A friend emailed me this link yesterday:
http://buddhism.about.com/b/2010/08/18/new-play-about-yeshe-tsogyal.htm
Here is the text from “Barbara’s Buddhism Blog” By Barbara O’Brien
New Play About Yeshe Tsogyal
Wednesday August 18, 2010
The 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe, September 3-18, will include a new play on the life of Yeshe Tsogyal. Yeshe Tsogyal was a woman of 8th century Tibet who is revered as a Buddha and thought to be the first enlightened Tibetan.
(There are a number of biographies of Yeshe Tsogyal on the web, and of course they all tell very different stories; some highly mythologized, others less so. This page on the website of His Holiness the Karmapa gives one of the more detailed biographies of the great lady, so that’s the version of her life story I’m going with.)
Anyway, in her early life Yeshe Tsogyal was raped by a suitor and then placed into the harem of an emperor. The emperor gave her to Padmasambhava, a great patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism and one of the first Indian masters to enter Tibet. Padmasambhava set the girl free and became her guru. Eventually she would be recognized as a dharma heir of Padmasambhava and a fully enlightened Buddha.
The play, ALL VICTORIOUS OCEAN, was written by Joanna Rotte. Rotte says the play focuses on how Yeshe Tsogyal transformed the brutal experiences of her youth. “The way in which she handled her experience of rape was different than anything I had heard of,” Rotte said. “She was able to see differently. Her presence–how she received the aggression and how she could transform it. The story is that the rapists became great practitioners.”
I heard a dharma talk about women in Buddhism last weekend that I want to write about, probably in the next post, and this story relates. If you start digging, you find there are many stories of remarkable, spiritually accomplished women in Buddhist history, going back to Mahapajapati. Yet too often the details of their lives and even their names have been lost. Over the centuries the record keepers swept women’s history under the rug, so to speak. And I’m certainly not picking on Tibetan Buddhism alone here; you can find this in all schools, I suspect.
So let us be grateful that Yeshe Tsogyal is remembered, and may her life and practice inspire us all
