Dzogchen or sky-burial? A Tibetan pilgrimage

 

The convent of Gebchak.
Credit: Gyulama 

“Tibet, the path to wisdom” is a slow-paced documentary about a Buddhist nun who leaves her convent and becomes a pilgrim. The nun´s name is Ani Rigsang. According to an ancient Tibetan tradition, a huge female demon is lying across Tibet, her evil energies being the cause of the world´s suffering (!). The demoness is said to be contained by twelve Buddhist temples, and Ani´s pilgrimage takes her to these very temples. Her ultimate goal is Gebchak in eastern Tibet, right between the “eyes” of the imaginary ogre. During her peregrinations, Ani asks several (male) masters about “the yoga of magic heat”, presumably a preliminary stage to the highly esoteric practice known as Dzogchen. One of the masters tells her to go home to her nunnery, another says that you can accomplish everything without wandering, since enlightenment (surprise) can only come from within. A third guru turns out to be dead and worshipped by his followers in the form of a wax effigy, so he obviously can´t tell the nun anything either!

Finally, Ani reaches Gebchak, which turns out to be a collective of female mystics or yoginis, living like nuns in a convent. They gladly show Ani (and the camera crew) some of their peculiar practices, such as wandering in winter cold with a blanket soaked in cold water wrapped around your body (to generate “inner heat”) or sleep in upright position while doing “dream yoga”. The abbess claims that a dying nun recently attained “the body of light” (in other sources called “rainbow body”) and that this miracle was witnessed by the other mystics. The end-point of Dzogchen is the transformation of the physical body into a body in all the colors of the rainbow. According to Wiki, Gebchak is affiliated with the Kagyu branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, but Dzogchen itself is a practice associated with the Nyingma branch.

The story ends with Ani deciding to leave Gebchak and continue her pilgrimage indefinitely, in effect becoming a perpetual wanderer circumambulating Tibet so as to save our world from the demoness…

As already mentioned, the documentary is slow-paced and perhaps not suited for the average watcher (who may not know the Buddhist-Tantric context of the story). Trigger warning: “Tibet, the path to wisdom” actually shows a traditional Tibetan sky-burial. The corpse is placed at a charnel ground and broken into pieces, after which large flocks of vultures simply eat the remains! You heard me. A bit weird to see such a gruesome scene in this particular production, but there you go…

Available on YouTube in all its luminous splendour.