Tare Lhamo

“Women have played and still today play an important role in the Vajrayana, especially within the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. The problem is that female tantric masters rarely make it into the literary record—something the late Rita Gross called androcentric recordkeeping.

Traveling in eastern Tibet for more than a decade, I met or learned of at least a dozen other contemporary khandroma. This is the Tibetan term that translates dakini from Sanskrit and designates a realized female master. But they seldom travel and teach widely, gaining regional renown, as Khandro Tare Lhamo did.

So Khandro Tare Lhamo is exceptional in many ways: her heroism during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution; her twelve-volume corpus of writings and revelations with Namtrul Rinpoche; and her prominent role in restoring Buddhist teachings, practices, and institutions in eastern Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“Khandro Tāre Lhamo was born in 1938 in the valley of Bokyi Yumolung in the nomadic region of Golok . Her father was a prominent terton or "treasure revealer" of the Apang family, named Apang Terchen Pawo Choying Dorje. Her mother, Damtsik Drolma, was the daughter of a local chieftain and recognized as a speech emanation of Yeshe Tsogyel …

In 1978, Tāre Lhamo initiated a correspondence with Namtrul Rinpoche Jigme Puntsok, a lama six years her junior who lived across province borders in Serta County of Sichuan Province. After more than a year of exchanging letters, she left her homeland of Padma County in Qinghai Province to join Namtrul Rinpoche in Serta, where the couple lived together until her death in 2002. Together, they rebuilt Nyenlung Monastery in his homeland, along with Rigdzin Nyima, a lama who had occupied the site as a hermitage and remained close to the couple.

Although Tāre Lhamo relinquished her birthright to serve as the head of Tsimda Gompa by leaving Padma County, she and Namtrul Rinpoche continued to serve as principle teachers there, and she played an important role in reconstructing the monastery. In 1980, Khenpo Jigme Puntsok gave Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche the transmission for Apang Terchen's treasure corpus, which she had received as a child directly from her father, and encouraged them to propagate it widely. Later in 1986, he authorized the couple as tertons and bestowed the transmission for the treasure corpus of Lerab Lingpa, his own previous incarnation. In 1987, Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche joined his entourage of approximately 10,000 on a historic pilgrimage to Wutai Shan, the sacred domain of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī in Shanxi Province, where the couple revealed a Sarasvatī sādhana. In 1990, Dola Chokyi Nyima gave them the transmission for the treasure corpus of his father, Dudjom Rinpoche Jigdrel Yeshe Dorje, and authorized them to disseminate its transmission.

Shortly thereafter, Tāre Lhamo garnered international attention for recognizing Dola Chokyi Nyima's son as one of two reincarnations of Dudjom Rinpoche. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Tāre Lhamo and Namtrul Rinpoche revealed treasures together and taught widely throughout the region of Golok and beyond. During their teaching career, they held and transmitted three principle treasure collections: their own treasure corpus in twelve volumes, that of her father Apang Terchen in sixteen volumes, and that of Jigdrel Yeshe Dorje. They held an annual dharma gathering at Nyenlung each summer, attracting more than a thousand followers in attendance since the 1990s, and served as stewards for a number of other monasteries in Golok and neighboring areas, helping to fund rebuilding projects, sponsor rituals, and establish liturgical practices, while visiting regularly to give teachings. They also took a strong interest in and promoted the Gesar epic.

Toward the end of 2000, Tare Lhamo fell ill and the following year she was diagnosed with an illness, which may have been esophageal cancer. Various ritual and practical measures were taken to try to cure her, including spending time in hospitals in Barkham and Chengdu. She passed away on March 26, 2002 in Chendgu, and her body was transported back to Nyenlung soon thereafter for the appropriate funeral rites.”

~ Holly Gayley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.