Today's speaker is Kate Fitzgerald, who's a recent graduate from the Ohio State University's Department of Comparative Studies.
Her research focuses on contemporary Tibetan religion or rhetoricians, late Buddhism and women's practises.
Her work can be seen in, for instance, the Asian Theatre Journal, The Erotica Handbook of Asian Theatre, the read, the Tibetan and Asian Anthology.
Today, she will talk about the preliminary practises and job blood in East Kallus Palms and the transformative nature of women's labour.
And without further ado, Kitty, take it away. Thanks so much.
I'm going to try to share my screen, hopefully with some success.
OK, can you see the PowerPoint? Yes.
OK, perfect. So thank you so much for inviting me to talk today.
It's been really nice in the past two weeks. And I'm also looking forward to the coming speakers.
It's kind of nice. During during this quarantine self isolation period to get a little bit of scholarly brain food is really nice.
So I'm going to talk. Basically, my talk today comes from one of my chapters, my dissertation.
And then after I'm finished, I also just wanted to mention that if if there's interest that I can also talk a little bit about the
kind of process of performing fieldwork or the transition from field work to dissertation writing,
because that's what's been most fresh in my mind.
So especially for current graduate students, is that if, you know, that's if there are questions about that, it can be helpful to to discuss.
And I'm happy to talk about this. OK.
So I will begin this on the laughs and grimaces simultaneously as she recalls her own preliminary practises.
She shows me on her body where she developed wounds during her prostrations, her palms, her knees, her head.
She closes her eyes tightly and recites mantras breathily in the countenance she adopts whenever she discusses things.
And the met him. She talks about the wear and tear her body experienced while accumulating her
one hundred thousand frustrations of the aching joints and bloody bandages,
which toward her wounds open when she changed them. She speaks of this time, but the combination of pride and reverence.
It was difficult. She completed it. She was changed by it.
So in this paper, I explore the preliminary practises of a group of women in a Tibetan region in rural Qinghai Province called Bumba MEMA.
Specifically,
I focus on nuns and lay women who utilise a set of teachings and practises which are originally composed by the fourth floor Bunjil or Knewton Dorji,
which is on the left side of the screen here.
And the second text, which I have pictured up on the screen just this past January when I was back in the field,
there were new a new set of teachings. Basically, the kind of meat of the teachings were the same.
And by the same individual. But did they they have produced a new text as well.
So the preliminary practises have been compiled and edited in by the current full bundle.
Tenzin Yeaman. I'm pushing these practises and teachings not only initiate practitioners into the Chicken Club you tradition of Tibetan Buddhism,
but also more fundamentally into Vajrayana Buddhism at it as it is practised in this region.
Although amongst Imlay, male practitioners also tend to perform the same preliminary practises.
I focus specifically on women because of their unique relationship with physical labour.
So in this presentation I will address women's domestic labour, child labour,
by which I don't mean child labour, as in like children working in factories.
I mean women giving birth to children. I'm trying too hard to use this word labour.
And I think it comes across more about kids performing labour.
But I mean, the kind of labour involved in giving birth to your child and then rearing them as well as religious labour.
OK, so OLMA Mama is a nomadic area and you shoot Tibetan Autonomous Region.
And it's located on the border between Luncheon and Z. So this map here, you can kind of see that little red splotch on the bottom.
It's a little bit in between the kind of yellow bit to the left of there.
So it's right on the border between those two regions.
The main forms of economic production in this region are a combination of nomadic animal husbandry and caterpillar fungus cultivation.
Nomadic household duties are almost exclusively performed by women, while men take responsibility for the economic duties outside of the home.
And because of a transition within the economy towards settlement and enforced schooling,
which is happening across Tibetan regions, many families have transitioned or partially transitioned into town life.
So opportunities to live with full time nomadic communities are limited.
Nevertheless, the Young Tung family maintains a Full-Time nomadic settlement and continue to use the kind of summer winter camp model.
