AC: The Tibetan Buddhist system has also been accused of being extremely patriarchal, with a structure that traditionally keeps women in second-class positions. One of the most outspoken critics of that system even went so far as to say that "the patriarchal structure of Tibetan Buddhism literally depends upon the subjugation of women." Even though historically there indeed have been renowned female tantric masters, for the last five hundred years, strong female tantric voices have largely disappeared from public view. As a female representative of that tradition, what has your observation been? Is Tibetan Buddhism a man's world?

JAL: I have to say that I really don't agree with the view that women are subjugated under the Tibetan system. Guru Rinpoche [Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism] himself has said that, in fact, in the tantric tradition, it is women who have the highest potential for liberation. He has said that culturally, throughout time, women have been trained in such a way that spiritual surrender is easier for them. Letting go of certain fixed, rigid things to stand on is easier for them.

AC: Are you saying that the Tibetan monastic system isn't held together by a patriarchal structure at all?

JAL: The Tibetan monastic system is. But the left hand of that monastic system is another system of dakinis who are held very, very highly. In fact, in thangkas [Tibetan Buddhist paintings], when you see a representation of someone practicing tantra, while you'll never see a male practicing alone, you will see dakinis practicing alone. And the reason why is that the woman is considered to be a display or an emanation of primordial wisdom. She's held in very high regard. I think the people who are saying that the monastic system is so oriented toward males understand only one aspect of it.

You have to understand, each of us is viewing the situation with our own preconceived ideas and prejudices. I think if I were inclined to feel demoted as a woman or less than as a woman, perhaps I would see that male superiority, but I don't. I do see that traditionally the form has the man on the throne in the monastery, but I don't in my practice or in any other way see a male superiority. For instance, when most males are enthroned, they are enthroned with the crown of their lineage. When I was enthroned, I was enthroned with the crown of the five primordial wisdoms. From one perspective, you could say, well, maybe the five primordial wisdoms are much higher than the male lineage crown. But I just don't think there is any value in looking at it in that way. The male is the head of the lineage—that's how the Buddha appears in the world. The woman with the five primordial wisdoms as her crown—she's the dakini. These are all the appearance of the Buddha. How can they be unequal? To me, the Buddha appears. Period. That's the event. We're sitting here with our cultural bias and our gender bias and we're looking at that and we are interpreting it. "He gets to sit on the throne. She gets to sit in the cave." And we put our meanings on that. But I'm telling you, the only event that occurs is that the Buddha has appeared, and that's how I see it. I would be unfaithful to my practice if I tried to distinguish and make one higher than the other.

AC: In a previous issue of WIE, we spoke with Buddhist scholar Miranda Shaw about gender roles in the practice of Tibetan tantra, which is considered by many to be a powerful and even essential vehicle for reaching enlightenment. She made the intriguing statement that in tantric practice, conventional male/female gender relationships are reversed and, specifically as part of the practice of sexual yoga, the primary role of men is to serve women, acting as their devotees, servants and even slaves. In tantric practice, Shaw writes, men are to "take refuge in the vulva of an esteemed woman" and are to literally worship her as a goddess. By worshipping her in this way, she told us, "He's also realizing his innate divinity and his Buddhahood; only he believes that the proper expression of his Buddhahood is to honor her divinity. In this worldview, it is the role of the female to channel enlightened energies, the energy of transformation, into the world in a powerful way. It is the role of the male to be the recipient of those energies and to honor them and their source." According to Shaw, that is the tantric view. In your own experience as a dakini and an incarnation of Mandarawa, perhaps the most renowned Tibetan yogic consort of all time, are women the source of enlightened energy for themselves and for men?

JAL: Wow! Well, I can't say that I agree with her interpretation. I don't feel that men actually worship and become enslaved to women. I think that what really happens is that there is a mutual recognition of the view. The female and the male become inseparable; they become unable to practice fully without one another. They are a unit in union. They are primordial emptiness and its display, inseparable. And that being the case, there is a mutual viewing of one another as that. The dakini recognizes the daka [male counterpart of a dakini] as the source of her energy; the daka recognizes the dakini as the source of his energy. It is a symbolic picture of primordial emptiness and the display or emanation of that emptiness, like the sun and the sun's rays: completely inseparable. Any words or any thoughts that separate them or put one higher than the other are simply conceptual proliferation and really have no place in that kind of practice.

AC: In general, what do you see as the fundamental differences between men and women on the spiritual path? Do men have any particular advantages over women on the path to enlightenment? Do women have any particular advantages over men?

