Machig Labdron — “the Singular Mother, Lamp of Lab” — is the great female master and founder of the Chöd (“Cutting”) tradition: an enlightened Tibetan woman of the eleventh-twelfth century who developed a unique and powerful tantric practice and stands as one of the very few women to originate a major lineage of Buddhist teaching. She is revered as a fully realized master and an emanation of the wisdom-mother.
The Singular Mother
Machig Labdron was a Tibetan woman of extraordinary spiritual gifts, renowned from childhood for her remarkable ability to recite and understand the sacred texts. She became a great practitioner and yogini, and through her realization she developed and systematized the practice of Chöd, drawing on the “Perfection of Wisdom” teachings on emptiness. She is one of the rare figures — and the rare woman — to be the source and founder of a distinct lineage that spread through all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, an accomplishment of singular importance.
The Practice of Cutting
The practice Machig founded, Chöd (“Cutting” or “Severance”), is one of the most striking in all of Buddhism. Its aim is to cut through the root of all suffering — the clinging to a self — through a radical visualization: the practitioner mentally offers up their own body, visualizing it cut up and given as food to all beings, to the demons and the hungry ghosts and the buddhas alike, severing forever the attachment to the body and the ego. Practiced often in terrifying places — charnel grounds, cemeteries, haunted sites — to the sound of a drum, bell, and thigh-bone trumpet, Chöd confronts and transforms fear itself, using the body as the offering that cuts the bonds of self-clinging. It is a fearless, transformative practice of generosity and the realization of emptiness.
The Mother of a Lineage
Machig Labdron is revered as an emanation of [yeshe-tsogyal] and of the wisdom-goddess, a fully enlightened master whose teaching transcended sectarian boundaries and endures as a living practice to this day. As one of the few women to found a major Buddhist lineage, and as the source of the profound and fearless practice of Chöd, she holds a place of supreme honour in Tibetan Buddhism, an inspiration especially to women and to all who would cut through the root of fear and self. In Machig Labdron, Tibetan Buddhism honoured the great mother of Chöd — the enlightened woman who founded the “Cutting” practice that severs the attachment to self, offering the body to all beings in the charnel grounds, a singular female master and the source of a fearless and transformative path.