In August 2025, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from non secular establishments throughout India and Nepal – a report quantity – amassed on the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern India to take more than a few ranges of the “geshema” exam. Those assessments are in preparation for someday receiving the geshema stage, similar with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The just about four-week accumulating used to be particularly notable as a result of till 13 years in the past it used to be totally unavailable to girls.
Now, due to a better emphasis on girls’s schooling in recent times, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are an increasing number of turning into academics and abbesses. In monastic establishments and in Buddhist facilities world wide, nuns are taking over management roles and being said for his or her non secular scholarship, together with the geshema stage.
As a student of spiritual research and gender, I learn about the converting roles of girls in Buddhism. Whilst nuns have been lengthy revered in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, they have been traditionally now not granted get right of entry to to the similar instructional or management alternatives as priests. However that has modified, partly because of the an important function performed through the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso.
He inspired nuns to change into complex stage holders as a part of his broader function 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 stated in 2013. Along with nuns reciting prayers and acting rituals, he emphasised they must learn about vintage Buddhist texts, one thing historically reserved for males.
Such steerage has helped problem historic misconceptions about girls’s highbrow talents that undermined girls’s prominence in Buddhism. Certainly, nuns at the moment are educating philosophy inside their very own nunneries at house and out of the country, turning into principals in their establishments, serving as function fashions for different nuns and the laity, and getting into lengthy retreats – a staple of Buddhist contemplative actions at the trail to awakening.
The Dalai Lama speaks throughout a rite in 2011 to commemorate the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan rebellion towards Chinese language rule.
AP Photograph/Ashwini Bhatia
Ancient roots
The Dalai Lama has resided in exile since 1959, when he fled to northern India following unrest over the Chinese language profession of Tibet. Many Tibetans adopted him, and he has remained the important thing non secular and political chief of the Tibetan neighborhood and diaspora ever since, regardless that he formally gave up political tasks in 2011 to the Tibetan executive in exile.
All over the Dalai Lama’s a long time of management, bettering schooling for the diaspora communities of Tibetans in India and Nepal has been a an important road for shielding and retaining Tibetan tradition, together with Tibetan Buddhism.
Traditionally, on the other hand, the trail of formal schooling used to be essentially reserved for priests. In Tibet, nuns have been essentially ritual experts, in keeping with Buddhist research students corresponding to Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Mitra Härköken and Nicola Schneider. They carried out rituals in temples and houses however hardly had the chance to check the Buddhist texts.
Or even with the Dalai Lama’s make stronger, creating a scientific direction of analysis for nuns that used to be identical to priests’ curriculum used to be now not simple, particularly with just a restricted collection of nunneries in India and Nepal, in keeping with Schneider’s analysis.
“When the nuns arrived in India, they were ill, exhausted, traumatized and impoverished,” recalled Lobsang Dechen, co-director of the nonprofit Tibetan Nuns Venture, 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’ schooling potentialities have been additionally hampered through 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 paintings at the Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. Ehm discovered monk directors tended to endorse the Dalai Lama’s requires gender parity in title with out at once supporting nuns’ schooling.
A brand new age for tutorial alternatives
Larger get right of entry to to schooling for nuns started to switch within the Nineteen Eighties as extra Tibetan nuns migrated to India and Nepal. A community of extra advanced nunneries adopted, corresponding to Gaden Choling and Dolma Ling in Dharamshala, India, the place the Dalai Lama lives in exile.
Those establishments have been funded through organizations such because the Tibetan Nuns Venture, a part of the wider Tibetan Girls’s Affiliation that used to be established in Tibet in 1959 in line with the Chinese language profession. The TWA used to be reinstated in India with the blessing of the Dalai Lama in 1984, and the Tibetan Nuns Venture used to be established quickly thereafter to coach and make stronger nuns in India from all Tibetan faculties.
Nuns in Dharamsala, India, prepare a unique prayer on July 4, 2025, a couple of days forward of the Dalai Lama’s ninetieth birthday.
Elke Scholiers/Getty Pictures
The Dalai Lama inspired those organizations to assist construct nunneries, empower current nuns and make stronger their additional schooling. “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 getting into the diaspora in India and Nepal, a number of different components helped advertise girls’s development.
The ones come with the advocacy and make stronger of global organizations corresponding to Sakyadhita World Affiliation of Buddhist Girls, which has hosted global conferences to empower nuns and lay Buddhist girls for almost 40 years.
Inside India, in the meantime, native nonprofits such because the Ladakh Nuns Affiliation have supplied alternatives for nuns to paintings in well being care.
Attaining the best ladder of monastic educating
The geshema stage that nuns were ready to obtain since 2012 is within the Geluk custom, probably the most 4 faculties, or distinct branches, of Tibetan Buddhism. Those levels are the best stage of monastic coaching however have been in the past to be had best to males, whose stage are referred to as “khenpo” or “geshe.”
Applicants for the geshema stage are examined after having studied Buddhist texts. Nuns will have to rating 75% or upper throughout their 17 years of analysis ahead of qualifying to take the geshema examinations.
In 2016, the Dalai Lama presided over and granted 20 Tibetan nuns geshema levels, 4 years after he and the Tibetan executive in exile known the accreditation of upper levels for nuns. Prior to the formal construction of the geshema program, just one German nun, Kelsang Wango, had gained some extent. Now, there are 73 geshemas.
After the Geluk college started granting geshema levels, nuns throughout the different faculties of Tibetan Buddhism – Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu – additionally started pursuing complex levels in India and Nepal. Inside those different 3 branches, nuns elevate the identify of “khenmo,” which just like the geshema qualifies them to show the famend Buddhist scriptures. In 2022, the Dalai Lama introduced blessings to the brand new khenmo, who gained their titles within the Sakya college.
All instructed, nuns are converting the direction for Tibetan Buddhist girls – and feature had an best friend within the Dalai Lama.
Because the numbers of girls on the best echelons of studying keep growing, girls will likewise extend their talent to take management roles of their monastic and lay communities – serving to to strengthen different nuns’ schooling and protective Tibetan tradition within the procedure.
