- Dakinis in Jurts
- Women Choed-Masters of Mongolia/
Dakinis in Jurten - Chöd-Meisterinnen der
Mongolei
- A video document by
- Wolf Kahlen
- German, 1994/95, 108 minutes
- Choed is a Büddhist Vajrayana ritual, which has been practiced,
- intensively and perpetually, especially by women in Mongolia,'
- who could not live a life as ordained nuns, since ordination had
- been refused to them by the monks of the leading Gelugpa lineage.
- (A specific historic phenomena in Mongolia at the time of the
- extinction of Buddhist belief in the country by the Russians
- and by selfdestruction in the thirties)
- Just a few of them, now in their eighties, have survived, having
- practiced their forbidden ritual secretly.
- The exercises took place in the deserted steps, in secluded
- parts of the mountains and on moonlit cemeteries.
- The aim of the ritual is to offer all parts of the practitioners
- body to the called demons and local deities in order to
- abandon the selfish, ego-centered cling to life and bodily
- posessions, and become unselfish. and selfless.
- This film is the portrait of two extraordinary old women,
- masters of Choed, reborn dakinis (goddesses of the sky), of one
- reborn male dakini, and of a younger nun, who teaches the ritual
- to Mongolian girls, who want to follow the traditions.
- The dakinis live in the far east of Mongolia, in Gobi desert or
- lived (one of them died only a few months after the documentation)
- near to Ulan Baatar.
- The film does not unveal illegally the privacy of the ritual,
- but depicts empathically the aura of the Choed-mas.
