Welcome. This is the 11th lecture in our course on Mission Buddhism. And today it is my great
pleasure to welcome Venerable Kamala Chitsoom, who is going to speak to us on the topic of
Mission Buddhism. Venerable Kamala Chitsoom is a professor of religious studies at the University
of San Diego, where she teaches Buddhist thought and culture and other courses. She studied Buddhism
in Gamsal in India for 15 years and received a doctorate in comparative philosophy from the
University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2000. She obtained as a novice Buddhist student in the
Tibetan tradition in 1977 and is a fully ordained student in Korea in 1982. She is
vice-president of Saketi International Association of Buddhism and the founder and director of Yam
Yam Foundation, an organization that supports study programs for women in developing countries.
Her publications include Into the Jaws of Yama, Buddhism, Bioethics and That, and Nine,
edited readings on Women in Buddhism. With that march of introduction, I now hand over to Venerable Chitsoom.
Good evening, everyone. Glad to see you in the virtual classroom. So I've had some technical
difficulties, but I hope this is going to work. Our topic this evening is Women in Tibetan Buddhism.
And I'd like to thank Sarah Kirschberger and Esther Bianchi for setting the stage by discussing
women in Chinese Buddhism, because a lot of it is relevant to our discussion today. I'll try to
bounce off of some of what they said and also bring it into the Tibetan context. Starting with
the historical background in recent history, of course, the communist takeover was disastrous for
Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, just as it was for China and Chinese Buddhism. So the number of
monasteries that were destroyed is estimated to have been about 6,000. And of course,
that would have included nunneries as well. The nunneries were far fewer in number. And compared
to monks, the number of nuns in Tibet was also far fewer. But because of that, then the destruction
of nuns and nunneries was even greater, proportionately, and very few Tibetan nuns managed to escape
to India. There were a few who made it to Dharamsala, a few who made it to Nepal,
and a few who made it to Orissa. There was a community down in Orissa, a small community of
highly realized practitioners. The head nun had rainbows in the sky when she passed away and so
on. But those nuns have pretty much died by now. In the meantime, however, the Tibetan exiles,
the massive wave of Tibetans who made it to India, have occasioned a real revival of Buddhism in India,
that is Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition. And the number of nuns has increased steadily
since 1959. So I suppose everyone is familiar with the history of Buddhism in Tibet,
and the recent history of the communist takeover of Tibet. So from 1950 to 1959, His Holiness
Dadalaylama tried to work out a compromised solution with the PRC. He even traveled to Beijing
in 1956 to try to discuss with Mao how Tibet could manage to maintain its independence
under the Chinese rule. He was even willing to concede that much of the army, the post office,
the foreign affairs, and so forth, if the Tibetans could maintain their own Buddhist
cultural identity. For a while, he thought that it was going to work out, but unfortunately,
eventually, it didn't. The Lamas continued to be invited to drama performances and then disappeared.
And since the Lamas were the leaders, both spiritual and often community and leaders,
that was a disaster for the Tibetans. And so when His Holiness Dadalaylama was invited to a drama
performance in 1959, in March, without his bodyguards, then the Tibetan people, he was ready to
go. But the Tibetan people wouldn't hear of it. They amassed around Norvalinka in about 20,000
strong, and refused to allow him to attend the performance. So he managed to escape in the
dead of night and made it to India 17 days later. Fortunately, the Indian government welcomed the
refugees, numbering about 100,000. And of course, over the years, even more have managed to make
it to Nepal and India. Unfortunately, the trickle is now almost to a halt because the border is
more and more dangerous to cross. And whereas in the 1980s, hundreds and thousands of young
men and women, monks and nuns, crossed the border into Nepal and then to India,
in India, that has slowed almost to a halt. So things are changing. The nuns in Tibet was
always far fewer than the number of monks. It's estimated that about a quarter of the male
population was at one in robes, but the number of nuns that were ordained, it was far fewer.
Now the position of women in an Tibetan society was a fairly strong relative to other societies
in the region. Women were not forced to marry. They were not forbidden to remarry if they were
widowed. They had quite a lot of say in who they married. And if they wish to remain single,
and live a religious life, they were allowed to do so. And they also did business. Many women
were involved in business dealings, as they are today in India. However, the position of women
in Buddhist institutions has been practically non-existent. Women had no place at all in the
religious hierarchies. The three largest monasteries, Jaifung, Gandhana and Sarah,
which were the pinnacle of Buddhist scholarship, were close to women. And the few Tibetan nunneries
that there were, were located very far away. I guess it was assumed that women should be in
remote locations, maybe to protect them, hopefully not to marginalize them. But in any case,
they were generally quite far from any city or town, which meant that they were far from any sort
of Buddhist instruction. Women in Tibet were welcome to attend public teachings. When Lamas
came to town, men, women, children, monks, nuns, lay people, everyone was welcome to attend these
public teachings, as they are to this day in Indian Nepal. So when His Holiness the Dalai Lama
gives the Kala Chakra initiation or other teachings in Bodh Gaya, so I'm not, sometimes 100,000,
200,000, some people estimate even up to a half a million people attend, and women are welcome.
Earlier, the nuns were sitting in the back, and there were, I remember one Kala Chakra
must have been around 87, when His Holiness the Dalai Lama was teaching, and there were
20,000 monks, then tens of thousands of lay people, but the nuns were in the very back of
the gathering, where they could not see or hear. Now all of that has changed today, and when I
attended the Kala Chakra in 2013, I suppose, the nuns had their own seating arrangements, they were
in a nice location, it was all roped off, there were thousands of nuns there, they were able to
see His Holiness, they were able to hear the teachings, and because education for nuns has
improved remarkably in the last 30 years, they were also able to understand the teachings. So
this was quite an advance for nuns in particular, and also women in general. So
there will be something of a focus on nuns here, because nuns are the ones who are fully
committed to Buddhist practice, and lay women have other responsibilities.
