Today’s episode is part one of three parts that will be shared over the coming weeks.
Time notes:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:51 Elizabeth’s early years at Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s retreat place, and about the Togdens and Togdenmas
00:07:14 What led Elizabeth to Gebchak gonpa.
00:09:00 The initial meeting between Wandrak Rinpoche and the Gebchak yoginis
00:15:00 How Elizabeth spent her time at Gebchak gonpa
00:18:40 Nangchen as a fertile ground for yogis
00:23:00 Gebchak founder Tsang-Yang Gyamtso & the Rime period
00:29:37 The way of the yogin scholar
00:37:00 The first Tsokyni Rinpoche’s, vision
00:44:00 Karma mudra and the early years at Gebchak with yogins and yoginis
00:55:00 Origin and preservation of practice texts at Gebchak
00:56:00 The yogini Sherab Zangmo
00:59:00 Rebuilding Gebchak
01:05:00 The Royal Family
01:08:00 Gebchak practice path
01:15:00 16 retreat divisions and yidam accomplishment
01:28:00 Typical day during drubchen periods
01:34:00 Typical day outside drubchen
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.”
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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. Towards the end of her time as a nun, as a way of bridging her experience with modern qualifications, 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 [00:01:00] 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. Today’s interview is part of a series with Elizabeth on the Gebchak Yoginis, female practitioners in the Nangchen Kingdom of Tibet. Well, first of all, thank you so much for meeting. I’m grateful to see [00:02:00] you here today and let’s begin with you before we jump into the Gebchak nuns. How did you end up at Gebchak in the first place?
Elizabeth: Well, good, good evening to you and lovely to see you as well. I spent about from 2006 to 2019, spending around four months of the year at or around Gebchak in Nangchen And so I was a nun from March 1st, 2000, until 2017, I was a nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, mostly based in India, in fact entirely based in India. and I spent time over those 17 years at two nunneries in India. One was a Drukpa Kagyu and one was a Nyingma nunnery. And then in the summer times from 2006, I would go up to Gebchak nunnery for around four months.
And if I wasn’t at the nunnery itself, I would be maybe in a branch hermitage or another hermitage in Nangchen sometimes with a family home. [00:03:00] Uh, but the kind of the short story is I was a nun in India and, the first nunnery I lived at was a new nunnery. It was Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s nunnery and I was there, before it was built I was there for a few years and I was volunteering to help teach English but I was also, having a real insight into what a Drukpa Kagyu community for nuns would be like because of course in India, These major nunneries and monasteries are often kind of embedded in a larger community with Tibetan lay people living in a village around or several, you know, refugee camps around.
And in the first nunnery, I kept hearing about how nuns are at the bottom of the basket in Tibet and had had such a kind of second class to monks, but At this first Drukpa Kagyu nunnery Dongyu Gyatso Ling nunnery. that Tenzin Palmo had established, those nuns were really very privileged. They were given all of these opportunities, because that was her vision for the nunnery.
And the lamas were very kind to them. You could kind of say it’s a branch of Tashi Jong. And so in the Kangra Valley in [00:04:00] North India, about two hours from Dharamsala, is Tashi Jong.
And Tashi Jong in Tibet was Khampa Gar And Khampa Gar was the seat of the Khamtrul Rinpoche. . Rinpoche. One very close with His Holiness the Gyalwang Drupa, the Drupchen Rinpoche, I think mostly based in Ladakh and Bhutan. And then there’s the Tashi Jong Khamtrul Rinpoche, but in Tibet there was one sort of main emanation of Khamtrul Rinpoche at Khampa Gar So Khampa Gar is based It’s kind of in, if I’m remembering correctly, sort of, uh, western central Kham on the border of the T. A. R. And it had very, very close lineage lines with Nangchen over the last couple of centuries, a few centuries. because the last dynasty of the Nangchen kings was Dru kpa Kagyu So the first Tsoknyi Rinpoche was based at the seat of the Nangchen King and had very close, you know, lineage transmissions and lineage relationships with Khampa Gar.
And so before the Cultural Revolution at Kampo Gar, they had a very strong tradition of [00:05:00] female yoginis called Togdenma, in fact, the Drukpa Kagyu tradition of yogis had the long dreadlocks and the white and red zen, but they had the vow of celibacy.
Which wasn’t always the case, in Kham in those days, you’d have a lot of yogins walking around, practicing very you know, rigorously, but um, they didn’t all necessarily have the celibacy vow, but the Drukpa Kagyu yogins called Togdens, also had the celibacy vow, and then they had the Togdenma around Khampa Gar And if you talk to the folks in Tashi jong in India, who are coming from Khampa Gar in Tibet, every now and then you’ll hear about, you know, if you think these Todgens are great, the Togdenmas were really something, and apparently these Togdenma in Khampa Gar and these nuns, apparently, they had very long, heavy dreadlocks, and apparently they would tie them up onto cords above their head as they did their yogas, just to lift the weight off their bodies as they were doing their Trulkhor and Tsalung yogas. And then with the Cultural Revolution, Khamtrul [00:06:00] Rinpoche fled to India, and many of the male togdens who probably had close friendships and very close relationships with Khamtrul Rinpoche, which was allowed because they were men, They followed him to India, but many of the Tokdenma who had a very close devotional relationship with Khamtrul Rinpoche, but maybe not so much on a daily basis, many of them were dispersed and they didn’t follow Khamtrul Rinpoche to India.
So that tradition had been just kind of dispersed and lost. And so Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo was asked by the previous Khamtrul Rinpoche to start a nunnery deliberately to re establish the lineage of Tokdenma. the female yoginis. And so that’s why she started this nunnery. So the years that I was there, it hadn’t been built yet.
And then after I left, I think a few years later, she had her retreat center established. And then a small group of those women, and it grew very quickly to a hundred nuns, and a small group of those women chose to go into the intensive yogini training retreat center.
And so really the [00:07:00] lineage lines between Nangchen and even Gebchak Gonpa and Khampa Gar you know, really quite close.
so I was at Tenzin Pambo’s nunnery for four years there, but wasn’t really very aware of Gebchak, but obviously had heard about these yogini nuns from the Drukpa Kagyu tradition, and you know, like everyone, very inspired.
And then the second nunnery was a very large Nyingma nunnery of about 700 nuns in South India, in Bailakupi. And in that nunnery, it was much more probably representative of what it would have been like in Tibet. So, Bailakupi was the largest settlement of Tibetan refugee camps.
And it has Sera Monastery, and Namdroling, and – Kagyu, and Tashi Lumpo are all down there. And then at the middle of all these large monasteries, you have Tsogyal Shedrop Ling, which is the nunnery, uh, connected with Namdroling, with 700 nuns. And, in that nunnery, I experienced what it meant to You know, that nuns were treated, by double standard to the monks just down the road.
And so, I was becoming very [00:08:00] quickly disenchanted with the Tibetan tradition and how it it treated nuns. And I and I should say as a footnote that it’s gotten so much better. since the early 2000s because, of course, the nuns have been given equal education to the monks. There’s been this movement towards full ordination and just a lot more awareness of the need to equalize opportunities for men and women.
So, the nuns are much more autonomous in these nunneries nowadays and I think probably things would be quite different in a much better way now. so, I was feeling quite disenchanted. About the tradition I had signed up for as a nun, and around the same time I ran out of money, and as a westerner, you know, in the Tibetan tradition, you’re responsible for your own finances, so I had gone to Taiwan to teach English.
And in Taiwan, this was around, this was 2005. And in Taiwan, I went, I went to meet my friend, um, Phil, who was a monk, an English monk, who I’d met in India, and he had just come back from Gechug. And if you’ve read the book, Calling the Lama from Afar, written by [00:09:00] Jampa Kalden so Phil is the English monk who’s translating on their trip.
And so Phil had just come back from that trip, and he was a mate of mine, and I went to see him. And he was there with a lama from Gebchak Nunnery who they’d all traveled with in the book, Wangdrak Rinpoche. He was one of the tulkus of Gebchak Nunnery and Phil decided he wanted to go back to continue his studies in the Shedra, because he was very diligent with his studies.
And, in fact, in Taiwan, really, they didn’t speak much English, and he felt that they needed a Chinese translator. And Wangdrak Rinpoche, had just recently been recognized as a tulku so he had actually become a monk as a young boy, and then actually studied at Dzongsar Shedra at Derge, and become a Khenpo, and then was living, you know, quite a happy life as a Khenpo in the Tibetan tradition, just teaching classes, and learning some science, and having lots of conversations about adapting the tradition to the modern world, and, and then one day, when he was in this Shedra, where he was teaching at the time, he saw these nuns come in [00:10:00] the front entrance with a big white khatag And he wondered what was going on.
He could tell it was something significant. And then, before he knew it, there was a knock on his door. And these nuns prostrated to him and offered this khatag and said, You’re Wangdrak Dorje, our tulku of Gebchak Nunnery. And they’d spent at least six years, trying to track him down with the help of Sakya Trizin Rinpoche and other local lamas looking at signs.
And they’d done a lot of Ritual practices to remove the obstacles to finding him and they’d found him and he didn’t see this coming and he was I guess in his late 30s at the time maybe around 40 even and You know in the in the kind of contemporary period of Tibetan Buddhism, if you’re a tulku you’re also responsible for Materially supporting your gompa your monastery and nunnery.
So these nuns also said please provide us with one meal a day because Gebchak nunnery used to be this You know, very high altitude nunnery filled with yak herding women, women who had grown up as yak herders in Nangchen. And they used to get their food supplies [00:11:00] from their families. And with the kind of modernization and the open and reform period in China, there was this very strident campaign to economically develop the Tibetan Plateau.
And so what we see happen to the Tibetans is that most of them were settled in urban centers, and, that kind of land based economy of yak herding and agriculture very quickly, very quickly and radically changed to a kind of monetary economy, an urban centered monetary economy, and so the nuns didn’t have food supplies anymore from their families, and they were struggling to keep to the discipline of the nunry, which required them to be there and not leave, except for very short periods of time.
So they asked Wangdrak Rinpoche to provide their food and Wangdrak Rinpoche was just kind of flabbergasted by being recognized as a tulku and also by this request to provide food. And a lot of his family and friends said, said, don’t do it. Don’t say yes, because, you know, there’s nothing to show for food and it will never end.
It will be the rest of your life. And nuns are [00:12:00] difficult. You know, looking after a nunnery is going to be a big headache. Anyway, so he took some time to make his decision, and he went to Gebchak He’d been recognized as this tulku and Tsoknyi Rinpoche had helped to arrange things, and he was You know, sort of invited up to Gebchak with fanfare and trumpets and on horseback and, and when he went to Gebchak and he saw these nuns and the dedication to practice and the quality and the atmosphere of their practice there, he just had no question in his mind that this would be worth his while, so he said yes.
