When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty

While male reincarnations (tulkus) in Tibetan Buddhism, most notably the Dalai Lama, have long captivated western scholars, female incarnation lineages are far less common. Hildegard Diemberger's latest book, When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet, focuses on one of the few and certainly the most prominent example of an incarnation lineage that was began and has been continued by women: the Dorje Phagmo lineage based at the institution of Samding on the shores of Yamdrog Lake in Tibet. In her riveting study of the woman and the deity that inspired this religious lineage, Diemberger has established a compelling model of scholarship for students of Tibetan social history and gender studies. While the incarnations of Samding Dorje Phagmo have been held up on repeated occasions as examples of powerful women in the male-dominated religious landscape of Tibet, little was known about the beginnings of the lineage. This changed with the discovery in a Beijing archive of the fifteenth-century biography of Chokyi Dronma (1422–1455/6), the Gungthang princess turned religious teacher and original progenitor of the Dorje Phagmo incarnation lineage. This text was made available to Diemberger, who has previously written extensively on Tibetan female oracles and the history of the Bodongpa lineage, with which Chokyi Dronma is associated. While the lucid translation of this biography that makes up the central section of the book is ground-breaking on its own for the information it provides on subjects as diverse as gender, authority, and engineering, the more remarkable part of this book is the commentary that Diemberger has written around the translation—a history of the lineage of the famous Samding Dorje Phagmo, from its beginnings through incarnations to the present, where the current incarnation serves in the Communist government in modern Tibet. In her commentary, Diemberger engages with the Samding Dorje Phagmo lineage as a living tradition, and thus provides a captivating narrative of the mechanisms used in the establishment and consolidation of religious authority in Tibet.

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