Machig Labdrön: The Woman Who Founded Chöd

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 September 2026

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Machig Labdrön was an eleventh-century Tibetan yogini who founded Chöd — the practice of “cutting”, in which a practitioner visualises offering their own body in order to sever self-grasping at its root. If you have met her name, it is almost certainly through Chöd, or through the modern “feeding your demons” teachings drawn from it.

She is one of the very few women in Buddhist history credited with founding a lineage rather than joining one, which sets her at an unusual angle to the rest of the story of women in Buddhism, and beside Yeshe Tsogyal in the Tibetan chapter of it. Her name is transliterated both ways you will meet it — Machig or Machik, Labdrön or Labdron — and Machig glosses as “the One Mother”.

Her life, as the sources give it

Most of what follows comes from one short account: Asha Kaufman’s article for Tricycle, written for its weekly series drawing on the Treasury of Lives, the scholarly biographical encyclopedia of Tibet and the Himalaya. Two things are worth saying about it before we use it. It is a magazine summary rather than the encyclopedia entry itself — the Treasury of Lives entry on her was written by the Chöd scholar Michelle Sorensen and published in April 2010 — and the longer treatments in English are Jérôme Edou’s and Sarah Harding’s books, named at the end of this page. And within Kaufman’s account it is worth separating what is reported as history from what is reported as tradition, because the two are braided together in every Tibetan life-story.

She was born in Labchi, in southern Tibet. As a child she was invited to a festival by the ruler of the region and recited a Prajñāpāramitā sūtra — the Perfection of Wisdom literature that stands behind the Heart Sutra and behind Chöd itself. He was impressed, and gave her the name by which she is known: Labdrön, the Shining Light of Labchi.

She studied with several Tibetan teachers, among them the Nyingma lama Drapa Ngonshe (1012–1090). She is then said to have met the Indian pandita Padampa Sangye (d. 1117?), who brought the Zhije — “pacifying suffering” — teachings to Tibet. Afterwards, Kaufman writes, she “began to dress in rags, hang out with lepers, sleep anywhere, and eat anything”, taking up the life of an Indian tantrika.

At twenty she received teachings and initiations from Kyoton Sonam Lama. Here the register changes: tradition holds that during the initiation her body rose a cubit from the ground, floated through the walls and came down at the Tree of Serlak, a place feared for its snake demons, and that Tārā then appeared to her and predicted that her teachings would spread widely. That is namthar — sacred biography — not chronicle, and this page reports it as such.

She met an Indian practitioner named Topa Bhadra and had several children with him over roughly a decade, then returned to wandering, teaching and giving initiations, drawing disciples from across Tibet. Her youngest son, Tonnyon, was among her closest students; Kaufman records the tradition that he was thought insane until she sent him to sleep among the corpses of a charnel ground, which cured him. Notably, the account gives her no monastic ordination. Her standing rests on transmission and realisation, not on the nuns’ order — a different route to authority from the one Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī opened, and one reason bhikkhunī ordination is not the axis of her story.

Her dates are not settled

This is the first thing a careful reader should know, because almost every page about her states one pair of dates as fact. They differ, and the difference is real.

That table should be read for what it is. The middle row lists four names but does not carry four independent witnesses: three of them lead back to Michelle Sorensen — her own encyclopedia entry, Kaufman’s summary of that entry, and Zakin’s review of her dissertation — leaving Lion’s Roar as the one separate voice for 1055–1149. The birth year 1055 is close to consensus; the death year is not.

There is a further wrinkle worth naming. Kaufman’s summary carries 1055–1149 in its opening line and then ends by saying she “passed away at the age of 99” — an age those years do not accommodate. This page does not try to reconcile the two.

What Chöd actually is

Lotsawa House defines gcod as “literally ‘cutting’ or ‘severance’, the practice of offering one’s own body to demons as a means of overcoming self-cherishing”. That is the whole practice in a sentence, and the sensational versions online usually go wrong by stopping at the word “body”.

