Today’s episode is part two of three parts.
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Time notes:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:15 Subtle body, mind and prana
00:11:30 Yidam and reflections of the universe
00:13:40 Tsa-lung and trulkhor
00:18:51 Modernization influence on dedication, asceticism and health.
00:24:00 Chu Rey, wet sheet ceremony
00:31:00 Tsa-lung lama Jamtsen Chodron
00:33:40 Chudlen retreats
00:37:00 Mundane and sacred, collective and individual
00:39:00 Togal and trekchod 100 day winter practice
00:46:00 On memorization and reading as a means of realization
00:50:00 Tantric practice form of learning
01:00:00 Yogin Pema Dorje and a song of devotion
01:06:00 Yogin Pema Drimed
01:13:00 Sherab Zangmo and Urgyen Chodron
01:16:00 Sky burial
01:21:00 Recognizing signs
01:24:00 Cultivating a whole person
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Listen to Part One here:
On Gebchak’s History & Yogic Activity in the Realm of the Meditators
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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.”
Spontaneous teaching by Elizabeth
Gebchak yoginis with cropped hair to reflect their tantric practices
Yogin Pema Dorje
Lagen Pema Drimey at Gebchak by Eiizabeth
3 year retreat place and dzogchen meditation hill by Gebchak Gonpa
Chu Rey, wet sheet ceremony
Chu Rey wet sheet ceremony. These images of this ceremony at Gebchak are from the internet and have emerged only in recent years. Vajrayana’s previously strict prohibition of photographing such practices has changed with all-pervasive social media.
Dzogchen meditation holes
Retreat
Jamtsen Chodron Tsalung Lama
Yogin Pema Dorje offering nature of mind transmission by Caterina De Re
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 McDougal. 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.
She continues to serve as a Tibetan to English translator for Gebchak Wangdrak [00:01:00] 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.
I wanted to see if you’d be willing to try to convey to a listener, the subtle body in Vajrayana the understanding of it.
Olivia: How would you describe the subtle body from the Vajrayana perspective?
Elizabeth: When I was doing my PhD, I knew what I was trying to articulate. And, and in a way, my PhD is an argument against sort of, mainstream epistemology in Western Buddhist [00:02:00] studies.
And, and I sort of struggled, I mean I was mostly being descriptive, it was an ethnography, but of course to have a good ethnography you have to have a good clear argument in it. And my PhD supervisor, Jeffrey Samuel, Who’s really, really, really brilliant. He’s an anthropologist and he wrote the book civilized shamans among many other books And I don’t think I could have done this PhD without him to be honest, but boy he’s he drives a tight ship He was very I found him a very difficult supervisor, and I think you know the old school school PhD supervisors were very difficult and he really challenged me and he kept telling me, your PhD, the work you’re doing is too descriptive, it’s too descriptive, there’s not enough analysis, there’s not enough of a theory there.
I really struggled to find the words. And to be honest, it wasn’t until the last six months that I kind of found the key to doing so. And it was this Japanese scholar named, Yasuo Yuasa. And in 1987, his book called The [00:03:00] Body. Towards a mind body theory in Eastern philosophy or something like that. It’s the body by Yuasa 1987 publication And it’s basically him establishing a theory of the body As understood in Eastern traditions. Um, so he’s a Japanese scholar of religions. You know, who’s obviously Japanese with an Asian worldview of religions and philosophy.
But also very conversant in English and Western philosophy. And I love this book. And he talks about the body. And in fact, he wrote it in Japanese, and it was translated, and his translator says it’s a nightmare, it’s a nightmare. Every time you say the word, the body, so much is lost. And he’s just really casting light on how the Asian understanding, and particularly in a tradition like Buddhism, the pathway of knowledge is one towards mind body integration.
And so if we look at the Tibetan tradition, we [00:04:00] can see, you know, the terminology they use for realization or awakening is often has the word union in it. So in Tibetan, they talk about like, uh, rikton sunjuk, so, you know, rikpa and emptiness, the union of rigpa and emptiness, the union of bliss and emptiness, the union of clarity or awareness and emptiness, the union of appearance and emptiness.
And then at Gebchak Nunnery, These nuns aren’t training so much in, like, Madhyamaka philosophy, but they are certainly training in understanding the nature of their mind. And the terminology that really kind of runs throughout their discourse when they describe what they’re doing is lung sem yer me, which means indivisible mind and prana.
And so, of course, in Tantric Buddhism that kind of principle that prana, or lung in Tibetan, and the mental consciousness function like The analogy is often given that it’s like a horse and a rider. So wherever the horse goes, the rider [00:05:00] follows. Wherever the rider directs it, the horse follows. So likewise for mental consciousness and prana.
And so the principle of yoga, so the practices of Tantric Buddhism, which we could in one way say yoga, is about, in a way, kind of directing the horse or manipulating the prana and through, so you know, like a tummo practice or the tsalung practices that the Gebchak nuns are doing, or that any sort of Tibetan yogi or yogini would be doing.
It’s about, very deliberately Working with prana and mind through visualization. So of course they have that whole system of vis visualizing the central channel and then the two primary secondary channels, which the understanding of course, is that the dualistic mind functions in those two primary secondary channels.
And so, our mental consciousness is always function functioning in a binary. And then of course there are all these many, many tertiary channels that go beyond throughout the body. And so our mental consciousness and kind of our personality and the way that we construct and [00:06:00] experience our experience of the world is through the kind of grid or prism of the way our channels are calibrated through the habits of our mental consciousness and how that works in the subtle body, how prana is flowing, and then of course these knots and blockages and, you know, the way that the prana is flowing in the subtle body, but you know, that just sort of goes to say that We can really not separate mental consciousness from lung or prana and we can’t at any point in our existence.
And so the Gebchak tradition and, you know, any Tibetan tantric tradition of, of rigorous practice is about, you know, working with the prana very deliberately, you know, to sort of manipulate or to really calibrate through visualization, through manipulating the breath. And of course, in the Tsa Lung practices they are visualizing the chakra. And then they are holding the breath for long periods of time in that they call it You know, the Bum, the [00:07:00] bumpa, where you’d hold the prana, the breath, and visualization, and then working with the prana through the chakras.
it really has to be highlighted that this is also with devotion. So it’s working with the breath, it’s working with visualization with, and also with the cognitive understanding. of the nature of mind, non conceptual Rigpa or Yeshe wisdom, but so much with devotion. And so the nuns are calling into the practice the blessings of the Guru first, you know, in any of these practices they’re calling the presence of the Yidam or the Buddha.
And of course they understand that the Yidam or the Buddha is one with their Guru. And so, they might be visualizing their Guru as Guru Rinpoche, or as Hayagriva, or as their Yidam, or as the union of Padmasambhava with Yeshe Tsogyal. So, they’re calling the presence of their Yidam, and then their You know, merging through the crown chakra, sort of melting or merging their [00:08:00] mind with the mind of the yidam, getting that complete blessing, and really that full presence of the Buddha as their own being.
And then there’s a lot of devotional verses, and there’s, it’s quite kind of sonorous, there’s a lot of sorrow as well, like this deep yearning to awaken, that deep yearning that comes from being aware of our suffering. in the confused mind. And so there’s that calling the blessings of the guru and then working with the prana and then sort of, refining the prana through working through the chakras
and then the understanding is when the, the energies, the prana are balanced at the heart, naturally, and it’s not forced and it’s not contrived, it’s just naturally, that is a non conceptual. Awareness, because it’s not caught in either of the binary channels. And so it’s just this awakening to what is naturally our primordial non-conceptual being, awareness.
And so the subtle body is, in fact, like in Tibetan, I never found, certainly Gebchak [00:09:00] nunnery doesn’t have a term for subtle body, because it’s not something in their tradition, it’s not an aspect of tradition, it’s just all pervading in their tradition. And so, when I came across Yuasa’s book, And he talks about how the path of Buddhism is really one towards mind body integration.
And he talks about how, in Buddhism, of course, philosophy and meditation are always like a combined pursuit. Like, you can’t really separate just philosophy. It’s always combined with cultivation of the person. So just like you can learn about morality and be a scholar of morality and ethics, but it doesn’t make you an ethical person.
Likewise, you can know about wisdom, but to become wise is a cultivation of the whole person. So, so it just means that in Tantric Buddhism and in all of Buddhism, Knowledge is all oriented towards whole person cultivation and, and the subtle body is really, how that happens, where that happens, and it, and it’s not just the body and the mind of the [00:10:00] person, it’s an entire world, you know, an all encompassing understanding of your being and that it, nature, the universe, there’s this profound correspondence, this profound dependent co arising, right, of the self and, you know, And what seems to be out there, very non dual.
Olivia: Will you say more about that last piece, the reflection of the universe?
Elizabeth: Yeah, so, of course, in those earliest tantras, Buddhist tantras, you can see images and see references to, like in the Kalachakra tantra, for example, there are passages that talk about how the outer world corresponds to the inner body or the inner world of the yogi. And so, working with the chakras and working with the prana the loong and Refining and you know opening and purifying those channels and awakening to non conceptual awareness Corresponds to the outer world and this [00:11:00] is so so integrated with the yidam practice in Tibetan Tantra and so when A, a tantric practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism awakens, they awaken into this as a Buddha. They awakened as the yidam. So for example, Tara, they awaken as you know, a personified, awakened being as Tara with all of her qualities and in her mandala.