So the roles of women in Buddhism are varied, women may participate as
just everyday practitioners, reciting mantras, sometimes all day, going on Koda
to circumambulate the temples, and religious monuments, they can go to teachings when they're
offered, they can also request private teachings and empowerments, they are allowed to go to
nunneries where they can study if they wish to, and increasingly the nunneries are also allowing
lay women to come and study without necessarily becoming nuns. I think this is also an advance
for women, it was something that His Holiness the Dalai Lama expressed to me specifically as
early as the 1980s, he said, why don't you allow lay women also to study at Jang Myung Ching, which
we established in 1987, and I said, oh, they're most welcome, I would love to have lay women to
join the programs. And at first, there were none who joined. Later though, some young women decided
to come and study and today there are women doing the complete debate program as lay women. So
that's also a big change. So we could say that the socioeconomic status of women in Tibetan societies
is subordinate to men, but it is also, they're in a position of relative freedom,
compared to other societies, for example, China, until recently, and Indian society even today.
The situation in in Tibet, and in Indian Nepal, and so forth is quite different. So what I'd like
to present here is a kind of taxonomy of Buddhist women. We find that I want to talk about
Buddhist women in Tibet. Oh, I see there's a mistake here. But I had two, three computers
malfunction today. So I hope we can manage anyway. So talking about Buddhist women in Tibet itself,
then Tibetan women in India, then women in the Himalayan region, and then Buddhist women beyond
the Himalayas. So this is a more or less geographical. But you will find that the
situation of women in these different regions is rather different with many commonalities.
Um, speaking of commonalities, we could say that all of them have female archetypes of enlightened
or realized women to draw on. And this is quite important for women to have models of, of other
women who have managed to achieve realization. So if the image of human perfection is male,
then that's going to be problematic for women. But fortunately, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition,
we have such figures as Galoma Palmo, who was not actually Tibetan, but she's a legend in Tibet,
and is recognized as having been fully ordained. So Galoma meaning big shuni,
she managed to become fully ordained. But unfortunately, the tradition of full ordination
for women didn't make it to Tibet because Himalayas are so high, travel is so difficult.
So unfortunately, as far as we know, there was never an established shuni lineage in Tibet.
Now, I'll come back to this question, the ordination issue, again and again, actually.
So the other commonality is a sort of myth that women are somehow inferior.
Women are stupid, women are have bad karma, being reborn as a woman is a lower rebirth.
And this is embedded in the language in Tibetan language.
It means literally means lower birth. On the contrary, the words for nuns are quite
favorable. So summa is quite respectful. Chilla, honorable Dharma practitioner is very respectful.
Lobuma, meaning a woman scholar, woman Buddhist scholar is very respectful.
But the common term for a nun in Tibetan societies, unfortunately, is ani,
sometimes with an honorific la at the end, ani la. But nevertheless, the word ani really means
ani. I think this derives from a time when, although women were not forced to marry,
they lived in the home, they didn't have enough monasteries for nuns. And so women who wish to
live a religious life would stay with their families and look after the children, the kitchen
and so forth, and were referred to as ani. And the term sort of stuck. So for about 30 years now,
we've been trying to get rid of this term. But unfortunately, it's caught on and people still
use it. And some even deny that it means ani, but I'm quite convinced that it does. We do have
biographies of realized women in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And this is really wonderful
because it gives women models for enlightenment. We can do it. And so for example, Yeshe Sogil
is one of the earliest figures concert of the group Emma Samava. And we also have many other
biographies of enlightened women since then, for example, Machik Labdron, the progenitor of the
fasting or new may practice. We have Chikidoma. We have Machik Labdron, the progenitor of the
Chilinich. We have Urgen Chiki from the 17th century, 17th, 18th century. In more recent times,
we have Jetsun Lochan Rinpoche, who lived up to 1951. He was a remarkable figure of Manipat
storyteller who traveled all around northern India and western Tibet, singing the Dharma,
and was a nun. The others that I mentioned, many were not nuns. We have Sarah Khandro,
a lay woman who lived into into recent times. All of these were singular figures. But we also have
the lineage of Sanding Dorjhomo, who was represents a whole lineage of Riankhanet mamas
in female form. So female lineages of Tokus or Riankhanet mamas are quite rare, but we do have
a few examples. So we can't say that they don't exist. I should probably clarify at this point
for people who are not familiar with the Tibetan tradition that lama means guru, means teacher,
especially a spiritual teacher. Whereas a monk is a celibate practitioner who observes a certain
number of precepts, including celibacy. And the nun is the female counterpart of a woman who
lives a monastic or some of that life observing a number of precepts, including celibacy. So
not all monks are lamas. That means not all monks, those who have the precepts of a monk,
are qualified to teach. At the same time, not all lamas are monks. That means that a person could
be a lama, a qualified teacher without necessarily keeping the precepts of a monk or nun. So this is
common in all Buddhist traditions. There are lay Buddhist teachers in all Buddhist traditions,
but somehow this is often misunderstood in the Tibetan tradition. So I wanted to clarify,
not all lamas are monks, not all monks are lamas. In fact, some lamas would be nuns,
and we're seeing more and more of them. Unfortunately, in society, they generally
use the term lama to mean a monk, or a male teacher, and it's almost never used to denote
a female teacher. So there's no reason that it shouldn't be. But just by social custom,
it's rare to find in Tibetan society itself, a woman referred to as a lama. Now this is changing
in Western countries, where women who have done three year retreat, for example, are recognized
as lamas and are called lamas and respected as lamas. But that's not the case in Tibetan societies
typically. Maybe this will change. Now, when we talk about Buddhist women in Tibet,
there are many monasteries in Tibet today. I noticed that Esther Bianchi, Professor Bianchi,
was talking about 30,000 nuns in China. I've been to China a couple of times recently, and people
have told me that there are something like 80,000. Of course, this is hard to document, but there may
be more. It depends, too, on whether they include Tibetan nuns in their figures. Since the Chinese
government at present considers Tibet part of China, then they might be also counting Tibetan
nuns in those figures. Two of the largest monasteries in Tibet today are Yarchun Monastery
in Eastern Tibet in Kong and Ladungar. But there are many others of varying sizes,
some very small, very remote, and some huge. So I'll show you some photos here of
Yarchun Monastery. This monastery has been documented recently by Pema Sol. It's in the
book Eminent Buddhist Women. So here's a picture of a community of 8,000 Tibetan nuns.
The community as a whole has a total of 10,000 monks and nuns. So that would be 2,000 monks and
8,000 nuns. The monastery was led by a monk called Achef Rinpoche, who passed away last year,
and 25 tukus. It's a ningma monastery, and all of the tukus are galos or bhikshus, celibate monks.