And he just, from that point, had dedicated himself to his responsibilities as a Gebchak tulku So he was there in Taiwan, just, this would have been just about four years after he was recognized as a tulku And he didn’t speak any Chinese, and he certainly didn’t speak any English, he still doesn’t really speak English.
He does speak Chinese now. and, and also, he wasn’t a famous tulku really nobody knew who he was. And he was the tulku of a nunnery. And so in East Asia and Taiwan, that very quickly made him a second [00:13:00] class Lama, you know, both in the eyes of, you know, Chinese Buddhism and also the Tibetans didn’t as much respect to Lama from a nunnery, because typically a Lama that looked after a nunnery was assigned by the main monastery to look after a nunnery. But Gebchak of course, really broke that mold. So, he was just there in Taiwan, trying to start fundraising for the nuns, and really struggling to do so. And so, I kind of stepped in for, for Phil, and, and just I mean, I was coming from a place of being very disenchanted, like, seriously disenchanted with how nuns are being treated in India.
And then suddenly very inspired by Gebchak nunnery, which I had heard about at this point, you know. And then also meeting Wangdrak Rinpoche and seeing his dedication. It was the first time I’d encountered a Tibetan Lama who was so genuinely such a feminist. to put it in one way. And so I went up to Gebchak Nunnery that summer.
The next summer was 2006. And the Taiwanese very kindly paid for my flights. And then I went up with this lovely French photographer, Jérôme Raffelin, [00:14:00] who’s Some of his photos I passed to you. And I spent a month at Gebchak Nunnery and really just had probably one of the very few most special periods of my life.
Elizabeth: So when I talk about the nuns in these conversations and also in this book, mostly I’m talking about these nuns kind of before modernization. And so modernization for the, for Gebchak nunnery, I would place around, I mean, it’s hard to put your finger on it, but for Gebchak nunnery, I’d place it around 2010.
For the Nangchen region, I would place that earlier, like maybe around the 1980s when those shifts really start. But that’s how I got up there. And then, and then I. Kind of just dedicated to helping Wangdrak Rinpoche to fundraise, so I helped build a website and, and to translate for him whenever he traveled, because of course lamas now when they give teachings often brings in fundraising, so those two became linked.
Um, and I’ve been doing that ever since and I still do that, translate for Wangdrak Rinpoche and try and help a little bit with [00:15:00] fundraising, so.
Olivia: And what were you doing those two to four months that you were there, the periods of time you were there?
Elizabeth: So I would go up, uh, usually I would go up with Wangdrak Rinpoche or maybe go up on my own and then meet with Wangdrak Rinpoche.
And so I was often just sort of hanging around and spending some time getting to know the nuns and trying to find out more information about the nunnery for brochures and for the website and helping to communicate. You know, the nunnery’s tradition To Wangdrak Rinpoche’s students that were abroad.
So I did some interviews with the nuns and I tried to document a lot and take, you know, to try and take some footage and photographs. And then very soon he had students from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and also more from United States and and Australia. And so they would wanna come up as well.
So I’d be translating on their visits and then we’d start to organize retreats. And then I’d often just be doing my own retreats as well for some time. And so it was quite informal. [00:16:00] And then from around 2018, after I Disrobed and I disrobed in 2017. And then my, for me, my Bridging project back to a Western economy, was doing a PhD.
So I was doing these formal studies and, and then I did my PhD on my field work, both the informal periods that I’d spent there. And then in 2018 and 19, I went up and very deliberately kind of did an ethnography, which is a lot of that is in our conversations and in this
book.
Olivia: And when you were doing retreats, were you staying with them or staying elsewhere?
Elizabeth: So mostly elsewhere. So I would stay like. In, in Nangchen, there are so many retreat centers. Some of them are like three retreat centers. Some of them are hermitages that are higher altitude, kind of in an old cave site or something. So I spent time in maybe three or four of those hermitages. And then in the more recent years, I would usually just be based at a place called Dongsang Ritro, which [00:17:00] has become a major center for the Gebchak community.
and then usually on each trip, I would spend maybe three to four weeks at the nunnery. doing my own sessions throughout the day, not so much of a formal retreat, because, you know, what you’ll find when you spend time at Gebchak Nunnery, and for me, you know, as a Westerner who, Kind of trained in Tibetan Buddhism in India.
For me, a retreat would be quite, like, uh, distinct. So you would have your scheduled four sessions a day, and you would try and stay quiet for certain periods, and you’d really try and keep to a schedule. And if I tried to do that at Gebchak in fact, if I tried to do that in any of these Hermitages in Nangchen, Like it very quickly wouldn’t, wouldn’t work because people would come into your room and the nuns would come in and just sit right next to me on the bed and start having a conversation, you know, open my books, maybe look at my phone and for them, like, it’s just so woven with their daily life, especially at Gebchak they have very deep practice and extremely rigorous practice of retreats, [00:18:00] but they don’t have that like bold division between practice and non practice.
And so I would, you know, try my best to keep to my sessions, but often it was just sort of living the daily life with these nuns and doing my own sessions in my room,
just
learning from them.
Olivia: Will you share about Nangchen known as the realm of meditators.
Like, how has it allowed for the practice and culture to birth at Gebchak Gonpa?
Elizabeth: So Nangchen, it’s an erstwhile kingdom, was considered a kingdom in, in Kham, so northern Kham in eastern Tibetan plateau. And it was developed as a kingdom around, uh, year 1300, I believe. And so in the Yuan dynasty, when you had this alliance between the Mongolian Yuan dynasty and the Sakya lineage in Tibet, and Chogyal Pogpa, who was, politically, you know, leading a lot of Tibet at the time, had legitimized some of these characters in Nangchen as political leaders.
And so Nangchen [00:19:00] was, as a kingdom, it was originally very much coming from the Baromkagyu community. And those first founding fathers of the kingdom of Nangchen were, some of them were actually Baromkagyu yogins. And the name Nangchen comes from Nangsa chenmo, which is the name of the first monastery kind of seat of the king.
and the way it was structured from the beginning was around these 18 monastic districts. so you would have these monastic centers that would hold some kind of, uh, Ruling responsibility, there were probably some taxes, just a way of organizing the community, but there’s a wonderful, and she talks about how, so the Nangchen Kingdom then developed very much as a practice lineage, like a concentration of practice lineages, but very much as a Kagyu stronghold. And it’s you know, throughout its existence. the last ruling Nangchen King, I believe, passed away in [00:20:00] 1961.
And so, just before the Cultural Revolution began the Nangchen King, before he passed away, would have been somehow assimilated into, the Chinese structures, and effectively lost sort of his, you know, ruling power, and then he passed away, and he didn’t. He didn’t have sons, I believe.
He didn’t have sons that would have taken over that. So it was effectively kind of the end of the Nangchen kingship with his passing in 1961. Although there have been some nephews and daughters with children who have, who are still alive and, you know, very much respected in Nangchen today.
Maria Turek talks about how the kingdom of Nangchen, it was more kind of a federation of clans and didn’t necessarily have very much of like a political hierarchy like Derge to the south would have had. But was, you know, in its own eyes it was a kingdom and it had relationships, very strong relationships with Derge and Lhasa and with the Mongolians and also the Chinese, the Qing [00:21:00] period.
And when you, when you’re reading the history of Nangchen, some of the major sources would be like Qing sources or Derge sources or like neighboring sources. And even the terms for the ministers of the Nangchen kingdom, like Beihu and stuff, are coming from Chinese and, and neighboring sort of sources.
So they were legitimized very much through neighboring polities. but still kind of existed in its own eyes as this kingdom. But because it was quite decentralized, it has always very much been a very highland, yak herding and sheep and horses, very much a herding economy. So like 80 percent of the economy would have been herding.
and also agricultural, but primarily herding. And so it was quite decentralized politically, and then very high altitude economically, herding. So it really supported this culture of yogic practice. And so, over time, it went from like, – Kagyu, and I’m not sure in between but the [00:22:00] most, recent version of the Nangchen kingship was the Drukpa Kagyu.
So, like, the last dynasty was the Drukpa Kagyu dynasty of the Nangchen kingship, so. And then during the Rime period you had. You know, very strong, like, cross pollination of Nyingma and Kagyu and Sakya and even sometimes Gelugpa lineages. So it was very much a high altitude world with a very down to earth herding economy and a very down to earth practice culture and a very much a concentration of Drup Gyu, these Drup Gyu practice lineages.
Olivia: You also talk a lot about how the Rime movement really did play a role in Gebchak Gonpa existing, and, will you say a little bit more about its influence?
Elizabeth: Sure, yeah, so, the Nangchen community and so many of these characters from Nangchen would have been very active characters in that whole Rime period.
Tsang-Yang Gyamtso [00:23:00] the founder of Gebchak Gonpo would be a really good example. So he’s somebody that produced 16 volumes of scriptures, of written scriptures. He had sort of , a very close pen pal relationship with Jamgong Kongtrul. a close friendship, and then they would go back and forth in letter writing.
And then he walked from Nangchen to see a Jamgon Kongtrul, and would visit Jamyang Khyentse Wongpo along the way, and end up at Tsadra Hermitage, where Jambgong Kongtrul would have been living, or, at other places. Usually hermitages. and go to visit him. And he would travel, so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso traveled down to Dergi to visit Wangpo, and other great masters, and he would travel with Tsogyal Droma and, and others, and other lamas from the Gebchak community.
So Tsogyal Droma was this, this wonderful nun, one of the original nuns of Gebchak nunnery, who was considered a, an emanation or reincarnation of Yeshe Tsogyal. [00:24:00] And Tsang-Yang Gyamtso was considered an emanation Gyalwa Choyang one of these original disciples of Padmasambhava, so there’s this real replication of the early source of the Nyingma lineage Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, as an example, is a really good example for the Rimé kind of culture because First of all, he, you know, he wrote a, a corpus of scriptures and few things that characterize that Rime period is a real propagation of scriptural writing, very eclectic, scriptural production.
but also an attention to those early Indian treaties. so a lot of attention to scripture and like eclectic scripture. So kind of in contrast to the, the Gelukpa. culture of study, which focused on a kind of fixed set of scriptures and would be memorized and deeply analyzed.
Kind of what you see happening with the Rime is a much broader base of scripture, with a very eclectic looking at things from all different [00:25:00] angles. And, and of course the Rime period didn’t start in the Rime time. This, this sort of trend to eclecticism and this very open minded. characteristic of the Rimé period is something that’s always been there in Buddhism and always been there in Tibet.
You know, just looking to synthesize all of these different yāna, all of these different pathways, as all leading to that same essential Buddha nature. And Tsang-Yang Gyamtso 16 volumes, that’s the main, message. almost of all of them, is look at your own mind. It’s not outside in words and external sources.
It’s always immediate, right there in your own mind. And these are all different pathways to that same primordial experience of Buddha nature. But another thing that characterizes, like a Rime characteristic of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso , so is that he developed all of these volumes in a hermitage, out of his yogic practice.
