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Gomchen

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Gomchen

Gomchen (male) / gomchenma (female) — literally great master of meditation. A category of Tibetan yogic practitioner, typically reclusive, often living in caves or mountain retreat places.

Key Points

  • Definition. Ch.2 footnote: “Great master of meditation.” The term pairs gom (meditation) with chen (great).
  • Reclusive by default. Gomchens often lived high in the mountains — some in simple shelters, some in caves built up into small houses with wooden flooring and windows. Access was usually difficult; supplies sometimes ran out.
  • Often surrounded by disciples at a distance. “Many of these Lamas were profound Tantric masters surrounded by groups of disciples who lived at a discreet distance, absorbed in the practices their teacher had set for them.”
  • Powers and endurance. “These Lamas often had spectacular powers that enabled them to endure all kinds of privations.” Their fame drew mystically inclined practitioners from considerable distances.
  • Receiving disciples is discretionary. “Being accepted as a disciple of one of these gomchens is not necessarily an easy matter. … The method of such Lamas is to welcome some aspirants yet turn others away without a word of explanation. There are some reclusive masters who throw stones at visitors from a distance, so they do not even get close enough to pay their respects.”
  • Crazy-wisdom style. “Some of these gomchens are known to be crazy wisdom masters, and they can behave in almost any way.”
  • The swift path. “Such masters hold teachings that lead to swift realization. The swift path is said to be strenuous, difficult, and sometimes dangerous.” Precedent: the Marpa–Milarépa story, “known to all Tibetans.”

Khandro Rinpoche — Ch.2’s Exemplar

The imagined gomchenma in Ch.2’s vignette, named Khandro Rinpoche. Described in detail: undyed homespun ngakma’s skirt; sheepskin waistcoat; embroidered gom-tag (Long-dé meditation strap) with parallel cloud-bands in blue, red, and white; conch earrings hidden in long loose hair; nine-eyed gZi stone on a gold chain. “Utterly simple” despite the ornaments. Age indeterminate. A son sits on a tiger skin arranging colored pebbles — probably a form of mo (divination).

The encounter registers two signatures that recur in accounts of realized teachers:

  • Time elision. “While you were with the Lama in her cave, it seemed as if you had been in there for days, but when you leave, it seems as if it had been only seconds.”
  • Full perception without caution. “He takes in each detail of what you are, quite exactly, but without any sense of caution or suspicion.” (Said of a young togden-disciple, but characteristic of the milieu.)

Her pedagogy is the point of the page — see below.

The Gomchen’s Pedagogy — Experience Before Explanation

The two impossibility-exercises Khandro Rinpoche assigns to her disciple in Ch.2 (force thought out; force thought continuous) are a compressed case of a general pedagogical pattern:

  • Give the disciple a task whose failure contains the teaching.
  • Let the disciple come back confused; laugh; let confusion ripen into the recognition that something has in fact been learned.
  • Then deliver, in one or two sentences, the explicit point.

The authors explicitly say Roaring Silence’s structure imitates this: “The approach we take in this book is similar to the method of the gomchenma — we first introduce method and then follow that with explanation.”

Disciples of the Gomchenma

Ch.2 describes them as sharing “the same quality of being”: frequent loud laughter at tiny things (sun behind cloud, a marmot sitting up, a goat belching); unhurried attentiveness (“awareness spells often on their lips”); movement between retreat, errands, herb-gathering, travel to powerful places; “a singular brightness in their eyes — their gaze is unblinking yet unstrained.”

They provide almost no answers. “Some things, you are informed, will have to wait until your meeting with the gomchenma.” They are not gatekeepers so much as non-interferers with the Lama’s pedagogy.

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