your room while you were practicing and asked you about your meditation. And you just talked about how that’s just how it is. They have such a community oriented and gregarious way of being together with such a practice focus and it’s really sweet to hear about that.
Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely, they do. And it’s quite common, you know, you might be sitting there trying to do some practice and they just come into your room. At all times. They don’t really see that as a, as a thing at all. yeah, they’re very intimate. They’re very open.
You almost feel like, how is your meditation? It’s almost like, the plenum or like the air they breathe. It’s everything. It’s the whole purpose that they’re there. And it’s what, It makes meaning to everything. So how is your practice? How is your practice? And, and they’ve also always got their malas with them, they’re always doing mantra They might be, telling stories or cooking, but they’ll [01:18:00] always have their mantra going under their breath all day long. so they’ll do. A lot of domestic work throughout the day. They have fields of construction, patching holes in the roof and all kinds of things like that. But they always have mantra going.
And I think they’re always also bringing their reflection on the nature of mind into that. So, for them to separate formal meditation from their daily life just isn’t something that they do. I think it’s also something that they’re able to not do because they live in a world that’s entirely dedicated to that.
Olivia: Before we close, what is your main aspiration for the Gebchak community?
Elizabeth: I just hope that they can continue as they wish to continue. I hope these nuns have the ability to continue to hold their practice and live in the ways that they want to live.
Generation after generation and that many, many of us can benefit from their inspiration and to some extent from their teachings and practices as well.
[01:19:00]