And if we look at, you know, like the Rinchen Terzod and these great [00:26:00] collections of scriptures that came out of the Rimé period, compiled by Jamyang Kongtrul and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, they spent almost all of their time in hermitages as well. So we often think about all of the monastic colleges that were developed and the scholarship that was developed in the Rimé period, and it certainly was, but so much of that was actually written in Retreat settings and came from yogic visionary practice.
So Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, he’s somebody that actually only learned to read in his early 20s. So he grew up as in, in a nomad family, and in fact the valley where Gebchak Nunnery is, was the valley where his nomad camp was, as his family nomad home was. They were quite a wealthy nomadic family, he would have had thousands of animals.
He was one of many children, I can’t recall if he, I don’t think he was the oldest son, but for some reason he usually ended up saddled with the responsibility of looking after the yak when he wanted to go elsewhere. He talks about when Chokgyur Lingpa, this, [00:27:00] wonderful, famous terton of the Rimé period.
Elizabeth: Chokgyur Lingpa was coming through, like he was going to visit Dzonguling. So if you know the book Blazing Splendor, the front cover image is Fortress Peak, Dzonguling, and that’s very close. It’s probably just maybe five kilometers from Gebchak Nunnery. And Chokgyur Lingpa was coming to visit that fortress peak, and Tsang-Yang Gyamtso wanted so much to go and see Chokgyur Lingpa, but he wasn’t allowed to go because he had to stay and look after the yak.
But all he ever wanted to do was learn to read and practice Dharma. And so he did sort of start to learn to read as he was herding yak, and he had a couple of uncles that were master meditators, and he used to barter with his siblings for pictures of lamas. And Tsang-Yang Gyamtso talks about, you know, he would have been probably a teenager or a late in sort of a young adult when he was doing this, but he would develop little shrines.
He would be up on the mountains with the animals and he would develop little shrines for the animals and, you know, make offerings to the lamas. He had [00:28:00] such a deep devotion and yearning towards Dharma practice. So finally when he was in his early, early twenties, his father sort of cut him loose from the responsibilities and he was able to go on pilgrimage.
And he formally learned to read. The first things that Tsang-Yang Gyamtso learned to read were these prayers to Padmasambhava. So he didn’t learn in a classroom, he didn’t learn with a textbook, he didn’t learn with the rules of grammar, he just learned by reciting prayers over and over and over again, you know, from deep devotion in his heart.
So he was learning to read, really, from a, you know, a very deep devotion in his heart. He would have been memorizing these scriptures, and he would have gone on, I think then he learned to read the Pema Khatang, which is this huge volume, the life story of Padmasambhava, and it’s actually quite difficult to recite.
So, they’re learning to read, but they’re also reciting out loud often, because these are prayers that are chanted. So, we can imagine somebody like [00:29:00] Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, so many people in Tibet. In the Rime period, they would have been learning to read out loud. They would have had the scripture and then they would be off with the yaks or off walking around and they would be reciting them out loud as they’re walking.
And then they would be in a community shrine hall reciting them in a prayer setting, in a community prayer setting. And probably visualizing Tsang-Yang Gyamtso as well. But you’re learning to chant rhythmically with all of these prayers and so much of the text. In fact, all of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s 16 volumes are metric, they’re in verse form.
And likewise for the great masters of the Rimé period, so much of it is in Gur, like Doha verse form, coming spontaneously from these. experiences of meditative realization. And so the Rime period is this wonderful kind of fusion of, like, very sophisticated scholastic knowledge of the Indian treaties, like of Madhyamaka, of emptiness.[00:30:00]
of Tathagatagarbha, of Buddha nature, of the Chittamatran view, and their visionary Yidam and Dzogchen and Mahamudra meditative practice. so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, so he, he never would have studied in a Shedra, like in Nangchen before the 1980s. There was in fact only one Shedra. Probably, I think it was founded in the Rimé period.
There was just one Shedra. but many of these monks and lamas would have studied in Nangchen. so the lamas of the Rime period were considered Kedrup. They were lamas that were accomplished in study and practice. They were Yogin scholars and many of their kind of monk disciples and those lucky nuns that got to study would have been a few and far between, but those lucky nuns that would have been studying as well, probably the pattern of how they would have been formally learning would be that they would go to a Lama who is an expert in a set of commentary.
They would go and spend [00:31:00] time with that Lama and learn maybe. like the Gyu Lama, which is the Uttara Tantra, which is a commentary on Buddha nature. And they would learn that for several months from this Lama, but then they would also be doing meditative practice. It would be woven with, you know, these semtri, these pointing out instructions where they would go and they would meditate and experientially meditate on the studies that they were doing.
And then they might, you know, go into retreat. Because this really is not an exaggeration at all, that every monk and nun in Nangchen would have done a three year retreat. It would have been an exception to the normality, normality to not do one. And they would start when they were quite young. You know, a typical Gebchak nun would be doing her first three year retreat when she was about 15 or 16 years old.
and then they might come out of retreat and then go on to learn from another Lama, you know, another Lama scholar master of the period who was a specialist in mind only school. And then eventually with the Rimé period, because [00:32:00] what was being accomplished in the Rimé period partly was really fortifying these practice lineages.
And there were so many practice lineages, you know, all of these sub lineages of the Kagyu school and these termal lineages of the Nyingma school and the Sakya school and, you know, all over the place. And it was about fortifying them and giving them a bit of a stronger textual and political voice because there was some encroachment from that centralized Gelugpa.
You know, rulership and takeover of, of Kham, so they really did have to stand up for themselves and fortify themselves and defend themselves politically and, and through strengthening your scriptural corpus and your scholarship, that actually gives you that voice to, to do so. And so you see a lot of Shedras being established with the Rimé period, but it’s just so important not to overlook how much these hermitages were really the generation of those Shedras.
so probably many, many more hermitages were established in the Rimé period than shedras, than colleges.
Olivia: What would you [00:33:00] say the time period is? Like for this period where it’s just assumed you’ll do a three year retreat, or it’s just assumed that any time you receive a commentary you’ll then go into retreat.
Elizabeth: I mean, what is this time period we’re speaking of exactly?
So there was a nun at Gebchak Gompa who talks about being 11 years old when she joined the nunnery, I think that’s probably pretty typical, they would have been quite young when they would become a monk or a nun or, if you were a monk or a nun, you would have joined a community, a monastic community, and then you would have started your, your training. It wouldn’t have been like a Shedra study in those days. It would have been like your training. So you’d be memorizing the ritual texts and the texts that informed your tradition.
Elizabeth: But something that you can see, if you go to Nangchen, you can just see that every monastery would have a three year retreat, a Drupkang three year retreat. So, um, Probably by their late teens, they would be going into a three year retreat, and that’s just part of how they cook, kind of how they train. and then you can see, you know, across Nangchen, quite a [00:34:00] typical pattern up until fairly recently, and maybe even today.
I haven’t been there in six years. most people, if not everybody, monks and nuns, would do that three year retreat, and then some of them, after a three year retreat, would really want to deepen that. And so they might go from the monastic Drupkang, that three retreat building, which is an annex of their nunnery or monastery.
Then they might go to a kind of hermitage up in the mountains, which is also connected to the monastery. And it would be fewer nuns or monks that would do that, but certainly some of them would want to go and do more retreats. prolonged retreat in the, the cave or the kind of retro, the manath, the mountain hermitage.
And then of those fewer monks or nuns, then there would be like one or two or three or four that would just disappear into the mountains. And they would come out every now and then and give a transmission and eventually they would become renowned because they would become these Dzogchen or Mahamudra masters, but you didn’t hear about them.
[00:35:00] And they would wander. They would just wander from cave to cave and hermitage to hermitage. And so, you know, after the Cultural Revolution, with this vibrant revival of Tibetan Buddhism across the Tibetan Plateau, especially Kham, where you have less administration, huge revival of Tibetan Buddhism, and there’s so many masters.
Olivia: Great masters of the practice lineages that people will have and continue to flock to for transmissions. So just so much practice was happening in these regions.
Gebchak Gompa is a mother gompa, which is so unusual, usually there’s a monastery, that’s the the father monastery, and then a nunnery is often a branch, but Gebchak Gompa is really a center of 40 different, at least, branch nunneries and monasteries.
Olivia: So will you speak of how it began. and The relationship between Tsokyni Rinpoche and Tsang-yang Gyamtso in terms of the formation of Gebchak Gonpa,
Elizabeth: Gyamtso was born in [00:36:00] 1848. And the first Drup Wang Tsoknyi Rinpoche, as he was known, Drup Wang, you know, the great yogin Tsoknyi Rinpoche, the first, would have been maybe a decade or something, older than Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, and was living in Nangchen, and the first Tsoknyi Rinpoche seat was at Nangchen Gar, which is also known as Sechu Gongpa, which is the seat of the Nangchen King.
And this was Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s monastery. Tsokyni Rinpoche I would have been, you know, a primary lama to the king. and an extremely, you know, influential Yogin Lama of his time. And so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, after he gets cut loose from his herding duties with his family, the first thing he does is go on pilgrimage, because he’s heard of the Drukchen Rinpoche, the Gyawang Drupa, so the head of the Drupa Kagyu.
And, and Drukchen Rinpoche is living in central Tibet, so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso goes on pilgrimage to Drukchen Rinpoche, and he meets a Dakini along his way. And, and a Dakini says it’s [00:37:00] wonderful that you’re going on pilgrimage to see Drukchen Rinpoche, but your real karma, your real guru, is Drukwang Tsokyni.
Anyway, so he goes to see the Druk chen, and he meets the Druk chen, and Druk chen Rinpoche actually points him in the same direction. And the Druk chen Rinpoche, interestingly, ordains Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, according to his request. Tsang-Yang Gyamtso wants to become a monk. But the Druk chen Rinpoche will only give him the vows of a Sangchu Genyin, which is Basically, the five precepts, but without celibacy, which in this day and age is pointing him to, you know, the yoga practice, which is involving some sexual practices.
And so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso then returns back to Nangchen and meets Drupung Tsoknyi Rinpoche at Nangchen Gar, where Tsoknyi Rinpoche is living. And sparks fly, and his devotion to Tsoknyi Rinpoche is, textbook classical devotion. He cries all the time. He cries, like, Tsang-Yang Gyamtso is crying all the time in his life [00:38:00] story, out of devotion to his guru.
And he gives all of his possessions to Tsokyni Rinpoche, and Tsokyni Rinpoche transmits the Ratna Lingpa termas to Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, because he can see this is his. Karmic potential and so he sort of stays at the feet of Tsoknyi Rinpoche and gets all of these transmissions And then he goes off and does its intensive retreat periods.