So mandala practices really this expression of a whole universe and all of the beings around you and all of the, the landscape around you and all of. The directions around you and the energies and the air you breathe. Everything is a part of this awakened divine universe. and so an enlightened being exists in this enlightened mandala.
If we meet a very awakened being in our world, they kind of, everybody sort of gets brought into this, energy and, you know, there’s this really uplifting feeling and things happened around that being and, you know, there’s this sort of world that sort of accompanies [00:12:00] that being and, and so that the individual and the world around them we can’t really separate.
Elizabeth: And then you’d hear in Tibet, you know, these yogis that could tell when an eclipse would happen because they would be able to feel it on a subtle level in their lung and prana and their energies. They could tell that an eclipse was happening or they could tell when it’s a full moon because of that very sensitive awareness of the energy the connection.
Olivia: I would love to go more into trulkhor with you. One of the Gebchak Yoginis talked about the division of trulkhor, and she said that there are five stages of trulkhor. They learn three before retreat and two during retreat.
Elizabeth: And then rotate in retreat. So I was curious what the five stages meant. Like, is she referring to the fact that they have many trulkhor exercises? They just can’t do them in one session. So they divide them into five or is there something else she’s speaking of?
I never practiced trulkhor with the nuns so I just heard them talk about this, but I learned trulkhor from another tradition in Nangchen, and basically I think probably the five is [00:13:00] referring to, a sequence. So the Nea Nga, so the, probably the sequence translating Nea, five sequences of trulkhor is probably what they’re learning.
Elizabeth: And a sequence can be. several minutes long, maybe even up to five to ten minutes long. And these are coming from ancient Indian tantras, these Mahasiddhas of India. But the function of a trulkhor practice is really to forcefully clear the channels, kind of in preparation for the more subtle, Tsalung practice.
Olivia: That makes sense. And so following their three year retreat, it sounded like some keep tsalung trulkhor as a lifetime practice.
So are they integrating it into their practice on a daily basis or do you know if the Yoginis are practicing once in a while or how do they maintain it?
Elizabeth: It’s a bit tricky because my observations of Gebchak nunnery have gone from 2006 until around 2019.
And that was the period when, you know, modernization happened for the [00:14:00] nunnery. And at Gebchak Gompa, you’re not going to see, you know, economic development. But what you’ll see, when I say modernization, is very subtle changes to the culture of the nunnery and the traditions of practice. And so, I think the dedication and some of the degrees of, intensity of how they practice has been diluted over the last maybe five to ten years.
For some of the nuns, probably not for all of, certainly not for all of them. For the older nuns it’s about the same. But, when I first went in 2006, the nuns would have been practicing tsalung and trulkhor every day. at least once a day, and when they talk about how it was in the past and how it was in the revival period, so from the 1980s, in the 1980s and 90s, the nuns would have been practicing it every day.
And so, again, the Gebchak nuns are, are somewhat unique because they start to practice tsalung and trulkhor. They learn it from the first day of their three year retreat, and sometimes they learn it even before their three year retreat. So it’s just so, standard [00:15:00] in their training. tradition, that it’s just like learning mudras and learning, you know, the ritual chanting, you’re also going to learn tsalung and trulkhor because it’s like really integrated in their practice tradition.
Olivia: And so when one of the Gebchak Yoginis reaches older age, I mean, the trulkhor exercises, can be quite abrasive on the joints. I mean, they’re meant to be right there, like meant to be rough or harsh on the system to clear these nadis, the tsa. And so did you see any modifications that older yoginis would apply?
Or do you know much about that?
Elizabeth: I observed them doing tsalung in the drubchen and in their meditation boxes, but I never saw them doing trulkhor. And in the long 16 Retreat Divisions building, in the basement they have their yoga room, and I never went downstairs. Like, I wasn’t allowed to go downstairs.
And, you know, it was kept very secret. You know, of course, up until very recently, any of the [00:16:00] yogas in Tibetan Buddhism were kept very secret. and so I wouldn’t have seen it. In the three year retreat, of course, I didn’t go in there and see it, but from what I hear and kind of what I saw as the nuns would get older, you know, nuns above age 70, sometimes sleeping in the meditation box and living in the meditation box became difficult for them, and so the younger nuns would encourage them to continue.
Stay in a bed, but often those older generation nuns would just refuse. Their dedication was so profound and their joy in what they did was so profound that they just would refuse, often at the expense of their physical health. And so I think probably as you got older and your bones got weaker, you wouldn’t be doing the trulkhor much anymore because you probably prepared your body pretty well and you’re on a much subtler level with your tsalung.
And by the time you’ve been at the nunnery for a couple of decades, the Tsalung practice is so integrated into everything else you’re doing, into their Yidam sadhana, into their Dzogchen practice, [00:17:00] you know, it would just come naturally to them in any session of practice that they’re doing. And you can see in a Drupchen that there are periods of silence and you can observe nuns holding their breath for periods of time, you know, sometimes for a long time, like several minutes.
but You know, just touching on the modernization, you know, one of the kind of main ways that you can see changes is, and then older nuns will talk about this, is the, the dedication and the kind of asceticism of the nunnery has, has been diluted, has weakened. So, around 2006, and certainly in the 80s and 90s, those older nuns, would probably just have tsampa every day, and this soup made of tsampa flour and cheese, and on a special day, some yogurt and dairy, and on a special day, a bit of dried meat, but very rudimentary diet, with some turnips and potatoes and You know, thrown in here and there.
And they would not have stoves in [00:18:00] their retreat divisions. So they were not allowed to have stoves in their retreat divisions because they were doing so much tum mo That it wasn’t allowed to have stoves because they had to rely on their own inner heat. And I heard from one nun that they also were not allowed to wear very warm cloaks.
You know, they have these big, heavy cloaks that the monks will wear in winter, and the nuns would wear in winter. And I think sometimes the nuns would try not to wear those, because they had such inner heat going.
In the last, like five to ten years, you do see stoves in the retreat divisions. , and I think with the younger generations of nuns that are coming to Gebchak nunnery, these are nuns that would have been born like in the late 90s or 2000s, so the, the younger generations of nuns at, nuns at Gebchak today Might be in their thirties, know, some in their forties, some in their thirties, even a handful in their late twenties, which is very rare.
Elizabeth: We can talk later about why that would be, but these are nuns that have grown up after the Open Unreformed period in China, and of course, Nangchen is China. and this [00:19:00] is, a period of very quick economic development. So Nangchen Town and all of the areas where these nuns have grown up and been born has developed a lot.
So the conveniences and the value system has changed so much. It’s become materialized. And so those younger nuns, to have the kind of fervor and asceticism that those older generations had, it’s quite hard to expect that of them. And it’s very hard for them to have the aspiration to practice that way.
Or for it to come naturally to practice that way. you know, the daily trulkhor and kind of competency in tummo is with those younger generations of nuns isn’t what it is for the older generations of nuns. And that’s not to say that it isn’t there with some of them, but like generally speaking it’s waning because to become a monk or a nun in China, and it’s been this way for like a hundred years, at least since the early 1900s in China, to become a monk or a Buddhist monk or nun, you need to be 18 years old.
Because they, they say that it’s good for you to be educated, which of course, generally speaking, [00:20:00] is a good thing for you to choose for yourself to become a monk or a nun. But the challenge in China is that the modern education system is one that orientates the student towards materialist values. And to become, you know, a rational market actor, to become a part of the business world and developing things economically.
So their, value system, their priorities, their consciousness is different. So it’s quite rare for an 18 year old girl to graduate from secondary school and wish to become a Gebchak nun. So many young women who do become nuns now, want to join one of the other lower altitude nunneries that has a Shedra because the values around knowledge are changing with the materialization. of the environment and the economy.
In the last ten years, you don’t see as much of that asceticism that the nuns get sicker and something that’s happening that’s kind of a little bit curious is so because the hospitals and the families and the shops are now in these urban centers at lower altitudes, [00:21:00] kind of the center of society, the centers of society now are at lower altitudes and so the Tibetans, including the Gebchak nuns, are going up and down quite often throughout the year, especially like the, the nirpas, or the, the managers that are doing the shopping, or the nuns that are having to go to the hospital.
They’re going up and down the mountain, you know, several times a year, and they start to get altitude sickness at the nunnery. And so the lamas, the male lamas of Gebchak Nunnery, largely do not live there anymore. In the past, they would have all been based there at the nunnery, but they don’t live there anymore.
And it’s very hard on their systems to spend much time at the nunnery because they get altitude sickness. And some of the nuns are getting this as well. and, and their health is suffering much more than it used to, and so there’s this new large hermitage that’s been developed near Nangchen town, kind of in a way looking to the future of, of the Gebchak nuns as a place for them to be based.
but still the Tsalung practice you’ve got sort of different generations. So in the revival period, You know, we talked about those older senior nuns who survived and came back to [00:22:00] establish all aspects of the tradition again. And then they taught this new influx of nuns in the 1980s that joined, who would have been joining as teens, who today are in their late 50s, some around 60.
