The Sakyadhita Movement

At 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 manual work instead of having opportunities to pursue religious studies.

As a teenager growing up in California in the 1950s, Karma Lekshe (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 Buddhism in the first place. The books and scriptures she had read suggested 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 dominate 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 eventually died out