Meanwhile Tsoknyi Rinpoche as a Incredible yogin himself is also in these long periods of really serious yogic practice So Tsoknyi Rinpoche in his in his Namtar in his life story And to be honest, I’m not sure who’s written this Namtar, if it’s his own autobiography or somebody else’s biography. But at any rate, it said that Tsoknyi Rinpoche was extremely ascetic and would only eat small amounts of food.
And would just wear like one sort of tattered robe. And so a very, very ascetic practice. Incredibly dedicated and very [00:39:00] visionary. So, really the framework and, and we can talk about this later , but really the framework of tantric practice in these pre-modern tantric lineages, practice lineages is the yidam the visualization of a deity, the self visualization of a deity.
And you know, if you read any of these scriptures coming out of the remake period, it’s always, there’s always a vision of some deity.
So Tsoknyi Rinpoche is transmitting these practices to Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and he says to Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, listen, I know you want to stay here with me, but your potential, your karmic calling really is for the women, because of course all beings have equal Buddha nature. But women just simply don’t have an opportunity to practice it, to fulfill that. And this is Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s vision. He sees this. but he can see that Tsang-Yang Gyamtso is the one, who’s, who’s got to like build the shop, so to speak.
and just kind of a footnote. [00:40:00] So there was a nunnery in, in Kham, sort of southward in Kham at the time, called Drakkar Monastery, and the scholar Nicola Schneider has done some work on this, and, and she says that like Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok had said, for there to be a hundred nuns at Drakkar nunnery at this time was quite a miracle.
So it’s just going to show that it was very rare for women in Kham to have like a nunnery where they could really practice these advanced Vajrayana practices and, you know, as, as we know, often nunneries were annexes of a monastery and nuns would be given, they would do a lot of Nyungne, sort of Avalokiteshvara practices, purification practices and lower level tantric practices and recitations, but you very rarely would you see a monastic community where nuns were given, you know, Tummo practices and the.
subtle body yoga practices and stuff like that. So, Tsokyni Rinpoche tells Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, you know, you really need to establish an opportunity, a community for these nuns. So, [00:41:00] Tsang-Yang Gyamtso uses some of the buildings from his family home and this is where these nuns first start to gather. But it’s not just nuns.
So, Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, he’s really ripening as a yogi in his own right. He’s actually, you know, there would have been so many of them that are lost to the history books. But we do have these written scriptures from Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and, he, you know, also is somebody that gathers around many, many people. And they’re not just women, they’re also these, these male yogins, so they’re called Togden.
In Nangchen, they’re called Togden. So a lot of the male followers of Drup Wang Tsoknyi, and also Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, were not monks. And in fact, both Drukwang Tsoknyi and the first Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, they would have had the long hair, they would have looked like yogins, and they probably would have not been celibate. And you can see some of these old pictures of monasteries in Nangchen.
the monks in a group photo, but they all have long hair, and they’re yogins, and they don’t have necessarily the celibacy [00:42:00] vow. Whereas the nuns that start to gather, the women that start to gather around have the very short cropped hair, and are required to take celibacy vows.
And they want to. But at the same time, there’s sort of a double standard. That there’s a social expectation of nuns upholding this pure ethical preset. Uh, whereas the monks have a relaxed expectations. and so these first women, so Tsang-Yang Gyamtso establishes, what becomes Gebchak nunnery in one of these buildings of his family nomadic home.
at first there’s 80 of them, and very quickly Tsang-Yang Gyamtso in his own biography talks about how, you know, 50 of those 80 became accomplished, very, very much accomplished in the practices he was teaching them. And then you can read in Tuku Urgen’s memoirs in Blazing Splendor and he talks about how It would just be a sea of red robes. So when one of these great yogins, these masters, would have come through and stopped at Gebchak Nunnery, and many of [00:43:00] them would have stopped at Gebchak Nunnery because these nuns were such wonderful receptive vessels for transmission. They were so dedicated to their practice.
And when a transmission would happen at Gebchak, there would just be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of red robes. And the nuns talk about, you could see, when new nuns would join, there would be all this long black hair across the hillside that had been. And so we know that by the 19, late 1940s, there were 700 nuns at Gebchak nunnery.
And so, You mostly have nuns, but you also have a lot of these male yogins and monks, you know, orbiting around this community of nuns. And in many cases, they’re living there. And even today, there are a few monks and male yogins that live at Gebchak Nunnery. But what happens, and I won’t say much about this because, you know, in Tibetan Buddhist communities, the sense of propriety and also the secrecy around the sexual practices is something that’s a part of their tradition.
And whenever I ask questions about, you know, the karma mudra, the [00:44:00] sexual yogas In the Gebchak community, you know, it wasn’t much that people would tell me, and there’s this respect for the secrecy. So I won’t say much, and anyhow, I don’t know much about it, but, we can assume that that would have been practiced.
And we can see in Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s written, Namtar, his written life story, that in those, in the probably first two decades of the, of Gebchak Nunnery. that Tsoknyi Rinpoche had encouraged Tsang-Yang Gyamtso to pair off women and men to practice sexual yoga. And Tsang-Yang Gyamtso was very anxious about this, because the Nyingma tradition in Tibetan Buddhist history has always had to, you know, clean up its act, and sort of defend itself against scandals and, you know, the sort of loose ethical kind of rules.
anyhow, so he does this and And I think the sexual yogas are being practiced, to transmute very powerful energies. but in many ways it’s also used as a test. In the same way that these, like, wet sheet ceremonies are used to demonstrate, you know, the [00:45:00] mastery of that yogic practice.
I think the sexual yogas were often used as a test of their mastery of those energies. and so anyway, so these, these men and women, obviously nuns and, and monks, quote unquote, would have been paired off. And then when the wider community found out about this, then a scandal. You know, naturally follows, you know, this isn’t okay for a nunnery and a monastery to be doing this.
So, Tsoknyi Rinpoche then tells Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, so he needs to found a monastery. You know, really these need to be separated. They need to have separate communities. And, and these lineage followers need to have a monastery. And at this point Tsang-Yang Gyamtso is tired. He’s built this nunnery. He’s done, you know, so much and he just wants to be in retreat.
And he says, please, I really don’t want to do this. I just want to be accomplishing your teachings. I just want to be in retreat. And Tsokyni Rinpoche says, listen, if you want to accomplish my word and my teachings, you must build this. monastery or else you’ll break samaya. So Tsang-Yang Gyamtso establishes Raya Monastery.
Raya Monastery is the first [00:46:00] branch of this Gebchak community. and it’s the first of many. And so it goes, you know, Gebchak nunnery, what is a nunnery, goes on to have, as you noted, like over 40 branches. And so many of these were founded by Tsang-Yang Gyamtso himself, but also many of them were founded by disciples of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and, and Tsoknyi Rinpoche.
So very early on, you get the Gebchak Lagu, which are the nine lamas of Gebchak Gompa. So these would have been nine kind of outstanding, mostly male yogins, who would be also continuing the lineage. And how they would continue the lineage, quote unquote, was by establishing gompas. You know, by establishing sites and expanding the lineage.
But, you know, of course that’s not to say that the women of Gebchak Gompa weren’t also holding the lineage through their mastery of their practice. And within the nunnery we can see very much that practically the nuns are the primary transmitters of their practices, their practice tradition, [00:47:00] including Dzogchen.
But the nuns of Gebchak Gompa, they’ve never written anything. They’ve never gone off and established a nunnery so much. but most of those 40 branches were nunneries. and three of the branches were monasteries, so the rest of them were nunneries. And they would have had several hundred. But then, of course, with the Cultural Revolution, that all was put on a major pause. And then since the revival, I think most of those branches are small hermitages. There are a few that are large nunneries, and Raya Gompa, which was that first branch, is now a vibrant shedra.
monastic college with strong links to Larung Gar, which is sort of the center of the Tibetan Buddhist universe today in Tibet. but yeah, it’s very unusual for a, for a nunnery to have branches, let alone forty branches, and for Gebchak Gonpa to be the Mag one, the mother nunnery, of all of those.
But you know, the, the branch monastery, Raya Gonpa doesn’t necessarily like to see it that way. I think they would like to see themselves maybe as the [00:48:00] center of the lineage because they are, you know, writing and publishing and spreading the teachings farther than the nuns are.
but if we look at the history, we can see that Gebchak Gonpa is, is that center and the beginning of the branches in a sense, so.
Tsokyni Rinpoche, you know, he also would have spent a lot of time, and there would have been a lot of joint transmissions.
Tsokyni Rinpoche would have been giving transmissions in this valley, this Gebchak Nunnery area. And you can see today, there’s this log cabin, there’s this house that’s still there at Gebchak Nunnery, which is where Tsokyni Rinpoche did retreat.
Olivia: We’re not going to get into karma mudra because you said you don’t have much to disclose here, but just with the comment you made about all of these yogins, that they’re lay practitioners, the men are lay practitioners do the women not want to be lay practitioners?
Are there any lay Gebchak yoginis or is everyone taking the precepts and, you know, is celibate, monastic,
Elizabeth: so nowadays they would all be celibate monastics. So since the revival In modern Tibetan Buddhism, especially in China, there’s this [00:49:00] really important attention to being celibate if you’re a monk or, you know, to be a celibate monk or nun in order to preserve the tradition.
So, and interestingly, like Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, who was a contemporary Thereton treasure revealer, and, you know, traditionally treasure revealers in order to fully be able to have all of those subtle conditions would often have a consort. Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok would not take a consort and he chose to be a celibate.
monk and he could see the importance of like celibate monastic communities in order to really strengthen Tibetan Buddhism in modern China And so, you know, we have this very broad Chinese audience now and participation in Tibetan Buddhism. And what we have in Tibet nowadays is really this hybrid of Tibetan Chinese Buddhism.
Through language, you know, it’s mostly Tibetan lamas transmitting to Chinese students, but there’s a lot of mutual influence and hybridization of Chinese Buddhist sutras, you know, Mahayana sutras, with the teachings of Tibetan lamas. And [00:50:00] so, to be a celibate monk or nun is very important in the eyes of modern China.
in the eyes, in India, it’s been important in India, and where you don’t have that really intensive prolonged yogic practice, you also see more ordained monks and nuns. So the Gebchak nuns are all, are all celibate, but I, as far as I know, you know, prior to the modern period, they would have been taking the celibacy precept when they became nuns.
they probably didn’t even necessarily take the novice precepts in those early days. But they would have taken those five precepts, including celibacy, and they would have had their hair cut, and they would have worn the nuns, and they would have considered themselves fully ordained nuns.
And the community saw them as fully, you know, legitimate nuns. there wasn’t a conversation around being a fully ordained bhiksuni in Nangchen in those days. Probably not much of an awareness of it even. This is a very down to earth. by down to earth, I mean a very remote yak herding high altitude [00:51:00] community based around these yogic practice lineages.