JAL: Yes and yes. I really feel that I understand and vibe with what Guru Rinpoche said about women having, through our cultural experience, been trained in surrender a little bit better. This is simply my own observation. But in looking at the great weight of the male population as practitioners and as people in our world today, I do think that men are having a little problem with their footing. I think that certain things have been expected of them and that they haven't known how to get beyond that. There are certain kinds of strengths that men are supposed to have and certain ideas that men have as to how to have those strengths. And sometimes they can be counterproductive to getting past our exterior ego identity.

AC: Do you mean that certain culturally imposed ideas about manhood become obstacles to liberation?

JAL: Yes, I think they do. Men are expected to be strong, they're expected to be controlled, they're expected to be producers. And judging from a lot of the students I have taught, I think that psychologically a lot of men have to go through a period where they have to accept this intuitive, spiritual, feminine part of their natures in order to go even one step farther. But that's not really something women have to do. We're taught that's okay for us, so we don't so much feel that we have to get to that point before we let go. I think if there is a difference, it isn't because there's any fundamental potency or strength that either gender has over the other. I think the two are equal and meant to function in union. But I do feel that culturally, men have been biased toward a more materialistic life than women have.

AC: So do you feel that because it's more culturally accepted for women to be intuitive and vulnerable, they therefore have less to let go of on the spiritual path?

JAL: I definitely think that's a factor, but again, you have to take everybody case by case.

AC: In the Buddhist teaching, enlightenment is said to be directly related to the recognition of the inherent emptiness or insubstantiality of a separate personal self. In a previous issue of WIE, the renowned Indian woman sage, Vimala Thakar—the only person who the great J. Krishnamurti ever asked to teach—spoke in detail with us about her observation that women tend to have greater difficulty letting go of attachment to a personal sense of self than men do. She said, "Nothingness, nobodyness, emptiness—even the intellectual understanding of this—frightens women. Because of our physical vulnerability, because of our secondary role in human civilization, on a subconscious level, there is fear. If I mature into nonduality, into nothingness, into nobodyness, what will happen to my physical existence? Will it be more vulnerable? Will I be able to defend myself in case of difficulty, in case of some attack against me? Consciously, intellectually, women understand everything because regarding the brilliance of the brain, there is no distinction such as male and female. But psychologically, at the core of their being, is this fear." In my own experience as a teacher I have also noticed that women do seem to have greater difficulty than men in letting go of the habit of what I call the personalization of their experience. Now I certainly don't mean to imply that this means men, as a gender, tend to be fearless heroes who are willing to jump into emptiness and abandon any and all notions of self at the drop of a hat. Men and women struggle with the same fear of nonexistence. But it's been my experience or my impression that women seem to have greater difficulty being able to see directly into the impersonal nature of all human experience than men do. As a woman and as a teacher of enlightenment, is this also your experience?

JAL: At a certain point in our path, there's a kind of grieving that both men and women have to go through. When we leave the party and begin to really practice renunciation, begin to practice recognition of what samsara [cyclic existence] really is, there's a grieving that comes from that. And I think for men and women it's a different grief. I think that men have to let go of certain kinds of expectations that are made of them and that they have of the world. And I think that women have to grieve about the letting go of another kind of expectation, which is a more personal one. Women are culturally biased toward being in relationship to, and so their best way of understanding themselves is in relationship to. However, at a certain point in our practice, when that grieving is finished, we are every bit as capable of allowing that to pass, and approaching the ground view and letting go of identification with self-nature as being inherently real. I think at a certain level of practice, after that grieving is done, our abilities are equal.

AC: Would you consider that to be, relatively speaking, quite a high level of practice?

JAL: Yup. (Laughs)

AC: In this issue, in addition to exploring the relationship between gender and spirituality, we're also looking into the relationship between sexual orientation and the path to enlightenment. In our time, there are many gays and lesbians who view their experience of sexual orientation as the very basis of the spiritual path. Do you think that giving spiritual relevance to sexual orientation is a help or a hindrance on the path to enlightenment?

JAL: I think maybe I should speak personally about my experience with this whole issue. First of all, I'd like to say that I have been very disturbed by the way in which some of the conventional religions that are present in our time have kind of lopped off their gay population and considered them not fit and inappropriate and bound for someplace bad. I feel a tremendous amount of grief about that. When I developed the temple and even before His Holiness recognized me, I made it very, very clear that any sexual orientation did not preclude being a member of my temple. I made it very clear that whether you were gay or straight, tall or short, thin or fat, it didn't matter to me at all. When that word got out, a lot of people who were gay who were looking for a spiritual home took refuge in my temple. I now have some nuns who are gay. They're not practicing, of course. They're celibate.

