by Vicki Noble: Since my introduction to Tibetan Buddhism almost twenty years ago, I have been fascinated by the strong female subtext that runs through it like an underground stream. At the Nyingma Institute in the early 1980s there were images of Tara, but the female in general was still fairly invisible; women attended retreats at the center and helped prepare the Sunday afternoon public dinners, yet were explicitly NOT allowed to ring the dinner bell. Shortly after beginning my Buddhist practice there, I learned from reading Stephen Beyer’s classic text, The Cult of Tara, that Tara was at the heart of Buddhist practice for Tibetans who, Beyer said, called on her every day for every kind of purpose. Over the next two decades, the Tibetan Goddess officially arrived in America along with numerous Lamas and teachers whose unfortunate refugee status has been such a boon to the West. Almost anywhere in America now, one can receive direct authorized transmissions of Dakini practices or get Tara empowerments, and so on.
As a younger feminist I experienced Tibetan Buddhist organizations as a roller coaster ride. Although deeply called to the dharma, I found myself infuriated over what appeared then to be hopelessly entrenched discrimination towards women. I signed up for a three-week retreat to study Kum Nye Yoga, a wonderful Tibetan form developed by Tarthang Tulku, founder of the Nyingma Institute. Our retreat was interrupted halfway through when the Lama requested that everyone in the organization come up to Oddiyan (the retreat center they were developing in northern California near Sea Ranch) and help with completion of the stupa that was being built there. It was urgent that the stupa be finished in time for fire ceremonies to be performed on an auspicious date, the next Full Moon. Retreat participants were invited to come as well, and we happily consented to join the community for this exciting event.
The minute we arrived at the retreat center, all the men in our small group were sent down to the stupa to join in the construction work, while the women were sent to the kitchen to cook and clean. I told the person in charge of our group that I had changed my mind and was going home (“been there, done that”) and he surprised me by calling a special meeting with Tarthang Tulku, the outcome of which was that men and women were allowed to work anywhere they chose at the site without reference to gender. Thus began an exhilarating three days of working from morning till night on the completion of the first stupa to be built in California (in America?). In an almost preternaturally harmonious environment, men and women worked side by side in a focused way for as much as twenty hours a day, and without any observable antagonism or gender charge.
This was my first experience of participating in a group context where a guru was holding a spiritual vision, and the light from that vision was so strong that it held us all inside of its amazing vitality and high-voltage energy. When Tarthang Tulku himself spoke to the group on the final day of the consecration, I saw threads of light emanating out from his heart to the audience and found myself weeping as my heart opened in response. I was certain I had found the community I was seeking. Then as the much-awaited fire ceremony was about to begin, our group was counseled that women might not be allowed to participate in the ceremony! Like a ping-pong ball, back and forth my state of consciousness bounced between joy and anger, moving from moments of profound awe to equally profound cynicism. Now many years later I know that this triggering process belongs to the central tenet of Tibetan Buddhism, which says that it is precisely our attachment to these hopes and fears, desires and aversions, that causes our perpetual suffering — but at the time I took every nuance personally. Luckily for me that day, not only did this very flexible Lama decide to let women participate in the important fire ceremony, he even asked his two young daughters to help officiate (“priestess”) the event.
Yab-Yum statue from a Buddhist museum in Kathmandu
Three years later Dharma Publishing in Berkeley brought out the first English translation of the biography of Yeshe Tsogyal, the female cofounder of Tibetan Buddhism whose image is so often shown intertwined in sexual union with that of Guru Padmasambhava in the traditional “yab-yum” (father-mother) thangkas painted by Tibetan artists. At the center and in the foreground of most Tibetan meditation centers one will still always find the famous male magician (yogi) and founder supposed to have flown in from Oddiyana with a retinue of dakinis to anchor Buddhism in Tibet during the … More