A conversation with one of the West’s only female lamas, Christie McNally

Written by Patrick James and originally published in GOOD, October 22, 2009
URL: http://www.good.is/post/three-years-of-silent-retreat/

In late 2010, in the sun scorched highlands of Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, some 50 Buddhist students will embark on a retreat. For three years, three months, and three days, they will have no contact with the outside world, and they will not speak a word. The retreat will be lead by Lama Christie McNally, one of the only women in the world to carry the title of “lama” (or teacher), and Geshe Michael Roach. (The Buddhist degree of geshe is comparable to a doctorate in the United States.) McNally and Roach are the founders of Diamond Mountain, a school some 100 miles from Tucson which is modeled after Buddhist monastic tradition, and which is not far from where the retreat will take place. Earlier this month, while Lama McNally was visiting the Asian Classics Institute of Los Angeles’s Mahasukha Center to teach from and talk about her book, The Tibetan Book of Meditation, she spoke to GOOD about what would move someone to take a vow of silence for three years, and what it’s like when those three years are up.

GOOD: A lot of people might be surprised to learn of retreats like this in the United States. You’ve spoken before about how, in this country, mastery of a craft or practice isn’t widely pursued. This sort of retreat seems, to me at least, like an attempt to achieve mastery of meditation. Could you speak to that?

CHRISTIE McNALLY: In cultures like India or in previous times, people had traditions of apprenticeship. They’d want to be a blacksmith, so they’d spend 12 years at the feet of a master. By the time they were done, they became a master themselves. That’s how people learned things in the old days, they would fully master them.