Now my experience has been that, of the people who came to my temple at first, some of the ones who were suffering the most were a lot of the gay people. They were deeply ingrained in finding an identity and gathering it around themselves and making a box out of it. It was as if they were less free than those who didn't feel the need to find an identity. They were just encumbered by this need.

AC: They were encumbered by their gay identity?

JAL: Yes. Not by their homosexuality itself, but by the need to express it in one way or another, or to not express it—either coming out of the closet or not coming out of the closet—whatever their phenomena were about that. That was what oppressed them, not their sexual proclivity. And what I've tried to do is to let them know that they shouldn't put themselves under such pressure to express themselves in one way or another but rather they should identify with the original nature that we're trying to reveal. I feel that people have to be who they are. In the same way that I didn't want to lose my Jewish-Italian American identity and start wearing Tibetan chubas, I don't expect my gay practitioners to act like straight people or to lose their sense of gayness. But I feel that just as being a Jewish-Italian American is not going to get me enlightened, neither is being gay going to get them enlightened. My feeling is that we all have to drop that stuff and go for it!

AC: What you're saying has also been my observation—that often a gay identity tends to be just another expression of ego. That doesn't mean that one has to necessarily deny one's sexual preference. But one has to maybe question the ego's investment in any particular sexual preference.

JAL: Totally. That's totally it. What keeps us from functioning as awakened beings is the fundamental belief in self-nature being inherently real. Self-nature as defined by anything—gender bias, sexual bias, emotional, cultural, anything. Whatever form it takes. So in giving that any validity, any lip service—what's the point? We've already got that in the world. Let's move away from it.

AC: Father Basil Pennington, a highly respected Trappist monk, whom we also interviewed for this issue, made an intriguing statement about the relationship between spiritual freedom and sexual orientation. He feels that "all men and women are ultimately bisexual and that therefore, a person who is really free knows that he or she is bisexual and can relate with others in whatever way is appropriate, that they're not bound by any particular sexual orientation." In your experience, is Father Pennington on to something when he says that there's a direct relationship between spiritual freedom and liberation from a rigid adherence to any particular sexual orientation?

JAL: He is absolutely dead on. Absolutely correct. Because again, the bodhisattva, when it appears in the world, appears in the form of compassion, in whatever form is needed. So if you need a banana, the bodhisattva is going to appear as a banana. If you need a person with a certain kind of orientation, the bodhisattva is going to appear in that way. I really think that at a certain level, the bottom line, the only thing that matters is the bodhicitta [aspiration to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings]. The only thing that matters is the appearance of compassion in the world.

AC: So would you agree with his assertion that if someone is free, they know they're bisexual and that would be expressed in whatever ways are appropriate?

JAL: I would say that if a person is free, they know that the human condition is to be sexual and they don't have a determined bias as to how that sexuality should be expressed. However, I wouldn't say that a person knows himself to be bisexual. To recognize yourself as bisexual is, I would say, a preliberated state. If you are free, you can't even recognize the concept of bisexual. A person who's truly liberated isn't going to spend all that much attention on thinking about what box to put their sexuality in. If you are free, your sexuality, like anything else, is an adornment that you wear in order to be of benefit to others.

AC: So in this way of looking at it, the expression of one's sexuality would somehow have to be for the sake of someone else?

JAL: As a bodhisattva, everything is for the sake of all sentient beings. I think that for a person who is a liberated bodhisattva, if it were required for them to be homosexual at a certain point in time, that would not be a foreign concept. I think that would be a perfectly okay thing to do because that's the way the bodhicitta would appear. I feel for myself that if it were needed for me to function in a homosexual way, I'm sure I could. I'm sure I would. And that would be part of my sexuality. It would be real.

AC: Marpa, the guru of Milarepa, one of the most revered Tibetan yogis of all time, is widely known to have been a fierce and demanding teacher. Tales of his ferocity in the service of his disciples' liberation are legendary. Not only did he repeatedly humiliate Milarepa but he even was known to beat him physically in order to awaken him to his own true nature. You too have a reputation for being a fierce and demanding teacher and have even been criticized for the lengths to which you have been willing to go to keep your students on the straight and narrow. The whole notion of crazy wisdom, meaning that the teacher will go to any lengths necessary to awaken his or her students—including that which often appears to be incomprehensible to the unawakened mind—is revered by Tibetans as a powerful method of spiritual instruction. Some of the most widely respected male Tibetan teachers of our time have been accused of far greater abuses of their disciples than you have, and yet the Buddhist world at large seems to be much less forgiving in your case than in theirs. Is there a double standard in place? Does the fact that you're a woman make it unacceptable for you to be a fierce and uncompromising teacher? Or are your critics correct in saying that sometimes you go too far?