They are all vegetarian, which might surprise people. And I found when I spoke with them,
they told me that whatever donations they receive, they distribute equally to the monks and the nuns,
which I thought was wonderful. So the nuns live in an alluvial plain down by the river,
and their housing is really minimal. I don't know how they survive under such living conditions.
It's really harsh. The winters are terribly cold, and they have only this one water source, this
river, which when I was there, was quite polluted. In this picture, it looks fine,
but they use this water for everything. So their housing is mostly wooden boxes
with plastic on top, and it's really cold. But the nuns are happy to have the opportunity
to practice Dharma. Now I noticed that the monks dwellings were in better condition,
and when I asked, they said, well, the monks get support from their families,
whereas the nuns come from very poor families, so they generally don't get much support.
The diet, they said, was mostly potatoes. So I'm not sure about the nutrition there. They may get
some sampa, but the diet is rather poor. Sanitation is also very poor. But they've managed to set up
this new study hall for nuns, and the education programs are really very good. So it's nimma style,
where they get classes one day, and then the next day they're tested. Someone at random is selected
to explain the lesson of the previous day. And this method is also being used in South India,
down at Nandraling, and in Manali, at Santanchaling. It seems to be, rather than the rigorous debate
style of the monastic universities, and some of the nunneries now in India and Nepal,
they use this style of, although now also in India, nimma monasteries are starting to incorporate
debate, dialectical reasoning. So here's the new monastery for the nuns. I toured it in
2013, and it's really beautiful. And they can all, the nuns can, all 8,000 can fit in there,
they assured me. And they do many interesting things. They don't only study the texts,
the ritual texts and meditation are their focus, especially zukjan practice. But they can also
branch out into literature and the arts. And for example, if they wanted to focus on the arts,
then their exams would be in the arts. And the exams are all public, witnessed by everyone.
So they seem to have a very interesting and varied program of studies.
Here you can see that they're huddled together to receive teachings. And I was told that a lot
of the public teachings, especially when Achyapurmache was still alive, 25,000 people would routinely
attend his teachings. So, and the nuns, of course, are welcome to attend the teachings,
and lay women. You'll see some lay women in the picture too. They have only a few sources of
supplies, a couple of shops in town that are poorly stocked. And this is where they get their
potatoes. There's one clinic in the camp, but the Tibetans don't trust it. It's run by the Chinese
government, and it's supposed to serve them, but they really are reluctant to go to this clinic.
The number of nuns is restricted to 8,000. No one is allowed to build outside a particular parameter,
and that's by Chinese restrictions. So if a nun wants to join this community, they pretty much
have to wait until someone passes away. Otherwise, it's next to impossible to find a place
in the camp. So the nuns are so dedicated, and so diligent, and so avid to learn
Buddhist teachings that they will come out even when it's raining, even when it's snowing.
And it gets really, really cold. So they have a system of getting instruction from chemmos.
The lamas have authorized a number of nuns to teach, and they're given the title chemmo.
At first, there were eight who were authorized, and last time I checked, there were 20
authorized chemos. So the nuns will go for instruction to the chemos between the public
teachings. They will, on a day-to-day basis, receive teachings from these chemos. It means
abbots, but it's also a term for a qualified teacher. So it's an example of nuns studying
with nuns, instead of a continual reliance on monk teachers, as we see in India, Nepal,
and other places. So interesting, though their political rights are severely curtailed,
they have to be exceedingly careful not to mention anything. Privately, they may have a picture of
this woman, this Dalai Lama, but publicly they need to be extremely careful to avoid any kind
of politics, or political involvement, or opinions, even. This is one of the chemos,
Sunam Doma, and she's one of the teachers. She's very, very busy because she has so many students,
and she's very diligent, takes her role as a teacher very seriously. She's highly respected,
both for her knowledge, her wisdom, and her compassion. So you can see that she lives simply,
and she's known to be a real practitioner. Now this is Ladungar, which is another
huge community of practitioners. It also includes both male and female practitioners, monks, nuns,
laywomen, and laymen. You probably remember that Ladungar was a huge encampment under the direction
of Kempo Jigme Penso, and it grew from a small number of retreatants into an enormous community
of 10,000 people, a small city really, and it flourished as a Dharma community until suddenly
in 2003, early in the morning, the Chinese officials came and bulldozed the place, and
completely destroyed it, and told the monks and nuns that they had to relocate, which they did,
and then the next year Kempo Jigme Penso died under what many believe was mysterious circumstances.
Well since then, little by little, people have returned to this spot.
