Ngala Rig’dzin Dorje
with son Henry
In this picture Henry is wearing some items of aristocratic Tibetan dress kindly lent by Robert, the son of Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen. One of the Chinese emperors, while China was the ‘patron’ of Tibet, granted the Tibetan aristocracy, as a mark of high respect, the right to wear the yellow silk brocade which was otherwise the exclusive privilege of the emperor. Four years before Henry was born, Ngala Rig’dzin Dorje saw him in a dream wearing such a tunic.
The married Aro Lamas in the lineage enjoy sharing their view and experiences of parenting with each other, and spending time together as an extended family. In Tibet there were many more family lineages than is commonly imagined, both mother-daughter, like the Aro gTér, and father-son, like the family lineage of Ngak’chang A-Kyong Düd’dül Dorje. In the west it remains to seen whether, against the cultural norm, parents will ever come to be adopted as spiritual teachers by their own children; in the way that Jétsun Khandro Rinpoche refers to her father Kyabjé Minling Trichen Rinpoche. In this lineage, the practice of extended family, which has generally ceased to be a cultural model in the west, could be one means by which children of practitioner parents could form a relationship with adult teachers who were not their parents, but close to their parents in the same lineage. It would not be so different from the way that most western children grow up knowing several so-called ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’, who are actually not of the family as such, but very old friends of the parents.