Preliminary Practices: Bloody Knees, Calloused Palms, and the Transformative Nature of Women’s Labor

Abstract

In this article, I explore the prostration accumulation portion of the Preliminary Practices of a specific group of Tibetan Buddhist women in Bongwa Mayma, a rural area of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province. I focus specifically on the nuns and lay women who utilize this set of teachings and practices. The Preliminary Practices not only initiate practitioners into a specific tradition (that of the Drikung Kagyu and more specifically the Amitabha practices of this lineage), but also more fundamentally into Vajrayāna Buddhism as it is practiced in contemporary Tibet. Although monks and male lay practitioners in this region also tend to perform the same Preliminary Practices, I focus specifically on women because of their unique relationship with bodily labor. I begin this article with a discussion of the domestic and economic labor practices of contemporary Tibetan women in rural Yushu, followed by an analysis of Preliminary Practices as understood through the Preliminary Practice text and oral commentaries utilized by all interviewees and interviews (collected from 2016–2020) with female practitioners about their motivations, experiences, and realizations during the Refuge and prostration accumulation portion of their Preliminary Practices. Women themselves view bodily labor as a productive and inevitable aspect of life. On the one hand, women state openly that their domestic duties impede upon their ability to achieve religious realization. On the other, they frequently extol the virtues of hard work, perseverance, patience, and fortitude that their lives of labor helped them to cultivate. Prostration is meant to embody the act of going for Refuge, of submitting oneself to the teachings of the Buddha, to the path of the dharma, and to the community of religious practitioners with whom they will study and grow. Prostrations are meant to embody the extreme difficulty of Refuge, to remove obscurations, to crush the ego, and to confirm a dedication to endure the hardships on the path to realization. Buddhist women, despite their ambiguous relationship with physical labor, see the physical pain of this process as a transformative experience that allows them a glimpse of the spaciousness of mind and freedom from attachment-filled desire promised in the teachings they receive.