82 BUDDHADHARMA: THE PRACTITIONER'S QUARTERLY
A
t age thirty-eight, Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo felt
ready to take full ordination as a Buddhist nun. Five years
had passed since she had taken her novice vows in 1977,
and it had been almost a decade since she had moved to
Dharamsala to study Buddhism. Yet, as she prepared for the
next step, she realized that the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition does not
offer full ordination for women. Women monastics are limited to
being novice nuns—until recently, occupied with chanting and man-
ual work instead of having opportunities to pursue religious studies.
As a teenager growing up in California in the 1950s, Karma Lek-
she (then named Patricia Zenn) was drawn to Buddhism. But she
discovered that Buddhism as it was traditionally practiced in Asia
did not always conform to the ideals that had attracted her to Bud-
dhism in the first place. The books and scriptures she had read sug-
gested there were no gender distinctions when it came to the dharma,
and she knew that the Buddha himself had established an order of
nuns (bhikshunis). In contemporary Buddhism, however, men domi-
nate the sangha while women generally play secondary roles, with
less financial and institutional support than monks, few women in
leadership positions, and limited educational opportunities. Until
the 1980s, many Tibetan nuns had never even learned how to write.
When Karma Lekshe studied Buddhist logic and philosophy at the
Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, she was usually the
only woman there.
The bhikshuni order that the Buddha himself established eventu-
ally died out in much of the Buddhist world, but it survived in East
Asian Buddhist societies such as China, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
So in the fall of 1982, Karma Lekshe traveled to Korea to receive
bhikshuni ordination from nuns there. This experience was the
next significant step in her effort to advocate for a stronger role for
women in Buddhism.
Karma Lekshe reached out to others, such as German nun Ayya
Khema and Thai professor Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, who were alsophoto previous page Published with permission by Sakyadhita