Long ago, in the eighth century, the valleys of Bhutan were home to fierce spirits and ancient deities who resisted the teachings of the Buddha. From the faraway land of Oddiyana, the magnificent Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche, emerged in the robes of a wandering yogi. His aura radiated serenity, yet within him burned the fire of unstoppable and uncorrupted power of compassion and wisdom.

On his arrival, the skies darkened as the local spirits stirred, sensing the profound presence of the Guru. With a smile and a piercing gaze, he ascended a rugged peak, his heart attuned to the rhythms of the earth and all the natural elements. With each step, he chanted sacred mantras, sending ripples of light through the valleys, calming the turbulent winds. He didn’t destroy the evil spirits, but tamed them—he had the mastery to awaken the goodness even in the most evil of hearts. 

Stories of Guru Rinpoche are heard in every part of the Kingdom of Bhutan. He is considered the second Buddha, responsible for bringing Vajrayana Buddhism to this land, opening an intense exchange of knowledge between India, Tibet, and Bhutan. But Bhutan was never conquered by external powers, and its culture and costumes have been preserved in a vivid and pure form. The current king, His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, encourages his people to wear traditional clothes during official events, to paint their houses with auspicious buddhist symbols, and adorn the intricate wooden windows with layers of carved and colorful wooden blocks.

This was the second time I have brought a group to Bhutan after spending many years leading trips in India. The neighboring countries are dramatically different. What’s immediately noticeable is the clean and well-preserved ecosystem. Coming from India to Bhutan creates an intense contrast; I like to think that India is a loving yet wrathful mother, while Bhutan is a soft yet mysterious one. I can immerse myself in Bhutan’s dense forests, hiking for many hours and reaching little-known temples, crossing pristine waterfalls, walking beneath towering trees garlanded with moss, encountering caves and cliffs with self-arisen magical signs and mantras carved into the rock by local pilgrims.  

This time I came to Bhutan to better understand the role of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhism—whether dakinis, yidams, or human consorts—without male interpretations. I came closer to the source of these primordial symbols, and sensed their reality in myself as the mysterious feminine energy that conceals and reveals the secrets that men are often unready or unable to experience. Indeed, at each temple that we entered, we heard only magical stories that obscured the deeper meaning, unless we could ease our minds and slip into a different time-space in which our imaginations and experience could expand without imposed conceptual limits. The fantastical narratives invited us to suspend our rational minds, but they also confined us to inherited, and limiting, beliefs. It’s a thin line between being open to magic and submitting to superstition.

Magic is never literal; it’s a way of seeing that demands both openness and generosity, as well as discernment so as not to fall into adoration of new fabricated gods. Real magic is to dwell in an indeterminate territory, as if between waking and dream. You cannot prove it and you cannot deny it. By being attentive to the gaps in my own perception while listening to the traditional narratives, I try not to bring any judgment or comparison, but remain open like a child in awe.

Like when I heard the story of Dzongdrakha Temple not far from the town of Paro, perched on a vertical cliff very much like the famous Tiger’s Nest, as told by the words of Dorji Wangchuk: “In the 15th century, a Tibetan yogi, Drupthop Gyempo Dorji followed his master in search of a place called Zhungphug in Bhutan. When he reached the present day Wochu, a jackal appeared to show him the way to the rocky cliff. Legend says that the Guru appeared in person and passed him a crystal sword, with which he struck the rock face. A crystal stupa and three egg-shaped relics of Sangye Yoesung (Buddha Kashyapa) were revealed. Two of the relics flew off: one was taken by the divinities, and one by the subterranean beings and the one he kept, he built a chorten (stupa) to secure the relics that trembles during the auspicious days. The chorten is curiously only half-built as the top one-third is believed to be in the realm of gods and the base is in the subterraneans of the nagas. Legend says that one day it will either fly away or drown in there.”

We visited the stupa at the cliffs of Dzongdrakha, home of one of the five mountain-spirit sisters who are adored for bringing wealth and long life. The day we visited we could see the stupa, but workers were already building walls around it to cover it completely. The reason was that miracles had been attributed to the special stupa and people had begun removing pieces in the belief that it literally possessed healing powers. But in doing so they were bringing it almost to ruin! We were lucky to see the old stupa before it was covered up, and not only the stupa but also other relics—one of them a statue of Guru Rinpoche that had reputedly spoken about where it wanted to be placed. 

In order to access magical wisdom, the question should not be, “Is it true?” or, “Did it really speak?” When I heard the story, my mind went back to my childhood, when my parents used to read to me and tell me magical stories. I didn’t question whether or not they were real, I just let myself be amazed and enjoyed the ride on the back of a unicorn who could fly and take me faraway from the dark monsters who used to terrify me. Other mythical beings took me to other places, where little girls lived inside mandala-like flowers. And in imagining all of these fantastic things, I would fall peacefully asleep, contented to be part of such a rich and interesting world. Something within me knew that the stories weren’t literal, yet at the same time they built my inner world where different moods, feelings, and thoughts churned. 

Today I know that thoughts are energy and that energy is what builds the material world that we call “reality.” How we feed our thoughts also shapes the person we are in the world. Thoughts are the seeds of everything that unfolds in the “real world.”

