Terror in Namthar: Reframing Violence in the *Lives* of Tibetan Buddhist Women

To read about women in Tibet is to read about violence. 

If you are thinking, instinctively, of ways to qualify that statement so as to render it less general, less essentializing, let me say first that I would not have stated it so succinctly myself if my students had not been apt, time and again, to conclude as much. Lately, in response to questions about why we read so many “violent” texts in my courses, I have had to rethink my hermeneutics. Where I once thought I was assigning more or less empowering narratives about exemplary Tibetan Buddhist women, my students saw me assigning stories that were first and foremost about terror, cruelty, brutality, and assault. Undoubtedly, this perception says something about the ubiquity of violence in our present-day lives. But it also says something about the prevalence, or even the preponderance, of violence in the *lives* of Tibetan Buddhist women, and our tendency to look only indirectly or fleetingly at that violence.

Above all, this paper will venture two things. First, it will characterize some of the typical frameworks scholars use to discuss violence against women in traditional Tibetan Buddhist narratives. Second, it will suggest certain ways we might discuss such violence differently. Beyond probing our usual scripts for talking about disturbing scenes in the lives of female practitioners, my overall aim is to uncover ways to analyze violence that do not always emphasize, whether implicitly or explicitly, what happens *in spite of* it. 

To do so, I look to the life story of the “foremost female figure” and “pre-eminent female exemplar” (Gyatso 2006) in Tibetan Buddhism, namely Yeshé Tsogyal. If, as Robert Campany (2009) once put it, hagiographies are “artifacts of an attempt to persuade an audience,” then the hagiography of Yeshé Tsogyal is nothing if not a story intent on compelling its audience to bear witness to the violence experienced by its protagonist. One could take either of the better-known, full-length accounts of Yeshé Tsogyal’s life, either Drimé Kunga’s (b. 1347) in the fourteenth century or Taksham Nuden Dorjé’s (1655–1708) in the seventeenth, in isolation or as of a piece and come away with the same impression. Drimé Kunga’s version, for example, opens on heated verbal and physical conflict. For refusing to marry, Yeshé Tsogyal’s father sanctions her torture and execution, and she herself threatens suicide if she is not allowed to practice Dharma. Ultimately, her father sentences her to exile, but from there, she is dragged away and tortured, once again, by a suitor’s henchmen. Then she is bound in chains and imprisoned in a pit. All of this happens before she is beaten unconscious by wrathful *yoginīs*; before bandits rob her, or, as in Taksham’s account, rob and rape her; and before she descends into hell. 

In scholarship, mine included, it is common to see these events and kindred others, in other women’s lives, referred to broadly as “gruesome scenes,” “traumatic events,” “extreme hardships,” “trials and tribulations,” and so on. Ultimately, each of these phrasings could be called accurate but superficial, for they group incidents of violence and avoid specificity, often in the name of moving on to talk about something else. Particular events are also commonly deemed “obstacles” to liberation. Indeed, Yeshé Tsogyal herself is given to articulating some of what she endures this way, and once again, the accuracy or applicability of a term like “obstacle” is not in question. Notably, however, it implies a goal, and with that, the term preemptively delimits the possibilities for interpretation. To wit, where “obstacle” is used to describe physical torture or sexual assault, enlightenment is the point. Yet we know that whenever one reads a story that is relentless in its presentation of violence, violence itself begins to feel like the point.

To let that point stand, or simply stand out, even briefly, and allow enlightenment to shift into the background is, at the very least, a way to begin to see it as it is. Beyond that, we may find that sustaining attention to violence helps us see if and how the goal of enlightenment can serve as a pretext for normalizing all the gender-based violence that might precede it, from generalized misogyny to outright physical abuse. Often, we see the *Life of Yeshé Tsogyal* described as a story–the paradigmatic one, in fact–that tells of a woman’s ability to achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime. However, it does not take an interpretive leap to foreground the darker side of the story. The *Life of Yeshé Tsogyal* is a story about a devout woman’s enlightenment; the *Life of Yeshé Tsogyal* is a story of the many violent incidents a devout woman endures before she achieves enlightenment. Both encapsulations are true at once. The former elevates and centers enlightenment–not denying the context out of which it arose, but not overtly signaling it either. The latter not only situates enlightenment back in its brutal narrative framing but also leads with it, just as the story itself does. With that, Yeshé Tsogyal’s life as a *violent* story of one woman’s enlightenment comes into focus, and we can begin to wonder what, if anything, that small shift can do to recalibrate our readings.

Where I suggest we resist the temptation to privilege what happens in spite of violence, I acknowledge that my readers could be thinking, “But aren’t many stories about Tibetan Buddhist women explicitly about attaining enlightenment in spite of experiencing gender-based prejudice, discrimination, and violence?” On this point, I am reminded of Rhiannon Graybill’s (2021) caution against reading stories of rape in the Hebrew Bible in ways that might let the suffering or darkness of such stories consume all the interpretive space around them. Still, at this juncture, it is worth asking just how much and what kind of interpretive space suffering and darkness have actually taken up in our analyses of Tibetan women’s *lives*, not least, of course, where we find rhetorics of redemption, and certainly where we see valorizations of oppression.