Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture by Ronald M. Davidson

Author:Ronald M. Davidson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: History/Asia/India &#x0026, Religion/General, REL000000, HIS017000, South Asia
ISBN: 9780231134712
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE LADIES MACHIK EXPAND THE REPERTOIRE:CHÖ AND THE ZHAMA LAMDRÉ

While these necessary monastic developments were taking place, Padampa’s female followers were promoting their own interesting directions. Padampa’s most important female disciple generally has not been included in the Zhiché tradition, apparently because her individual lineage and system were so important. This was Machik Labdrön, about whom much has been written, so I will simply summarize the available scholarship.44 She was born possibly somewhere in the region of Éyül, east of Yarlung, probably in the third quarter of the eleventh century.45 Although she was granted the great honorific “Machik” (One Mother) generally accorded mature aristocratic or religious women, there is little indication that she was born into the aristocracy. Her first lama was Drapa Ngönshé, the well-known Eastern Vinaya preceptor who later abandoned his vows and established monasteries associated with Nyingma practices. Machik Labdrön learned to read very well during her training and became a professional reader of religious texts, supported by others for the merit of the ritual performance. She continued her studies with various masters and eventually had several children by one of her teachers, not that uncommon then as now. Most sources indicate that she began studying with Padampa rather late, probably after he returned from China and settled in Dingri in 1097. She ultimately removed to Zangri in Lho-kha, close to her place of birth and just upriver from Gampopa’s monastery of Dakla Gampo.

The tradition is content to claim that there were two lineages of Chö, meaning “cutting off the realm of demons,” but the practice seems to have been developed primarily by Machik. Its Indian roots are somewhat dubious, and the ritual of mentally offering one’s body to demons in a remote or possessed locale was said to have been based on a short Grand Poem of the Perfection of Insight, attributed to Āryadeva, which had two translations. Shamanic connections have been sometimes associated with the practice, but it appears that its fundamental visualization was influenced by the Tibetan postmortem rite of offering the body to vultures and other scavengers, sometimes called a “sky burial” in Western literature.46 The practice was combined with a mentalistic demonology in which the four Māras were described as entirely conceptual in nature, thus amalgamating a postmortem ritual with a Buddhist assessment of its meaning. If this was the case, then the textual source must have been affected by Tibetan or Tibetan-like (Zoroastrian?) rituals. It is certain that the Chö practice was criticized by the neoconservatives, and Chaglo Chöjé-pel (1197–1264) is noted for having accused Padampa of fabricating works that incorporate the un-Buddhist doctrines of Chö into a Buddhist framework.47 It is more likely, though, that the actual practice came from the ritual conversation of Padampa and Machik Labdrön.

Machik Labdrön was not the only woman to be favored by Padampa. Zhama-lotsāwa’s sister, Zhama Machik, was also one of his disciples, but with a less positive outcome. She, like her brother, was born in the region of Six Fathers (Pha drug) in Latö-lho, close to the Nepalese border, and were among the 104 Zhama clan members from that area.

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