And so today, those are the older generation of nuns. And all of the senior nuns that had survived the Cultural Revolution, all have passed away. The last one passed away in 2020. So the older nuns today are around aged, you know, around 60. Late 50s, 60s, and those nuns are like, it’s almost like they’re holding the torch, they’re holding the flame, because they’re connected to the old world.
They’re connected to the memories from before the Cultural Revolution, they’re connected to the lineage of training, they’re connected to the standard of training, and of course they know all of the aspects of their tradition. And so. those older nuns are still doing tsalung every day and sometimes trulkhor, like there’s one nun who’s 60, Yanka, and she’s been assigned by the lamas to [00:23:00] live at the lama’s house which is called the labrang, and it’s up at the very top of the nunnery.
And the lamas assigned her to live there to keep the recitations and the practices to protect the lama’s house. So she’s got her own little room and her own little meditation box inside the Lama’s house. She does protector prayers. She does her own sadhana, which it’s a yidam that’s probably connected to Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, so maybe it’s Hayagriva, I’m not sure.
And she does very intensive tsalung, and probably trulkhor every day. She’s 60, and I tell you, this woman is so spry, and you would think she’s 40. She’s kind of very sort of childlike and I once hiked to the top of, one of these mountains the nunnery is surrounded by mountain tops.
I mean, not snowy mountains, but big hilltops. And in the summer, they’re not covered in snow. And I walked with her up to the top of a mountain and I really struggled. It was two and a half hours. And she literally just like leaped and bounded to the top of this hill. And you can just tell who’s [00:24:00] doing a lot of tsalung and trulkhor because they’re so buoyant and there’s just a quality there.
And, and every January, the Gebchak nuns still do this ceremony called the Chu Rey, which is their wet sheet ceremony. It’s given out other names in other monasteries, but it’s called wet sheets. So it’s, you know, when they dry off the wet sheets to demonstrate. Their mastery of tummo.
Olivia: Will you speak about that ceremony from beginning to end?
Elizabeth: So just as a kind of quick, footnote that the way that the nuns get tested at the nunnery is.
You could translate it as demonstrative. It’s a bad translation, but it’s called – where they basically demonstrate their meditation, or they demonstrate their yogas to a senior nun or a male lama. Because it’s not book learning, so it’s not like they’re going to have exams where they’re showing that they know these objects of knowledge about something.
But rather, it’s literally their embodied mind, body, subtle body cultivation, right? So the Chu Rey is one of these major demonstrative kind of, [00:25:00] not exams, it’s not an exam, but it’s a way that they demonstrate their mastery to the wider community. So it happens, on the full moon of, I think it’s the 10th lunar month in the Tibetan calendar, which usually is January.
And so the full moon in January, you know, at 4, 500 meters in Tibet is going to be one of the coldest days of the year. And I, and I saw it once in 2010 and it was minus 25 degrees Celsius, which is pretty cold at 4, 500 meters. And the nuns who participate in this ceremony, this wet sheet ceremony, are only nuns that are very competent at the yogas, at the tsalung and trulkhor yogas.
Because if you weren’t really competent at it, you would become sick. And so of the approximately 250 nuns at the nunnery in 2010, about 80 nuns participated. So that tells us, you know, and some of the nuns that didn’t participate probably were competent, but were maybe unwell that year.
And so chose to not join or maybe had responsibilities that they weren’t free to join. [00:26:00] So we’re looking at maybe around a hundred nuns, at least half the nuns that are pretty good at what they’re doing when it comes to these tsalung and trulkhor yogas so the, the nuns that are participating, they enter the yoga hall, which again is under the retreat divisions building, the yoga, they enter that at dusk.
just after dusk, the night before, and they perform a preliminary kora, or circumambulation. They walk around the whole campus of the nunnery at dusk, the night before. And then they go into the yoga hall, and they don’t come out until dawn, just before sunrise the next morning. And when they go in at, at dusk, they start their sessions of tsalung and trulkhor.
So again, there’s a lot of devotion, so they’re reciting A lot of verses of calling the Lama from afar, and then there’s sadhana. So these would be you know, specific sadhana of Tsalung. And then they start to build up this heat. They’re building up the engine of their practice. [00:27:00] And I think they drink.
They’re able to drink until midnight, and they’re able to go to the bathroom until midnight. Like, step out and go to the bathroom if they need to. But from midnight Until the major ceremony in the morning, they stop drinking and they are not allowed to go out. And the nuns say, you know, as they start to build up the heat, they’re drying off sheets, even in the yoga room, over at night.
And everybody else is outside. Nobody else sees this. And the nuns who are the best at it are drying off, you know, dozens of wet sheets. And the wet sheets are kind of like large pillowcases. So they’re, they’re cotton, you know, maybe like longer than a meter wide. And maybe a little bit more than half a meter square.
And so they’d be put into very cold water, because you don’t get warm water at Gebchak Gonpa in January. So they’d be put into very, very cold water, and then they’d wrap it around their shoulders. And these nuns are wearing no shirts, and they’re wearing that, that little yogi skirt, the angrak, that little short little mini skirt for the yogi .
[00:28:00] And then, That’s it. And they would be drying off these wet sheets and throughout the night. And then just before sunrise, of course, it’s the coldest time of the morning, then they slowly step out into a kind of parade. one by one and they’re wearing their lineage hats and they’ve got their hands, with the mudra, on their hips, which is a particular channel, Nadi, on their hips. So they’re kind of, again, manipulating the channels. and prana by placing their, their wrists on this, these spots and then they have these boots that they wear when they go outside and then they’ve got these wet sheets draped around them.
And at each of the four corners around the nunnery campus, which is pretty, pretty big. If you’ve seen an aerial photo of the nunnery, it’s quite big. At each of the four corners, then that wet sheet will be dunked in cold water again and wrapped around the nun’s shoulders. And so the families of the nuns, you know, these nomad family members and, and anybody else who’s visiting the nunnery at the time, we are [00:29:00] standing up on the hillside at quite a distance, actually.
So in 2010, we were at quite a distance. We were not allowed to take pictures and we were not allowed to video it. I mean, it was very strict. And this is the tradition. The tradition speaks for itself. And the nuns would tell you this. And of course the lamas were telling you this. So I don’t have any images of it.
And to tell you the truth, my most, like, salient memory is being so flippin cold standing on the hillside watching this. I was so cold, I mean, I could hardly really pay attention. So it would have been like 5. 30, I don’t know, maybe 6 in the morning or something. And you watch these nuns and you can hear their chanting.
And again, there’s some sorrow in the chanting. They’re calling the Lama from afar, and very slowly, and it took about 45 minutes for them to walk around the nunnery, and you can see the steam coming off the shoulders as they’re drying off these wet sheets. And then they come to the end of the kora, the circumambulation, and then everybody’s free to come down, and they finish with kind of a puja inside the shrine hall, and throughout the whole [00:30:00] parade, there are nuns on the roof of the main shrine hall, again blowing these really long trumpets, so it’s a very deep and kind of moving sound of music that’s accompanying this.
And then when you go down to meet the nuns that were participating, they are just, it’s like they’re walking on air, their eyes are just So awake, the buoyancy of these women and their joy and it’s not overjoyed like sometimes for me when I get really overjoyed, I kind of I’m not very grounded.
These nuns, they’re very grounded, their lucidity and They’re just like the level of joy and buoyancy and clarity, but also groundedness is really really like stark It just you there’s no missing it and then so Wangdrak Rinpoche and the other lamas that are there for the ceremony will lead the parade and When I talked to a couple of these lamas at the end of the parade, they were just like kind of Just bowled over.
They couldn’t believe it. They were so impressed with these nuns. And the Gebchak nuns, there’s no question, if you go [00:31:00] to Kham these days, if you go to Tibet probably, and you’re connected to any practice lineage, any yogic tradition, The Gebchak nuns are renowned for being the one surviving full time community of yogic practice and being the best at tsalung and trulkhor. And so, you know, of all those nuns that are pretty good at it, there were, you know, two or three that are considered the lamas of tsalung at Gebchak Nunnery and, and the one who was the best named Jamtsen Chodron, she’s one of these nuns that joined in the 1980s as a young girl and trained from Palmo, who was one of the senior elder nuns who’d survived.
She learned tsalung and the yogas from Palmo and she became, you know, the real master. And she was invited to Larung Gar, so also known as Serta Jigme Phuntsok’s monastery, which is, you know, again, kind of the epicenter of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet nowadays. She was invited. To Larung Gar, she was invited to other monasteries, you know, for Kempos, for male Kempos to train in the yogas [00:32:00] from her.
She was also regularly invited to branch nunneries of Gebchak and monasteries of Gebchak. So definitely the master of the practice for the nuns and for the wider community. And very sadly, Jamtsen Chodron was one of these nuns, that suffered from very poor physical health. over the last decade, like a bad gallbladder, a bad liver, and, and she passed away three weeks ago.