And the practice was more important than kind of your status and, whether you were ordained or not. At the time they weren’t important to the nuns. When you ask the nuns these questions about, How do you feel about being a nun as compared to being a monk?
Many of those nuns at Gebchak will say, Well, listen, we can see that often the monks have better conditions, they have better food, they have better facilities, but We have the Dharma, we have full access to all of the Dharma, and once you have that, they’re just, you know, so happy to have that, and not worried about the rest.
Olivia: Will you talk about the two volumes of texts, because practice will be so connected to this, the one referred to as the 16 and the other, the 25, that are practiced at Gebchak Gonpa?
Mm
Elizabeth: hmm, yeah. So, Gebchak Gompa, when they were dispersed at the start of the invasion, and of course the nunnery, like every religious institution was destroyed. So there was one nun named [00:52:00] Tendrong. This, she would have been probably in her 40s at the time. And really at the risk of her life, she took the 16 volumes of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso and the 25 volumes of Ratna Lingpa that kind of defined Gebchak’s scriptural corpus.
And she carried them, and she sewed them in a, in a, probably a sheepskin, to try and make them watertight. And she buried them underground in a poor farmer’s field, where she thought they would be, attract the least amount of attention. And then at the end, when religion was allowed again, she went back and dug them up, and put on her best new robes, put them on the back of a yak, and carried them back to the nunnery and offered them to the lamas who were there.
And so the, the sixteen volumes of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, which were mostly his spontaneous teachings that he gave in question and answer to many nuns, to many yogins, to many lay people, and sometimes to the land spirits of the [00:53:00] mountains around Nangchen. So his 16 volumes are mostly these dialogues he’s having with all of these beings.
And he would have been reciting them spontaneously and then one of these nuns, Sogyal Droma or two or three of his very literate monks, they would have been scribes writing them down. And then they were edited very quickly into 16 volumes by first generation, followers. So those are the 16 volumes of Tsang-Yang Gyamtso.
And then the 25 volumes are the 25 termas of Ratnalingpa. So Ratna Lingpa, , important Nyingma terton. So this was the kind of basis for Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s practice. It’s what Tsoknyi Rinpoche had transmitted to Tsang-Yang Gyamtso.
And, and it’s really kind of the bones of the Gebchak practice tradition. So the 25 volumes of Ratna Lingpa are the basis. And then Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s 16 volumes are in many ways him kind of adapting Ratna Lingpa’s 25 [00:54:00] termas for his contemporary audience. So that’s what terma does. It takes source material from Padmasambhava and it adapts them to a new time and a new group of people.
It keeps it alive.
Olivia: Because Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, he revealed these texts.
Elizabeth: You could say that he revealed them, that’s a good question, because, you know, a treasure revealer technically would, like, for the nuns to consider Tsang-Yang Gyamtso a treasure revealer, he would have had to reveal Earth terma they say, but because he didn’t reveal Earth terma they don’t fully consider him a terton but at the same time, he had a lot of mind treasures, gong ter, mind treasures, so much of those sixteen volumes are Tsang-Yang Gyamtso’s.
Mind treasures. Yeah, which is, as you said, it’s like revealing, Ratna Lingpa and Padmasambhava’s insights.
Olivia: And do you want to say anything about the between period, so pre Mao, and then modernization? So once, the late 70s [00:55:00] arrives, there’s been this break with the Gompa, and it needs to be rebuilt.
Where are those yoginis between the 50s and late 70s? Are any of them practicing, what’s happening during that middle time?
Elizabeth: The nunnery was destroyed. and the nuns, you know, just disperse. So a few of the older nuns that, that I talked to talked about in the daytime when the Red Army came in to loot the nunnery to destroy and loot the nunnery, the nuns would hide in nearby forest and sometimes they could watch.
And they said there are actually many Tibetans that were participating in the looting of the monasteries and nunneries anyway, so it was destroyed. And then those nuns Just had to disperse.
And so what happened for those 15 to 20 years of the cultural revolution is that they would. Go home to their birthplace, and then they were organized by, you know, the new government into kind of communes, where food production was divided and organized. [00:56:00] So they mostly did farming and herding in sort of commune type situations, and of course they weren’t allowed to overtly practice religion, so they could not wear their robes, and they couldn’t look like nuns, and they couldn’t recite mantra out loud.
But you do hear a lot of stories just in general of people who just practice silently in their mind. and there’s this wonderful story of Sherab Zangmo, who’s this amazing Dzogchen master, senior Gebchak nun, that during the Cultural Revolution, she pretended that she couldn’t walk. So she was actually fine, but she pretended that she wasn’t able to walk.
So that she was able to lie down and continue just meditating throughout most of those years. And then when they were allowed to practice religion again, she kind of got up, quickly got her legs back to work, and then went on a kora, just started walking around Fortress Peak, you know, near Gebchak Nunnery, and she was fine.
so, the nuns that did [00:57:00] survive, immediately, as soon as they were allowed, You know, the amount of fervor and energy that the Tibetans had to revive their religion is, is really, really inspiring.
So, the women who were still alive, and from what I’ve heard, there were around 60 or 70 of them. They immediately came back to the Gebchak Valley. And there were a few senior, you know, male lamas from the Gebchak. lineage who came back, or also younger generation tulkus who came back. There would have been three or four.
And they built a couple of big tents. You know these black yak wool tents? They built a couple of big tents. And they gathered, and the first thing they did was a Mendrup Drupchen, so Mendrup is when they consecrate a lot of local herbs into sacred medicine. So they would be consecrating it with a lot of, you know, tantric practice into these sacred herbs that they then distribute to everybody as sort of a blessing that [00:58:00] you can eat.
And, and a lot of Tibetans would rely on it as medicine when they were ill. You know, for mind and body. So they did a Drupchen, which, a Drupchen is these extended group sadhana ceremonies. So they’ll last about 7 to 10 days. Often they go for 24 hours. And they’re very intensive, like sadhana of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, with a lot of ritual music.
You know, the mudra, the gestures, the hats, the costumes, there’s some charm dancing. And throughout all of that, then these Nuns would be visualizing the Buddha, like whatever Yidam or Buddha is of the sadhana. So if it was, you know, Amitayus, for example, they’re visualizing Amitayus. And the whole sadhana is about great accomplishment of oneself as Amitayus.
So Drupchen means great accomplishment, but really in Tantric Buddhist practice, or in Tibetan Buddhist practice, you’ll hear that word drup, [00:59:00] drupa, again and again and again in the terminology, which means accomplishing, and, and what’s going on, of course, is the nuns are awakening to Buddha nature, they’re awakening to the nature of their mind.
But they’re doing that as people. the Yidam functions as a way for them as people to relate to that ineffable, tacit kind of energetic way of being as a Buddha. You know, it’s symbolic, but not symbolic as something abstract from you, but something that in a way is an emanation of you. So they, they’re doing these sadhana ceremonies.
and mantra and visualization and visualizing them with their chakras themselves as a Buddha. And, and all of this is, is a way of awakening to that Buddha nature. And so the first thing the community did when they came back to the valley is to do a Drupchen, a ten day, you know, group practice of, of these Buddhas to consecrate medicine.
And then, so they just had these tents. [01:00:00] And one of the older nuns talks about how this howling wind, this violent howling wind was just coming through the valley as they were doing this Drubchen. And it kept blowing the tent away. And the nuns felt that maybe it was some sorrowful spirits from the Cultural Revolution or something that was coming through and, disturbed spirits.
but at any rate, you know, you just get on with what you’re doing and that’s what the practices are for. And, and then eventually the nuns. And the Lamas and the local lay community, because there are a lot of nomad, you know, villages and communities around them. And the animals, they all got together and rebuilt their shrine hall.
out of local materials, so just mud brick and stone. So they rebuilt this major shrine hall, which is the center of the Gebchak practice tradition because at Gebchak Gompa they do 18 Drupchens every year, and a drubchen is 7 to 10 days, so that’s more than half their year that they spend all together in the shrine hall.
And so it’s really the hub of [01:01:00] their tradition. And then they built the other retreat buildings of their, of their tradition. But, you know, it wasn’t just the nuns, it was the lay people and, and also the animals. And then they, they, very quickly revived their practice tradition. And so there were about 60 or 70 older nuns that had survived.
And they would have been, you know, also around 70 years old at that point, 60 or 70 years old at that point. So these were senior women who had been there, some of them from the late 1920s, you know, survived and come back. And the devotion the Gebchak nuns have to their tradition is really, really moving.
and many of the nuns have made a vow to never leave the nunnery. And when you see some of the nuns like you, a couple of the nuns that have died, and they’re younger nuns that didn’t do very many years of retreat, but because they were there and they felt this devotion, they, they died and they vowed to be reborn in the nunnery, to serve the nunnery in their next life.
[01:02:00] So there’s such a devotion for the tradition. And so you have these senior nuns that have returned, And then these nuns start to die, and the way these senior nuns are dying is, you know, really impressive, because they’re all dying quite consciously. And they’re dying with joy, and they’re dying with gratitude, and they’re dying with, no worries.
and so, Gebchak Gompa already has quite a good reputation in Nangchen. It’s quite a renowned nunnery by this time, so it was founded in 1892, the time of Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, you know, it’s flourishing very quickly. By the 1950s, there are 700 nuns. And so it’s quite renowned in the region. So after the Cultural Revolution, when things are reviving, the families in Nangchen, if they have a daughter that they want to send to become a nun, they would think, often think of Gebchak Gompa, if they have devotion to their culture.
But also there are many young women who maybe had an aunt or an older sister or a cousin who was a Gebchak nun. And they would maybe go to visit the nunnery, [01:03:00] and they would see the nuns doing these Drupchens. And for a young girl, the Drupchen looks kind of fun, because there are these colorful hats and musical instruments, and you get food and yogurt.
You know, you get good food when you’re in a Drupchen, and, it looked quite fun. So many of these young girls would, would want to join, and so they would go and they would live with their older aunt or whatever, and, or families would send a young nun. And then they would join these older nuns that had survived, and these older nuns were reviving every aspect of their practice tradition.
Olivia: I meant to ask you earlier when you were actually talking about the kingdom itself was the role that the Gebchak nuns had with the king. Will you just talk about that exchange?
Elizabeth: So the Gebchak nuns, they were asked by the Nangchen kings at times to do these like ritual practices to prolong the lifespan of the king, which was quite common for a king in a Buddhist country to have monks doing these longevity rituals and empowerment rituals. [01:04:00] And actually the kingdom of Nangchen, you know, it was Early on, it was a Barunkagyu kingdom, it was founded kind of along the principles of like a Buddhist mandala, and you would also have thirty three districts according to the tantra with, you know, the heaven of the thirty three Buddhas.
And so, you know, in any pre modern Buddhist world, often the kings were empowered by the religion and, and the king would, would be seen as kind of an emanation of a Buddha. and in many times quite devout, not always, but, um, in Nangchen it was usually the case. So, so what happened is that Tsang-Yang Gyamtso passed away in 1909.