Writing in Tricycle in 2008, Alejandro Chaoul — an academic who went on to publish a study of Chöd in the Bön tradition — describes the rite closely. It is done deliberately in frightening places — cemeteries, charnel grounds — with singing, dancing, a bell, a damaru drum and a trumpet made from a thighbone. The practitioner first learns it somewhere peaceful; only when trained does he or she take it to the desolate place. In the visualisation, consciousness is expelled from the body, becomes a deity (most often female), and the body is left as a corpse. The deity severs the skull, which becomes a cauldron; flesh, blood and bone are cooked into a nectar that satisfies every guest invited — buddhas and bodhisattvas, wrathful protectors, spirits, demons, ordinary beings. A “white feast” is followed by a “red feast” for the more carnivorous guests. No being is excluded from the offering. That inclusiveness, not the gore, is the point of the imagery.

Chaoul quotes Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, whom he introduces as a Tibetan lama, scholar and chöd master, on exactly this: the name chöd means to cut, “but it is the attachment, not the body itself, that is the problem to cut through”. Nothing physical is done to the practitioner’s body at any stage. Chöd is a visualisation practice within Vajrayāna, transmitted by a teacher, and it belongs to the same family of methods — deity yoga and visualisation, tantra, emptiness training — as the rest of the Tibetan repertoire.

The four demons

Chöd’s “demons” are a technical set, not folklore. Adam Pearcey’s note to a Lotsawa House praise text lists the four demons of Chöd practice (gcod yul bdud bzhi): the substantial or tangible demon, the insubstantial demon, the demon of elation, and the demon of egotistical pride. They are distinct from the classical four māras — the aggregates, the afflictions, the lord of death, and the devaputra — which the same text names separately, and which our page on Māra covers. Chöying Khandro, writing in Lion’s Roar, gives Machig’s working definition — anything that obstructs progress toward awakening is a demon — and sums up the method in three words: “feeding, not fighting”.

Rooted in the Perfection of Wisdom

Chöd is not freelance shamanism dressed as Buddhism; the tradition anchors it in the Perfection of Wisdom teachings on emptiness. Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö’s praise of her, composed in 1956 at Zangri Kharmar before her image, makes the lineage explicit:

Almost nothing survives that can be called her voice with confidence. One couplet on meditation circulates widely, and Lotsawa House is careful to label it attributed rather than certain — a caution worth keeping when you meet it quoted as hers:

The claim worth checking: did Chöd travel from Tibet to India?

You will meet this line everywhere: Chöd is the one teaching that went from Tibet back to India, reversing the direction Buddhism had always travelled. It is a striking claim, and it needs handling carefully.

What can be said plainly is the narrower part. Chöying Khandro states it in Lion’s Roar: “Chöd is the only Buddhist tradition to have originated in Tibet, and also the only tradition among the eight major ‘chariot’ traditions in Tibet to have been founded by a woman.” That is a claim about origin, and it is the form in which serious modern teachers make it.

The stronger part — that Chöd was then exported to India — is something the tradition says about itself, and it is best reported that way. Michelle Sorensen’s study of the early Chöd literature treats it as one of a set of paradoxes the tradition holds simultaneously. Susan Zakin’s review summarises them as “the paradoxical claims found in the tradition that Chöd was both transmitted to Machik by the Indian Padampa Sangyé and that it was the first practice tradition initially founded in Tibet and then brought to India”. Both cannot be straightforwardly true, and the tension is the historically interesting thing.

Kaufman is blunter still: “Though it has Indian antecedents, Chöd is a Tibetan innovation. Numerous legends attempt to legitimate the practice as an Indian import while still venerating Machik as its creator.” The famous story of the three Indian panditas who travelled to Tibet to test her is exactly such a legitimation: she described her previous life in India and the body of that incarnation lying preserved in a cave, told them what signs its cremation would show, and the signs appeared. Kaufman reads the story for what it accomplishes — it makes Machig Tibetan and Indian at once, authenticating Chöd’s Indian pedigree while leaving her the credit for creating it.

So: say that the tradition holds Chöd travelled to India. Do not say it is documented that it did.

