The Treasury of Lives

The practitioner known to people as Nun of the Cemeteries (dur khro a ne) makes a brief appearance in David Jackson's two-volume biography of the Eighteenth Chogye Trichen, Tubten Lekshe Gyatso (bco brgyad chen rin po che thub bstan legs bshad rgya mtsho, 1920–2007). She was a disciple of Lama Ngaklo (bla ma ngag dbang blo gros, 1892–circa 1959), who was an important teacher to Chogye Trichen.

She was a Chod practitioner, as Chogye Trichen, who considered her to be very powerful, requested that she perform a Chod fire offering when she visited Nepal in 1982.

While in Boudhanath, Nepal, she had complained to Chogye Trichen that Lama Ngaklo's reincarnation had not yet been identified. Lama Ngaklo had passed away in 1959, after performing powa ('pho ba), or transference of consciousness, shortly before being sent to a Chinese prison. Jackson speculates that it was Lama Ngaklo to whom Thomas Merton referenced in his journal entry on his 1968 visit to Chogye Trichen, although if so the teacher and student roles were reversed:

[Chogye Trichen] even knows how to impart the technique of severing one's soul from the body. He taught this to another lama who was later captured by the Communists. The lama, when he was being led off to prison camp, simply severed soul from body—pfft!—and that was the end of it. Liberation!^[1]

Pointing out that Lama Ngaklo had ensured the conception and birth of the Forty-first Sakya Trizin Ngawang Kunga Tekchen Pelbar (sa skya khri 'dzin 42 ngag dbang kun dga' theg chen dpal 'bar, b. 1945) and had taught Chogye Trichen the Indian treatises, she demanded he explain why he had not yet taken rebirth. She was concerned that, having performed powa, perhaps in a karmically disadvantageous way, he would have been reborn in a hell realm. Chogye Trichen assured her that Lama Ngaklo had been reborn in a pure land, which comforted her.

Jackson's informant Lama Guru (bla ma gu ru) added that Chogye Trichen's favorable answer later gave her pause when Lama Ngaklo's reincarnation was identified in 1984.^[2]

She returned to Tibet and lived in the Lhoka region, wandering southern Tibet without settling anywhere for long. She lived to a great old age.

 

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Publication of this biography was made possible through support of National Endowment for the Humanities.

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