Jamtsen Chodron passed away just three weeks ago.
Olivia: So sorry to hear that .
Elizabeth: Yeah. Um, so very sad for the Gebchak nuns for the whole community, you know, quite a loss. And I think she was probably, maybe, I’m guessing, maybe 57, 58? Around that, yeah. The Lamas had encouraged her to move to a lower altitude because the high altitude can be really hard on their bodies.
It didn’t used to be, but it is now, or at least they’re aware that it is now. Maybe that’s what it is. And once you’re aware of something, you know, then the suffering increases. so she was encouraged by the, the lamas to, to stay at a lower altitude, altitude [00:33:00] hermitage, but she was so dedicated to the lineage of Gebchak that she just stayed at the nunnery.
Um, but at any rate, she had gone to Chengdu Hospital last month to see a specialist and she started to feel a bit better and then she was going to fly back to Gebchak and then on her way home in, in Xining, which is a big Chinese city, close to Nangchen. she passed away there. And so they brought her body back to Nangchen, And to be honest, I’m not sure, but they’re definitely doing a lot of rituals for her, and I’m sure she stayed in Tukdam because her body is, has been, you know, prepared like the body of any great yogin, where they kind of sort of tie her up, probably she’s been in Tukdam, and they’ll probably put salt and keep her body there for a long period of time, but I’m not sure. I’ll try and find out the details. But fortunately, she has trained, you know, dozens of nuns to competency. So that they can continue to hold the lineage and to train younger nuns so,
Olivia: Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing. And it sounded like they do week long chudlen retreats. Do you know much about what kind of chudlen retreats they’re doing or any [00:34:00] details?
Elizabeth: throughout the year, the nuns will, again, they have all of these Drupchens, you know, 18 Drupchens, and then depending on the responsibility that you’ve got at the time, because it rotates, if you have free time at all throughout the year, then those nuns that do, will gather together to do a chudlen retreat, and every year the nuns will do this at least once, who are free.
So they get together for like seven days, and it’s, for the nuns, it’s a Dzogchen training retreat. it would be part of the -, it’d be one of these Ratna Lingpa termas that have come to them from Tsoknyi Rinpoche I, and Tsang-Yang Gyamts’s terma gongter
so they go in for seven days, they’ve blocked all of the windows, these are very dark old buildings anyway without really any windows, and they’ll just stay in there lining the walls and taking just herbal medicine, like herbal pills that the nuns would have created themselves. Because they have their own herbal, Tibetan medical center there at the nunnery and their own [00:35:00] doctor, Tibetan doctor.
And they develop a lot of their own herbal medicines from the hillsides around the nunnery. So they’ve got their own herbal medicine, which would be following a prescription from the early days of the nunnery. And their, taking the essence, you know, nutritionally from these pills, but also, of course, they’re taking the essence from Buddha nature, from the nature of mind by, you know, relying on these deep meditation practices.
And, of course, for these nuns, it would be Tsalung. I doubt that they’re doing trulkhor in this retreat. And so they’d also be doing, togal, this advanced aspect of Dzogchen training, togal. which is working with, you know, visual consciousness to recognize the non dual nature of what we see with our visual consciousness and how our mind constructs that by working with the projection, you know, the inner projection of form.
and what we perceive on the so called outside. It’s really recognizing the non duality of that through these kind of forms that appear through, in the mind, through, through togal, as well [00:36:00] as out there. So that they would be doing a lot of togal practice in the dark and recognizing the forms that appear in the mind and the deities that appear in the mind.
And it’s about them really seeing the non duality, recognizing the self arising nature of everything that appears in the mind. So it’d be a very deep working with togal. I’ve never been in one of these retreats. I’ve never seen them do it, but, I saw a group of nuns once come out from a chudlen retreat.
When you talk to them, just on coming out, it’s hard to explain, but the, profundity of what they’ve done, and for them it’s this merging their mind with the Guru, merging their mind with the Yidam, merging their mind with the Buddha, merging their mind with their own Buddha nature, which is intimate, and the amount of Compassion that they, and blessing that they experience from the Buddha, from the Yidam, from the Lama.
The amount of compassion and love and just liberating blessing that they feel is so profound for them that they come out and there’s this very deep joy there, but there’s a lot of I saw the nuns cry several times when they [00:37:00] would speak. Because they’re so deeply touched by that awakening, that merging their mind with the mind of the guru.
So it’s really a tradition of deep devotion and, , merging their mind with the mind of the three roots. , the Lama Yidam Khandro, so the Yidam, or in other words, the Buddha that they visualize. And the Lama, and the Khandro, , the female kind of wisdom quality of all of this is, you know, really all one at the same, at the end of the day, it’s all their Buddha nature that they’re becoming one with through the path of their training with the three roots.
Olivia: Do you know when, they’re in the space together doing chudlen retreat, If they’re each maintaining their own yidam, or they’re doing their own practice, their own version , if it’s collective or more individual.
Elizabeth: They would be sharing a recitation, so they’d probably be sharing a sadhana practice.
And, and out loud being, they would be reciting the same sadhana practice, but then in the silent periods, it’s hard to say what each individual nun might be visualizing or experiencing, but in the silent period, she’d be doing her [00:38:00] own, you know, meditation.
And that’s something else that’s kind of interesting at a place like Gebchak, you have the collective and you have the individual, and you have sacred and you have mundane, but to try and find where the line is, maybe can’t be found really. So in a practice like the chudlen Retreat, they have their individual consciousness and the mind and the training that they’re doing, but they share these collective practices in a way that their individual practices is really kind of merged with that.
And you’ll see nuns, usually the older nuns, that have become established in the training tradition. They do like to take the opportunity to do individual retreat when they can. And so they might go to one of the smaller, you know, if they’ve had permission to build their own little house below the main buildings of the nunnery.
They’ll go there and do some retreat. Tsoknyi Rinpoche has a little cabin at the top of the nunnery, and some nuns will go up and do a retreat there. Or Tsang-yang Gyamtso has his old house, and nuns will go up and stay there. But the older nuns really prize the opportunity to do solitary retreat as well.[00:39:00]
Olivia: And you also mentioned the other day, and I don’t know if you want to elaborate as well, on dark retreat. Is there anything else you’d like to say about that? It seems like a similar container to the chudlen retreat.
Elizabeth: Yeah, so for them, I think they do it together. From what I’ve observed, they do the chudlen and the Dark Retreat at the same time.
Yeah, so they’re, they’re fasting and they’re taking the essence of this medicinal pills that they take. And they would understand these medicinal pills also to be consecrated and blessed. so they’re taking the essence of the, the food of these pills, but then also taking the essence of pure nature of consciousness through their, their Dzogchen training in the dark context of the retreat.
Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve only observed them do it together.
Olivia: Is there anything else you want to say about togal? Because last time also we spoke, you just mentioned they’re kind of dug out little retreat spaces they have on the hill. Is there anything else just to complete that?
Elizabeth: so again, they like to do hundred day sets of practice, especially throughout the winter. And so the [00:40:00] nuns that have the freedom to do so. So usually it’s the nuns that are looking after the sadhana for the retreat division.
that don’t need to go to the Drupchen for that period of time. So they’ll do their sadhana session in the morning in the retreat division, and then they’ll go to their togal hole. And they do that for a hundred days over the winter of practicing togal. And they like to do togal in the winter because the atmosphere is much more arid and pure, like dry, whereas in the summer there’s more rain and I guess the atmosphere is different.
So, and it’s a perfect place to do togal, togal in, in Tibet. And I, and I suppose it sort of developed in Tibet because probably of their environment. And so these nuns are doing togal in these winter retreats, largely during the daytime. And they’re, they’re looking so that if they’re looking directly in front of them they’re able to look right at the sky.
Or there’s a huge amount of space between them and the next hillside. Huge amount of space. Several kilometers. And so they’re able to look at space.
And so they’re looking out at space and then, you know, in the togal training, they’re looking into sunlight, [00:41:00] into the rays of sunlight. And, of course, light is how we observe, you know, we wouldn’t be observing any forms without light and color. And they’re looking at a very subtle, through the Dzogchen meditation, the Dzogchen kind of way of seeing, they’re looking at the forms that they, that their visual consciousness perceives, so called out there.
And then they’re also recognizing that the Bindu or the Tigle, these little spherical forms that appear in space in their visual consciousness, and it can be different for every nun, and it’d probably be different for every person in the world depending on your cultural imprints and expectations, but they see these different spheres and if a practitioner has very stable meditation, then the spheres will be still.
So one way that they’re testing their meditation is their ability to maintain The sphere there, but often it’s moving around because the mind, the mental consciousness is active. And so they’re, I suppose you could say, focusing on these tigle and, and recognizing them both as forms out there, but [00:42:00] also as projected from their mental consciousness.
And recognizing, you know, really how the mind creates the form of the world that we experience. so it’s pretty, pretty subtle and very profound practice that they do and, the nuns at Gebchak would often be seeing, Yidam deities in these forms that appear in the visual consciousness, and then they’d be resting into a kind of trekchod, approach of Dzogchen meditation as well, where just the space of, the outer space and the inner space of their awareness would be known as one.
