Palden Lhamo

Palden Lhamo (Sanskrit Shri Devi) is the foremost protective deity of Tibet, the special guardian of the Gelug school and of the line of the Dalai Lamas, and the only female figure among the eight great wrathful dharmapalas, the protectors of the teaching. She is depicted in a terrifying form, riding a mule across a sea of blood, the mule's saddle resting on the flayed skin of her own son, a fierce image whose story is that she killed her son when he grew up to harm the teaching, and turned even this into a vow of protection. Her attributes and her frightful setting mark her, like the other wrathful protectors, as a power whose ferocity is directed against the enemies of the Dharma and the obstacles to practice, not against beings as such; in the understanding of the tradition the wrath is an aspect of enlightened activity in a forceful mode.

Palden Lhamo has a particular connection with the affairs of Tibet: the sacred lake associated with her, Lhamo Latso, was traditionally consulted for visions to help in the search for the reincarnations of the Dalai Lamas and other high teachers, and she is invoked as the guardian of the Tibetan government and people. She belongs to the class of Vajrayana meditational and protective deities whose full practice is transmitted within the tradition; described here at the level of her public role and iconography, she stands as the fierce maternal defender of the teaching and of the land under its care.

The practice of seeking visions on the surface of Lhamo Latso to help identify the reincarnation of a deceased Dalai Lama has specific, well documented historical instances, among the most often cited being the search that led to the recognition of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, in the 1930s. Following the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1933, the regent overseeing the search, Reting Rinpoche, is recorded by Tibetan historical accounts and by the Dalai Lama's own later writings as having traveled to Lhamo Latso and observed visions on the lake's surface that were interpreted as indicating specific Tibetan letters and images pointing toward a monastery and a general region, understood afterward to correspond to Kumbum monastery and the wider Amdo region in what is now Qinghai province in China, guiding the search party that eventually identified and tested the young child who would become the fourteenth Dalai Lama. This episode is frequently retold, including in the Dalai Lama's own autobiographical accounts, as a central and formative part of the modern narrative of his own recognition, giving Palden Lhamo's oracular lake a documented and historically specific role in one of the most consequential religious-political successions of twentieth century Tibet.

The practice continues to be regarded within the tradition as a legitimate and important, though not exclusive, method for guiding the search for high reincarnate teachers generally, used alongside dreams, astrological calculation and other divinatory methods, and Lhamo Latso's association with Palden Lhamo gives this specific body of water a continuing religious and political significance well beyond its natural geographic features alone.