And in his wake, actually Tsogyal Doma, who was this nun we’ve heard a little bit about, who was really a lama in her own right, and also literate and was able to write, she was sort of appointed as the leadership for the nunnery after Tsang-Yang Gyamtso passed away. Then Tsang-Yang Gyamtso was reborn as the son of the Nangchen King.
And also [01:05:00] Tsoknyi Rinpoche I, whose seat was at the seat of the Nangchen King, was also reborn in the family of the Nangchen King. And so, for Tsang-Yang Gyamtso to be reborn as the son of the Nangchen King went a long way to making Gyepchak Gompa. What it was in the long term, because it really, you know, got that royal patronage and connection.
and it wasn’t just Tsokyni Rinpoche’s reincarnation and Tsang-Yang Gyamtso, but I think in total there have been eight members of the Nangchen royal family who have participated at Gebchak Gompa, like either as lamas of the Gebchak lineage or as like royal patrons. And so it was quite, quite common because the nuns were very respected in Nangchen for the quality of their practice.
And really they were the best it gets probably. They had the whole suite of higher tantras and, you know, yogic practices and the nuns were doing these full time. And so the Nangchen kings would ask the Gebchak nuns to do, you know, like a Drupchen to come and do these [01:06:00] ritual ceremonies. So there were some official monasteries in Nangchen.
Olivia: That would be given even money from the kingdom and official monasteries that would do that and the Gebchak nunner was never officially one of those, but nevertheless they would be asked on a regular basis to perform these rituals.
Will you talk about the path of entry to be a part of the gompa, you know, to be a full time practitioner there?
Olivia: I think maybe it begins with yak herding,
Elizabeth: usually, I mean in the past, and see when I talk about Gebchak nunnery, it’s sort of mostly based on my observations between 2006 and around 2015, and things really changed between 2010 and 2015, and since then things have really changed, but generally over Gebchak’s history, a nun would join, usually in her early teens.
It’s like around age maybe 10 to 12, she’d be a young girl and she might have like an older relative who was a nun at the nunnery. And so what she would do is come [01:07:00] into the nunnery tradition and there might be a room for her with some older nuns and the first thing she’ll do is be taught how to read.
And she’s not learning, you know, grammar, and the rules of grammar, and she’s not learning from a textbook. But she’s just got a couple of older nuns that are, she’s got a text in front of her, probably a text from a Drupchen, and they’re teaching her how to sound it out. So she starts to sound it out, and to put together the words, and then to put together the sentence.
You know, in Tibetan monastic, reading is done metrically. So for these young monks and nuns, it’s quite fun, because they do it to a musical, kind of, like, it’s a bit like singing. And so the young nun learns to read, and then what she, once she’s able to pronounce everything, she can be doing this by herself.
And so the first thing that a young nun needed to do, before she could formally join the nunnery’s practice tradition, was look after the yak for two years. So you have to do your, your requirement of labor before you join. But this would come quite naturally to these, to all of the women that joined Gebchak in the [01:08:00] past, because they would have all come from nomad families in the region.
So they would have been doing this growing up themselves, just like Tsang-Yang Gyamtso. And they would go off in the valley. So Gebchak is actually located sort of on the, a slope, but in a very open valley. with hills on all four sides, or kind of mountains on all four sides. So the nuns would set off for the day with their herd of around 200 yak, and there would be a few nuns, usually at any time, that would be doing this.
And they would wander with the herds throughout the day, and they would just sit on the hillside with their texts, and they would be continuing to practice reading. And they probably, since they were a young child, they would know some mantra. They might have a Buddha that they just naturally feel an affinity for and they’ve been doing the mantra of that Buddha.
And then they also start to learn like making torma, so these ritual offering cakes that the Tibetans do in their ritual ceremonies. They’re learning some of the gestures, the mudra gestures that they do in the Drupchens. And when they have time, these nuns start, start to [01:09:00] join in Drupchens, so they’re sitting there kind of sandwiched between some older nuns.
with a lot of enthusiasm, reading along in these Drupchens. And the nuns read very quickly in a Drupchen. So the nuns can really quickly pick up the reading. And then they might need to also pour tea and distribute food during the Drupchen, when they’re still new to the nunnery. And so they learn to read pretty quickly.
And, and how they learn to read is also sort of a topic of its own because it says a lot about what it is they’re learning at the nunnery, but, once they perform their yak herding duties for two years, then the first thing they do is their ngundro.
But sometimes they do the ngundro along with yak herding because to these nomad girls from the Tibetan Plateau, it sounds like a lot of work to us, and it is, but these nuns will do it in four months. They’ll do 400, 000 accumulations of different practices in four or five months. so the nuns would start their first set of Ngondro Preliminary Practices, so they would start with [01:10:00] prostrations, and they would do this in the entry, entryway to the shrine hall.
There was sort of a portico, like a, an entryway foyer area with a couple of big prayer wheels, and those young nuns would be, Accumulating their prostrations while the older nuns were doing a Drupchen. So they would accumulate a hundred thousand prostrations, a Vajrasattva mantra, mandala offerings, and so on.
And in a way they’re quite creative practices and a little bit colorful. So, you know, it probably is a kind of interesting for these young girls to do those. And then after doing four hundred thousand preliminary practices, then they do, a hundred sets of Nyungne. one set of Nyumne is a two day fasting practice to the Buddha of Compassion.
very beloved by Tibetans, especially Tibetan lay people love to do a Nyumne. It’s, it’s really connecting you with the suffering of, of life. You know, you really connect your heart to just the suffering of life and then you connect that to your compassion for all beings and you purify. so there’s some fasting and prostrations.
So the nuns will do a [01:11:00] hundred sets in a row of Nyungni. And after that, they do a seven month retreat of a protector buddha in their tradition, and this is kind of a preliminary retreat that they see as removing more of the inner obstacles to deeper practice. So they do seven months of a Vajrakilaya protector kind of retreat.
And then when there’s space in the three year retreat center, the nun will join the three year retreat center. So usually by this time she’s maybe 16 or 17 years old. And she’ll join the Three Retreat Center with around 20 nuns. So by this point, when they enter the Three Retreat Center, then they start to live in a meditation box.
And they’re spending most of their time in a meditation box, and they’ll sleep in the meditation box as well. A meditation box would be quite deep, and it’s probably a square meter wide. And they have a lot of comfortable cushions and blankets, so when they sleep they can curl up and sleep quite well.
And in the three year retreat they, they start to learn the yogas. [01:12:00] And so at Gebchak Gompa, they start to learn the yogas from day one of a three year retreat. So often, in a three year retreat, if, if one is following Jamgon Kongtrul’s retreat manual, for example, one will do, those tsalung, or the Prana and Nadi yogas, more towards the end.
But because the nuns have done so many preliminary practices already, they start by learning the yogas from day one. So every day in the nuns three year retreat, they’d be doing, regular sets of their sadhana. of their Yidam practice, but In the morning and evening they would be doing the yoga practices along with prostration.
So they are moving their body a lot in the three retreat. They’re out of the meditation box. They’re doing a lot of prostrations, like thousands a day sometimes. And then they’re doing the yogas. So at Gebchak Gompa these are Prana and Nadi yogas. The Gebchak nuns will call those in Tibetan, Tsalung and Tru lkhor they do the Prana and Nadi yoga, but there’s a corollary kind of Hatha yoga that they would do always together called Trulkhor, [01:13:00] which is, you know, very kind of dynamic physical movements to clear out the channels and to stretch and clear out the channels to prepare the body for the Prana yogas.
And so they do that three year retreat, and once they’ve finished the three year retreat they’re considered quite competent in all of the practices of the tradition. And when they come out of the three year retreat, then they will be placed in one of sixteen retreat divisions. Each one is dedicated to a different yidam of the Gebchak tradition.
So, Then they’ll join one of the 16 retreat divisions, which will be a room of about maybe 15 to 20 nuns, again with meditation boxes lining the walls of this room, and all the nuns in that retreat division would be doing that Yidam sadhana for the rest of their life, at least once a day, maybe one to three times a day.
Olivia: This is very unusual, right? Only Gebchak Gompa has these 16 divisions, is that right?
Elizabeth: That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. And it’s really kind of the bones of [01:14:00] their tradition, the Yidam practice. And so the nuns are in a retreat division, one of 16 retreat divisions. They’re all following old Mahayoga collections of, of Yidam Deities, so these are coming back from ancient Indian Tantric traditions. So for example, they might be doing, Hayagriva, or Vajrasattva, Green Tara, Wrathful Guru Padmasambhava.
Uh, they might be doing, one of the Sadhanas from Ratna Lingpa, or or Troma, Troma Ngakmo, so those are the types of Yidams that they’re doing, but when they do a Drupchen, so when the nuns all gather together in the shrine hall for one of the 18 Drupchens that they do every year, those are also each dedicated to one of, you know, 18 Yidam.
So in a way, Like every practice that the nuns are doing has some kind of visualization of, of a Buddha. And it’s, it’s just unfortunate because in English we really don’t have another term that can translate Lha in Tibetan into, so we’d say deity. [01:15:00] We say deity yoga. We say that a yidam is a deity. But it’s nothing like a deity in the monotheistic sense at all, is it?
You know, it really isn’t, and deity yoga in Tibetan Buddhism functions a very non dual psychological goal. It’s really accomplishing non dual awakening in the mind. In a really creative, emotional, like energetic way. The way that you can have this really personal relationship. You can call on this Buddha.
This powerful presence, this loving, compassionate, wise, powerful, protective presence. Of this Buddha who is with you, like in your body, in your psyche. There protecting you all the time. That maybe you haven’t realized your nature yet. So you sort of relate to as something outside of you. And is outside of you because we’re connected cosmologically.
But is also one’s own potential. And is what she’ll, she’ll awaken to in her lifetime at the nunnery. So, you know, the nuns will often go up on the hillside and do just some Dzogchen meditation. Like very formless Dzogchen [01:16:00] meditation. Maybe gaze at the sky. And it’s not a discursive meditation. They won’t be Doing any mantra or anything, but even before she rests into that Dzogchen, Formless Meditation, often, you know, she’ll have some short Guru devotion where she’ll call on the Lama to, you know, melt, merge into her body mind and become one with her. So union, you know, a view with the Buddha as a pathway to realizing that non dual nature of Buddha.
Of being that’s what the Yidam does for these nuns.
Olivia: So the Gebchak Yoginis, many of them don’t focus so much on the details, what it sounds like, like that’s not their focus for Yidam practice. And can you talk more about this?
like what you’ve noticed the outcome of this particular method, because you’re speaking right now about the benefit for this recognition of non dual nature. What do you see in terms of this way of connecting with the deity more about experience versus the details [01:17:00] of the mandala and everything going on?
It seems less important to them.