After ceremonies at a monastery. Sixty seven year old Yelton sister Tiba and her husband gets a tip as the woman here
with the she asked me to give her give them a ride home to their nomadic settlement.
Tipa is a tiny woman, stocky in stature and never seen without her head dressing a heavy crown of amber,
coral, turquoise and bone gems sewn onto claw straps that drape far down her back.
She's quick to smile and loves a bit of gossip, but her fingers are bent at all angles from arthritis and prolonged overuse.
After arriving at dusk, I spend the night in their settlement and when we get up the following morning,
the two day full moon is still out over the mountains and the four women currently
at home are out collecting Yorketown before releasing the axe to Grace for the day.
I squat to pee overlooking the fields where a soft fog is rising off the Mountain Dew and go to wash up and
sip us house where I schedule her son and gets they are still sleeping and the with the youngest children,
Kinjo Pommel, who is tip his daughter and it's all them nunnery.
None is wrangling the stove back to life and tells me there's no hot water yet to wash.
So we use cold water to brush our teeth and wash our faces. A teenage girl,
Tatiana and I take buckets and yolks down to the stream at the bottom of the valley to collect water for the day when Joe Paterno
Bruce tea on the now roaring fire and the men come out of their rooms to ensure the herds are set on course to their proper pastures.
And then they receive breakfast over a breakfast of milk, tea and Sumba.
The family discusses plans for the day.
Everyone is finishing up their morning prayers as a bustle about washing up, eating, dressing and preparing for their work.
Kinjo promos. Prayers are interrupted as she refills tea and washes dishes and table puts down her hand.
Money will to comb the children's hair.
She's rough getting out the nuts, occasionally using the butt of her comb to smack the wiggling and whining children into compliance,
all the while continuing to recite her prayers.
Kinjo Pump continuously has to stop recitations to get up and stoke the fire, replenish water, feed others and go get done.
So much happens in the nomadic household before the sun fully rises and the days where it continues.
There are all waking hours as family members tend to animals clean and then the house and stables cook five meals.
Care for children and transform raw animal products into items that can be consumed or sold.
For women whose families have transition to village or town life, domestic and child care responsibilities shift.
Women are still responsible for waking up before the rest of the family, starting a fire in the stove,
fetching water from wells, preparing tea, waking and dressing children, cooking all the meals.
Keeping the fires lit. Cleaning the house and entertaining guests. But they leave behind the responsibility to collect and process dung for fuel,
milk the herds and make butter and cheese as well as processed meat and other duties as well.
The daily necessities of sustenance can be purchased at a store instead of produced at home,
which theoretically gives women more free time in the home.
In either the nomadic encampment or the town centres, the domestic labour of the household best almost exclusively on the shoulders of women.
These responsibilities and daily activities shape the ways in which women talk about and think about their religious practise.
Women's labour not only encompasses the realm of domestic labour, but also spreads to the duties of child care.
And so child birth rearing, education, discipline and nurturing.
And eight is sixty four years old and has given birth 11 times, four of her children, two boys and two girls have died.
She also adopted an infant after its mother died in childbirth, leaving her with seven biological and one adopted child.
She tells me about the loss of her twin boys a number of times during our time together.
She repeats this story when we discuss my own fertility, a favourite subject amongst my female friends as well as she.
When she recounts her oral history to me alone in her home, her husband away for work, she went into labour and delivered two twin boys herself.
She cut their umbilical cords herself, wrapped them in a blanket and went outside to tend the herds.
If she didn't bring home the animals and milk them. They could die or get ill.
And then the whole family would starve. She was haemorrhaging blood and the twin boys were weak and sickly.
She tried to nurse them and tend the herds. But before her husband could return home, the children died.
She went to a hospital and received an injection to stop her own bleeding. But there was nothing to be done for the babies.
Over the course of nearly three years of fieldwork and interviews,
I came to see that every woman I interviewed over the age of 35 has lost at least one child.
Reasons for this high child mortality rate amongst these women have various causes, including higher rates of pregnancy,
complicate complications like hypoxia from high altitude populations and pre-eclampsia.
