In August 2025, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from spiritual establishments throughout Bharat and Nepal – a file quantity – gathered at the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern Bharat to jerk numerous ranges of the “geshema” exam. Those tests are in preparation for one age receiving the geshema level, related with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The just about four-week amassing was once particularly impressive as a result of till 13 years in the past it was once utterly unavailable to girls.
Now, due to a better emphasis on ladies’s training in recent times, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are increasingly more turning into academics and abbesses. In monastic establishments and in Buddhist facilities all over the world, nuns are taking up management roles and being stated for his or her spiritual scholarship, together with the geshema level.
As a scholar of religious studies and gender, I learn about the converting roles of girls in Buddhism. Pace nuns had been lengthy revered in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, they had been traditionally now not granted get admission to to the similar instructional or management alternatives as priests. However that has modified, partly because of the a very powerful position performed by way of the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso.
He inspired nuns to turn out to be complex level holders as a part of his broader objective to extend 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 mentioned in 2013. Along with nuns reciting prayers and appearing rituals, he emphasised they must learn about vintage Buddhist texts, one thing historically reserved for males.
Such steering has helped problem historic misconceptions about women’s intellectual abilities that undermined ladies’s prominence in Buddhism. Certainly, nuns are actually instructing philosophy inside of their very own nunneries at house and in another country, turning into principals in their establishments, serving as position fashions for alternative nuns and the laity, and coming into lengthy retreats – a staple of Buddhist contemplative actions at the trail to awakening.
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Historic roots
The Dalai Lama has resided in exile since 1959, when he fled to northern Bharat following unrest over the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Many Tibetans adopted him, and he has remained the important thing spiritual and political chief of the Tibetan public and diaspora ever since, regardless that he officially gave up political duties in 2011 to the Tibetan govt in exile.
Right through the Dalai Lama’s a long time of management, bettering training for the diaspora communities of Tibetans in Bharat and Nepal has been a a very powerful street for shielding and retaining Tibetan tradition, together with Tibetan Buddhism.
Traditionally, alternatively, the trail of formal training was once essentially reserved for priests. In Tibet, nuns had been essentially ritual consultants, in step with Buddhist research students reminiscent of Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Mitra Härköken and Nicola Schneider. They carried out rituals in temples and houses however hardly ever had the chance to review the Buddhist texts.
Or even with the Dalai Lama’s backup, growing a scientific direction of research for nuns that was once identical to priests’ curriculum was once now not simple, particularly with just a restricted choice of nunneries in Bharat 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 Undertaking, 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’ training possibilities had been additionally hampered by way of restricted literacy and priests who held administrative and decision-making roles over them. The ladies necessarily lived in “masculine institutions inhabited by nuns,” student Chandra Chiara Ehm argued in her ethnographic work on the Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. Ehm discovered monk directors tended to endorse the Dalai Lama’s requires gender parity in title with out without delay supporting nuns’ training.
A unused pace for tutorial alternatives
Greater get admission to to training for nuns started to modify within the Nineteen Eighties as extra Tibetan nuns migrated to Bharat and Nepal. A community of extra evolved nunneries adopted, reminiscent of Gaden Choling and Dolma Ling in Dharamshala, Bharat, the place the Dalai Lama lives in exile.
Those establishments had been funded by way of organizations such because the Tibetan Nuns Undertaking, a part of the wider Tibetan Ladies’s Affiliation that was once established in Tibet in 1959 according to the Chinese language career. The TWA was once reinstated in Bharat with the blessing of the Dalai Lama in 1984, and the Tibetan Nuns Project was once established quickly thereafter to coach and backup nuns in Bharat from all Tibetan colleges.
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The Dalai Lama inspired those organizations to aid form nunneries, empower current nuns and backup their additional training. “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.”
Along the Dalai Lama’s efforts and extra Tibetan nuns entering the diaspora in Bharat and Nepal, a number of alternative elements helped advertise ladies’s development.
The ones come with the advocacy and backup of world organizations reminiscent of Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women, which has hosted world conferences to empower nuns and lay Buddhist ladies for almost 40 years.
Inside of Bharat, in the meantime, native nonprofits such because the Ladakh Nuns Affiliation have supplied alternatives for nuns to work in health care.
Attaining the easiest ladder of monastic instructing
The geshema level that nuns had been in a position to obtain since 2012 is within the Geluk custom, one of the crucial 4 colleges, or distinct branches, of Tibetan Buddhism. Those levels are the easiest degree of monastic coaching however had been up to now to be had best to males, whose level are referred to as “khenpo” or “geshe.”
Applicants for the geshema level are examined next having studied Buddhist texts. Nuns will have to ranking 75% or upper all the way through their 17 years of research ahead of qualifying to jerk the geshema examinations.
In 2016, the Dalai Lama presided over and granted 20 Tibetan nuns geshema degrees, 4 years next he and the Tibetan govt in exile identified the accreditation of upper levels for nuns. Earlier than the formal building of the geshema program, just one German nun, Kelsang Wango, had won a point. Now, there are 73 geshemas.
Next the Geluk faculty started granting geshema levels, nuns inside the alternative colleges of Tibetan Buddhism – Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu – additionally started pursuing complex levels in Bharat and Nepal. Inside of those alternative 3 branches, nuns elevate the name of “khenmo,” which just like the geshema qualifies them to show the famend Buddhist scriptures. In 2022, the Dalai Lama presented blessings to the unused khenmo, who won their titles in the Sakya school.
All instructed, nuns are converting the direction for Tibetan Buddhist ladies – and feature had an best friend within the Dalai Lama.
Because the numbers of girls on the easiest echelons of studying keep growing, ladies will likewise enlarge their talent to jerk management roles of their monastic and lay communities – serving to to fortify alternative nuns’ training and protective Tibetan tradition within the procedure.