Elizabeth: Hmm. I mean, that’s such an important kind of point you made that question because like for the Gebchakt nuns, the details aren’t that important. I mean, they’re important and that they have a deity of a particular color with a particular number of heads and certain qualities that they associate with that deity, but you know, when I spent time at the nunnery and I was trying to maybe do one of the practices and I would ask the nuns to clarify which way is the horse head facing or what color is the head on the right, you know, are there four arms or six arms and often the nuns would give me different answers.
Like different answers, or they wouldn’t know the answer, they’d tell me to ask somebody else. Often the older nuns would say don’t worry so much about these qualities, it’s just about knowing that this yidam is present. Just knowing that this yidam is present.
That your nature is the yidam, the presence. and so, the details aren’t so important, and like [01:18:00] the nuns aren’t trained as scholars they read their scriptures on average, I would say at least five hours a day, but probably averaging more like six to ten hours a day, because they do so many Drupchens.
So they are reading all the time, but their knowledge, it never becomes, Like intellectual knowledge. It’s never like a, an understanding about something. It’s always their being. It’s always cultivation of their, of their view of, of who they are in the world, and the way they know their world, and their own inner qualities.
So, I mean, it, it is, you know, in Buddhism, a hundred percent the orientation of knowledge is about, at least in traditional Buddhism, it’s, orientation is about cultivating oneself. It’s a way of being in the world, so, you know, it’s a philosophy, but it’s a philosophy about how to be, so the Gebchak nuns, when we ask for clarification or explanations, like an intellectual explanation about their scriptures, often they [01:19:00] weren’t interested or they weren’t equipped to do so.
It’s just not the orientation of their tradition.
Olivia: So another way you say that Gebchak Yoginis are unusual is that they don’t differentiate visualization practice from what you call non discursive liberation or, or resting in rigpa.
And can you elaborate a little bit more on this?
Elizabeth: so another way we can put that is the generation stage and the completion stage practices at Gebchak nunnery, at a tradition like Gebchak gonpa, it would be very hard to draw a line between the two. You know, obviously, the whole structure of generation stage and completion stage, one is a completion stage on the basis of the generation.
And so the generation stage, of course, is that Yidam deity practice, that Practice of visualizing oneself as a Buddha, a particular Buddha with particular characteristics and qualities and energies. But always the essence of those energies, the essence of those qualities is the emptiness, is the Buddha nature, which is empty [01:20:00] and aware.
Like the definition of Buddha nature according to the Tibetan tradition is, you know, it’s empty, I can’t find it anywhere, but it’s clear, it’s knowing, like the nature of mind is empty, but knowing by nature. And so really, like, I’ll just read a couple of statements here, because when the nuns join the nunnery You know, obviously they’re learning.
It’s a, it’s a tradition of very deep training. And it’s a structured tradition with a very clear goal of learning, which is to awaken. Like it’s Dzogchen, sort of Ratna Lingpa Dzogchen orientation. So they’re learning to awaken to Buddha nature in a Dzogchen meditation paradigm. But when they get teachings, which they get all the time, sometimes there’ll be a visiting male lama who will give a formal transmission.
Sometimes it will be a yogin from the Gebchak community who’s lived in a mountain cave, who comes down and gives them many hours of formal transmission about their nature of mind, like teaching them how to meditate, how to [01:21:00] look in meditation, helping them to recognize what is already there. And then sometimes it’s just between the nuns themselves, like over soup.
In very informal situations. It’s just permeating the nunnery in very informal ways as well. And so what the nuns are being taught over and over again is, is very simple. It’s just that rest your mind in the view beyond conceptual thoughts.
The nature of your mind will not be found in words and concepts of emptiness. Emptiness will not be found in words and concepts of empty. Buddha will not be found in the thinking mind and objects of the mind. And those who meditate mentally only become obscured.
You know that basically Buddha nature is nowhere to be found other than in the nature of one’s own awareness? Like, that’s it. That’s [01:22:00] it. That’s what they are learning at this nunnery. And all of the reading that they do for six hours a day and all of these very creative, detailed visualizations and sadhanas and drupchans and rituals in Tibet, that’s all for the purposes of for them awakening as a person to that embodied Buddha nature, which has qualities of compassion and love and creative wisdom and language and insight and all that stuff.
So the generation stage is how they get there. In the Tibetan tradition, like, at least at Ge So it would be very hard to draw that line, like, So a nun might sit And do, in her retreat division, she’s required to maintain at least one full length, like extensive sadhana practice of her yidam. So she’ll do that once a day.
If there’s a drupchen happening, the drupchen usually starts very early in the morning, so she’ll probably do that in the evening. So when she’s doing it in the evening, she’ll sit down and she’ll do, you know, generate, she’ll start with her bodhicitta prayer, [01:23:00] and then she’ll remember that her basic nature is empty.
And from emptiness, you know, generate this visualization of herself as the Buddha and this mandala. And see the entire world is pervaded with Buddha nature as part of this mandala of her yidam. And then she’ll probably be visualizing lights from her heart chakra at different chakras, especially the body, speech, and mind chakra.
at the throat, the head and the heart. And then she’ll be, for the bulk of that session, she’ll be just reciting the mantra and visualizing rays of light just radiating out from her heart as the Buddha. Just to all the beings in the world, you know, just blessing all the beings in the world like a prayer.
But cultivating the qualities of that yidam in herself energetically, in her subtle body, like in her body, through that mantra, through that visualization, through that one pointed resting on that visualization. So her mind is not lost in thought. It’s just one pointed. And then, towards the end of the session, you know, [01:24:00] of course, she dissolves the visualization.
And then a Gebchak nun will usually rest in non discursive meditation when the visualization dissolves. And she’ll probably rest like that for 40 minutes or longer, in just that, you know, Dzogchen. And then she’ll fall asleep for some time and wake up and do it again in the morning. So that’s basically what they do the whole time, you know.
And when we hear about these Tibetan nuns, Masters who, who die and in their ashes there are relics. Like Geshe Lama Konchok, who was this amazing, you know, Gelugpa master at Kopan Monastery in Nepal. And he passed away. And he was quite a hidden yogin. He was a bit of a grumpy Geshe. He was much loved, but he wasn’t very kind of outgoing.
And then he passed away, and he left in his ashes, like, long black hairs. His yidam was Vajrayogini, and his tongue, it was like this, his tongue from after his cremation looked like Mother of Pearl, [01:25:00] with an image of Tara on it, like a really clear image of Tara on it. and sometimes, you know, you’ll see some lamas even before they die, like a syllable forms on their forehead, like all these, we might think are weird and wacky, but in the world of ancient Tibet, this just happened all the time.
Because they literally embodied the energies and the symbols of these deities in their subtle body. So, they cultivated them and that, that’s what they accomplished. So, back to that word, Drup, like Drup in Drupchen or Drupa. They’re literally accomplishing a personified Buddha nature as a, as a, as a deity.
But it’s not, of course, a deity like the English word. It’s just your divinity. It’s sort of personified Buddha nature, .
Olivia: So will you share about the typical day for a Gebchak practitioner?
Elizabeth: I think in the last ten years it could be different. You know, we can talk a bit later about the modernization of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet in China [01:26:00] since the 1980s and how that’s affected Gebchak nunnery but generally speaking like up until the last 10 years a typical day for Gebchak nun would be, And this is just from the nuns I’ve asked it might not be typical for all of them if she’s finished her three year retreat and she’s in her retreat division at this point So she’s in her mid 20s or later She would wake up probably about four o’clock, and so we’re at 4, 500 meters.
So it’s very high altitude, a very kind of arid, very rarefied atmosphere. And you get these two nuns, a few nuns will go up to the top of the shrine hall with these very long horns, these dungchen horns that is the alarm clock. And it’s, there’s no light pollution, there’s no noise pollution. So from, you know, the dark night and, and from the deep sleep, the nuns are awoken by these long horns into their practice.
And so most of the nuns would be waking up [01:27:00] into their meditation box, it depends what’s going on, so if there’s a Drupchen, like a cultivated Gebchak nun who’s done her three year retreat, the first thing she would be doing most likely is probably spending some time just resting in the nature of mind, you know, remembering, doing some meditation, and then she would get up, get dressed, go to the bathroom, and then go to the shrine hall.
and find her seat in the shrine hall, and then the Drupchen would begin for the day. And so the Drupchens happen for about 60 percent of the year, so that’s really what’s typical. So if they’re doing a Drupchen, they have these long benches covered in Tibetan carpets, and a nun will have her designated seat with her texts, you know, many, many hundreds of pages on her text stand in front of her, and she’ll have her, costume, like her hat, her ritual hat, maybe two of them that she’ll wear at different times throughout the day.
She’ll have her vajra and bell. She might have a drum. She might, if she’s doing a different instrument, she’ll have her [01:28:00] instrument. and she’ll sit down and she’ll have her mug and her bowl. That’s very important as well. And she’ll probably, first thing, she might get that out and get it ready for tea and tsampa
and so usually, first off, they’ll come with big pitchers and they’ll, they’ll serve the nuns hot water. for her to have some tea and sampa. And the nuns have healthy appetites. They eat a lot because it’s so cold up there. they need to eat a lot to keep their furnaces going. And then they start the Drupchen.
So the Drupchen is It’s kind of what I described about a sadhana practice earlier, the generation stage and completion stage. It’s an elaborate version of that, so you throw in the music and you throw in a bit of ritual dancing, and it’s all about a very creative, embodied, communal way of welcoming in that divine presence of the Buddha and the mandala deities.
And in the shrine hall, they’ll have a three dimensional mandala, which is just off to the side of where the nuns sit, and you’ll have maybe two nuns who are responsible for the rituals, and they’ll [01:29:00] be attending to that mandala throughout the day, making different offerings. There’ll be, you know, dozens of very elaborate, kind of wildly elaborate, torma cakes that are painted, and the nuns would have spent many days prior preparing these torma offering cakes for the particular Drupchen that they’re doing.
And then on the three dimensional mandala stand, you have a vase. A Bhoompa vase, and inside the vase there’s some consecrated nectar. And that vase has a thread tied to it. And that thread goes all the way to one of the two nuns who is a Vajra Master. Sitting on one of the two thrones at the head of the nunnery.
So closest to the main shrine at the head of these long benches where all of the nuns are sitting. So you’ll have, today there’s around 200 nuns, 250 nuns at the nunnery. So you’ll have, you know, 200 300 nuns in the shrine hall. All together doing this. And the nun, the Vajra Master, holding the thread which is tied across the room to the vase on the three [01:30:00] dimensional mandala, has that tied to her Vajra, and then she’ll have the Vajra at her heart.
And so what’s going on there is in the three dimensional mandala, the understanding, and this is part of the generation stage, completion stage kind of organization of practice, is that you have the real Buddha out there, and then you have your Buddha nature, which is also the real Buddha, but This is a practice to help us realize this and so the real Buddha is blessing us and we’re becoming one with that real Buddha in the Drupchen.