Because of the high fat diet of nomads, nomadic populations also lack access to hospitals,
something sometimes living more than a day's journey away from any kind of medical centre.
The climate and environment also play an important role.
This region has habitable camps at over forty five hundred metres, which is well above the tree line,
and temperatures can reach as low as negative 40 degrees Celsius. And there's very high winds as well.
At least one child drowned in a river during my fieldwork period.
So whatever the myriad causes, it is reality of life with its population,
that motherhood comes with the burden of seemingly inevitable child mortality.
In addition to the obvious difficulties of pregnancy and labour,
along with the treacherous emotional processes involved in child loss, women's child rearing duties do not end with birth.
I mean, in this picture with her little girl got pregnant with her fifth child at 40 years old, her next oldest son was 12 years old at the time.
And she recalls to me having to stop him from breastfeeding after she became pregnant,
although he obviously eat solid food and no longer relied upon breast milk for nutrition.
He still suckled for comfort at night or when he was upset after becoming pregnant unexpectedly.
She had to stop him from breastfeeding so that the foetus would not be deprived of the nutrients going to her breast milk.
His experience is not unique in that most mothers stop Breck's breastfeeding one child when they become
pregnant with another due to the enormous strain that breastfeeding and pregnancy put on a woman's body.
Child rearing duties not do not end after menopause either, as most grandparents live with one of their sons and his new bride and continue to
care for their young children until the grandparents are too sick to contribute.
Young children often cleave to their grandparents and frequently sleep with
and are more attached to their grandfather or mother than their own parents.
Mothers and grandmothers can frequently be seen carrying their smallest children
tied to their backs or strapped to their fronts when they carry baskets, water on their backs.
Children in this region are now required to enter school between eight and nine years old.
But traditionally, children stay close to their mothers,
sharing every aspect of life until the child either enters a monastery or marries into another household.
For male children, they will ideally find a bride to enter the home and they will never leave their parents for me.
For example, her journey as a mother and wife began when she was 19 years old, and she continues to breastfeed and care for an infant.
Twenty two years later, when her son decides to marry, she will again take on the responsibility of child care.
Despite the strain of domestic and child labour upon both them as women,
the first entry point into serious religious practise is also physical labour.
Although there's a large diversity across Tibetan Buddhist strict traditions on the timing, order and pace of the preliminary practises,
we might generalise by saying that novices in the new mom and SILC Chen and suckage and cogie
schools of Tibetan Buddhism utilise preliminary practises as a way of initiating new members,
preparing practitioners for tantric initiation and introducing the fundamental practises of the lineage.
The many practise that are divided into these,
the general outer preliminaries and then the extraordinary inner preliminaries, each of which have their own divisions.
The outer preliminaries involve study and contemplation on the fourth thoughts that turn the mind.
What we might also call the four motivations to practise the inner preliminaries involve, as you can see here,
are taking refuge generating Buddha to the reciting the mantra and performing the meditations of USA,
making Mundulla offerings and then performing good or yoga. And there's different kind of divisions of this depending on the teaching.
But this is the specific kind of delineation that's used in this monastery.
I focus in this paper on the first of the inner preliminaries, the process of taking refuge in the three jewels.
So this process involves risk recitation of a specific verse while performing full body frustrations.
This process of frustration, accompanying visualisations and recitation of the refuge pair is repeated one hundred thousand times,
which sounds like a number that you hear a lot in kind of Buddhist literature.
And you kind of think, yeah, a hundred thousand times, but a hundred thousand times is really a significant number of times.
So what does a frustration entail?
Frustration is a movement of the body from a fully erect position to laying completely prone upon the ground and a return to a standing position.
This kind of like a Berbee.
This movement is accompanied by hand motions that place the fingertips together with the thumbs resting in the spaces between the palms.
The hands move up to the crown of the head, down to the throat, down to the heart,
and then open palms facing forward as the body moves down to the floor.
When down on the ground, the arms go straight above the head, palms spot on the ground,
and then the palms, the hands move up to the crown of the head with the fingertips pressed together.