JAL: I have to say that I don't have a particular view on the subject except that in looking at each student individually I see that each one of them has a particular capacity and a particular set of obstacles. And sometimes, something really unusual or outrageous might be the very thing that provides the hook on to the path, or the very thing that provides some amazing ripening. When it happens that this kind of student comes together with a teacher who is capable of seeing it and maybe delivering what is needed there, I think that is the most fortunate of circumstances. I think that is an outrageously rare thing and an outrageously fortunate set of circumstances. So when that has happened, I have dived on it. But my teachers have also done that with me.

AC: They've been very fierce with you?

JAL: One time when I was newly recognized, my teacher was extremely wrathful with me and it was about something that never even happened. It was so outrageous and it tore me up so badly but it also, I think, added years on to my life because health obstacles that were happening to me disappeared like magic after that. So I believe that sometimes those two circumstances come together and when they do, it is the teacher's responsibility to take advantage of them. There have been circumstances where I have gone to amazing lengths to befriend and stay with and hook on to the path some student of mine, to the point where the other students will say, "Gee, you didn't do that for me!" But that's just because of the way the karma has ripened. That's because at that moment in time, there was a window and there was a way to go through it. When one of my nuns was first ordained, a series of things happened where I really took her to task and yelled at her. It upset her very badly and yet the very next day she was totally able to see it, and there was an amazing change after that. I don't think a person should make an issue about such things. I think that once a student entrusts themselves to a teacher and trusts that teacher to the degree that they have confidence in their qualities, then at that point, you kind of have to make a deal that it's not always going to be roses; sometimes you're going to hear things you don't want to hear and it's going to be painful. And it's a student's responsibility to somehow let that input come into their lives.

AC: Someone engages in a committed relationship with a teacher of enlightenment because they're saying that they want their ego killed. So that's not necessarily going to be a painless process. I mean, most of the time, it's actually horrendous. And it's very hard, it seems, for most people to make that kind of commitment where they say, "This is it."

JAL: Right. And it's difficult to teach in that way, with that kind of passion, in a world where it has become very fashionable for people to file lawsuits about everything. Anytime anyone goes to a counselor, I guarantee that counselor will find out that they have been abused. That's kind of the popular thing. The idea that people are being victimized or being abused is very much in style. To write a really hip pop psychology article, you've got to talk about abuse, and sexual abuse if you can! You know, at a different time, in a different place, it would be different. Even in my family—Italian Americans are very tough on their kids—but they're also very loving and very friendly. It's the way a mother shows how much she loves that child that she is willing to not be a good guy in a particular situation.

AC: Right.

JAL: And I'll tell you, I have been willing not to be a good guy in a situation that I thought would protect a student. I think of myself as being like a Jewish-Italian mother in that way. If I do come to a point where I show wrath toward a person, at the same time I'm feeling so much love for them. I feel like you don't have the right to show wrath to a person if you don't know how much you love them. And I feel that knowing that I would die for them, knowing that I care for them to the nth degree, empowers me to do whatever is necessary, and that's the basis of the agreement that I have with my students. They know that if the time comes that they need it, they're going to hear from me. I have a number of students who are recovering alcoholics. Now they're monks and nuns. One woman, whom I love dearly and think very highly of, not too long before she met me was living as a homeless person under a bridge, an alcoholic. And now when I see her wearing the robes of the Buddha, and I think about what it took—how much wrath and how much love and how much of everything it took to get her to that point where she's not only not under the bridge but she's benefiting others—when I see something like that, you know, I think this is an amazing opportunity. This is fantastic. And I don't think I could live with myself if I hadn't taken advantage of that. I don't think I could live with myself if I hadn't been strong, if I hadn't been wrathful, if I hadn't said, "Sit down. Listen. Now I'm going to tell you the truth." I don't think I could watch someone pass through their neuroses if I have a karmic connection with them and not do something about it. I feel that every karmic connection I have with a student is an opportunity. I feel that I have a passion about that opportunity and I'm going to take it. And I'm not going to apologize.

I want to thank Vickie Mackenzie for allowing me to quote liberally from her chapter on Jetsunma in her fascinating book Reborn in the West.