The most magical, transformative, and powerful magical story I can think of now is the idea of God. We have perhaps never met “Him” or “Her,” but belief in God has moved the world for thousands of years, bringing communities of faith together and also terrible divisive wars. The energy that belief generates gave mankind the power to construct temples, cathedrals, churches, mosques, and most of the world’s grand monuments. But where is this God if not inside our deepest imagination? I dare to wonder if we ourselves are the imagination of some god.  

So here I am in Bhutan, hearing everyday magical stories of flying yogis, shape-shifting women, an ogre the size of the country, and even a “divine madman” who used to perform miracles with his phallus. The temple dedicated to him is Chimi Lhakang in Punakha, where people still go today for fertility rituals. Many (I have heard most) report bearing offsprings usually a year after their visit. Does it really have magical powers or has the energy built by the community’s belief created a collective consciousness of fertility that one can somehow access?

Leading a group of 15 people for this trip allowed me to realize that there was some magic we could also generate as a group: in every temple we visited, some monk would show us a secret chamber with rarely seen relics, making each one of us feel so lucky, special, and blessed—I could see in their faces the warm glow and joy of the experience. There we were between accepting the magic and seeing it as mere superstition, but I believe that there is something in between. Probably the right word to describe it would be “mystery”—one recognizes that it’s there but one can’t fully explain it. 

Walking back through the thick forest from Chompoo Temple we could observe eye shapes in trees and rocks that the people believe are the eyes of the dakinis themselves. I allowed myself to imagine that I was walking across and inside her body, to suddenly experience the feeling of being her body, inseparable from the skin of the trees and the lungs of the clouds running down the high, muscular mountains. That vision made the whole day a magical experience. I recalled Vajravahari’s face, with three open eyes: two horizontal, and one vertical between her brows, also called the third eye, which sees beyond appearances, beyond logic, and is intimate with the mystery; the eye that can see in the dark and sense the future; the eye that can see beauty in the ordinary, sadness in a fake smile, and joy in a tear. Having this eye open is magical, bringing color and music and flavor into our lives. 

If we analyze our desires for things such as cars, houses, clothes, careers, relationships, we will find that what we are actually seeking lies beyond the thing itself. We want the thrill, the magic. In some sense, it’s not the lover that we want, we want love; it’s not the car, it’s the horse-power within; it’s not the clothes, it’s the wish to be seen. But what if we could attain these experiences without having to expend so much effort chasing after things without developing our senses to experience the real magic? In so many cases, we get what we want but still can’t feel any joy (or perhaps for a very brief moment). This is not because the object is lacking anything, but because our third eye is not open, with the capacity to see the beauty and the magic. Creating a rich, imaginative, and free inner world is what makes any object, any job, and any person enjoyable and fulfilling. In other words, a beautiful life does not depend on where you are or what you have, but on how perceive and how you see things. As in the aphorism that some attribute to Plato, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, or to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost (1598):

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.

In looking for the wisdom of the dakinis in Bhutan, I realized that it is more about merging into her mystery, finding “her” within us—the magical key of unlimited imagination, undefined concepts, not believing literally and not disbelieving. She lies in between the lines, in between the breaths, in between the trees and rivers, in between two spoken words, and in between a half smile and a gaze. It reminds me of Lex Hixon’s translation of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which describes her “wisdom body” as unfindable, unthinkable, indescribable, indecipherable, indefinable, ungraspable, unformulatable, inconceivable, incomparable, unlocatable, unisolatable, unapproachable, unchangeable, unreachable . . . walking in the wild, feeling the presence of Her without seeing or tasting or touching literally, but somehow experiencing Her in total mystery.

There’s a beautiful exceprt from the Dao De Jing, which os probably appropriate here:

Look and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.
Above, it isn’t bright.
Below, it isn’t dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.
Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

Arriving at the top after a few hours’ walk, we reached Chompoo Temple, the Temple of the Floating Dakini, with a statue of the dakini Vajravahari that is said to have been discovered in the cave behind the waterfall, the size of a cat. But once it was placed in the temple, the statue grew to the size of a tall person while the base of her foot does not touch the ground, giving her the appearance of levitating. I looked closely at her foot, indeed it wasn’t touching the ground. I allowed myself to be transported back to my childhood, not thinking it was real or unreal. I simply looked in wonder and stayed with that feeling. And it was magical. Such feelings make my heart levitate. With moist eyes and a soft smile, I bowed to Vajravahari. 

As His Holiness Sakya Trizin once commented: “The main method that is used in Vajrayana is to stop seeing things as ordinary. So you should see all these things as transcendental wisdom and oneself in the form of a deity, and all sounds as mantra, and every thought that comes as transcendental knowledge. Although at the moment you are just visualizing, you are just imagining, gradually your attachment to the ordinary vision loosens and you strengthen your path in the Vajrayana tradition.”

See more

Tiffani Gyatso
Yangchenma Arts & Music

Related features from BDG

Inner Sanctuaries and the Temples of Tibet
Creative Happiness: A Journey through Suffering and Joy
The Secret of All Demons

See more from Geometry of Life by Tiffani Gyatso