After rising once again to a standing position, the hands return to the heart centre before beginning the process.
Again, this physical act is performed while reciting the refuge prayer, the one that's used in this particular tradition that I have up on the screen.
It's interesting, but it's generally the same kind of idea as all refuge, prayers and visualising in the field of accumulation.
And this is all done. A hundred thousand times. I want to emphasise again.
So how do women themselves understand the act of taking refuge through a process of rather extreme physical labour?
Forty five year old mother of six control tells me how she accumulated three thousand prostrations every day during her preliminary practises.
She downplays her own abilities by telling me of certain monks or young men who can accumulate up to five thousand in one day.
When I point out the fact that she continued to care for a family of eight during this process, she laughs.
I ask her about the effects on her body and she says it was very painful to eat,
walk, sleep, crouch to use the toilet or bend to pick anything up during this time.
But she mentions that she is used to hard work, not unaccustomed to aching joints and sleepless nights.
She tells me however, many prostrations one can do is good, and the point is just to keep going.
Tribune is a 56 year old nun. But she stays at home with her ageing parents approximately half of the year.
She performed her preliminary practises in the nunnery while in retreat.
Her young cousin, who's also a nun, stayed with her to cook, clean and fetch water, keep the stove lit and make tea.
She points to the parts of her body that caused her problems during the practise. Her back, her knees, her shoulders.
She mentions that she performs doesn't. Dozens of fasting rituals is nuni every year.
So she knows that discomfort is best dealt with gradually.
You can get used to anything you do, enough of prostrations or more mental and physical, she says.
So she still suggests anytime that one feels exhausted, it's just rest in the beautiful emptiness of the mind that comes from exhaustion.
But don't rest too much or too long, she says to sit for one minute after every prayer beads cycle,
which is one hundred and eight frustrations, and then break apart the sessions. Many of the women took time away from their household.
Their monastic duties during their preliminary practise is to do a kind of retreat.
But others had to squeeze in domestic and child care duties around their busy schedule.
So women presented the following as one example of an ideal schedule while performing the first step of the preliminary practises.
So for daily practise sessions broken apart around the larger three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner in this region, there are five main meals,
but the three breakfast, lunch, dinner or the kind of larger, more important meals and then interspersed with the secondary two meals.
So the kind of mid-morning and mid afternoon snacks, but their meals as well.
And then along with various tea breaks. So when women emphasised again and again that it is very important to eat enough food and to sleep well.
But it is also important not to rest too much.
If your muscles get cold and stiff, it will be even more difficult to get going again, according to the children.
The nun from the previous photo, the best method is to maintain a slow but steady spit pace throughout all waking hours
from the beginning days when the body is still adjusting to this new level of exercise.
Maintain this same schedule, but move more slowly. So, for example, you might kind of do a lot of calculations involved in this.
So in the beginning you might imagine aiming for one hundred prostrations per hour, but then maybe you can work yourself up to six hundred per hour.
So 20 per 100 per every 20 minutes.
But she mentions don't focus too heavily on the number of frustrations, but rather on maintaining the quality of your meditation and intention.
But also do not stop even when the meditation falters or the mind wanders.
Keep moving. Keep pushing forward. This message was consistent through all the advice I received.
Transfer information on the Buddhist path is not soft and pleasant, but neither is a woman's life.
So keep going. So religious and domestic labour are both forms of work, as in their systems of action that produce results.
Religious and domestic labour are also ways of indicating morality, good behaviour and dedication to parents duties or monasteries.
Women perform more labour than their male counterparts.
And this unique relationship with physical labour is conceived of in two important ways by the women of America.
Mama. The first is as an obstacle to practise. And the second is as an essential element of liberation.
In either of these cases, Labour does something to women. It either prevents them from having the time,
resources or freedom to participate in religious sex activities or their domestic labour makes them better practitioners.
This is the kind of two ways that women frequently talked about the relationship between their religious practise and their domestic labour practises.