They’re able to recognize the one, the lack of duality of, the space of your own awareness and the space that you so called perceive. So it’s, you know, Dzogchen meditation really awakening to that non dual, Rigpa, non conceptual nature of awareness and being of reality. So the nuns will love to do this practice for a hundred days in the winter in these holes in the ground.
And, you know, they’re very happy. Nowadays The older nuns again are around in their late 50s or 60s and, and that [00:43:00] generation of nuns, the senior nuns of Gebchak today, they derive so much joy from their practice. They don’t want to be anywhere else. And so I was talking about, this nun who lives near the Lama’s labrang, near the Lama’s house, who has been assigned to do the practices to protect the Lamas.
And she would really love to go back to the lower part of the nunnery and, you know, take a break, but the lamas won’t let her, because she’s so good at what she does. And also, as a result, she’s never been allowed to travel. so this is a Gebchak nun that’s probably not traveled further than Nangchen town in her life, and at that, maybe only a few times in the last 20 years.
She’s always at Gebchak. And then her neighbor is an older nun named Barchung, who’s just, oh, I just love Barchung. I mean, they’re all so, so wonderful. And so Barchung talks about, I asked them once, I said, you know, if you could choose where you would go on pilgrimage. And I said, for example, you [00:44:00] know, Bodh Gaya or Kushnagar, where the Buddha died, or Tulasa, or, you know, Wutaishan, the Manjushri Mountain in China.
Where would you love most to go on pilgrimage? And, and she said, you know, I’d love to go to Tulasa, but you know, for me, I’m here at Gebchak, and I do my sang, I do my smoke offerings to the sky. And I know that all the sacred places are here under the sky , and Gebchak for them is the most sacred place.
It is sacred. I mean, it’s fully sacred. It is a pure land. Like they talk about it as the second glorious copper colored mountain. You know, it’s a Nyingma tradition, so Guru Rinpoche’s glorious copper colored mountain is kind of the pure land that a good Nyingma would aspire to. For the Gebchak nuns, they see Gebchak as the second glorious copper colored mountain.
It really is for these senior nuns. an incredibly sacred place because of their practice and the joy they get from their practice. And, you know, we talked earlier about the [00:45:00] Drupchens and how much enthusiasm they have to spend like 14 hours a day in the Drupchen, day after day after day after day, reciting often the same things over and over again.
But because, they’re getting that fruit. Of the practice, you know, the joy, just that nothing can compare. So they’re happy to keep doing it.
Olivia: The Gebchak Yoginis are in a continual Dharma immersion you say, that when they memorize, they exhaust the ordinary minds. And memorization is a part of this to ultimately embody what they’re reading, ritualizing and training in. And can you speak about that piece of, of their training and how memorization plays a part in their realization.
Elizabeth: It all comes back to the subtle body and the subtle body comes back to everything in the Tibetan world or Vajrayana system. And this definitely kind of reflects it as well. Like, generally speaking, when a Gebchak nun joins the nunnery, again, the first thing she learns to do is to read.
And the way that [00:46:00] she learns to read is not like in a classroom setting where she has a textbook and she learns the rule of body language. the rules of grammar, but rather she just learns by doing. So she’ll have some older nuns that teach her to sound out the words and to put the words together into sentences and then she just starts chanting, chanting the Drupchen texts.
Like she jumps in and she starts doing the hand mudras, putting on the hats, playing the music, musical instruments, and doing the chanting. And you know, for a young nun, that’s quite fun. And then they just start doing it. And, like more recently you’ll have Khenpos visit the nunnery and teach them You know, Rigney, so Rigney is kind of like arts and sciences, so a kind of more modern topics of knowledge and, and they might have classes on grammar, like their major grammar texts.
But generally, before the Cultural Revolution, I doubt that that happened very much, and it certainly doesn’t happen that often nowadays. It’s not regular anyway. So the nun just learns by doing, just by learning to chant and by chanting. And then as she grows up in this tradition, and probably asks a lot of questions, and observes and gets a lot of teachings, practical [00:47:00] teachings about the nature of her mind, the Buddha nature of mind, practical transmissions about these sadhanas that they’re doing, eventually she just kind of learns in her body, like, not in her body as opposed to her mind, but just in her being, she learns what these words mean.
And a lot of this is by example, by seeing the older nuns doing it, and how they understand what it means. and there’s a lot of, obviously a lot of words in their written text that’s in their vernacular language that she already knows what it means. but of course their written Tibetan language and especially of Tantric Tibetan language is quite, quite different than their spoken language.
And so, memorization for a Gebchak nun is How they learn to read so they just do it over and over again and compared to like a Gelugpa Scholastic training so you know in a Gelugpa kind of college You know you’d be assigned a treatise or a root text that you would have to memorize as a matter of your Understanding of that text in order for you to go very deeply into the [00:48:00] philosophy of that text the logic and philosophy of that text So you would deliberately memorize that text and then just unpack it there you know as far as you can go and then You know, my understanding is that the Gelupa approach starts with the intellect.
You know, the Madhyamaka is starting with the intellect and is exhausting the intellect. And then you do your meditation, and there’s nowhere for your doubts to go but into the nature of mind. I think that’s what the Madhyamaka intends. Whereas the, you know, the practice lineages of, something like Gebchak Gompa, you go in it straight from this understanding of Buddha nature, straight from this pointing out the nature of your mind, a practice in your meditation, looking again and again at this non conceptual nature of your mind.
and the philosophy is sort of like parallels it, but it’s not the beginning point. It’s something that you might learn the language of, but it’s not, primary. and so these nuns are doing these sadhana practices both daily in their retreat divisions and then also in their Drupchens. And the Yidam sadhana that they do in their Retreat [00:49:00] divisions, some of them replicate in the Drupchen, so you might be doing more extensive sadhana of your yidam in a Drupchen once a year.
And so you’ll meet these older nuns, like the old nun, the last old nun who died in her early 90s in 2020. She had a text memorized of about 500 pages. -, she had like 500 pages of her yidam memorized because she’d just done it over and over again so many times. And so again, like what they’re learning is to become the yidam.
What they’re learning is embodying Buddha nature and all of the chanting that they recite over and over again isn’t explaining to them what this word meaning means and what that word means, but rather it’s cultivating a way of being in the world. Within this Dzogchen hermeneutic and again, you know peppered often with these pointing out instructions from lamas and senior nuns And when you read one of their Dzogchen texts or one of their, you know, Yidam retreat division texts, you know, it’s a generation stage text So it’s describing the visualization and all the mandala deities and that at Gebchak in the Ratna Lingpa tradition [00:50:00] Not only are you visualizing the deity and the mandala around you, it’s so complex You’re visualizing in the chakras of the nun of the practitioner, the different mandalas with different yidam deities in your own chakras, in your own subtle body.
And then those chakras are symbolic of Dzogchen qualities and Buddha nature qualities and the qualities of your yidam. So you’re complete, like literally embodying the mandala in your, in your prana, in your nadi. Visualizing it there in your chakras, in your nadi. And then in that sadhana practice at Gebchak, you know, you’re reciting the chanting, the sadhana text, over and over again throughout your lifetime.
And slowly over the years you do start to understand what these words mean. And the words of a tantric text are, kind of allegorical or, you know, symbolic. They’re not literal, like a Madhyamaka text, if you’re studying a Nagarjuna text. It’s fairly easy to translate. You need that linguistic precision to translate [00:51:00] a text on Madhyamaka philosophy.
But if you’re doing a Tantric text based on, you know, direct experience of your Buddha nature and all of this symbolic generation stage you don’t practice to get you there. The words are, again, like symbolic. whole issues of translation there, right? of literal translation Um, and yeah, the nuns just kind of feel what these words mean by doing them over and over again in these ritual practices and also by examples of older nuns and lamas, transmissions and asking questions and, and then they do have formal transmissions, like maybe once a year there might be two or three periods where a great lama will visit and for one month give them a transmission.
of the whole Ratanalingpa collection of terma or something else that’s relevant to their tradition. Like Adeu Rinpoche, in the revival period, came up and transmitted all of their practice texts to them. from a Great Lama, when you have a transmission, there’s a lot of instruction that happens.
And then, you know, in some of the images that you’ve seen, You [00:52:00] can see the, the older yogins, the older male yogis of the tradition that live in caves around the nunnery and there were two most important ones, Pema Dorje and Pema Drime, these senior male yogins that live very nearby Gebchak Nunnery and would sometimes just show up on horseback with very little advanced warning, and the nuns wouldn’t have phones to know and he would show up and they would just sit on the hillside with this elder yogi with a picnic all day long and that yogin would be instructing them on what this all means.
So they start to understand what this allegorical language in their text means over time through their tradition of learning. And so, you know, Gebchak Narayana Drupchen, for example, she’s reciting these texts, but she’s embodying the text. So by doing it over and over and over and over again, it’s not like me when I recite a prayer.
You know, for me, I was educated as a young woman in Canada, and I came to Buddhism in my twenties, and I tried to learn it in the Tibetans way, but just I can’t avoid the fact that my [00:53:00] mind is conditioned by modern literacy. So when I’m reading one of their texts, I’m trying so hard to understand what it means with my head in order for me to embody it, right?
