Buddhism: Monks, Lamas, Rinpoches, Nun of the Above

Although I really wanted to go this year, I didn't get to the July 4th fireworks. I saturated myself with bug spray, grabbed a sweater and was leaving the house when my phone rang. Recognizing the number, I took the call. I didn't think I'd be holding the receiver to my ear for the next 75 minutes.

I missed the fireworks to listen to someone fired up about a missed life opportunity. A Swiss woman who's spent the last 24 years as a very active, devout Tibetan Buddhist wants only to be fully ordained as a nun and for all sorts of nonsensical reasons can't be. Since she closed her pricey couture shop in Zurich, shaved off her hair and took basic ordination vows in the Kagyu lineage (that I share), she's done more than enough long retreats to be a lama, worked as attaché and translator for the tireless English speaking Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo of Cave in the Snow fame, attended countless teachings and expended endless energy trying to get the full ordination the way any monk can. She had just returned the night before from an all-Buddhist nuns conference in Indonesia and was outraged all over again. More runaround, more fences to block this sort of immigration. 

"You know," she said with great exasperation, "while we were there in Indonesia, we heard the local sultan who has four daughters and no sons had just announced he would not let the title pass to his nephew when he died but to his oldest daughter. He said it was time for change. Imagine: a Muslim sultan can acknowledge women but a Rinpoche won't."

All Tibetan Buddhist nuns are categorically and systematically denied the final blessing of full ordination no matter how far beyond a monk their level of practice and achievement extends. The great icons of compassion for all beings give lip service about making these nuns equal to Tibetan Buddhist monks, but the luck stops there. The Dalai Lama is not against the idea; he just isn't the right person to ordain them and doesn't know who to ask. He says it will happen one day...soon.  His Holiness Karmapa has started to focus on women, saying he wants to repay his mother left behind in Tibet beyond his purview, by helping all women. He's set up a training program for would-be nuns, but it doesn't include final full ordination. "Maybe soon,"  he promises. My friend said that "soon" will only be for Tibetan Buddhist nuns who are Tibetan, not Western. Emphasis on Tibetan, not Buddhist. Read that wisdom, compassion, racism.

My friend is particularly incensed at not having a decent name. The Tibetan word for a nun is "Ani" and with a note of respect added becomes Ani-la. That's the term I've always used. But apparently it simply means "auntie."  "Can you imagine," my friend snapped, "I've spent 24 years in retreat, service and study to be called auntie! Just to show them how degrading that is, I've started calling monks uncle. Boy they do not like that!!!" 

So now at least the powers that be are telling laypeople and monks to call Western nuns "tsunma", Tibetan for venerable female.That's about as far as change goes.  Nobody dares to be the first to do something that has never been done before. Tibetan Buddhism is so hide-bound, even my own beloved teacher is guilty of discrimination. With great foresight and compassion, he chartered what's become a thriving nunnery with its own separate three-year retreat center (graduation from that makes a male a lama) and shedra or five-year intensive study program. Five years ago, Rinpoche even let the nuns sit for the entrance exam to the great Buddhist university in the holy city of Varanasi where a specific number of admission slots is allotted to each branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The women earned more than 50% of ours. Nine nuns were sent for medical training and are now amchis, Tibetan doctors. But not one of Rinpoche's nuns has ever been fully ordained as a bonafide monastic in the Buddha's sangha. 

Western nuns have become the untouchable caste of Tibetan Buddhism. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo has had to turn away many who wanted to become nuns because Western women who want to devote themselves to Dharma as nuns can't even think about doing that without a fat bank account to pay for their food, lodging, studies and future of no income. If they do dedicate themselves and their money as my friend has done, they get to spend their lives and funds in limbo and oblivion, shunting about for sanctuary, never acknowledged, accepted or advanced. As though they'd pollute the pureland. 


The situation is not this dire in non-Tibetan Buddhism. Jetsunma and the even more famous Pema Chodron got their full and final ordination outside their Tibetan lineage, seeking out Chinese Mahayana and southeast Asian Theravada masters--on the advice of their Tibetan gurus no less. Tibetan rinpoches remind Western nuns they still have those options. My friend, who is getting on in years and thus has reason to be impatient, will go to Taiwan for the two-month full ordination program the next time it is offered. "What else can I do?" she said. "Rinpoche told me to go to China, but I don't want to be ordained by some mainland Chinese. It's sad enough you can't take your vows with the Rinpoche you've been devoted to the way a monk can. This is not the Buddha's teaching!"


She is right. This is not the Buddha's teaching. Dharma, with deliberate emphasis on the unity and equality of ALL sentient beings, was supposed to be the antidote to the poisonous caste system. With prompting from the loyal Ananda, the Buddha stopped discriminating, embraced the devotion of his step-mother and ordained her as the first Buddhist nun. Other women then entered his sangha the same way. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo-- an iconoclast of infinite determination--has managed to find an image of the first Buddhist nun and enshrined it at her own new and growing nunnery outside Dharamsala, India. My friend wants to make thousands of photo copies to pass out at the huge annual Tibetan prayer services, the monlams, now convened annually around the globe. The next one is Vancouver BC end of August, presided over by our beloved teacher. "I am going to put this in their faces. I am going to show Rinpoche and ask him why he is waiting, why he is not following the Buddha's example."

It's cultural, more Tibetan than Buddhist. The great voices of virtue that sometimes swallow meat can't swallow equality for women...ostensibly because they believe their job is to pass tradition on exactly as they received it--pure and unpolluted by changing worldly concerns. Since there were never any Western women in Tibet begging to be nuns, they can disregard and discount them now. The way none of us can smell our own bad breath if we have it, these men don't smell their own hypocrisy. Equality for female monastics, like meat eating, is the huge blind spot in the vehicles on the Bodhisattva path and it's causing life-threatening collisions. 

The saddest part is that these so-called great cavaliers of compassion and wisdom, the Karmapas, were knowingly empowered and launched by women, the dakinis to whom they owe their power. In fact the entire Tibetan Dharma and its sibling the Mahayana that is the foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama rests on the prowess of the great Prajnaparamita: wisdom --always and ever portrayed as the great goddess. One stream of the Kagyu lineage to which my friend and I belong was launched by the accomplished Sukhasiddhi. Guru Rinpoche needed Yeshe Tsogyal to advance and protect his teachings. The powerful and precious Tibetan Buddhist practices of Chod, Red Chenrezig and Tara were all created and bestowed by women. And it is not for nothing that the entire Kagyu lineage wakes up every morning and starts the day with prayers to Mother Tara. 

Women have innate power that men must struggle to attain. So shots are still being fired in the battle of the sexes, an unending civil war, even in places that proclaim peace and by men who proclaim compassion for all sentient beings. They are as stuck in samsara as the rest of us.















~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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