In Tibetan society, they believe that a place of practice where people have been
practicing seriously, intensively, has a certain blessing, and that would be the case with Ladungar
as well. You can see from the picture that it's grown now, again this is the new Ladungar,
it's grown into way over 10,000 practitioners. Unfortunately last week, the government again
issued an edict that everyone has to leave, so the community is in jeopardy, and no one knows
exactly what's going to happen, so I'm trying to get an update on the situation, but it looks quite
drastic, quite serious, and of course the Tibetans have no power to to speak against this
restriction. So the nuns into that face many challenges, not only the challenge of
their female status in society, which is considered somehow lesser than monks,
meaning that they have no opportunities for coordination, and they also get a little
support from the community, so their diet is poor, their living conditions are poor,
meaning that they're more prone to illness and so forth, they have less money for medical care,
and you know all that goes with that. Still all of the nuns that I met and talked to were so
delighted that they had a chance to practice in these retreat communities, so retreat along with
study possibilities, so that's quite remarkable. Okay now moving to Tibetan women in India,
there are a number of model menries that have been established in India since 1987,
we had, I think Jamyang Chilling was the earliest one in 1987, but soon there was a massive
influx of refugees from Tibet, and the Domani monastery was established under the auspices of
the Tibetan government to try to accommodate some of the many nuns who came from Tibet to India,
seeking the blessing of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but also hoping to learn about Buddhism,
and many hundreds became nuns. Some of them also settled in Nandraling in South India,
Jamyang Chilling is located in Dharamsala, Changchub Chilling is located in South India,
Shungsetanri is located in Dharamsala, and then there are many many other monasteries
all over India. Some are very small with only maybe eight or ten nuns, and some are quite huge,
probably Nandraling is the largest that was established as a ningma nunnery established
under the leadership of Penarimache, and it has at present 600 nuns, or with very good study
programs leading to a khemod degree, they also have nuns teaching nuns, and we've actually invited
some of the nuns from Nandraling to come to both diet and teach in the winter, and I must say they
did an exemplary job, so they're very serious about their studies, and they come out qualified to
teach. So just a few images, this is from Doma Ling, they had a flower shop, and they do get
education in general subjects as well as Buddhist philosophy and debate and Tibetan grammar and
all of the traditional monastic topics, ritual and so forth, but they also get instruction
in English and math and so forth. So
they come from many different places, the initial influx was from Tibet
when I think started with about 300 nuns, and they pretty much had to start from the beginning
with literacy, because many of the nuns coming from Tibet were illiterate. So now there are more
and more nuns coming from the Himalayan region, since a few are next to none are able to escape
from Tibet. They're very well disciplined, they're not allowed to have cell phones at Doma Ling,
and their discipline is really excellent, and their study program is really excellent,
so the nuns are very fortunate. Now moving to the next category, women in the Himalayas,
there are a number of areas, as we discussed a couple years ago, but many of you are new,
and probably didn't hear that presentation, so just a little review of the demographics of
women in Tibetan Buddhism in the Himalayan region. This refers to Arunachal Pradesh way over in the
eastern part of India, Bhutan also in the east, Kinur which is in the western Himalayas,
Ladakh way up in the northwestern Himalayas, Lahul also western Himalayas,
Sikkim in the eastern part of India, Spiti west side again, and Sanskrit a very remote valley,
southwest of Ladakh. Now these areas are by and large very poor, very remote,
they are disadvantaged in terms of food rations, the Indian government has an interest in keeping
people in the region, and to that end they've established a central Buddhist institute in
the western part of the Himalayas in in lane, the capital of Ladakh, and there people are allowed
men and women are able to study Buddhism, beginning from sixth grade up to the PhD level,
so some of our schools in Zanskar now have and one in Spiti are branches of the central Buddhist
institute in lay, this has also been really good for nuns and for women in general, before only
monks were able to join these programs, but recent years, I remember the first school,
it took me eight years to get a school, but eventually we got it, and once that one was
approved then three others were approved, and then a fourth, so what these programs mean
is that the central Indian government funds teacher salaries very generously,
they'll pay up to 15 000 rupees for a teacher to go to these remote regions,
and they'll pay for books and the small study tables and carpets, and they'll also give a stipend
to each student, now this is really important because it encourages the parents to send the
children to school, so whereas normally it was considered useless for girls to study,
this is really changing in recent years, now the advantage of educating women is gradually being
understood, and the parents are allowing the girls in greater numbers to attend school, at least up
to a certain level, so the schools that are in the villages are actually housed in the nunneries,
the ones for girls are housed in the nunneries, and little girls wear robes and shave their heads,
but they can decide later if they want to stay as nuns or perhaps go back to being lay people,
they can study up to fifth class, and it's all free of charge, in fact the skypin is also quite
generous, in the beginning it was 450 rupees, but now it's 950 rupees, so that's um well it's
only about 20 12 dollars, but for them it's significant, and it definitely is an encouragement
to the families to send the girls to school, so after they finish fifth class they're eligible
to study in lay, and there they can complete high school, they can do a BA, MA, PhD if they like,
they can also transfer over to Skarnut Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies if they wish,
and these study programs are mostly Buddhist oriented, though they offer a range of topics,
including languages, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, and so forth, and also literature and and so on,
so it's a really good program and it's making a big difference, some of the nuns who go to lay
though, well they don't come back to their original home monasteries, on the other hand
once they finish even 12th class they'll be eligible to get a teaching position, and they
can they will be sent out to teach, and they're the nuns are being sent to nunnery, so this is
also a very good thing, very an advance for women in the region, and it sends to the lay women also
a message that women are capable of studies, women are capable of learning Buddhism, capable of
reading and writing and all of that, things we take for granted, but we're not taken for granted
necessarily in these remote cultures, and were novel until recently, so now this is an example
of Adunachal Pradesh, and I was amazed to find that there are a number of nunneries in this
remote location, you may recall that Adunachal Pradesh is culturally Tibetan,
the Chinese government claims it and has invaded three or four times,
year before last when His Holiness the Dalai Lama traveled there to give teachings, the Chinese
government had a fit and said that he could not visit Adunachal Pradesh because it was Chinese
territory, but the Indian government stood their ground and said this is definitely Indian territory
and His Holiness the Dalai Lama can go there as he likes, so the people have a distinctive culture,
but it's very similar in many ways to Tibetan culture, for one thing they would use Tibetan
texts, their languages are very similar to Tibetan, and when they study Buddhism they would study in
the Tibetan tradition, Tibetan texts, Tibetan rituals and so forth,
it's an example of their distinctive clothing, these are mumba women from Mundtawang, and so they
usually sometimes they wear a hat that has little a black hat that has little pigtails on it,
so when they come to Bodhaya we know who's from Mundtawang, the women's dress is quite distinctive
and their dance and is quite distinctive,
the women are very devout but they have limited access to Buddhist teachings,
there are very few monks and the educational standards previously, well to become educated
traveling to Tibet and doing your studies in Tibet in Tibet itself, generally in Vasa or
maybe more likely Tashi Lumbo, Tashi Lumbo was welcoming of all monks from the Himalayan region
and so many went there and studied and even got a kind of
Kempo degree or kind of a Geshe degree but not exactly equivalent, unfortunately for women there
were no study programs, so that's a missing piece. Here's an example of one of the nunries,
something chilling, and there's another one that I found that had 300 nuns, so I was completely
taken by surprise to find out that such a large nunnery existed in Arunachal Pradesh, even it's
located down on the plains, this one in the picture here is in the mountains, they're bombdila,
but the one that I found on my way out, so unfortunately it was impossible to visit,
but they said it had 300 nuns, so unfortunately mostly they do ritual, they don't have
systematic study programs in these monasteries. Okay so this is an example of some of the local
women in these areas, there are many different tribal groups, most of whom are Buddhist or
animist, yeah few are Christian, they weed the baskets. Now this is an interesting image where
you have the Bhutanese dressing both in traditional Bhutanese style and Tibetan style clothing,
so the influx of Tibetan refugees to India has made a fashion statement, so that many of the
women now are taking up Tibetan dress at least on special occasions, well it's beautiful.