But these nuns doing it over and over again, it’s almost like in a very felt way. The meaning comes to them in a much more felt way. You know, which I think is one way of explaining why it doesn’t get boring for them, because they’re embodying it. They get the power of the practice. They feel it, they get the blessing, they get the energy.
When you look at a tradition of, of sports training or, or dance training, these sports or arts are come through repetition, right? And anybody who’s done anything like music or sport. I haven’t done much music I wish I had but if you’ve done a lot of repetition of anything or learning a language even and you just do it over And over again, you know that it feels like you’re never gonna learn it But by just doing it over and over again, you reach a critical point where it just falls in, sinks into your body Something majorly shifts, and somehow you [00:54:00] know it.
That expertise comes through repetition. And so, when you look at Yuasa’s book on the body, he talks a lot about repetition, and how Buddhist knowledge is cultivation, again, of integration of mind and body, and integration of the whole person. And it happens through habit. It happens through repeated practice.
You know, and again, the word in Tibetan for meditation is gom. And it’s often Compared with another word, gom, in Tibetan, which is spelt a little bit differently, but means habit, to familiarize yourself with something. And the word bhavana, for meditation, in Sanskrit, of course, means to familiarize. It’s like cultivation of a kind of habit.
And so, when I did a Drupchen with the Gebchak nuns, I tell you, I mean, I’m this, you know, Canadian educated woman and I was getting so bored and kind of even frustrated sometimes because the Drupchen I did was a 40 minute lunch break with three bathroom breaks. It started at like 6 and it ended at 7. 45 each day.
It started at 6 a. [00:55:00] m. and there were three bathroom breaks and I timed it and the bathroom breaks were two minutes. So you were just sitting there all day long reciting the same sadhana like three times over and over and over again, hundreds of pages. And listen, I was interested and I enjoyed parts of it, but I just kind of got bored.
And then the last two hours of the final day of the Drupchen, with all the special dedication prayers, they were reciting special dedication prayers, which also repeated. I felt like, we’ve done this prayer already. And I had to go to the bathroom so badly. and literally it was driving me crazy and, and I was just like really frustrated because I felt how boring and what was the need to recite this over and over again, whereas the nuns were so enthusiastic.
And in the end, about 15 minutes before the end, I, I, I broke and I went and I left to go to the bathroom. And you know, I had a chat with a friend after and I realized if I had just stayed. Maybe something would have shifted in my mind. Like if you really reached that critical point through the resistance to that repeated [00:56:00] practice.
Olivia: Yeah. I love how candid you are about your experience. I guess also just tied to this, you, you did mention about the printing texts, you know, tied to learning and when the Gebchak Yoginis used to have to write their texts, how that also had an impact on their capacities and now that they’re printing texts, many of them are unable to write, they don’t have the same writing abilities that their predecessors had, so it is interesting modernization on depth of Dharma and on literacy and, On these things.
Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, it really is. And so much happens, like, in consciousness. What are modern forms of, mediums of technologies of communication. And so in the early days of Gebchak nunnery, because they would have had printing presses, you know, pre modern printing presses, of course, the Derge, you know, printing press and a few of them around.
So they [00:57:00] probably had their, you know, their 25 volumes and their 16 volumes, those two sets of scriptural corpuses that made up the Gebchak tradition, had probably at least once been printed on a printing press. But quite inaccessible for a remote community like Gebchak. And so, the nuns of those generations had very nice handwriting.
Because a lot of the prayers that they would recite, especially prayers that were inserted into the basic sadhana, which happens quite a lot, you know, you’d have your basic sadhana. And maybe they were You know, a handful of scribes associated with the Gebchak community. Maybe there might have been one or two nuns or one or two monks that came from upper class families, aristocratic families, that were literate and probably learned to read and write growing up as children.
So they were able to write out copies of the Gebchak corpuses. I know that this happened for a lot of the text, so I’m guessing it happened for the whole corpuses in the early days. that they would have been handwritten, the copies for all of those nuns. But there’s often a lot of [00:58:00] supplementary material that goes into all of these practices that might have come from like – Rinpoche, or from Khyentse Wangpo, or from Chokgyur Lingpa.
You know, there would have been a pith instruction that was given by a living lama that they would insert into their practice. and be chanting. And so the nuns would be copying those out for themselves. So the early nuns handwriting was quite good. And then after the Cultural Revolution and the Revival period, there was one Gebchak lama, Lama Tarpa, who was responsible for rewriting the main copies of, the volumes.
And, my understanding is that he used ink and some kind of like wax paper, and he had some kind of, printing press that he used. So in 2006, the copies of the Drupchen texts and the, all of the texts that the nuns were using were written in the cursive script, a kind of cursive script.
And that was Lama Tarpa’s script from, you know, the late 1970s or the early 80s that he had handwritten. All of these volumes would have taken him a long time, and they’re so even and precise. And then nuns would have probably found a way to copy [00:59:00] those. The nuns would participate in the copying of the texts, and the local community would have participated in the copying of the texts, and also, you know, wood and locally made ink, you know, naturally made ink, and handmade processes of copying your text.
So, again, quite embodied ways of literacy, or at least of printing. And then, of course, from the 1980s, you get these electronic and digital printing presses. And very quickly, you know, we get the Rinchen Terzod all of these huge copies from the Rime collections of text that have fortunately been preserved in digital mediums, electronically.
And so the Gebchak texts have now been printed in Xining, and in Chengdu, and in, uh, what was it, 2014 or later? Tsoknyi Rinpoche fundraised and led a project to kind of redact the collection of Drupchen texts for the Gebchak nuns, and he had them printed, I think, in Chengdu, , he had them also kind of redacted to make them more convenient for the nuns to recite, to kind of just help to [01:00:00] organize them for the Gebchak nuns to recite in their drupchens, and then reprinted.
And so as a result, when you look at the Gebchak nuns of the current generations, their handwriting isn’t as good, because they’re not writing copies of their own texts anymore. They can go to town and photocopy as well. And so, the Gebchak nuns aren’t coming from a tradition of literacy where they write very much.
Again, it’s this embodied, they’re realizing Buddha nature. And, you know, we could talk a bit about this, but, you know, unfortunately, the Gebchak nuns were never taught to write. And they’ve not been taught as much of a language of communication to the wider community. So they serve a very important role in the community as, you know, we could call them teachers, as mentors, as, as prayer specialists, as, as mentors and counselors.
They do really fulfill important roles for the community in those ways, but not formally as teachers or as lamas. Because they haven’t been taught to write, they [01:01:00] haven’t been taught to communicate and write for themselves and communicate beyond the nunnery so much. So that’s kind of an aside, but within the nunnery they don’t really have much purpose with writing.
Olivia: I really want to talk about that as well, but before that, just going back to what you were sharing about the Lama coming over the hill and giving teachings and, can you share about some of the realized yogins and yoginis?
Perhaps that you spent time with, or you heard often about, I mean, it would be wonderful to hear any of your firsthand encounters, like what it was like to be around them. Maybe you have a memory, like something they said or did, It would be so wonderful to hear your experience.
Elizabeth: Well, from what you hear from the current generation of nuns, and from the few older nuns I was fortunate to meet, the ones who have now passed away, they talk about, you know, the early days of Gebchak, and the revival period of Gebchak as just being replete with highly realized yogic masters. And [01:02:00] sometimes, In recent years, you’ll hear the nuns lament that all of the good lamas are gone.
You know, the quality of, you know, the lamas of the older days would be in practice all the time. Like a Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, or Tsang-Yang Gyamtso or Drupwang Tsoknyi. They were literally there, teaching, transmitting Dharma, but based in yogic practice their whole lives. But the responsibilities of a modern Lama have led them in different directions.
So they’re still teaching and transmitting and to some extent doing practice, but it’s a different economy, right, for a Buddhist nowadays. So there are many, many I never met and have just heard the names of. And, you know, we could, we could list a lot of names, but, um, I was fortunate to meet two living, yogins, male yogins, who lived near Gebchak Nunnery.
One was Lagan, they call Lagan means, which means Lagan literally means old Lama, but it’s sort of like a respected senior Lama. So Lagan Pema Dorje and Lagan Pema Drime. So these were both, Tokden of the pre cultural revolution time, around, you know, [01:03:00] hovering around the Gepchak tradition. They would have been receiving transmissions from, probably not Tsang-Yang Gyamtso who died in 1909, but from his Disciples and, and living around Gebchak nunnery and participating deeply in that tradition of practice.
And they survived during the Cultural Revolution. At least Pema Dorje, he managed to continue his practice in caves during the Cultural Revolution. Very rare. And he never cut his hair. I can try and find a picture to send to you. There’s a picture of him with his hair down to the ground and growing out onto the ground, you know, like his whole life he never cut his hair.
And he lived in a hermitage and so the Gebchak nuns would very much look to him as their guru, you know, of their time. And so once I was fortunate to go up with one of the Gebchak nuns to meet Pema Dorje and with Wangdrak Rinpoche and a few visitors to the nunnery, we went up to pay our respects and to meet Pema Dorje and we took videos and asked him many questions.
