“I Prayed Fiercely to Never Be Separated from You in All My Future Lives”: Masculine Intimacy Across Lifetimes in the Rang rNam of the Tibetan Buddhist Adept Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé

Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé was a famously mercurial master of tantric Buddhism in nineteenth-century Tibet who penned his autobiography in the twilight of his enigmatic religious career. As the reincarnation of the massively influential nineteenth-century adept Jigmé Lingpa, Do Khyentsé was born into enormous prestige and responsibility—inheriting property, a treasury of precious ritual items, and a vast network of relationships and obligations from his previous life. One of the relationships that features most centrally in his autobiographical writings was with his tsawé lama (rtsa ba’i bla ma), or root teacher, a man named Dodrupchen. Dodrupchen was one of the closest disciples of Jigmé Lingpa, and before Jigmé Lingpa died, he promised Dodrupchen that he would take rebirth in eastern Tibet, Dodrupchen’s homeland, so that Dodrupchen could find him and assume responsibility for his education and training. Jigmé Lingpa fulfilled his promise to Dodrupchen when he took rebirth as Do Khyentsé in the tribal lands of Golok. The relationship between Do Khyentsé and Dodrupchen thus transcended the total ending typically brought by death. Instead, death stood as a portal for transformation, wherein these two men deepened their intimacy across lifetimes by alternating the roles of master and disciple, teacher and student, father and son. 

This paper offers the first-ever English translation and close reading of two of the most affectively charged scenes in Do Khyentsé’s lengthy memoir: his (re)union with Dodrupchen when he is just three years old, and Dodrupchen’s death when Do Khyentsé is twenty-five. These scenes contain some of the most acutely felt emotion in all of Do Khyentsé’s writings, because these men shared a relationship that transcended the boundaries death and rebirth: Dodrupchen identified Do Khyentsé as the reincarnation of his own previous master Jigmé Lingpa when Do Khyentsé was just three years old, and when the two first meet (again) in Do Khyentsé’s infancy, they immediately recognize each other and burst into tears with the emotion of their reunion. Dodrupchen then takes the infant rebirth of his previous master to train as his own disciple. Later, after Dodrupchen dies and Do Khyentsé conceives a son, Do Khyentsé identifies that son as the reincarnation of his beloved teacher, continuing their teacher-disciple dynamic through time, stitched deeply into both spiritual and biological patrilines. 

Their relationship, and Do Khyentsé’s portrayal of it in his autobiography, offers a unique glimpse into masculine affect in a religious context of endless lives—where death is not a final End, but a temporary separation. Nonetheless, the grief Do Khyentsé experiences at hearing of Dodrupchen’s death supercharges his religious practice and propels him into the existentially fraught darkness of the tantric charnel ground, where blood-drinking female deities feast on men’s flesh and bones. This paper thus looks to the poignancy of grief and the intensity of longing for reunion between two of the most famous religious figures of nineteenth-century eastern Tibet. Surfacing two of Do Khyentsé’s most emotionally charged memories with his root teacher reveals a depth of emotional tenderness that is both uniquely religious and uniquely masculine. 

While plenty of Tibetological scholarship has examined the system of catenate reincarnations famed in the Tibetan religious milieu, to date none of it has considered the gendered implications of these homosocial relationships that trans the boundaries between life and death. This paper thus positions the maleness of Do Khyentsé and Dodrupchen as central to their intimacy. While the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has preserved the life stories of a handful of female masters—including Do Khyentsé’s own sister, Losel Drölma—the relationships these female disciples share with their male masters are frequently inflected with romantic overtures, such as the famous case of Sera Khandro. Contrastingly, literary portrayals of non-romantic male-female master-disciple relationships tend to lack the acute intensity of feeling that Do Khyentsé conveys with Dodrupchen. Noteworthy here is Do Khyentsé’s sister Losel Drölma—herself a reincarnation identified by Dodrupchen, but one that does not share the same affective intensity of close emotional intimacy. 

This paper translates and analyzes the scenes of (re)union and (re)separation between two venerated religious men to offer a larger provocation to the field of Buddhist Studies: namely, Buddhist men engage in Buddhist practice and build Buddhist relationships as men, not as the normatively human, gender-neutral paradigms of sanctity often presumed by the tradition (and the scholars of it). Furthermore, Buddhalogical scholarship on the life stories of famous masters tends highlight prominent monks at historically significant inflection points. Do Khyentsé, in contrast, was a noncelibate, nonmonastic religious specialist who fathered children, carried a hunting rifle and machete, consumed alcohol and tobacco, and flaunted the propriety of social convention. To see him express such devotional intimacy runs counter to the Orientalist presumption that pious Buddhist men are celibate, unobtrusive, nonviolent monks. 

In provoking Buddhist Studies, this paper also makes an intervention into the field of Critical Masculinities Studies to argue for the irreducibly religious quality of these trans-lifetime relationships. While the system of catenate reincarnation that enfolds both Do Khyentsé and Dodrupchen undoubtedly carried political, economic, and social ramifications, it also provided a potent crucible for the brewing of religious affect: the care that Dodrupchen and Do Khyentsé share across lifetimes is supercharged by the soteriological concerns pulsing as the lifeblood of the guru-disciple relationship. Only the root guru can catalyze a practitioner’s liberation from the endless cycle of existential horror known as samsara (Skt. saṃsāra, Tib. ‘khor ba). Thus, the care that enfolds these two men as they find each other continually across lifetimes cannot be adequately theorized with secularist models of interpersonal relationships—be they psychological (i.e. Freud), sociological (Weber), or economic (Marx). Rather, when we tend closely to the relationship between Do Khyentsé and Dodrupchen, we find two men enmeshed deeply in webs of prestige, responsibility, ritual, clan relations, and spiritual striving. Their relationship offers an important corrective to the ontological presumptions of Abrahamic traditions that assume death is an irrevocable end; for accomplished masters like Do Khyentsé and Dodrupchen, death is a portal for spiritual transformation and deepening intimacy.