This framework of efficacy both indicates productivity as well as plot relies upon labour and effort as a transformative tool.
These two ways of understanding the relationship between labour and religious realisation are not mutually exclusive.
And the same woman might express both views even over the course of one conversation.
Domestic labour is both the same Zorich burden that detracts from spiritual practise,
as well as a training for both the aversion to this and toric world necessary to begin the spiritual journey,
as well as the extreme dedication and perseverance necessary to achieve spiritual accomplishment.
OK, so first on the on on Labour as a as an obstacle.
So one way that women talk about domestic labour, especially related to the household in childcare,
is that it's a distraction and an impediment to practise.
This is an argument familiar to both male and female householders throughout Buddhist history.
The argument being that the home and its demands detract from the householder's ability to break away from this entire world.
Adding a layer of gendered analysis, I find that female interviewees are much more likely to bring up their domestic
duties in relationship to religious practise than their male counterparts.
When asking nuns, for example, at telling nunnery about their experiences becoming nuns, almost every nun stated that they chose a religious life,
at least in part to avoid the pain and suffering of marriage and its subsequent labour.
So I've got to here quote a little vignette from my Field Notes.
So it's in the present tense. I think I get my tenses mixed up a lot in these field note pieces.
So bear with me. I went with this animal to its own nunnery to deliver some medicine and deity cards to
the retreat centre where nine nuns are in their first month of their three year retreat.
We stop at the house of Nundle. We go through old cassette tapes together because no one believes they are starting to deteriorate with age.
There are two types of Lamberton cinema's music which we listen to with joy.
There's also a tape of lummox in cinemas preliminary practise teachings,
which is almost that he made for her because they were not able to meet often during her preliminaries.
She says the teachings were really helpful and enabled her to complete her practises.
We then sit around and gossip about former nuns who now put on makeup and post pictures with boyfriends, and we chat.
We watch videos from the wedding of numbers niece enough to. She married two nephews of one of the lamas at the monastery.
No, over. Can't tell. Her niece cried when she had to be married because they all agree that becoming a wife is pure of suffering.
And this somewhat teases me that I should become a nun.
And I explained that it is very difficult to be a nun in America with no monastic community, no source of income and no teacher.
They tell me that becoming a nun would actually limit my mobility and my opportunities to travel and benefit others.
They say that what I'm doing now is better than becoming a nun. So I quote this entry from my Field Notes at length to highlight a few things.
The first is the point of view of nuns about marriage, a point of view shared by a lot of women, laywomen as well.
Marriage is painful in this region. Marriage generally occurs when a young woman leaves home and enters the household of her husband.
Although some women marry into a household close to their own homes, many women marry into into a household a significant distance from their parents.
Women generally have the right to return to their parents home once per year for a visit or if there is an illness or birth.
There are some occasions when a man, a man would leave his family and enter the family of his wife.
But this practise is looked down upon in this region, and men in this situation are viewed as having lacking economic power within the home.
When women enter a household, they often marry all the brothers of the home at once.
This practise developed in order to keep hereditary lands together and prevent multiple brothers from demanding separate plots of land or herds,
and thereby diminishing the wealth of the family unit.
The tradition remains and use today because nomadic life requires a lot, a large amount of work,
and having more than one young man and a home is seen as a great advantage. For example,
of one husband remains at the nomadic settlement to tend the herds and another husband can
take animal products to sell in a distant region without leaving the home vulnerable.
Women tend to not be able to drive or to have any formal education, making them less able to participate in informal economies in town centres.
But they are needed in the home to care for the frequently large family of her in-laws, husbands and children.
As the nuns pointed out to me, for a young woman. Marriage means separation from one's own family as well as introduction into an unfamiliar family.
Almost all marriages are still arranged, although this practise is really changing rapidly.
In addition, marriage means the beginning of taking the responsibility of a new household, which can include up to four generations and many members.
For most women, marriage marks the beginning of a life of labour and the dawning nunnery.
Nuns are grateful to be excused from that form of labour.
