Khandro Tseringma Rinpoche

Khandro Tseringma Rinpoche — born Khandro Tsering Kunga Bhuma, and known to most people simply as Khandrola — grew up among farmers and nomads in rural Tibet. She has written her own life in verse, and it is worth reading in her words: from the age of seven she wanted to understand how cause and effect worked among the people around her, and found joy in interdependence and solitary retreat, though her village had no schooling to offer her.

What followed reads as a series of encounters rather than a career. Palden Lhamo appeared to her and told her she would have to go to unfamiliar places at uncertain times. She made her way to the Jowo shrine in Lhasa and to Tashi Lhunpo, poorly fed and poorly clothed, and on pilgrimage met an old hermit who told her to go to India and find the Dalai Lama, and gave her money for the journey. She reached Nepal in 1994 and Dharamsala after that, ill, and — as she writes plainly — was turned away for a long time by staff who would not let her near him.

When she did meet him, the protectors Tseringma and Tenma entered her, and she was enthroned as the Official State Oracle of Tibet for those two goddesses. The Dalai Lama gave her the title Rangjung Neljorma, self-occurring yogini, said she had a particular karmic connection with the Fifth Dalai Lama's Secret Hidden Pure Visions, and authorised her as their doctrine-holder. She then spent ten years in retreat on what he had transmitted, and more than twenty receiving teachings from masters of every Tibetan Buddhist lineage.

She now teaches internationally at his direction. Her subjects are the ones that come out of that training: analytical meditation as a way into direct insight, bodhicitta, emptiness, and the compassion she describes as dawning by itself once emptiness is seen.

She is not Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, who also appears on this site. Both are addressed as Khandro Rinpoche.