You'll also see that although Bhutanese women traditionally kept their hair closely cropped,
almost like a nun, but in the last 20 years they've been allowed to grow their hair out,
and you see only a few older women with cropped hair nowadays.
Okay so visiting the temple is very popular practice, circumambulation, the prayer wheel,
lots of chanting and so forth among the lay women and also the nuns.
Then this is the nun in Bhutan again and they live a very simple life,
the emphasis in Bhutanese Buddhism which follows the Tibetan tradition is on retreat rather than
dialectical studies, so a person who is in retreat they say will always have enough to eat,
well that seems to work well for monks but it doesn't always work well for nuns, so again
without coordination, without support from the community, the lives of nuns are harder
than the lives of monks.
One of four sisters who were married to the previous king and she's a strong proponent of
nuns, a strong supporter, here she is, and she's greeting two nuns who attended the
Saketita conference in Vaishali India in 2013, so this is quite unusual that a public figure
in the position of authority such as the queen would take the the nuns issue to heart,
until recently nuns were thought to be rather marginal, expendable, not particularly worthy of
attention, but she sees the importance, the benefits to having this and so she's been very
kind in helping get some of these monasteries for women started and maintain them, they still
struggle but it's much much much better than it was 20 years ago.
Now we go up to the Himalayan region, an area called Spiti, and this monastery is part of the
Jamyang foundation programs. The area is very very remote, it started with a community of about eight
nuns living in a small cave above the village and now has expanded until they now have 38 nuns
of all ages, and a really good study program, so I think that having a study program is really
important in the modern day, especially for nuns, the problem is teachers, it's very difficult to
get teachers up in these remote regions, nobody wants to go there, there's no television, there's
no internet access, there's no satellite connection for phones, it's really remote and so it's hard
to get teachers to go up there. In some of the projects, the nuns are learning to use computers,
it's a good way for them to learn English and a good way for them to study during the winter months,
when they're snowed in for many months and don't have teachers, often don't have teachers,
so of course keeping the computers running is not another challenge, but they love the computer
itself and it's fun teaching them. Here are a couple of nuns from Spiti, they're very content,
very satisfied, I don't know one case where a nun was forced by her parents to become a nun or
joined out of poverty and I've been asking them for a long time, so this kind of urban legend
that says nuns only become nuns because they're hungry, I think we have to question, it's rather
demeaning to women's spiritual capabilities to think that she would be so opportunistic
as to join a monastery only for the food. I'm not saying it doesn't
happen, but I personally don't know of a case, all of these young nuns join because
they really want to study Buddhism, they'll talk about it in a very mature way,
oh samsara is such a mess, we have to practice dharma now and you know they see their mothers
suffer from repeated pregnancies and all kinds of health challenges without proper health care
available and sometimes the men are drinking and abusive and so forth, so the nuns get the message
and some of them really opt for an independent light, sorry it's three in the morning,
I've been up for a long time, okay let's look at Buddhist women beyond the Himalayas,
so I want to talk about Mongolia, the Buddhist republics of the Russian
Federation and then the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora beyond,
Mongolia like Bhutan, Mongolia and the Russian Federation had Mongol migration by
by Buddhism, so as they
managed to keep their languages until recently and now they've been heavily Russianized,
so the younger generation,
now it's rather rare to find them speaking,
the Kalmyk, oh mistake here, it should be Priyatya and
for a long time there most people speak, anyone speaks Russian, trade-offs, more Russian,
this would be the Tsarist government, agreed migrations, these Mongol tribes,
inextrices, guards, both with and then the necessity of protecting those borders,
then tribes will settle and the catch landed in you, it's the industry public of Europe,
but it's on the north, the west bank of the K and C, so many should tell they give you a bit of
background.
and they practice according to the Tibetan tradition,
every day, but they enjoy just
this thing up in traditional clothing, and the modern Mongolian women are you know monoculture,
ideal of sweatpants and so on, but at the Mongolians they're quite
great and they keep much of them,
public, so many people still live which is rare and it happened to be a time of revolution,
a change of
well an election that the communists protested there on their
victory and
so luckily the conference disrupted, but it was an interest into the political, so the economic
knowing that both Mongolia and the Russian republics are coming under the PRC, the People's
Republic, that means that because of the profit these three stand to gain through China, then
they find themselves under the thumb of the Chinese decision-making, for example on whether
or not they can invite his onlyness
so for some years now he's not been allowed to
to Russia or to Mongolia like many other countries, but it's surprising the people
they're really
want him to visit and they have candidates so forth, but
the reasons are not too far to submit
those who do not follow their directives
for not towing the
well nine however is independent country and they have had private permits also
unfortunately they didn't know how to run a government so then the communists won the next time but
so
buddhism has been allowed to flourish
so that's a really good thing um on the flip side start no quality is buddhists are actually
in yurts so you can just set up a yurt doing ringing a bell and doing put people
the or none sometimes none
or lay person who runs the center modify people that some something might
now in China and Colombia alike women have absolutely no place in the religious hierarchies
they were never allowed to uh join the monastery
in fact they weren't even allowed in Siberia they weren't even changed no but um there are still
ideas of pollution that women at certain times of the month and so forth
false words explicit administrative enter now that's not only Russian public in us live
and um yeah others so
pollution taboos that have nothing to do with buddhism that have somehow managed to
infiltrate and i think should be done on that
and how how that how did that happen that these pre-buddhist pollution taboos have come to be
be
thought of as buddhist restriction
okay this is all of um
to return um and they were killed and culture was completely destroyed and they had to start
from from rock bottom this necessarily found them to be the uh to reincarnate llama of
kalmi so apparently these are rather ancient because this this photo is i can't that
monastery we just saw in elista um the capital of kalmi so these groups have been going for a long
time and they um practice in each other's homes and they learned mantras and certain rituals from
actually important before just before the Stalinist era when the monks were almost completely
murdered and the monastery
there is complete and they brought them back so interviewed a group of what in 2014 has a one man
and they rituals they have on fern days newen days eight month it's a large region located in
southern Siberia and this is the first and only women's temple of Russia so it was founded by a
woman and her mother and it's still going strong i mean yeah uh it's just anyone can go men can also
they do a lot of ceremonies a lot of rituals and they just bought the land next door and they're
putting up a center that they hope will be a study center as well as you know have classes in yoga and
so forth okay this is another center called Tara's center and um it's and you'll see in the picture
