Shuksep Jetsün Lochen Rinpoche

On a mountainside south of Lhasa, in the first half of the twentieth century, some three hundred women lived in small stone cells and caves scattered up the slope. Their teacher was a tiny woman with white hair. Her door, it was said, was open to anyone who needed her, even in the middle of the night.

Tibetans knew her by many names: Shuksep Jetsün, Jetsün Lochen Rinpoche, Ani Lochen. Jetsün means "venerable one," ani means "nun," and Rinpoche, "precious one," is a title that was very rarely given to a woman. Her own name was Chönyi Zangmo.

She told the story of her life near its end, and the historian of religion Hanna Havnevik has studied that autobiography closely. Shorter retellings come from Tibetan writers and from the nuns' own memories. Their dates differ. Havnevik gives about 1865 to 1951; other records place her birth in 1852 or 1853.

Born at the Lotus Lake

She was born at Tso Pema, the "Lotus Lake," in the green hills of what is now Himachal Pradesh in northern India. Tibetans revere it as the lake where, the tradition says, Guru Rinpoche turned the flames of a pyre into water. Her parents were pilgrims who had stayed there for a time. A Tibetan library record says her father was Tibetan and her mother Nepalese.

A retelling by Kim Yeshi and Tashi Tsering, shared by the Tibetan Nuns Project, says her mother had wonderful dreams while carrying her and that flowers fell at the birth. It also says, more plainly, that her father was disappointed to have a daughter, treated mother and child harshly, and in time left them.

A child who told the mani stories

So mother and daughter took to the road. In the Himalayan world of that time there were wandering storytellers called manipa, or lama mani. They hung up a painted scroll in a market, pointed to its pictures and told the stories of kindness and its fruits, chanting the mantra of Avalokiteshvara, the buddha of compassion, which Tibetans call the mani.

From about the age of six, encouraged by a patron, the girl did this herself. The retelling says she hung up a painting of Avalokiteshvara and explained its stories, standing on tiptoe to reach the pictures, and that her listeners wept.

What people gave her, the story goes, she spent on buying sheep and goats that were about to be slaughtered, and letting them live. She is said to have travelled the western highlands on a big, tame goat that knelt down so that she could climb on.

Finding her teacher

When she first heard the name of a lama called Pema Gyatso, she felt a great longing to meet him, and she travelled for months to find him at Kyirong, a forested valley on the border of Tibet and Nepal. Havnevik notes that he was a personal disciple of Shabkar, the singing yogi of Amdo, whose story is told elsewhere in this library.

Near his retreat she met a nun named Ani Tsultrim drawing water at a stream, who brought her to the lama's cave. The girl offered him a vessel of milk, and he accepted her as his student. Her mother joined her, and they made a small hermitage in a cave screened with bamboo.

From Pema Gyatso she received many teachings. Among them, the retelling says, were the Great Perfection teachings that come down from the master Longchenpa, and the practice tradition called Chöd, which traces back to the eleventh-century woman teacher Machik Labdrön. These are practices to be received from a qualified teacher, so this page only names them; the Find a Teacher page can help.

The same list includes "Kunsang Lama," most likely Kunzang Lamé Shelung, the book known in English as The Words of My Perfect Teacher, by Patrul Rinpoche. You may read elsewhere that she studied with Patrul himself. The sources I could open do not say so. They name Pema Gyatso as her main teacher.

Devotion tested

Life near her teacher was not easy. A jealous monk told Pema Gyatso that the young woman was boasting of being an emanation of a female buddha. The next time she brought an offering, the account says, the lama flung it from a roof, and his boots after it. She picked up the boots and placed them on her head, a Tibetan sign of respect, and kept attending his teachings, though he ignored her.

In the end he sent her away to Nepal. There, the story continues, a misunderstanding at a king's court led to one of her two companions being imprisoned. Then, as Lochen and her other friend crossed a rope bridge, a cable broke, and her friend fell into the river.

Lochen prayed to her teacher and leapt in after her, the account says, and pulled her onto a large rock. The people watching from the bank decided she must be a dakini, one of the female embodiments of wisdom in Tibetan Buddhism. The king, impressed, set her companion free.

She went back to Pema Gyatso and bowed before him, and this time he received her gladly. Through all of it, the retelling says, her faith in him had not broken.

Forty years on the road

With her teacher and his other students she spent many years on pilgrimage. One of Havnevik's studies puts it simply in its title: forty years in the Himalayas. Lochen went twice to Mount Kailash in the far west of Tibet, and she meditated for years in caves in Nepal.

Around 1880 the little band walked into Lhasa. Havnevik writes that people were amazed by these yogis and yoginis, their hair long and matted, their cotton robes in rags. The great families of the city, the women above all, took Lochen to their hearts. She was invited into noble houses to read the scriptures, and in these middle years she was ordained as a nun.

Pema Gyatso died around 1889. The retelling says she cared for him to the end and saw rainbows over him at his passing.

The nunnery on the mountain

After his death she stopped wandering. She spent winters in a cave and summers at Shuksep, on the lower slopes of Gangri Thökar, the "White Skull Snow Mountain." Higher up on that mountain, five centuries earlier, Longchenpa had written his great books. Shuksep itself was an old hermitage site, linked to a master of the twelfth century.

Around the turn of the twentieth century she built it into one of the largest and best-known nunneries in Tibet, home to some three hundred nuns and yoginis practising in cells and caves on the hillside. The retelling adds that she taught Shantideva's Way of the Bodhisattva, the great guide to living for others, a hundred times. It was the book Patrul Rinpoche was most famous for teaching.

Stories gathered around her. In one, a dog fled from a leopard into her cave and hid in her lap. She rested for a moment in compassion, the story says, and then motioned to the leopard to sit down.

Another tells that during a long retreat she lay as if dead for three weeks, and in that time visited the Copper-Coloured Mountain, the pure land of Guru Rinpoche, before returning. Tibetans have a word for people who come back from such journeys: delok, "one who has passed beyond and returned."

Come in, come in

Her devotees regarded her as an emanation of Machik Labdrön. In one of her songs she says she keeps Machik's teaching alive, and calls herself only a beggar who follows the great yogis. The first she names in that song are Guru Rinpoche and his great disciple Yeshe Tsogyal.

A regent of Tibet, abbots and the great families of Lhasa climbed to Shuksep to see her, and so did nomads, farmers and traders. A Lhasa noblewoman who stayed there in 1948, quoted by Havnevik, remembered that she treated high and low alike and greeted each visitor with "yar shog, yar shog": come in, come in.

The Tibetan scholar Lobsang Lhalungpa met her in the early 1940s. He remembered a small woman with "a serene face radiating compassion and sensitivity" (as quoted on Rigpa Wiki), whose white hair was the only sign of her great age.

Shortly before her death, at her devotees' request, she told the story of her life, and a nun named Gen Tinley wrote it down. She died in 1951, on the thirteenth day of the third Tibetan month, according to one Tibetan record. Havnevik writes that nuns and yogis still mark that day, and a community of Shuksep nuns lives on today, in Tibet and in exile in India.

A beggar who followed

Her life began with a small girl pointing at painted pictures and telling strangers about compassion. It ended on the mountain where Longchenpa wrote, among hundreds of women practising in the caves above her. To the end, she called herself only a follower of those who had gone before.