Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote is from our friend and former Naropa University prof Lama Sarah Harding. Sarah is a lama in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, who in 1980, under the supervision of H.E. Kalu Rinpoche, completed the very first three-year retreat ever for westerners. Her published translations include Creation & Completion: Essential Points of Tantric Meditation, Machik’s Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chöd, and the brand new Niguma, Lady of Illusion. She’s also a complete delight, the bee’s knees — one of my favorite people. This is it — from the introduction to Machik’s Complete Explanation, pg. 22-3.:

It is hard to find the point in time or myth when a regular struggling spiritual aspirant makes the leap over into legend. For women this was an especially rare feat. In Tibetan society, once a woman catapults over the social limitations of gender and comes to occupy a position of strength, the transformation is radical, and she is equally respected without reservation by males and females as the paradigm of enlightenment. We might say that the ideal feminine principle so esteemed in the theoretical underpinnings of Tibetan Buddhism and the real life of women line up, for a change, if only posthumously.