to my right um a nun the only uh tensing student who is one of is the only maybe one of two nuns
in the whole of Russia a buddhist nun so she is unusual in that she's a professor she has a phd
in tibetan studies and she's a researcher at the university and she also established this center
on this Tara center so
okay um one of the last slides i want to show here is of our dialogue with his holiness the Dalai
on the ordination issue on the in the tibetan tradition nuns take 36 precepts of a novice the
shaman erica precepts known as get soma precepts in tibetan and they count them as 36 and these
10 precepts have been subdivided into a list of 36 precepts but they're basically the 10 novice
precepts um until recently they have not had access to full ordination as i mentioned there's
no record of the bikini lineage ever being officially established in tibet though his
holiness has expressed a strong wish to bring it into the tibetan tradition uh some years ago he
won a peace prize in switzerland and gave a small committee uh five of us this 50 000 swiss francs
and said figure out a way to get this done you would love to see an asanga of bhiktunis in the
tibetan tradition so we met in homburg in 2007 for such a conference he'd been calling for a
conference of vinayas scholars so uh venerable jambat satan who will speak next time and te amore
organized this conference which was um very successful had 62 papers by 62 scholars of vinaya
and related topics and we fully expected his holiness to announce that now we will have
full ordination for women in the tibetan tradition unfortunately uh the last line of the
statement which we had helped him prepare was changed at the last minute and the announcement
was not made and still to this day has not been made now the logic that i hear is being followed
is that first they wanted to get the geshe degree for nuts that's an academic degree
and sometimes people call it equivalent to a phd it's not exactly equivalent to a phd because
phd requires a much broader knowledge base than a geshe degree is very specialized
uh it's it's buddhist studies really and um very focused on buddhist studies both
from indian and tibetan texts and it's uh gained by through a method of study that includes
dialectical uh debates dialectics and logical reasoning and lots of debating it so this
in this study method of which was preserved in tibet uh it was probably current in india up until
about the 10th century but was transmitted to maybe 11th to tibet around that time was preserved
only in tibet it died out in india so it's quite a treasure what the tibetans have with this
brilliant systematic study method um unfortunately it's pretty much designed for geniuses
and you know out of a class out of a hundred students maybe two will be really good at it
according to one of my teachers but he was amazed to find that among the nuns there's a much higher
percentage and he attributes it to the fact that they're so determined to learn they're so dedicated
that even some of these nuns from the Himalayan border regions who are not native tibetan speakers
there they have they speak you know spiti dialect or kinori dialect or ranskar dialect which may be
cognate with tibetan way back but there are also many differences so um i find it quite remarkable
that they've managed to to some of them to master this system in the beginning they said
that the nuns didn't need to take the exams i suppose it was assumed that they were just
doing it for fun but later it was became quickly became obvious that the nuns are
deadly serious about their studies and they love it and um so then the tibetan government required
that they go back and do the exams so every year they've been doing exams and next month um july
that's coming soon they will take the final exams apparently there are 20 nuns set to take
the exams and we'll have the first women gueshes in history so this is a tremendous breakthrough
for in women's history in buddhist history and i hope it is noted by historians of women's
studies and so forth because uh this is something that hasn't happened for a thousand years
in fact longer because it never happened in india either so now there's a little bit of a debate
about the term geshe ma they're going to add they're adding a feminine ending so then the male
will get a geshe degree and the female um candidate will get a geshe ma degree so some
feel that adding the ma ending will imply that there's something different between the degree
that the women are taking and what the men are taking that somehow it may not be as rigorous
or it may not be counted um as seriously as a full geshe degree and um well it looks like
they're using the term so it's it's hard to to refute it but let's hope that two things that this
title geshe ma is not a diminutive or a way of diminishing the nuts or somehow relegating them
to a second class academic degree and second let's hope that this degree that this class of
20 is not the last class that this study program and that this awarding of degrees to none
continues and i think that it is of ultimate value uh even though the study system is designed for
geniuses and i believe that we have to find another study method that will be more embracing
more accessible to those who are not geniuses myself um lomrim is one example a lomrim lomda
sort of teachings but um we need to design systematic study programs that are appropriate
to women and maybe this intensive uh i mean people go crazy studying this stuff because it's
so intense um maybe there is a middle way a new way women's ways of knowing that will perhaps
incorporate both practice and study and the way we could say some of the monasteries into that
are doing that now let's see um what um so we've talked about the language issue
oh we also hear people say that gender is irrelevant in buddhism and although a strong
case can be made a strong argument can be made that gender is basically irrelevant because
the buddhist are concerned about the purification of the consciousness
and consciousness is not um it has no sex it has no gender so it seems like a miss
a misconception to say that men's minds and women's minds are somehow essentially different
um so on one hand we can say that gender is irrelevant to enlightenment in theory
on the other hand because of social constructions of gender we find that it matters very much
because it affects the way women are perceived and the way women perceive themselves um it
has led to the disenfranchisement disenfranchisement of women in that many
buddhist women do not have access to full ordination um and in in other ways so uh
less support less encouragement um so
the um
um okay so i know that there was one um ordination ceremony held in bogaya in 1987
with his only mr dalai lama presided i i observed it there were all about over a hundred nuns
ordained there as novices and meanwhile his only mr dalai lama has told women that they're welcome
to go to hong kong or taiwan or korea or another place to receive full ordination i myself
personally received his blessing to do so and i know that a number of other nuns in the tibetan
tradition have received his blessing to do so not only that but when we returned he recognized us
as being uh as belonging to the tibetan buddhist tradition i mean that is by going to the koreans
or the taiwanese to get full ordination that did not mean that we were relinquishing our affiliation
with the tibetan tradition he said publicly that we are fully accepted as nuns of the tibetan
tradition even though we're not tibetan um as dictionaries so but the numbers are still small
quite a few western women have gone and received full ordination um i doubt that it's over a
hundred but um there are also a number of women from taiwan malaysia hong kong and so forth
who are chinese by ethnicity but practicing in the tibetan tradition so that's what i mean by
the tibetan buddhist diaspora you have women in toronto and fort lauderdale florida who are from
chinese backgrounds but they're ordained in the tibetan tradition and many of those nuns have also
received full ordination not all but many have so that complex you know complexifies the situation
a bit um so so we have um a history of highly realized female practitioners in the tibetan
