a dakini’s counsel: sera khandro’s spiritual advice and dzogchen instructions

Translated here for the first time, a collection of heartfelt and intimate advice for Buddhist practice from the modern female Buddhist teacher Sera Khandro Dewai Dorje (1892-1940), revealing her firsthand experiences as a mother, wife, consort, and spiritual teacher of the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Sera Khandro Dewai Dorje was a rare example of a well-known Tibetan woman renowned as a teacher in the modern era. While there are many notable female figures in Tibetan Buddhist history, very few left a collection of poetic, autobiographical, and devotional writings as extensive as Dewai Dorje. Both biographical and instructional, this is a collection of advice, prayers, dreams, prophecies, and treasures (terma) from within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Dzogchen, a Buddhist practice on resting in the nature of mind. Typically seen as high level practices, these Dzogchen and other instructions are presented in Dewai Dorje’s highly personal and accessible voice.
This collection of practice instructions is a window into the inner experience of a beautiful woman in love who single-pointedly pursued a life of Dharma. Born to a wealthy and powerful father in Lhasa, she left home and became a dedicated Dharma practitioner living as an unaccompanied female in the wilds of eastern Tibet in the early 1900s. She became a wife, mother, and then consort and wrote of both highly spiritual and highly personal experiences, from spiritual realization to grief.

CHRISTINA MONSON is a Buddhist practitioner and teacher and Tibetan language translator and interpreter. She has over thirty years of study, translation, and practice experience in Buddhism beginning with an interest in Asian philosophy as an undergraduate student at Brown University. Later, she focused her studies on Tibetan Buddhism while completing a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She journeyed to Nepal in 1989 where she met her root guru, Chatral Sangyé Dorjé Rinpoche, under whose guidance she studied and practiced in periods of intensive retreat for the next twenty-seven years. Chatral Rinpoche first introduced her to the person and treasure lineage of Sera Khandro Dewé Dorje and conferred empowerment, reading transmission, and practice instructions. Christina continues to translate select sections of Sera Khandro’s works into English language as a Tsadra Foundation translator and scholar along with teaching and practicing the Dharma.