Machig Labdron

Chod means cutting, and what is to be cut is the grip of self. The practice, in outline, is this: the practitioner goes to a place that frightens people, a charnel ground, a mountain pass, a spot known for demons, plays a drum and a thighbone trumpet, and formally invites every hungry, harmful and afflicted being to come and eat. Then, in visualisation, the practitioner's own body is separated from consciousness and offered as the meal.

The theatre of it is what people remember and it is the least of it. The doctrinal ground is the Perfection of Wisdom, the teaching that the self, the body and the demons are all empty of any independent existence, and the point of the exercise is to test whether that teaching has actually been absorbed or merely learned. The demons that matter, in Machig's own analysis, are not the ones in the dark. They are the internal ones: attachment, aversion, and above all the pride of the practitioner, which she treats as the hardest of the four to cut.

Chod cuts across the Tibetan schools rather than belonging to one, and its liturgies are still practised. The atlas describes the practice and does not set it out as instruction: the tradition transmits it through a teacher, with preparation, precisely because the exercise is designed to be destabilising.

Almost everything in Tibetan Buddhism arrives from India. Teachers went south and west at enormous cost to collect it, translators worked for generations rendering it, and the schools trace their authority through Indian masters. Chod is the exception the tradition points to. Tibetan accounts hold that the practice originated with Machig Labdron in Tibet and was then carried back into India, where Indian yogins received it, which reverses the usual direction of the whole enterprise.

Her formation supports the picture. Before she was a teacher she was a chodpa in the older sense of the word, a professional reciter, employed to read the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures aloud, and she is said to have read at extraordinary speed. She then studied with the Indian master Dampa Sangye, whose Pacification teachings stand beside her own, and combined that inheritance with the scriptural material she had been reciting for years.

She was also a laywoman. She had a partner and children, one of whom continued her lineage, and she taught from that position rather than from a monastery. In a religious culture where authority normally came with ordination and with a male body, a woman who founded a lineage from outside both is a considerable anomaly, and the tradition has preserved her without much apparent embarrassment about it.