Machik Labdrön, the Lamp of Lab

In the eleventh century, in the valleys of southern Tibet, a girl was born who would become one of the most loved teachers Tibet has ever known. People came to call her Machik Labdrön.

Machik means “the one mother,” a title of deep affection. Labdrön means “the lamp of Lab,” after the district of her birth. Most sources give her dates as 1055 to 1149, so she lived well into her nineties. Lotsawa House also records an older reckoning, 1031 to 1129.

Her life is told in several Tibetan life stories, and they differ in many details. What follows is the outline the tradition remembers, with a note wherever the accounts part ways.

A birth the tradition remembers

The life stories begin before she was born. They say that in her previous life she was an Indian scholar-yogi named Mönlam Drub, and that his mind was guided to Tibet by dakinis, the “sky-goers,” the tradition's word for awakened feminine wisdom.

Patrul Rinpoche, the wandering teacher whose story is told in this library, remembered her this way in a short prayer: one who fulfilled the aspirations of an Indian pandita and then appeared to Tibetans in a woman's form.

Her father, Chökyi Dawa, was the chief of a village called Tsomer, and her mother was Lungmo Bumcham. Most accounts place Tsomer in the Lab district of E, south of the Tsangpo River. Another places her birth in the eastern part of the Yarlung valley.

The accounts say her mother had wonderful dreams of dakinis while carrying her. At the birth, they say, there was music and rainbow light, and the baby had a third eye open on her forehead. She sat upright at once, the story goes, and asked whether her mother was well.

The girl who read faster than anyone

She learned early. One account says she was reading by five, and that by eight she could recite at great speed the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines. The Perfection of Wisdom, or Prajnaparamita, is a family of long sutras on emptiness: the teaching that nothing, ourselves included, has a fixed and separate core.

In the Tibet of her day, families invited readers into their homes to recite whole scriptures aloud, as an act of merit for the household. The teacher and author Tsultrim Allione explains that the quicker the reader, the more readings a family could offer, and the more the reader was valued.

Machik, she writes, was “an extraordinarily fast reader” from a very young age.

At thirteen, the accounts say, Machik studied with a teacher named Aton, together with her elder sister, who was a nun. Her explanations of the texts were said to outshine those of the monks.

Then she went to Drapa Ngönshé, a learned lama of Dratang in central Tibet. She became his reader, going to the homes of lay people to recite the Perfection of Wisdom on his behalf.

Speed is not the same as understanding, and the story is honest about that. Allione writes that real insight came only when a teacher questioned her and sent her back to read the texts again. This time, the tradition says, the familiar pages opened from within.

Another teacher, Kyoton Sonam Lama, gave her initiations and a new name. Her studies were wide: the Treasury of Lives lists the Kadam and Nyingma traditions among those she belonged to.

Padampa Sangye

Around these years she met the teacher whose name is most often joined with hers. Padampa Sangye was an Indian yogi from the south who travelled widely and, the tradition says, came to Tibet as many as seven times. He died in 1117.

He lived long at Dingri, a high, wind-swept plain near the Nepal border, and founded a hermitage at Langkhor there. He brought to Tibet the tradition called Zhijé, “Pacifying,” because it aims to calm suffering at its root. Tibetans called him, with affection, the “Little Black One,” for his small build and dark skin.

His parting advice to the people of Dingri, the Hundred Verses, is still loved today.

Many life stories say he became one of Machik's most important teachers and gave her many teachings and blessings, some of them at Dingri. The historian Michelle Sorensen gently notes that the evidence is thin: one version rests on Machik only seeing him from afar, and another has his teaching reach her through Sonam Lama.

However it happened, the two are remembered together. Rigpa Wiki records that both meditated in caves near Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest in Bhutan, where a small temple now stands at Machik's cave.

The thread back to Guru Rinpoche

Why does Machik belong in a library of stories about a prayer to Guru Rinpoche? Because many traditional accounts see her life as a continuation of his. They regard her as a rebirth, or emanation, of Yeshe Tsogyal, his closest disciple.

Allione retells a prophecy from the Life of Yeshe Tsogyal. In it, Guru Rinpoche foretells that Tsogyal will return as Machik Labdrön, and that her companion Atsara Salé will return as Machik's husband. Others of their circle would be born around her too, and Guru Rinpoche himself, it says, would come as Padampa Sangye.

Here, too, the accounts differ. Other traditions see Padampa as the rebirth of Kamalashila, an Indian scholar who taught in Tibet in Guru Rinpoche's time. The version of Tsogyal's life that carries the prophecy was revealed in the seventeenth century, some five hundred years after Machik. It can be read as the tradition looking back and seeing one story across the centuries.

A family, and the open road

In her early twenties, the accounts say, Machik met an Indian yogi named Topabhadra, and they became partners. Some people criticized her for setting aside the customs expected of her. The sources do not agree about their children: three sons and two daughters in one account, two sons and a daughter in another.

For a time she lived as a wandering yogini, sleeping wherever night found her and dressing like a beggar. Then, in her late thirties, she took up a renunciate's life again. She shaved her head and settled in a cave at Zangri Khangmar, the “Red House” on the Copper Mountain, above the Tsangpo River.

The Red House

A community grew up around her there. The accounts say lamas, monks and nuns came, kings and queens and ministers, and also nomads, beggars and people with leprosy.

One of her sons became the monk Tönyön Samdrub and carried her teaching on. Her heart disciple Gyalwa Döndrub held the lineage too, and four women disciples were remembered as her “Ornaments.”

In those days, teachings were expected to travel from India to Tibet, never the other way. The tradition tells that when word of Machik's teaching reached India, scholars at Bodhgaya doubted it and sent a delegation to test her. She answered them, the story says, and they accepted what she taught.

Sorensen records the traditional claim that hers was the only Buddhist teaching born in Tibet that was later carried to India and practised there.

Chöd, named only

The tradition she founded is called Chöd, which means “cutting.” Rigpa Wiki describes it in a single phrase, as cutting through clinging to a self. Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources notes that it is practised, to some degree, in every school of Tibetan Buddhism.

Chöd is a practice to be received from a qualified teacher, in person, with that teacher's guidance. So this page only names it. If you feel drawn to it, the Find a Teacher page can help you begin.

The lamp still lit

Machik taught at Zangri Khangmar for the rest of her long life. Tibet kept finding her after she was gone. Jomo Menmo in the thirteenth century and Ani Lochen in the twentieth, both told of in this library, were each regarded as her emanation.

In 1956 the great master Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö stood before her image at Zangri Khangmar and offered a long praise to her. In it he remembers a girl whose gifts blossomed early, who bowed at the feet of many teachers and became a treasury of the Dharma.

The second line of the Seven-Line Prayer tells of Guru Rinpoche's birth on a lotus. In Machik's story, the tradition sees that birth echoed: a wisdom that keeps returning, in a girl reading aloud in a farmhouse, in a yogini on a red mountain.