Founder, or student of an Indian master?

The same question sits under her relationship with Padampa Sangye, and the sources genuinely disagree. Kaufman notes that some hold him to be her primary teacher and therefore the source of Chöd, while others claim she “only gazed upon Padampa Sanggye from afar and never actually met him”. Lotsawa House’s own page on her describes her as his consort. Chöying Khandro’s account has her receiving the Zhije teachings from him and then going further than he did, teaching not merely the pacifying of suffering but the deliberate inviting-in of it.

None of these is a fringe position, and the disagreement is not decorative: whether Machig received Chöd or made it is the same question as whether Chöd is Indian or Tibetan.

How she is depicted

Himalayan Art Resources, whose outlines are written by Jeff Watt, records her standard iconography: white in colour, the right hand holding an upraised double-sided damaru drum, the left a bell turned with its opening facing upward. She appears both as a peaceful goddess in ornaments and heavenly garments, standing in a dancing posture with the left leg down, and in seated forms. The large wooden damaru in her right hand is the instrument Chöd practitioners actually use — the iconography is a picture of the practice.

Praise literature goes further than art. Chökyi Lodrö’s verses hail her as “Ama Labkyi Drönma”, a manifestation of Vajravārāhī and “sovereign of space”, and offer praise to her as “Magnificent master of the tenth bhūmi”. That is devotional language from within the tradition, of the same order as the praises addressed to Yeshe Tsogyal — it tells you how she is held, not what a historian could verify.

Chöd today

Chöd did not stay a marginal practice. Chaoul notes that it “has filtered into many different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism” and calls the practice “pan-Tibetan” — so it is not the property of any one of the four schools, though he does not say it is found in all of them. It also exists in the indigenous Bön tradition, where — this is the honest complication — it is traced to a different source entirely, a relationship Chaoul describes as still being worked out by historians. Chöd began, in Chöying Khandro’s telling, as a lineage of wandering yogis and yoginīs; Machig founded no institution for it in her lifetime.

In the West it has arrived twice over. There is transmitted Chöd, taught in Tibetan centres much as Milarepa’s songs or tonglen are. And there is a psychological adaptation drawn from it: Feeding Your Demons, the title of Lama Tsultrim Allione’s 2008 book and now a trademarked programme run by her centre, Tara Mandala — which, as the site listed its courses in September 2026, includes an introduction aimed at licensed therapists, psychologists, counsellors and social workers. Tara Mandala’s own biography of her adds that in 2007 she was recognised in Tibet and Nepal as the reincarnation of Machig Labdrön.

It is worth being exact about what that means. An adaptation of a practice is not the practice, and neither one is treatment. Chöd’s language of demons and trauma is evocative precisely because it maps onto things people are suffering from — and reading about a visualisation on a web page is not receiving it, and is not care. Read it as a window onto how one tradition works with fear. If you are struggling with something real, the note at the top of this page points to people who can actually help.

Two book-length English treatments exist for readers who want to go further: Jérôme Edou’s Machig Labdrön and the Foundations of Chöd (Snow Lion, 1996), and Sarah Harding’s translation of Machik’s Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chöd (Snow Lion, 2003; reissued by Shambhala, 2013).

Why she matters

Buddhism’s women are usually remembered for winning admission — to ordination, to training, to a place in a lineage someone else founded. Machig Labdrön is remembered for the opposite. A laywoman with a consort and children, holding no monastic rank, she assembled a practice out of the Perfection of Wisdom, the Zhije teachings and her own realisation, and it outlived her into the practice lineages of Tibetan Buddhism at large. That a woman could be the source rather than the recipient of a lineage is a fact the tradition has never had to argue about — it simply is the case, and the praises addressed to her assume it.

(For the tradition she belongs to, see Tibetan Buddhism and its four schools; for the other great Tibetan woman, Yeshe Tsogyal; for the question her life answers by example, can a woman become a Buddha?; for a modern nun who rebuilt a women’s training lineage, Tenzin Palmo; and for the wider story, women in Buddhism and famous Buddhist teachers.)