Yeshe Tsogyal, the Woman Who Became a Buddha

Of everyone who followed Guru Rinpoche, the tradition remembers one above the rest: a Tibetan woman named Yeshe Tsogyal. Her name is often translated "Wisdom Lake Queen."

Tibetans call her a dakini, a "sky-goer." It is the tradition's word for an awakened woman, one who moves as freely in the open space of mind as a bird in the sky.

Her life story is called a namtar, which means "complete liberation": a life told as a path to freedom. Hers tells of a girl who would not be married off, a queen who left the court, a student who outlasted every hardship, and a teacher who cared for whoever came to her.

It is told here gently, and honestly about what history can and cannot say.

A girl from Drak

The traditional accounts say she was born in a bird year of the eighth century, in the valley of Drak, on the north bank of the Tsangpo River, into the noble Kharchen clan. The sources do not agree on her parents' names.

The best-known life story names her father as Kharchen Pelgyi Wangchuk. The nineteenth-century master Jamgön Kongtrul, citing an older history, says Pelgyi Wangchuk was her brother instead.

The life story says that at her birth the earth trembled, flowers fell like rain, and a small lake nearby overflowed. That lake, it is said, gave her the second half of her name: Tsogyal, "queen of the lake." A pond in Drak called Tsogyal Latso is still honored as her life-lake.

She grew quickly, the story goes, and learned with ease. From early on she wanted one thing more than any other: to give her life to the Dharma, the Buddha's teaching, rather than to a husband.

The marriage she refused

Her beauty was talked about, and two powerful suitors asked for her. Her parents, hoping to avoid a feud, agreed to let her go. In the seventeenth-century life story, one suitor's men carried her off against her will. She escaped, only to be seized by the other.

She did not go quietly. In the accounts she runs away and hides in the wild mountains, enduring cold and fear rather than consent. It is one of Tibet's oldest stories of a young woman saying no and meaning it.

As the two families prepared to fight over her, word reached the king, Trisong Detsen, the Dharma King who was bringing Buddhism to Tibet. He ended the quarrel by bringing her to his own court as one of his queens.

At the court of the king

At court she studied reading, writing and the classical sciences. Kongtrul's prayer says she needed only a few hints from her teachers to understand, and that she became a spiritual adviser to the king.

Then Guru Rinpoche came to Tibet. When the king asked him for the deepest teachings, he made a great offering in request: his kingdom, his treasures, and the young queen herself.

Modern readers may find this hard to hear. The tradition tells it as the moment Tsogyal was freed for the life she had always wanted.

She became Guru Rinpoche's disciple and his consort. In the Vajrayana, the tantric Buddhism of Tibet, a consort is a partner in the most advanced practices, which the tradition keeps between a teacher and committed students.

What the stories stress is not romance but trust. She was the one who stayed closest, learned the most, and followed furthest.

Years in the caves

Some at court were alarmed, and the accounts say the king was pressed to send the pair away. Instead they went into retreat in the mountains: at Chimphu, in the hills above Samye, and at Tidro, a gorge of cliffs and hot springs far to the northeast.

There her real training began. The accounts describe years of practice in cold caves and on bare mountainsides, with very little food and little more than a thin cloth against the snow.

The life story does not pretend it was easy. As the scholar Holly Gayley summarizes it, she met scorn from villagers, terrifying visions and hunger, and turned each hardship into fuel for her practice.

Once, the accounts say, seven bandits came upon her alone in the mountains, robbed her and treated her cruelly. She answered them not with curses but with teaching. She showed them the nature of their own minds, and they became practitioners themselves.

Kongtrul's prayer places this beneath the Shampo glacier; another telling sets it near Chimphu.

A master in her own right

Tsogyal once asked her teacher whether a woman's body was a hindrance on the path, as many then believed. In the life story his answer is plain: male or female makes no difference, and for one with a determined heart, "a female body is actually superior" (as translated on Himalayan Art Resources).

In Nepal, the story says, she paid the ransom of an enslaved young man named Atsara Salé and set him free. He became her companion in practice and her student. She went on to teach princes and nomads, monks and lay people, men and women, and she left a circle of close disciples who carried her lineage on.

The keeper of the teachings

The tradition credits her with a perfect memory. Rigpa Wiki says that through it she gathered all the teachings Guru Rinpoche gave in Tibet. Kongtrul's prayer adds that she set many of them down in symbolic script on small yellow scrolls.

Then, with her teacher, she hid them in caves, cliffs and lakes across Tibet and the Himalayas, sealed for later times. These hidden teachings are called terma, "treasures," and the people who later found them are called tertöns, treasure revealers. That is a story of its own.

When Guru Rinpoche's work in Tibet was done, the accounts say, he left for the southwest, and Tsogyal went with him to the borderlands to receive his last advice. Then she turned back. Tibet, the tradition says, still needed her.

Care for all who came

The rest of her life is remembered as service. Kongtrul's prayer recalls her giving food, clothes and medicine to those in need, healing quarrels in the sangha, the community of practitioners, and putting others' suffering in the place of her own.

How long did she live? The accounts differ widely. Kongtrul's prayer, following the life story, says she stayed in Tibet for more than two hundred years; other summaries say about ninety-nine. All agree it was a long life, given to others.

Her departure

At the end, the traditional accounts say, she gathered her disciples in the valley of Zabbu in Shang, gave her last advice, and promised to come to anyone who calls on her with devotion.

Then, they say, dakinis bore her up in a sphere of light, and she went to the Copper-Coloured Mountain, Guru Rinpoche's pure land, a realm of awakened presence, leaving no body behind.

What history can say

Scholars ask honest questions about her. The Treasury of Lives notes that no evidence has yet been found that a person named Yeshe Tsogyal lived, though a noblewoman of the Kharchen clan may well stand behind the legends. Stone inscriptions naming the king's queens do not include her.

Some copies of an early history, the Chronicle of Ba, do list a Kharchen lady named Tsogyal among the king's wives, explaining that she gave herself to meditation and left no children. That line may have been added later. By the twelfth century the treasure revealer Nyangrel Nyima Özer, in his life of Guru Rinpoche, presents her as his consort and the keeper of his teachings.

The best-known life story was revealed in the seventeenth century by the treasure revealer Taksham Nüden Dorje, born in 1655, some nine hundred years after her time, as the scholar Janet Gyatso points out. He presented it as a treasure written by two of her fellow disciples.

Gyatso has shown that it drew on an older life story by Drime Kunga, from the fourteenth century, in which King Trisong Detsen does not appear at all.

Holly Gayley calls the accounts "highly mythologized," and suggests that her importance lies in her living presence: in the prayers offered to her for centuries, and in the accomplished Tibetan women recognized as her emanations.

In the Seven-Line Prayer, one line asks that we may follow in Guru Rinpoche's footsteps. Yeshe Tsogyal is the tradition's picture of what that following can look like: steady, brave, and always turned toward others.