Unfortunately because [01:04:00] he’s, he’s an older Lama in Nangchen, very old, old Lama, but also from the older times, so I didn’t understand his dialect at all. but at any rate. It was really wonderful to watch because we arrived and he lived at a very high altitude, really high altitude. We had to drive up from Gebchak Nunnery, which is also already quite high, in a cave and you kind of felt like you were on the top of the world.
A lot of light and there were a few nomad families that lived there and cared for him and helped in the kitchen. And then there was a younger Tokden, then a younger male yogin who lived there and was his attendant, extremely devoted attendant. And he’s got a lot of People around him that would be practicing in retreat sometimes there with him and sometimes at other branches.
Anyhow, we arrived there, we came in, we prostrated, and people quickly took their place, seated around this old yogi, and the nun from Gebchak, she Such devotion, and she sat down on her knees in front of him, and she just started to sing [01:05:00] a song of devotion, memorized, and I’m not sure where it came from, but she had it there memorized, and it was this song, again, kind of sorrowful, but a great devotion, asking him to point out the nature of their mind, that she may, that may he have compassion, may the Lama have compassion, help her to awaken.
And then, after she kind of sang these verses of devotion, then the two of them just sat there together in silence. You know, she had her head bowed, but just literally kind of looking at each other. In silence for, I remember it being around 10 minutes, but I probably not remembering accurately, but it was for quite a long period of time, just in silence.
and that was a transmission. He never gave her answers to any questions. He didn’t give her a teaching. You know, it was just this very casual time where he was eating his tsampa and talking about the olden days and talking about the issues of the time. The lama who was talking to him and his younger male attendant, but the nun was just in his presence, and [01:06:00] there was that period of silence after her verses.
And you just felt like so much was happening there, through these lines of devotion, that what can help you to awaken. And then a lama, Lagen Pema Drime, also an extremely highly realized lama, who passed away about five years ago. maybe 2019 or 20 sadly passed away and he had a hermitage. just about five kilometers from Gebchak Nunnery, that had been there for a long time, and he had a hundred nuns, so it was considered kind of a branch, or it’s, in its own right, very much a hermitage, but also following same practices of the Gebchak nuns. And he had about a hundred nuns there in practice doing a lot of yogas, a lot of tsalung and trulkhor, a lot of the same types of things the nuns would be doing, but under Lagan Pema Dr ime’s direct guidance.
And we went to see him. I got to meet him twice, but once had a bit more time to ask him questions. And, he was super cool. He’s considered kind of an emanation of Hayagriva, I think his main practice was Hayagriva. And Hayagriva is an [01:07:00] important Yidam at Gebchak Nunnery, so the first Tsang-Yang Gyamtso was again given the Ratna Lingpa transmission, and the first Tsang-Yang Gyamtso was considered a reincarnation of Gyalwa Choyang, which was one of the first disciples of Guru Padmasambhava, and the main yidam of Gyalwa Choyang was Hayagriva, and Tsang-Yang Gyamtso also had Hayagriva as his main yidam.
So at Gebchak, the 16 retreat divisions, the head retreat division is Hayagriva. It’s not bigger than the rest, but It’s considered sort of principle. At any rate, Lagan Pema Drime also has some direct connection, strong connection with Hayagriva, which I’m not totally clear about.
But he was talking about how, you know, in the olden days, you know, meaning before the Cultural Revolution, any real yogin, any real lama, he literally said any real lama would have the dreadlocks, but all of the nuns would have the short hair and look like nuns. and then you hear names, you know, there were the nine disciples of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso.
So, and of the nine, in [01:08:00] those 1910s, 1920s, of the nine, one was a woman, the rest were male. But that’s not to say that among the Gechek nuns, there are also many highly realized nuns. And that was known. They just weren’t, like, recognized or formally enthroned or anything. But they were absolutely, acknowledged by the community.
And you can read it in the Namtar, so the Namtar are these biographies and autobiographies of. of the lamas of Gebchak nunnery, so of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and one or two of the other lamas. You can hear in these written biographies and autobiographies, they talk about the many dakini, fully realized dakini at Gebchak Gompa.
And you hear about these characters, and so again, Tsogyal Dolma, in the early days was this highly realized nun. But so many male lamas. yeah, so there are many of them. And so when Lagan Pema Drime, one day, he turned up, this was like 2007 or 8, I think?
And he just turned up over the pass, so the nunnery kind of backs onto a slope, and then, His hermitage is five kilometers sort of behind and [01:09:00] one day he just turned up over the pass on horseback with his attendant monks and all of the nuns and very quickly the nuns realized he was coming and they laid out carpets on the hillside.
It was a beautiful summery day so he probably chose the weather and they laid out carpets and he sat down and all the Gebchak nuns and the monks that were there gathered around him for like eight hours. And it was a whole day long kind of picnic situation where they had tsampa in their bowls and there was tea poured around and dry cheese and various things.
And Lagan Pema Drime was sat at the center of it all. And throughout the day he was telling stories. He was just telling stories of what happened during the Cultural Revolution, what happened beforehand, like kind of namtar, you know, life stories of the great lamas and nuns and, and at times.
Everybody there in the picnic would be crying, and at times they would all start laughing, you know. But throughout this kind of picnic storytelling day, he was giving them extremely profound, you know, semtri, like pointing out the nature of the [01:10:00] mind, Dzogchen instructions. You know, Mahamudra, kind of Dzogchen type instructions, and then they would all spend some time like looking into the mind at what he, you know, he’s pointing them how to look in their mind.
I like that anecdote, that story, because I feel like it’s really quite typical of how the Gebchak tradition tradition moves, you know, it’s informal, it wasn’t scheduled, it wasn’t in a classroom, it wasn’t, according to a text, but, you know, the pith of what they’re all learning, that was communicated in this gathering.
And I can imagine that that type of thing has happened many, many times at Gebchak over the years. But something, just a quick note about the nuns looking like nuns and the male lamas looking like yogins in the early days. So if you see the early pictures of the Gebchak nuns in the early revival period, so in the 1980s and 90s, the Gebchak nuns actually have like bowl cuts.
And I’ll try and send you a picture. So they actually have, like, you know, two or three inches of hair, cropped hair. [01:11:00] And I asked, uh, Sherab Zangmo, the senior Gebchak nun, I asked her if there was a reason for this. And she said, it’s nowhere in the text. It was just understood that because we’re practicing Tantra, we should have some hair. So it was just a Gebchak tradition. I think all the branch nuns would have had the same thing. And then, in the modernization period, That’s when they’ve started to cut their hair and, various things, reasons for that as well.
Olivia: And do you want to share anything about Sherab Zangmo? Were you able to spend time with her?
Elizabeth: I was fortunate to meet her a few times. But she was very elderly by the time I went to Gebchak and was sort of at bed rest all the time. And you didn’t want to just pop in for a cup of tea. She was already, you know, nearing the end of her life. So she was this nun that we talked about earlier that feigned illness throughout the Cultural Revolution and maintained her meditation and pretended she couldn’t walk.
And then at the end, when it was the revival, she just stood up and returned to Gebchak. And she was the nun, you [01:12:00] know, we talked about how there was, you know, a nun that had preserved every aspect of their tradition. Well, Sherab Zangmo was the one that had really preserved the Dzogchen insight. And she was the one that was really guiding the younger nuns to recognize the nature of their mind.
Olivia: You mentioned Sherab Zangmo’s niece, who you said also has an exemplary practice, and I’m going to quote you here. ” an exemplary presence whose stable meditative gaze I’ve never seen falter, even with blood running down her face from an injury after a fairly major car accident,” end of quote, which, which you said she fully recovered from.
Can you share about her as well and, and also just like any meditation advice you’ve received from her or Sherab Zangmo?
Elizabeth: Mm hmm. so this is Urgyen Chodron , lovely. Nun who would again be part of the senior nuns at Gebchak today, so she’d probably in her late 50s. Sherab Zangmo’s niece. So she came, you know, in the early revival period, probably beginning of the 80s.[01:13:00]
She came and immediately was looking after her aunt. Sherab Zangmo, who was established, it was very quickly to become known that she had this very high realization. There was no mistaking it. And so she attended to her nun for decades, and learned a lot from her, from her aunt. And now Urgyen Chodron is one of two nuns who are considered the Dorje Lopon at Gebchak Nunnery today.
So Dorje Lopon means Vajra Master. And there are two nuns who sit on thrones. that the male lamas have forced them to sit on. They’re very reluctant to do so, the nuns, but the lamas have forced them to sit on these two thrones. And these two nuns, who are the Vajra masters, will lead all of the Drupchens and lead the major ritual practices.
So one of them is Urgyen Chodron, the niece of Sherab Zangmo. and she’s very humble, like all of these Gebchak nuns. And she would never, put out that she knows anything, and she definitely is an example, because she really does have this gaze and this presence about her that’s just so steady, and her eye contact, and it’s hard to [01:14:00] explain, but just her presence is extremely stable.