tradition we have a number of biographies that thanks to some really dedicated scholars are
being translated now we don't have as many biographies of nuns which is very interesting
um were nuns fully educated as were they educated as well as lay women we don't know
um in some cases yes in some cases maybe not um but one argument for the full ordination of women
is that nuns should be participant in their own ordinations and this is the way the buddhist set
it up 2500 years ago was that the nuns would choose who joins their communities and the nuns
would train those candidates and the nuns would decide whether they were capable qualified
to be a nun and then they would also monitor them after that i mean to make sure that everything is
going well mentor them i should say rather than monitor them so um so even though there has been
a a revival of buddhism of the tibetan tradition in india there has not necessarily been a revival
of vinaya practice i would argue and for establishing a really solid bhiksuni community
in india and napalm i think we need to pay more attention to vinaya obviously just getting the
name bhiksuni is not sufficient the nuns need to be able to read the text and recite the text and
understand the text as well as receive the ordination so now that they are much better
educated than they were even 10 years ago then now all this becomes possible so the hope is that
after the geshe degree is awarded to successful candidates next month then the next um
challenge or target shall we say will be the full ordination for women so this committee
that his holiness uh convened of five western nuns to bring the bhiksuni ordination into the
tibetan tradition um how we've worked to publish a brochure that explains the rationale behind
bhiksuni ordination what is the point of becoming a fully ordained nun because they've never had
fully ordained nuns some of the nuns don't understand why it's necessary i mean they've
been keeping 10 precepts for generations so find that just continue as a 10 precept none
and this is being reinforced by many of the lamas who say oh yeah 10 precepts is enough for you
or 36 the novice precepts is enough for you right and not encouraging them to go for full ordination
but if ordination is is good for monks then it should definitely be good for nuns as well
so that's why we're hoping we can get a picture in large and um meaning the big picture we can
expand the the nuns community and um bring forward nation to all of the tibetan nuns
beginning in india i think it will begin in india and napalm i've estimated there's something
around 3 000 nuns in india could be more the number of nuns is increasing the number of nuns
is increasing whereas the number of monks is decreasing and this is significant too in terms
of the roles that women can play in tibetan buddhist societies young men are not joining
the monasteries in the numbers that they have traditionally the parents are not always
encouraging them to become monks before it was assumed that one monk one one son would become a
monk but now they don't have as many children and there are other opportunities such as business
opportunities for example and so the parents are not necessarily encouraging the boys to become
monks and in fact in ladakh recently the monks from the uh key monastery of the key monasteries
in zanskar and spitti have been going around to the people's homes and saying you have to send
one of your sons to the monastery if you don't there'll be no one to do rituals for you
and you can see the double entendre in that statement okay there'd be no one to have do
rituals for them if they don't produce more monks but it's also almost sounded like a threat that
if you don't send your sons to become monks we won't do rituals for you and it is true that the
monks the existing monks are overworked because in Tibetan societies they really love rituals and
there aren't enough monks to go around so um there's so much more to say but i'd like to open
it up to questions and it looks like we already have um a a question coming in from ravi chandro
kumar vijayan a british female nun tensing pomo has had an epic struggle to become a nun
currently residing in ladakh nunnery since 2006 providing drawings for many more nuns near um
kampagar monastery in tibet um let's see i'm having trouble reading this okay um
how has the western influence their biography and international exposure helped to address
the gender inequality well um jetsuma tensing pomo's monastery is actually located in india
uh and this kampagar is about three hours from darms fella and she has been um very successful
in building a beautiful monastery there she has about 70 nuns of mostly from the Himalayan region
her books i think she's published three books telling her the story of her struggle to become
a nun to find an appropriate place for a nun to to practice intensively has been very influential
the book's been translated into about 20 languages um people in many buddhist countries
have read it and been inspired by it and i think uh she has also been very outspoken on gender issues
so i should just mention that not all buddhist nuns are feminists and um many of them that's
not to say that they don't recognize the inequalities i'm quite sure that they do
but they're the feminist awareness varies from person to person but um and not everyone is
willing to speak out especially in a traditional society about gender inequalities it's an awkward
thing in Tibetan societies to say well you should be nicer to nuns when you're a nun yourself it's
sort of like promoting your own interests and so nuns tend to be very humble maybe humble to a
fault so i think that um western women practitioners nuns and lay women have been helpful in raising
issues of gender equality um but i i also know that the um malayan and tibetan nuns themselves
are becoming more and more aware of the issues and and increasingly discussing them but in
societies where the lamas have positions of of tremendous authority and women have traditionally
been neglected um i wouldn't say oppressed but i would say neglected especially on the educational
side then we can see that women's position is a bit tentative and they're reluctant to speak out
too forcefully on these issues so maybe western women can help because well they might be more
willing to speak out okay next question from bhikkhuni dhamdina regarding the use of geshe
versus geshe ma i wonder whether the omission of the feminine particle would have also
generated a comparable complaint that geshe would be male centered without taking the feminine gender
ma into account it sounds a rather ambivalent argument um would have indian or traditional
tibetan buddhist argued that to use the normal feminine bhikshu bhikshuni a female bhikshu
uh gellong versus gellongma would have implied some form of discrimination after all tibetan
language does know feminine normalizers that are productively and normally used in everyday language
um yeah it's it's an interesting question um we can't say for sure there are people who argue
that the word bhikshu has been used or can be used for both bhikshus and bhikshunis for example
and they point to texts where it's clear that the term bhikshu is being used to apply to
both male and female monastics and that may be true um on the plus side again like the word
humanity rather than man you know traditionally in english at least for some generations
the word man had been used to refer to humanity as a whole but actually man is a male gendered
word so now the trend is to use humankind or humanity instead and i think that is a step
forward uh that women are fully human we're fully part of the human community we're not
some other species outside of the human community so i would argue for the use of geshe and i'm not
sure that that would imply of course women could be marginalized within that community of geshes
it could be that even within the subset the academic community of geshes that women would be
subordinated or marginalized as somehow less qualified than the male geshes but i would
rather i think take that risk and say yeah they're fully geshe so let's just go with it
but let's see what they decide it looks like geshe ma is catching on but thanks for the
question um bhikshu and naleo has a question um about the gello degree
