Treading the spiritual path

Born Diane Perry in 1943 into an English home where spiritualist meetings were often held, Jetsunma (“reverend” in English) realised, at age 18, that she was a Buddhist. After a short stint as a librarian at the Hackney Public Library in London, she saved her money to journey to India to teach English, and in that same year became the second Western woman to be ordained in the Vajrayana tradition (often referred to as Tibetan Buddhism), receiving the name “Drubgyu Tenzin Palmo”, or the rather stately “Glorious Lady who Upholds the Doctrine of the Practice Succession”. Vocal about the discrimination against women in the Tibetan monastic world, Tenzin Palmo founded a nunnery to offer nuns the opportunity to study, meditate, even debate, in a way that challenges the establishment, which was previously a privilege held only by monks. 

Stav Dimitropoulos:

Apart from being a “bhik ṣ u ṇī” (a fully ordained female monastic in Buddhism), you are also an international teacher, author, and founder of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. What is the purpose of the nunnery?

Tenzin Palmo: Women in Tibet are not educated as a whole. The idea of educating nuns specifically is recent - counting no more than perhaps 20 or 25 years. In general, having more educated women is something that reaches out to the whole society, so we hope that in the future we will have greater numbers of them. 

How did China’s Cultural Revolution influence female monasticism?

During the Cultural Revolution many monasteries were destroyed and many monks and nuns