So the real Buddha is, is resting in that three dimensional mandala and the essence is in that vase and then the Vajramaster is connected through the thread to that, to the energies in the presence of that real Buddha and all the associated Buddhas of the mandala and so she’s holding that and then she leads all of these elaborate rituals.
So there’ll be two nuns that are Vajramasters and Depending on which one they’re doing, she might be a little bit more familiar with one or the other. One of those nuns will be leading the ritual. And it’s really impressive to see these nuns perform these [01:31:00] Drupchens, because they go for 24 hours. They’ll start around 4.
30 or 5 in the morning, and they finish for the day at around 7pm. And they have very short breaks to go to the bathroom, like three minutes, which I never thought was enough. And then, for lunch, they have about an hour and fifteen minutes, an hour and a half. So, that just tells you, and there’s nobody outside of the nuns there, that is making them.
Keep to this schedule of the Drupchens. They would have learned this from previous generations And it’s the nuns that are keeping to this schedule, and there’s obviously a lot of enthusiasm for these practices And so the nuns are impressively concentrated throughout the day And so they’re, they’re sitting cross legged for most of the day, for long hours.
They’re reciting, they’re visualizing, there’s some short periods of silence, but you kind of feel as the days progress through a Drupchen, which might go for seven or ten days, you kind of feel like, it’s hard to explain, [01:32:00] but you feel like this sort of silence builds up. In the Drupchen, like this profound quality builds up in the Drupchen.
I mean, obviously they’re still chanting and reciting. It’s not like actual silence where they’re not reciting, but you just feel like this sort of, like energy build up in the room as the days go on. And so the nuns in the back row, who are usually the younger nuns, and maybe haven’t done as much of the retreat practice yet, usually they’re kind of hanging out and maybe having naps.
maybe talking to each other. And the last time I was there, 2019, at least then, they didn’t have their phones in the droop chin. Actually, they had their phones, but they weren’t using them. And that was also peer pressure. Just the nuns modeling to themselves. in an impressive way, what was expected.
So when I asked the nuns about it, they said, listen, if we get on the phone, it’s just understood that this, that this isn’t appropriate and we would need to go to the door to talk on the phone. So nobody does it. But they actually do have their phones [01:33:00] in the Drupchen because when these kind of more exciting charm dances, like when the nuns stand up and put on their costumes and do special dances, then they all want to video it.
So they have their phones to take photos and video, but on the most part, they’re very concentrated, and especially the older nuns in the front rows are like really impressively concentrated throughout the whole day. And you can kind of see that’s really what is training the younger nuns. It’s just their example, because most of the nuns are coming from, you know, the same villages, the same regions, and they’re the same ages and peer group, so it’s very hard for them to discipline each other.
like outwardly, even though they do get assigned these roles of disciplinarian. They keep the rules, but it’s very hard for them to, you know, do it with each other. And so they’ll have this Drupchen day. It will go into lunch and they’re reciting. And then in the evening, uh, they’ll finish around seven and they’ll do a Yidam deity practice in their own retreat division.
And then in the morning or in the evening, there’s. This is a yoga room, which is [01:34:00] in the basement of the retreat division’s building. if you see an aerial picture of the nunnery, you can see that there’s one very long building there. And that’s the 16 retreat divisions where all of the nuns, or most of them, are living.
And in the basement of that building, which I’ve never seen, is the yoga room, where the nuns do their yogas. And in the past they would do them every day. And usually they would do them in the morning and the evening. And some of the nuns might do them more often. And so they’d go and they’d do some yoga practices, before or after their yidam practice, and then go to bed.
Go to sleep probably at around 11 o’clock. So
Olivia: that’s during a drupchen.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Olivia: It’s really incredible because a drupchen, I mean, 18 drupchens, my understanding is a drupchen is equated to seven years of solitary retreat or something. There’s some, there’s some analogy like that of the amount of transformation that happens because all the tantric rituals are pulled out.
Everything happens in this intensified environment. So 18 a year, [01:35:00] and many of these nuns have been there for decades. Just imagining the amount of transformation that occurs in them over the course of one year doing that many Drupchens. Truly how amazing.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. And the nuns just do it over and over and over again as well. And, you know what happens in a Drupchen is quite repetitive. And the way that I read, the way I learned to read was to try and understand what I’m reading, like with my, you know, with my head, so to speak.
It’s really important that I understand what I’m reading in order for me to embody it. But the nuns are kind of educated to go at it a different way, where they maybe don’t understand it with their head to start with, they just jump in and do it by reciting it over and over again for years, and then eventually come to like a a more metacognitive understanding of what they’re doing.
but it’s definitely repeats over and over again. And, but somehow these nuns love doing it over and over again for all of these days of the year. So I think it must be, you know, as you’re saying that [01:36:00] the fruits of what they’re doing are so great for the nuns, they feel such a transformation that they’re just really keen to keep doing it.
Olivia: And then will you also share The 40 percent of the time, what is their world looking like?
Elizabeth: Yeah, so 40 percent of the time when they’re not in a drup chen, there’s a lot of, domestic work to be done around the nunnery. They have a couple of fields of barley and turnips or food that they have to tend to, and then there’s the yak herds, and there’s construction and fixing holes in the wall, and that usually gets divided up on a rotation basis.
So there’s always, like, physical work to be done for every nun. And then, so the nun will wake up, usually quite early, like 4 or 5 a. m. She might have slept for about 5 hours. Maybe six hours in her meditation box, kind of curled up, leaning back. And the first thing they’ll do when they wake up is a session of their yidam practice.
And if it’s not a drupchen, they’ll recite this together in their retreat division. And then it will end with that quiet meditation for [01:37:00] about 40 minutes. And sometimes you’ll see nuns get out of their boxes and sit at the door and look out at the sky. And then after that first session of about two or three hours, The nuns will get up and have breakfast.
So, usually breakfast, there’ll be one nun in each retreat division that is responsible for bringing in the hot water for the tea. and then the nuns will have their roasted barley flour. Each one will have her own sack of roasted barley flour and then they’ll mix their tea with the barley flour and have breakfast.
And then they go out for the day and they might have some work to be done. And then they’ll have lunch, usually all together. So it’s kind of a mixture. It would probably change throughout the year, but what the nuns definitely do a lot of is kind of less scheduled practices that are very much formally part of the tradition but not so much formally part of the schedule.
So for example, they’ll do these sets of Nyungné every year. again is this fasting and prostration. It’s a purification practice to the Buddha, compassion. And then they’ll do a dark [01:38:00] retreat. every year. So usually for about a week, a group of nuns, and not all of them, just the ones that want to do it, if they have time, they’ll do about a seven day dark retreat.
So there’s an older building at the nunnery that they’re able to seal up all the cracks in the walls and seal up the door, and they’ll go into this dark retreat for seven days. if they don’t have any responsibilities, Then they’ll also do a tögal practice. So you might have seen the nuns have these holes in the ground on the hillside behind the nunnery, where they do tögal, which is the advanced stage of Dzogchen practice, where the nuns, and they especially will do this in winter.
So in Nangchen there’s a strong tradition of doing a hundred day meditation retreats in winter. The lay people do it. Monks and nuns from all the monasteries and nunneries will do it. And it can be any practice that you’re working on. But at Gebchak, the nuns like to do a hundred days of tögal meditation in these holes in the ground.
Olivia: And do they stay in the hole in the ground at night? I was curious if they actually are staying there for the hundred [01:39:00] days, or do they go back inside at night?
Elizabeth: As far as I know, they’ll come back, but they might stay out there for most of the time.
They might come back for food and just to sleep at night, but they’re out there for long days and, a few of the nuns have even built little tiny kind of meditation boxes or little tiny mini retreat houses, maybe two meters square, up on the hillside because it’s a vast open valley with a lot of land, and they’ll just go out to do a little bit more solitary meditation practice, so they’ll do that.
But the nuns take turns. Taking responsibilities. So, you know, you have your standard monastic roles, like the disciplinarian, you know, the manager looking after the food supplies, organizing events, looking after the money and that kind of thing. You have the kitchen duties, so you’ll have a few nuns that are doing the cooking for a month or for three months.
for all of the nuns. That’s a huge job. And then you have the satellite nuns that will come in and get the food or get the boiled water and bring it back to her retreat division. So that’s her responsibility for her retreat [01:40:00] division. And then you’ll have one nun for a period of about Um, I think it’s a period of about three to six months, maybe, who’s responsible for keeping the yidam practice going during Drupchen.
So she won’t go to the Drupchens during those months. Instead, she’ll maintain the Yidan practice, but also the protector prayers for those. retreat divisions, because in Tibetan, Tibetan Buddhism, they do a lot of protector prayers, which I think is really, really interesting, because, of course, you know, these Tibetan protectors, they, generally speaking, were originally all land spirits that Padmasambhava had harnessed to be Dharma protectors, but these are earth spirits.
fundamentally. And at Gebchak, they do, you know, the mainstream Nyingma protector practices, like the Tsering, the Tsering Ma goddesses, and then the three other ones. But they also have special practices that, that have developed over generations as they’ve come to be intimate with the spirits of the land around them.
[01:41:00] And these are integrated into their protector practices. So like their connection to the land is so integrated into Their practices. So in Tibet, they do hours of protector practices. So in a Drupchen day in Tibet, they do the main sadhana. And then they’ll spend about half an hour doing dedication prayers at the end of the day.
But there’s usually about 45 minutes or an hour of solka or protector prayers towards the end of the day as well. And they do that every day, like at least an hour dedicated just to Protector Prayers. And, and, you know, the nuns are always saying how important they are, and I just think it’s really, really interesting, because it’s really important for them on like a deep psychic level to be doing Protector Prayers.
But what these Protector Prayers are fundamentally are connection to the land, like they’re worshipping the spirits of the land and making sure they have this harmonious relationship with the land. You know, which I think gets into this subtle body conversation about, this sort of separation between the sacred and [01:42:00] the mundane, the separation between me and nature really is not, it’s just not there fundamentally or boldly, it’s not there boldly in the world view.
I mean, obviously they have a sense of being an individual and sense of nature and mind and body, but. The tantric system really has this direct connection with nature.
Olivia: Well, before we close today, is there anything else you want to share?
Elizabeth: well, thank you for this conversation.
I wish that the nuns could be here in the room, you know, taking their time for this to unfold over bowls of soup and in the ways that they mean it, it’s good to remember what this tradition is like for the nuns and for those of us who are interested in it to understand, but, you know, hopefully also for those of us who are involved as practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism to remember how simple the teaching can be.
You know, I love the Gebchak nuns for that. it’s so profound, and you know, the most sophisticated [01:43:00] understanding doesn’t need to be necessarily too far away from you.