Nevertheless, the nuns aversion to marriage was not just a foil for praising their own lifestyle.
When I expressed to them why it would be difficult for me to become a nun,
they responded very quickly and adamantly that the restrictions placed on them as nuns were
prohibitive in many ways and that my position as a childless laywoman was actually preferrable.
So this was a topic that we discussed frequently. Many cited travel restrictions placed on them by the government,
as well as monetary restrictions that prevented them from working and saving money in Tibet independently, as well as this kind of cultivated.
But at the same time, loathed shyness,
all those forces that prevented them from seeking out educational opportunities or attending teachings from Lomez and other Buddhist institutions,
or from maybe doing spiritual retreats in foreign places, places far from home.
I mention this because I think it's important to note that the nuns did not have
a romantic vision of being a nun in opposition to the suffering of married life.
They recognised the ways in which all life passed, have restrictions and that their nun Hood, does not shield them from the burden of duty.
Joe Plumber is also a delinquent nun who wears robes and maintains her vow.
But she lives at home in a nomadic settlement in Utah. She's.
I don't know how to point on this. Can you see my my. My little.
It's this one. If you can't see me, I'm trying to point to her with my pointer, but I'm not sure if you guys can see she's like.
Yeah, you can see this right here. The daughter in law of her household.
So her brother's wife got fed up with nomadic life and demanded that she and one of the brothers moved to the town centre.
They took a few of the children with them, but left too behind,
feeling that the two grandparents and one son were not equipped to take care of the two children
settlement and the herds and their own control from a what's called home from the nunnery.
Whenever I visit, she said, she has her prayer book propped open on the table,
which she references once in a while as she recites her prayers while adding yakked onto the stove.
She also cooks all the household meals, bathes and entertains the two small children,
fetches water, milks the herds, collects and dries the down, etc. One afternoon.
Could you come on? I were sitting by the fire cleaning dirt and debris from the caterpillars.
So nuns are not allowed to pick the other global caterpillar fungus,
but they're illogically in them cleaning the dirt and debris from the caterpillars.
And she talks about her life. She would prefer to stay at the nunnery, she says, because there's less work there.
There's less work is not simply about having more free time, but about having more mental space,
although there is still a lot of work to do to maintain life in the nunnery. It is quieter.
The kids don't scream. Guests don't come by demanding attention.
The family dramas that occupy a central part of any household, they're kind of dulled by distance.
But the decision is not hers to make. When her parents agree that she can leave again, she'll leave.
If they decide she must stay. She will stay. Her brother is a monk studying in a monastic college nearby.
But it would be unthinkable to call him home to care for the family. It is not a discussion nable point.
Laywomen like none's often talk about marriage and domestic life as a heavy burden on their religious practise.
When women talk about their religious practises, they would do if only they had more time.
It might be simply rhetorical, a way of simultaneously showing domestic dedication and a virtuous aspiration.
Maybe the same way that we talk about future exercise goals or charitable donations to be given in a kind of fictional future.
So they might be kind of rhetorical device. In some ways.
But there are also instances where women's labour practises directly impede their ability to attend religious activities poky to the woman.
And then Red is an extremely tall and buxom woman.
She's married for the second time and lives near a monastery where her oldest child lives as a monk.
I visit her home one morning and her husband suggests we go circumambulation,
monastery and climb the mountain to the retreat complex up on its hillside.
I ask Pilkey to join us, but her husband interrupts to say she cannot leave the house or the fire will go out.
Later in the year, Pookie and I worked together in the monastery kitchen during the annual festival.
She calls me to go with them every time there's a blessing to be received. So we can go into the assembly hall together.
I ask her each time what empowerment is being given and what blessing we are receiving.
And she says again and again, how am I supposed to know? We're all in the kitchen together.
But she asks the monk for me each time and reports back her answer.
We hide away during our break so she can sing nomadic songs and complain about her varicose veins.
So the second way that women describe their relationship with Labour is as deliberative tool.
