Dorje Phagmo

We often heard the drone of airplanes seeking out places like ours. They were determined to destroy every remnant of Buddhism in Tibet for their godless Master Mao. Farmers were nearly starving but they came, only at night, for fear of being seen from the air, to bring a little milk, a little tsampa—roasted barley flour – some tea. Anything to keep us alive. They wanted to show us how to snare birds that we could cook but we refused to eat any flesh.

My teacher taught me how to warm myself even in the winter blizzards, and how to conserve my energy so I could live on the small amounts of food so we needed little from the mostly homeless farmers who made shelters of tree limbs and had hollowed out other caves. My teacher taught me to leave my body at will. She said if I were tortured and raped I could rise above my body and feel little of the pain. She said there were many other power secrets but I was too young and she was too old. She had very little strength and such teaching demand great strength from both teacher and pupil. A few days before she died, she said she was so old and such a poor dried husk of a human that she could not cry the tears she wanted to cry for me. She said, “You will not forget me as I will not forget you and some day we will be together again—I in a younger body, you far wiser.”

She died and the people who brought food insisted she must be taken to the one lama who remained in the village disguised as a yak herder. Devout and loving people cannot be compelled to disrespect someone like my teacher so they gathered and prayed. But a boy, who had been promised rewards, told the Red Guards who were using our nunnery as a garrison and a jail. He had seen, not often, but a few times, the people who brought me food. The brown clad soldiers came. They were prepared to rape me, but when they stripped off my robe they saw my bare head and all my bones visible just beneath my skin because I had so little food. They saw not a woman–certainly not a fierce sow–but a childlike skeleton, more frightening than tempting.

They took me to the capital to their captain. He send me to prison with all the other anis and monks. He did not know my story and no one would have told him. I was in jail three years. When the others discovered Dorje Phagmo was with them, they shared their meager food with me. I did not want to take it for I knew I could live on less than they but it was their only possible act of worship. It was both very bad and perhaps good for me. My hair grew, long and wavy and my body became as it had not been before. I became beautiful, or so everyone told me. The guards told the new commander of the city who came to see this miracle in the prison where people were dying of starvation and of their beatings and tortures and I, like a wildflower among the stones of the barren mountain, had become beautiful. The guards had raped me, but I was not in my body when they used it for disposal of their semen. Practicing what my teacher taught, I felt as if she were in the filthy prison with me, helping me remember how to find the space in my mind that let me float away from the resisting body.

The commander took me for his own. He locked me in a room in his quarters where I was fed well and dressed in clothing I had not known existed. He insisted on using my body many different ways. He became angry that I seemed a doll and not a woman and beat me when I did not respond to him. He was a bad man, an ugly man but a man who loved the beauty of my body–an idea I almost understood. I learned to respond to him. I learned that my body could feel pleasure. These strange ideas invaded the times when I sat alone in my small room and meditated. I remembered being held and caressed when I was a small child and that I had watched the sow we kept feeding her piglets, grunting with some sounds that seemed to be pleasure. What would my teacher advise? I had no teacher. I had nothing but the Commander who caressed my body and stroked my hair and asked that I do the same to him. “Gently,” he said, “My skin is soft as yours is,” he said. “I have a man’s hard muscles and you have a woman’s soft breasts.”