i just wonder if the problem of not being permitted to study the thin layer impacts
women wanting to gain this degree um yes this was a problem i i think you mean the geshe
degree and yes this was a problem because the study of vinaya is part and parcel of the
geshe studies program you study first the logic then prajnaparamita then um madhyamika then
abhidharma and then vinaya and of course there are many jokes about why vinaya studied last
shouldn't be studied first because by the time you get to vinaya you're not a monk anymore or
something but um those are tibetan jokes by the way um in the monasteries but um so yes in
the beginning there it was thought that women would be disadvantaged and an argument was made
that women cannot become geshes because they cannot study vinaya because they're not
vixenius and in the tibetan tradition unlike the pali tradition these precepts sight unseen
for your life your whole life so that i don't know how this got started but that's the tradition
in tibetan and also in the chinese buddhist tradition no connection necessarily but
whereas in the pali tradition um what we now call terevada and apparently the lay people are
encouraged to study vinaya um by studying vinaya they they then know how to respect the monastics
they know how to care for them they know uh the boundaries what they need to do for the
for the monastics and what they should not do for for or to the monastics so um yeah i think
they're disadvantaged but they found a workaround they worked around it by giving the nuns some
kind of vinaya text that was allowable from their eyes and so the nuns studied that and it looked
like a very detailed text and very worthwhile studying so i think they found a way to resolve
that another question here from ravichandar from our battalion the strand of russian mongolian
influence gives great impact on the purity of the dharma in your research were there any
salient points that differ from the mainstream tradition well i'm not sure what you mean by
having an impact on the purity of the dharma because supported according to
practitioners in mongolia they have the pure tradition and the tibetans feel the same they
feel that they've managed to preserve the pure dharma and all the main branches of it including
the pali tradition what we would call the pali tradition or um terevada or shravatayana
traditions all those teachings are included in the tibetan translations of the indian text
and also all of the mahayana teachings and you know including both sudrayana and tantrayana
so they believe that these are all pure and that they're practicing them as purely as they can
of course the dharma is open to interpretation in all societies
at all times our interpretations of dharma today are not necessarily the way they were
interpreted at the time of the buddha we have this new reconstruction of terevada for example
since the 1940s perhaps this very strict almost rigid interpretation of of terevada tradition
which is not the only way to interpret terevada so Kate Crosby's new book on terevada buddhism
talks a lot about this there's a lot more going on in south and southeast asian buddhism than this
modern reconstruction revisionist approach to terevada so different ways of doing dharma
um one incident that i could mention was that the head lama of buryatya
said that a woman who has seven children will achieve nirvana
i was stunned to hear this statement um and i wasn't quite sure whether he was joking i
asked him if he was joking and he said he was serious so i don't know what to do with that
because it's um you know going back to the old adage of keeping women barefoot and pregnant
by having one child after the other and how is that going to lead to nirvana a woman could have
seven children and achieve nirvana but having children is not recommended by the buddha as a
pathway to um to liberation so that's just one example um i'm sure there would be others but i'm
not exactly uh sure what we mean by poor and and who's to judge what is pure dharma also that's
another question okay here we go um with um dikuni dhamma dina in the terevada tradition the lady tends
to get basic practical information on vinaya in the areas of how to properly handle offerings etc
but as far as i know in traditional terevada societies vinaya study is far from being
encouraged or considered relevant for the laity well i have been told this by
terevada practitioners lay and ordained in Sri Lanka and Thailand so it may have just maybe
my sources were mistaken and that's something we could check into um i would have been told by
you know Ranjani da Silva, kusuma Bhikkhuni kusuma, Hemaguna Tilaka in um Sri Lanka as well as
Venerable um Dhammananda and others in Thailand that the laity in the terevada tradition are
encouraged to study the vinaya so that they will know how to treat the monastics but
they may be mistaken or i may have misinterpreted them or there may be varying um perspectives on
that question yeah good let's let's try to ask some people and maybe you can write an article
about that question that would be great you do wonderful research and i thank you for that
um Bhikkhu and Laelio has a question yes i know from traditional terevada monasteries
that the vinaya is kept under key to prevent those who are not fully ordained including
novices that they look into it well now that's a different point of view i've never seen the
Vinaya kept under locking key uh in a traditional terevada monastery but it maybe it is in some
monasteries gee that's an that's an interesting point of view and it's and you do excellent
research too so i appreciate it if you could also work on that and see if we can come to a
some kind of conclusion now we know that one of the Vinaya precepts is that the Vinaya should
not be recited within earshot of the laity and this is during the reading of the patimoka
this is definitely the case i believe for both bhikkhus and bhikkhunis um that i understood to
mean that during the reading of the patimoka there might be confessions of fault that the laity
should not have to be privy to now that my assumption may be wrong because in fact we're
meant to declare our purity before we go into the recitation so if we've declared our purity or
lack of purity um the night before or earlier in the day um before reciting the patimoka then
then that wouldn't mean confessing our faults in front of the laity so therefore there wouldn't
be any problem with reciting the patimoka but wow now you have me really curious about this question
and i'll be interested to see if you can get to the bottom of it
actually during the Sakadita conference women from Sri Lanka said that it is considered good
for laity people to study vinaya in order to support monastics so different practice in
different areas that could be that could very well be so i'm glad that we've raised questions
for further inquiry this is always good i think to end on a note of further research um it's clear
that we have many questions i'm sure that this presentation raised questions from many of you
um i think there is a forum for entertaining further questions i'm sorry i'm quite groggy
jetlagged and it's now four in the morning here after no sleep so um i if i have made errors
or if i have misinterpreted anything um annoyingly or i mean unknowingly please i
beg your forgiveness and um i'm also just learning here speaking from my own experience
and i may be completely mistaken on some things and i'll be i welcome your corrections so thank
you very much um well you're very kind i i'm so happy to have this opportunity and i'm so
delighted that people are interested in learning more about the Tibetan tradition i think that
the Tibetan tradition is often misinterpreted and i i think that um it's largely the
responsibility of the monastics to try to correct some of the misconceptions we need more qualified
teachers and i hope that we can bring more knowledge and share our knowledge with each
other so thank you very much for tuning in and i look forward to more discussions more forums
thanks so much to Venable and Nailayo for all your good work all of your patience with the
technology and to all of you for um your kindness may you all be happy may you all be well peaceful
may all beings be free from suffering