I bring Nundle back to the nunnery this morning and the way we chat about why it seems
that so many nuns are performing retreats while so few monks are doing the same.
She says that many lamas, including monasteries, own organ doget and Party and Kimpo to download.
You have repeated many times that nuns are better practitioners than monks.
They know how to work hard and have a strong motivation for practise. Whereas monks like to play and joke around.
So this idea of deliberative tool menace manifests itself in two ways.
One, that women have more difficult lives and therefore more easily develop aversion to the material world.
And to that, women are trained from a young age to work diligently and have strict discipline, which are necessary traits for their religious life.
For a religious life. One of the main catalysts for practise is a.
An aversion to the Somsak world in order to turn away from samsara, a practitioner must realise the inherent suffering of Somsak existence.
This realisation, of course, can come about through various avenues,
like seeing the suffering of others or intellectually understanding the impermanence and suffering.
The kind of cycle of life and death, etc. There's a lot of pathways to it.
But women claim that their own experiences with suffering make them realise
more quickly and more urgently that the world contains boundless suffering.
This manifests itself in the pain of leaving home to become a bride in a strange household,
of marrying into a large family, of taking on the responsibility of fetching water, lighting the fire,
rising first, sleeping last, cooking all meals, cleaning all dishes, kneading the dough, baking the bread,
bearing the children, breastfeeding the children, cleaning urine and excrement off those children,
performing the milking, collecting fresh dung and spreading it to dry,
collecting more water sometimes from a stream covered in ice more than a kilometres walk away, taking care of ageing parents in law,
satisfying the needs of all male brothers of the household, all without the ability to read, write,
drive a car, open a bank account, or leave the confines of home without permission or a chaperone.
When discussing with women whether or not their lives are more difficult than those of their male counterparts or their male relatives,
I'm almost always met with laughter. It is laughable to even question out loud whose lives are more difficult.
Not only are women more experienced in the painful nature of some sorrow, but their lives of labour cultivated from a very early age.
Prepare them mentally and physically for a life of religious labour.
But as liberation is often framed as a difficult, tedious and vicious process, one that requires extreme dedication,
devotion, faith and perseverance, liberation through Vajrayana is not for the faint of heart.
And women have cultivated that knowledge in their lived experiences from a very young age.
At the end of the prostration accumulation portion of one's preliminary practises can be a bit anticlimactic.
After days or months of work, practitioners prostrate for the last time, not really knowing how to stop.
They sit down. They move forward to the new accumulations. Their muscles trained to always move in the same way.
Frustration after frustration. Hour after hour, day after day, the body has been broken down.
The ego new ball demolished, ready to begin the next step in their preliminary practises.
It's tempting to imagine that because Labour is transformative. It is also inherently good for women that these toils are romantic and value positive.
Far from shifting the paradigm, we would just be squat swapping in variables.
The philosophic and literary avenues of Budish study are less pure Buddhism than the bodily labours of the masses.
But that's not what I hope to achieve. And I don't think that's really the argument that any women themselves are making.
First of all, the women of boomer member themselves maintain an ambivalent attitude toward the productive power of Labour.
On the one hand, domestic and child labour can be a distraction from and a catalyst toward religious practise.
So labour of the body within the home can build the necessary skills of perseverance, patience and endurance needed.
First, a strong spiritual practise.
On the other hand, the women, the work that women perform in the household can hold them back from having the time,
energy and resources needed to devote to something like their preliminary practises.
The very physically demanding entry into religious practise presented in the preliminary practises is a form of labour productive,
an inevitable aspect of religious life that produces real results.
Something happens to these women when they perform a hundred thousand prostrations.
The calluses and wounds and aching joints are an external manifestation of an internal process of submission.
But submission is not inactive.
Women take time out of their labour, fill days to turn their minds and bodies toward the object object of their refuge.
They do so not out of convenience, but out of devotion and faith for Allama, for the teachings and for the promise that this labour will change them.
And that transform transformation, I argue, is at the heart of tantric practise in contemporary Tibet.
So I didn't.