The Conversation: Buddhist nuns win access to advanced degree

By DARCIE PRICE-WALLACE
Of Northwestern University

In August, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from religious institutions across India and Nepal — a record number — gathered at the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern India to take various levels of the geshema examination.

Advancing through the levels prepares them to one day earn the geshema degree, comparable with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The nearly four-week gathering was especially notable because the exam was not open to women at all until 2012.

Now, thanks to a greater emphasis on women’s education, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are increasingly becoming teachers and abbesses. In monastic institutions and Buddhist centers around the world, they are assuming leadership roles and being acknowledged for their religious scholarship, including attainment of the coveted geshema degree.

As a scholar of religious studies and gender, I study the changing role of women in Buddhism. While nuns have long been respected in Tibetan Buddhist culture, they were not historically granted access to the same educational or leadership opportunities as monks.

That has changed in recent years, in part due to the crucial role played by the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

He encouraged nuns to become advanced degree holders as part of his broader goal to increase gender parity.

“Biologically there is no difference between the brains of men and women and the Buddha clearly gave equal rights to men and women,” he said in 2013. In addition to reciting prayers and performing rituals, he urged nuns to study classic Buddhist texts, something traditionally reserved for men.

Such guidance helped challenge historical misconceptions about women’s intellectual abilities that undermined women’s prominence in Buddhism. Indeed, nuns are now teaching philosophy within their own nunneries at home and abroad, becoming principals of their institutions, serving as role models for other nuns and the laity, and entering long retreats — a staple of Buddhist contemplative activities on the path to awakening.

The Dalai Lama has resided in exile since 1959, when he fled to northern India following unrest over the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Many Tibetans followed him.

He officially gave up political duties to the Tibetan government in exile in 2011, but has remained the key religious and political leader for the Tibetan community and diaspora ever since.

Under the Dalai Lama’s leadership, improving education for the diaspora communities of Tibetans in India and Nepal has been a crucial avenue for protecting and preserving Tibetan culture, including Tibetan Buddhism.

Historically, however, the path of formal education was primarily reserved for monks.

In Tibet, nuns were primarily ritual specialists, according to Buddhist studies scholars such as Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Mitra Härkönen and Nicola Schneider. They performed rituals in temples and homes, but rarely had the opportunity to engage in formal study of Buddhist texts.

Even with the Dalai Lama’s support, developing a systematic course of study for nuns commensurate with that of monks was not easy, given the limited number of nunneries in India and Nepal, according to Schneider’s research.

“When the nuns arrived in India, they were ill, exhausted, traumatized and impoverished,” recalled Lobsang Dechen, co-director of the nonprofit Tibetan Nuns Project, in 2023. “Many nuns had faced torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese authorities in Tibet and endured immense physical and emotional pain. The existing nunneries in the struggling Tibetan refugee community in India were already overcrowded and could not accommodate them.”

Nuns’ education prospects were also hampered by limited literacy, and by monks who held administrative and decision-making roles over them.

The women essentially lived in “masculine institutions inhabited by nuns,” scholar Chandra Chiara Ehm argued in her ethnographic work on the Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. She found that administrators tended to endorse the Dalai Lama’s calls for gender parity in name without actually supporting nuns’ advanced education.

Increased access to education for nuns began to change in the 1980s as more Tibetan nuns migrated to India and Nepal. A network of more developed nunneries followed, such as Gaden Choling and Dolma Ling in Dharamshala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

These institutions were funded by organizations such as the Tibetan Nuns Project, part of the broader Tibetan Women’s Association established in Tibet in 1959 in response to the Chinese occupation. The TWA was reinstated in India with the blessing of the Dalai Lama in 1984, and the Tibetan Nuns Project was established soon thereafter to educate and support nuns in India from all Tibetan schools.

The Dalai Lama encouraged these organizations to help build nunneries, empower existing nuns and support their further education.

“In the beginning, when I spoke about awarding geshema degrees, some were doubtful,” the Dalai Lama recalled in 2018. “I clearly told them that Buddha had given equal opportunity for both men and women.”

Alongside the Dalai Lama’s efforts, and more Tibetan nuns coming into the diaspora in India and Nepal, several other factors helped promote women’s advancement. Those include the advocacy and support of international organizations such as Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women, which has hosted international meetings to empower nuns and lay Buddhist women for nearly 40 years.

Within India, meanwhile, local nonprofits such as the Ladakh Nuns Association have provided opportunities for nuns to work in health care.

The geshema degree that nuns have been able to receive since 2012 is in the Geluk tradition, one of the four schools, or distinct branches, of Tibetan Buddhism. These degrees are the highest level of monastic training, previously available only to men, whose degree is known as “khenpo” or “geshe.”

Candidates for the geshema degree are tested after having studied Buddhist texts. Nuns must score 75% or higher during their 17 years of study before qualifying to take their final geshema examination.

In 2016, the Dalai Lama presided over and granted 20 Tibetan nuns geshema degrees, four years after he and the Tibetan government in exile recognized the accreditation of higher degrees for nuns.

Before the formal development of the geshema program, only one German nun, Kelsang Wango, had received a degree. Now, there are 73.

After the Geluk school began granting geshema degrees, nuns within the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism — Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu — also began pursuing advanced degrees in India and Nepal. Within these other three branches, nuns carry the title of “khenmo,” which like the geshema, qualifies them to teach the renowned Buddhist scriptures.

In 2022, the Dalai Lama offered blessings to new khenmo who received their titles in the Sakya school. All told, nuns are changing the course for Tibetan Buddhist women – and have found an ally in the Dalai Lama.

As the number of women at the highest echelons of learning continue to grow, women will likewise expand their ability to take leadership roles in their monastic and lay communities — helping to improve other nuns’ education and protecting Tibetan culture in the process.

From The Conversation, an online repository of lay versions of academic research findings found at theconversation.com/us.