Lovely, very dedicated in the Drupchen. She’s so concentrated, so awake, you know, throughout hours and hours and hours of seated practice in the temple for days after days. She doesn’t ever fall asleep. You know, she’s so embodied and deep in, in these tantric practices. And she is another nun, along with the, sadly, the one who passed away recently.
She’s another nun that is considered a Gebchak teacher who goes to the branch nunneries and teaches at many of the branch nunneries in these practices. So she’s really, really lovely and, she’s very kind and kind of sensitive and very happy to share stories. And you can see, the younger nuns really love her.
really look up to her. And, and she often has a couple of younger nuns hanging around her. I haven’t had like meditation instructions from her per se because she, she wouldn’t ever give them formally. You know, they’re always happy to help you along. So she would say, at least [01:15:00] to me, she would say, make sure you do many sessions, shorter sessions, many times, shorter sessions, many times, so that you’re really integrating it throughout your day.
I was sharing a room with her for a time. She’d had this car accident, which unfortunately happens in Nangchen from time to time. Fortunately, she’s fine now. But I went to the hospital with her. She had to get like five or six stitches on her head. So there was just blood pouring down her.
And when I first saw her after the accident, I don’t think she realized what had happened. And she had blood pouring down her face. And, you know, she was completely steady. Not fazed at all. We brought her to the hospital. She got the stitches. Probably really hurt. Really not fazed at all. And then she had to recover in town for a few weeks.
so she took her time. But there’s just something incredibly steady about that woman. And when you see her go to bed at night, she, they all do their three prostrations. And then she literally falls asleep, reciting, you know, how kind the guru is. Thank you to the guru, remembering the great kindness of the guru.
So she’s still there. And she’d be one of the, the main senior nuns, you know, [01:16:00] really helping the tradition and the lineage to be upheld at Gebchak today.
Olivia: So you talk about the focus on accomplishing the deity through Yidam practice and the signs of this, such as the black hair appearing in the ashes of a cremated Vajrayogini practitioner. And you mentioned a story last time about a Khenpo’s relics having these. Have you ever heard stories like this for any of the Gebchak Yoginis?
Elizabeth: this is such a great question. I love this question. so the Gebchak Yoginis, they don’t get cremated because at Gebchak Gompa, you know, like so much of Tibet, very high altitude, permafrost, generally speaking. So their tradition, their burial tradition is sky burial. And in Nangchen, at least at Gebchak, there are really no forests around for wood to burn the bodies.
So most of those Gebchak nuns, they have their bodies offered to the vultures. It’s their dying wish. For the weeks before they die, they’ll be very explicit that this [01:17:00] is what they want done. It’s their last act of generosity. They want to feed the vultures. And so, I’ve seen a few, not like with my eyes, but I’ve been around when a few of these younger nuns have passed away.
from one illness or another. so there was one nun that had TB. This was in the early days. It’s much better now, but in the early days there was a bit of TB in the nunnery. One of these nuns had it in her spine. So she wasn’t able to sit up straight for a long time towards the end of her life. And she was very, very sick.
And then she was in the Nangchen County Hospital. So I think this was around maybe 2000. 2010 or maybe even 2013 or something and she was in the Nangchen County Hospital So it’s one of these new hospitals that kind of under the modern period with some Tibetan doctors who’ve been trained in modern medicine Who are really rejecting religion and very skeptical modern materialistic views And she’s in the hospital.
She’s hours from her death. She has nuns at her side that are guiding her and doing prayers. [01:18:00] There was a lama there from the Gebchak tradition. She’s about to die and she asks the Gebchak nuns to help her sit up. And remember she hasn’t been able to sit up because of the TB in her spine. She gets their help.
She sits up and she stays seated. And then she dies sitting up straight. And she’s sitting up straight and she dies. You know, consciously, you know, they can, the nuns that are there, the Lama that is there, they can tell that she’s dying consciously. And the Lama is so keen to bring in these skeptical, young, modern doctors, Chinese trained doctors, into the room to observe this, to see what their tradition is, right?
So these young doctors come into the room and they are so amazed. And they allow her to stay, I think, for up to a day in tukdam. And then eventually they brought her out of the hospital home, and she stayed in tukdam for like seven days. So she was probably around 40 years old. And then there was a young nun, I think her name was Pema Llamo, who, very young, probably only about [01:19:00] 19 years old or 20 years old, was in her first few months of her three year retreat.
And she knew she would die, and she died in the three year retreat, and she just kept saying, You’re all so kind for caring for me, thank you so much for caring for me. And her devotion and her gratitude to the, to the tradition of her Lamas, the Gebchak tradition was so deep, she vowed that she would return, she would be reborn a Gebchak nunnery to serve the nunnery.
And she died in the Three Retreat in her meditation box and also stayed in Tukdam for several days. So there’s a, Tukdam is very normal, very normal at Gebchak. It’s, I mean, it would be, you know, if you’re practicing that much, anybody, you know, it’d be pretty common to stay in Tukdam. So, because they don’t get cremated, you don’t hear about the relics.
there are relics of Sherab Zangmo, because she was cremated. So, there are a few relics going around of Sherab Zangmo, but largely their bodies are offered to the vultures and then there’d be bones that would be kept in a kind of shrine and a cairn at the top of the mountain as a memorial. But what you do see is these elder [01:20:00] nuns, the very old nuns are, as she’s dying, I’ve heard it described that they’ll see their Yidam appear very clearly to them and, and then they die, you know, consciously.
And then sometimes there was one old nun that died and the nuns were saying how you could see a vision of Hayagriva in the mist. You could see Shakyamuni Buddha and then sometimes Hayagriva Buddha. appearing in the mist, this is Tibet, and it’s an enchanted pre modern world, so to see signs in everything is, is just normal, to look into your dreams, to recognize the signs in the world around you, mirroring back to you.
The sacredness of your connection is, is just standard. And so, if you’ve spent time in Tibet or if you’ve spent much time around Tibetans, you probably have heard stories and, yeah, there’s so many stories of visions and appearances. There’s a story of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso giving a teaching.
And one of the old nuns who was in retreat in a hermitage in a mountain far away, really wanted to be at this [01:21:00] teaching or a transmission. And so she projected into the body of a bird and she came and was seated on his shoulder and he knew it was this nun, Tendron. He was like, Tendron you’re here for the teachings, aren’t you?
And this nun was hovering. I mean, this kind of story is pretty typical at Gebchak.
Olivia: So you talk about this 61 year old nun who wakes up at three each day to practice and is hungry by the time she finishes around 7am. And the nun says, and I’m going to quote, quote what she says here.
Everything we read is a meditation. You must recite from the depths of the heart with faith. Otherwise, the words are wasted. Gebchak is wonderful. We don’t have to learn all kinds of subjects. We just have to have faith and pure vision. And everything in existence makes sense.”
So, end of quote. I would love to talk about this just as we close today, this devotional piece. also the emotional pieces that are present at, Gebchak that are sometimes, and [01:22:00] what you say, uh, avoided in scholastic environments. So will you talk about Why these qualities of devotion and emotion benefit realization and, and also give an example of the emotional piece you’ve spoken a little more about the devotional piece and please elaborate on both and anything you’d like to say.
Elizabeth: It’s an important question. Well, the nun that, that you just quoted there, that’s, Bachung. So she’s the same nun that I mentioned earlier who said she’d, she’d love to go to Lhasa, but she feels like all the pilgrimages are there at Gebchak. she’s just so deeply joyful to be able to stay there in her meditation box, in her little hut.
And she’s also one of these nuns, few, few nuns, that gets to go inside the three year retreat center. She’s not a doctor. They see her as a doctor. She always makes them feel better. You know, the importance of the emotionally devotional aspects of the nuns practice is just so important because it is a psychological path, you know, it’s this cultivation of the whole person.
It’s not learning objects of [01:23:00] knowledge like modern education is largely doing. And life is suffering. so the path to liberation is one of, of deep emotion and, and the kindness of, of anybody who helps one awaken is also deeply felt, you know. and then of course because this is the Mahayana, you know, Vajrayana tradition, Bodhichitta is motivating all of their prayers and practices and, and the nuns, you can see, you know, if you try to point to this is the fruit of their practice, you know, this is the result of their learning.
First of all, the nuns are very reluctant to answer questions, to explain things to me or to explain things in general, like I’ve mentioned before. And I think partly that’s that maybe they’re not trained in philosophical language and so much in textual exegesis that they’re not equipped to do so. But also, it’s because the whole orientation of their training is towards this embodied way of being in the world.
It’s not, there’s not like an answer. It’s like a right answer to something, to a question. It’s not about a particular, it’s about your way [01:24:00] of being in the world. and for them, compassion is one of these primary qualities that, of course in Mahayana and Vajrayana, compassion and wisdom are one in realization, and you can really see that in the Gebchak nuns, and many people who visited Gebchak nunnery will say that, you know, one of the first impressions they make is how warm they are, you know, very warm and compassionate women, and they’ve got a great sense of humor.
very quite cheeky. so I think, yeah, I think emotion and devotion is just really important because it is a, whole person cultivation. It’s psychological and, and because they’re cultivating compassion that, the heart is at the heart of it, you know.