Practitioners in Tibetan traditions encounter Yeshe Tsogyal through the fluid medium of sādhana. A Yeshe Tsogyal sādhana is way to meet her, join with her wisdom, and finally become her. In practice, this process is based in the growing rapport between practitioner and Yeshe Tsogyal. This rapport is fostered by singing poetic sādhana lines resonant with guiding phrases of great import in Dzogchen. To better appreciate this process, I point to vital lines from a 21st century Treasure centered on white Yeshe Tsogyal, and reflect on how recognizing them as echos reverberating with, for example, Longchenpa’s 14th century Precious Treasury of the Dharmadhātu and Jigme Linpga’s famous 18th sādhana centered on red Yeshe Tsogyal, the Great Bliss Queen, can help dispel misperceived distance between oneself and the wisdom known as Yeshe Tsogyal. Practice is animated by the aspiration that, as the sādhana unfolds, rapport melts into union.
Anne Carolyn Klein is Professor and former Chair of the Religion Department at Rice University where she developed a graduate contemplative studies concentration, a lama in the Nyingma tradition, and co-founding teacher of Dawn Mountain, a center for Tibetan Buddhism in Houston.
Her work has focused on Tibetan texts and traditional learned oral commentary on them in three of Tibet’s great traditions. Knowledge and Liberation is on Buddhist distinctions between conceptual and direct knowing, while Path to the Middle: The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshe Tupden, focuses on Tsongkhapa’s Madhyamaka. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen puts Buddhist and Feminist perspectives in conversation. Her Dzogchen studies include, with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the Logic of the Nonconceptual; also, her translation of Khetusn Sangpo Rinpoche’s Strand of Jewels and Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse, with a chantable English translation of Jigme Lingpa’s Ngondro. Her most recent book is Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training. Forthcoming in the autumn of 2026 is her translation of Adzom Drurkpa’s Lamplight on your Path, a commentary on Jigme Lingpa’s Ngondro.
A central theme throughout these writings is optimizing an embodied relationship between head and heart. Professor Klein's current project centers on a contemporary Dzogchen Terton’s relationship with and revelations regarding Yeshe Tsogyal. Including his distillation of Jigme Lingpa’s Yumkha Dechen Gyalmo, Yeshe Tsogyal, the Great Bliss Queen. She teaches a retreat on this practice at Dawn Mountain May 11-17, 2026, www.dawnmountain.org.
Joshua Brallier
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