Tseringma- Tibetan GodDeity"Auspicious Long-Life Lady"

The Snow of Chomolungma

Five sisters ruled the high Himalayas. Each claimed a peak. Tseringma, the eldest, took Chomolungma, the mountain later called Everest. They were not goddesses then. They were demonesses, white and blue and yellow and red and green, who brought avalanches down on travelers and sickness on the villages below. They hated the new religion spreading across Tibet, and they punished anyone who practiced it within reach of their peaks.

Padmasambhava's Oath

Padmasambhava encountered the five sisters during his eighth-century campaign to establish Buddhism in Tibet. Through tantric power he broke their resistance and extracted an oath: they would protect dharma practitioners instead of harming them. The sisters submitted, but the conversion sat uneasily. They were oath-bound, not transformed. The hostility had not left them.

Milarepa in the Caves

Three centuries later, Milarepa came to meditate in Himalayan caves within Tseringma's domain. According to the Life of Milarepa by Tsang Nyön Heruka, the five sisters descended on him with everything they had. The earth shook. Floods poured into the cave. Fire roared from the stone. Milarepa did not move.

They tried again, conjuring apparitions terrible enough to break any ordinary mind. Milarepa sat. His meditation would not crack. The sisters had never encountered a human who simply refused to be afraid.

Tseringma yielded first. She approached him not as an attacker but as a student. Milarepa taught her the dharma, and what Padmasambhava's binding had begun by force, Milarepa's teaching completed through devotion. Tseringma became his patroness during his years of mountain meditation. He sang songs to her and her sisters, preserved in his collected songs, and she kept the snow and cold from killing him.

In her right hand she carries a vajra. In her left, a vase filled with the nectar of long life. She rides a snow lion across the glaciers of Chomolungma, and the people who live beneath that mountain still ask her blessing before they climb.