Hildegard Diemberger

Diemberger's dense and well-researched book explores the life of Chokyi Dronma, the first and most important lineage of female lamas in Tibet. Some background: Tibetan Buddhism is unique in that its lineages - leaders of schools of Buddhism, abbots of monasteries, etc. - are not done by choosing a successor or by passing the power onto one's child, but by finding the reincarnation of the lama who has died. This centuries-old practice is how, for example, we got the Dalai Lama. According to Tibetan belief, he is the fourteenth reincarnation of the same bodhisattva, in this case an incarnation of the celestial bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Like any other mode of passing on authority, lineage by reincarnation is subject to manipulation. Diemberger, an anthropologist at Cambridge, focuses on how these politics - especially gender politics - play out in the biography of fifth-century lineage founder Chokyi Dronma.

Chokyi Dronma herself was a Tibetan princess who, after the death of her only child, left behind her husband and his despised family to pursue a life devoted to the dharma. At first her husband would not let her leave, but she shaved her head - some say she scalped herself - and her possibly-insane devotion persuaded him. In time she came to be recognized as an incarnation of Dorje Pagmo (aka Vajrayogini), one of the most important female deities in Mahayana Buddhism. She studied under lama Chogye Namgyal and used her great royal wealth to act as a great patrons of the arts and sciences during the time of what Diemberger calls a "Tibetan Renaissance."

Soon after her death, her disciple Thangtong Gyalpo wrote her biography. Diemberger argues that he wrote it to legitimate the search for her successor, as the biography is full of references to how Chokyi Dronma was like Vajrayogini and how her rebirth lineage was prophecied during her life. Most tantalizingly, the end of the book is lost. Dronma was about to ascend Tsari Mountain, a holy site forbidden to women, which leads Diemberger to suggest that the end was censored because it flouted religious convention.

This is the fourth in my category of books written by or about women. Somehow this category turned into "women and religion." I'm beginning to see some commonalities in how women are depicted in the three religious traditions I am reading around. I see the most affinities here with the contents of [Lives of Roman Christian Women].

First - the theme of insanity. Dronma had to feign insanity to make others take her religious devotion seriously. This seems to be something women have to do in different religious traditions, perhaps because their agency would not be taken seriously otherwise. When [[St. Jerome]] writes about his patron Paula the Elder, he cites her abandonment of her children - surely insane - as proof of her great devotion to God. In early Christianity as in Tibet, women had more obstacles to renunciation, and had to be more drastic in proving their desire.

Like Paula the Elder, Chokyi Dronma was born into the elite, and her fame as a patroness would not have been possible had she not had a lot of money to give away. Elitism rears its ugly head. One of the projects she sponsored were a series of iron suspension bridges around Tibet, build by tantric master and civil engineer Thangthong Gyalpo. Some of these still stand, supposedly made of an alloy resistant to rust:

Last but not least, the problem of finding women's' voices in history. Chokyi Dronma's biography was written one of her male disciples. Most of the texts in [Lives of Roman Christian Women] were written by men. Even when they are esteemed, womens' own voices are often lost to history. I am suspicious of efforts to uncover these voices, such as [[Miranda Shaw]]'s, as they often seem to be inventing just as much as uncovering. [The Red Tent] provided a much better model, a way of imagining women's' voices and roles in history using fiction. Thankfully, Diemberger has one way of overcoming this problem: the fact that the Dorje Phagmo lineage is still alive and well in Tibet, as is her famous Samding monastery, rebuilt after its destruction in the Cultural Revolution. Diemberger does a great job of bringing the book back to the present and the continuing enigma of Dorje Phagmo.… (meer)