The Drubwang Rinpoche photograph

Original

Altered

DVD cover

Ven. Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche was a great meditation master of the Drikung Kagyüd School. An altered photograph of him appeared for some time on the Aro web site. Someone anonymous (“Dhammacop”) got excited about this and wrote on his blog:

just google : Drubwang Rinpoche images and you’ll see He NEVER wears white, which Aro has faked to further their cause of Lay Yogic sangha.

I had no idea what this was about, so I asked the Aro people involved. (Dhammacop could have done that, if he wasn’t so eager to prove that Aro is bogus.)

I’ll explain in detail what I learned. The summary is:

1. The photograph was altered by someone other than Aro. We don’t know who or why.
2. Dhammacop implies that we changed the color to white as part of an attempt to prove the existence of the “Lay Yogic sangha.” The existence of this “White Sangha” is no longer in doubt, since many Tibetan members of it have now written and taught about it in the West. (In past, hostility to Aro was based partly on the theory that the White Sangha was an Aro invention.)
3. A symbol of this sangha is a white skirt. The altered photograph of Drubwang Rinpoche shows a white shawl, not a white skirt. If Aro had wanted to fake photographs of the White Sangha, we would have had to change the color of a skirt, not a shawl. Aro shawls are red, not white.
4. Interestingly, an altered version of the same photograph was published on the cover of a highly-respected video about Tibetan yogis (that has no connection with Aro).

The White Sangha

For more than a thousand years, there have been two parallel sanghas in Tibet. There is the Red Sangha of monks and nuns (who typically wear red skirts) and the White Sangha of ordained tantrikas (who typically wear white skirts). These systems were once regarded as equal. However, in recent centuries, there has been increasing political pressure on the White Sangha. (This has to do with unpleasant Tibetan power politics that I won’t go into here.) Not many Tibetans enter the White Sangha now. Some that do stay “in the closet,” because there can be retaliation if they wear a white skirt publicly. So until recently, this ordination was unknown in the West.

Ngak’chang Rinpoche is the head of the Aro lineage. He was instructed by Düdjom Rinpoche to establish the White Sangha in the West. Some Westerners thought that Ngak’chang Rinpoche had invented the White Sangha—and attacked him as fake.

This argument has mainly been dropped, because several Tibetan Lamas from the White Sangha have recently publicly confirmed in detail what Ngak’chang Rinpoche had been saying for twenty years. You can read explanations by, for instance, Kyabjé Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche and by Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche.

The photograph on the Aro web site

The Aro Lama Shardröl Du-nyam Wangmo was the web master of aroter.org, which used to be the main Aro web site. Years ago, she collected pictures of Lamas from the White Sangha to put on the site. They were quite hard to find then. (You can find many more now using Google.) Several people she did not know helpfully sent examples, and she published them. The person who sent this one was not known to her, and was not a member of the Aro sangha. As far as we know, all the other photographs that were sent by other people are genuine.

Some time later, someone sent her the original photograph, showing that the version with the white shawl had clearly been altered. So, she removed the link to the page about Drubwang Rinpoche. She left the page on the web site, because deleting it was unnecessary given that there was no longer a link to it. The web page remained in existence but no longer accessible.

Two years ago, we did a large overhaul of our web sites. Ngala Nor’dzin Pamo reworked aroter.org into the Aro Encyclopædia. She didn’t know anything about the history of the Drubwang Rinpoche photograph. She found the page about him and assumed that it was only by mistake that there was no link to it. So she added a link, and the page was again available on the Encyclopædia for two years.

A few days ago (mid-May 2008) I decided to find out what the story was with this picture. Once I had the answer from Lama Shardröl, I told Ngala Nor’dzin about it, and she once again removed the Drubwang Rinpoche page from the site.

Lama Shardröl and Ngala Nor’dzin are willing to answer any questions you might have about this. You can reach them at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

White skirts, not white shawls

Aro shawl and skirt

It is hard to see why someone in the Aro sangha would have altered the photograph in this way. We had many genuine photographs of the White Sangha; faking a single one would not have made any sense.

More important, it is white skirts that are the symbol of the White Sangha. The altered photograph of Drubwang Rinpoche shows him wearing a white shawl. A white shawl does not have any symbolic significance that I know of. Members of the White Sangha wear shawls in many styles and colors. In the Aro lineage, most shawls are red, with blue and white stripes. I don’t recall having seen an all-white shawl anywhere other than in the altered picture.

If we had wanted to create fake pictures of the White Sangha, we would have needed to alter the colors of skirts, not shawls.

Where did the altered photograph come from?

It was sent to Aro by someone called Eric. We don’t know if he was the one who altered it; or why; or if Eric was his real name. (If Eric, or anyone else, can tell us more about this, I would love to hear from you: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .)

Reluctantly, I think it is possible that it was supplied by someone who wanted to prove that the White Sangha was fake. He would rightly expect that Lama Shardröl would trustingly publish it. Then he could triumphantly point his finger at this “proof” of evidence tampering.

Another possibility

A different altered version of the same photograph was used as the cover of the film The Yogis of Tibet. Drubwang Rinpoche wears his hair in a distinctive style typical for the White Sangha. Perhaps the person who made the cover knew a little about the White Sangha, and thought that it would be good to show him wearing yogic white clothes as well as a yogic hair style. The version that ended up on the Aro web site might have been a first draft for the cover. (Both altered versions edited out the people in the background and the small white cloth Drubwang Rinpoche holds in the original.) Then the artist found out that it is skirts, not shawls, that matter, so the color change was not used in the final version.

This explanation doesn’t seem especially likely. (Why was a draft photo sent out?) However, the whole business is sufficiently weird that the truth, whatever it is, must be odd.

I would rather believe this innocent explanation than that someone sent the image to Lama Shardröl with malicious motives.