Hayley Barker
Religious News Service
(RNS) — On June 21, Je Khenpo, Bhutan’s high-ranking Buddhist authority, began serving 144 women as bhikkhunis or female monks at Ramthanka Monastery in the small Himalayan nation.
The ceremony “has historical significance for all women in the Buddhist world and brings Tibetan Buddhism into the 21st century,” said Tibetan-German author Bhikkhuni Jampa Tsedroen. “For these nuns, this is an important opportunity to demonstrate their ability to contribute to Buddhism.”
Many of the new bhikkhunis are Bhutanese, but some come to Bhutan from other Asian countries. They were all ordained in the Tibetan tradition.
The news was posted on a Facebook post on the page of the Duomo of Bhutan, which was confirmed by Damcho Diana Finnegan, co-founder of the community of Venerable Venerable Nuns in Virginia.
When asked about the ceremony, Finnegan called it “an important step towards ending the institutionalized inequality between men and women in Tibetan Buddhism.”
The ceremony is the culmination of a decades-long campaign for the full ordination of Tibetan women, which has been fiercely resisted by Asia’s top monks, academics and political leaders. The bhikshuni movement has intensified in recent years as women around the world seek to revive a practice of ordination women established by the Buddha himself, but which until now has slowly disappeared in much of the Buddhist world.
After the Buddha passed away, female monks are generally considered to be one of the key elements of the ideal society of the four-in-one Buddhist society, consisting of male, female, male and female monks. Over time, however, war, famine and disease took the lives of bhikkhunis in Southeast Asia and Tibet.
Women continued to lead ascetic lives as nuns, but were prohibited from taking the next step to complete ordination. Officially, their status was limited by monastic regulations that required bhikkhunis to be ordained by other non-existent bhikkhunis.
To break this bondage, some women have taken other paths to complete ordination. In 1996, a group of Sri Lankan nuns became ordained with the help of bhikkhunis of the Mahayana tradition in Korea, and they have never been cut off. Since then, hundreds of nuns have been ordained in Sri Lanka, in what Tsedroen describes as a “universal ritual” that essentially rejuvenates the population.
But in Bhutan, a small number of monks ordained nuns without the presence of monks. Usually, the ceremony is only awarded to a small number of women, and it never reaches the scale of June 21. According to Finnegan, such a large ordinance guarantees a community of Sangha or bhikkhunis that will last into the future.
“All other Buddhist lineages have female sanghas ordained as monks. This is the first time a Tibetan Buddhist woman has had such an opportunity,” she said.
The current Dalai Lama has long encouraged bhikshuni ordination, and Bodhi Bhikkhu, a prominent Theravada monk who practices in India and Southeast Asia, has called on his many supporters to advocate for the bhikshuni movement. After years of research, the influential Tibetan scholar Geshe Rajang Bhikkhu Rinchen Nudrup delivered a speech at the 1st International Conference on the Role of Buddhist Women in the Sangha in 2007, proposing a powerful statement on the bhikshuni precepts. reason.
In addition, compared to male religious leaders, lay people across Asia call attention to the excellence of nuns. Scandals such as the temple fraud in Thailand and rising allegations of sexual assault against Tibetan monks have been rocking Buddhist communities around the world.
Thai journalist Sanitsuda Ekachai calls attention to this dichotomy in her book Keeping the Faith: Thai Buddhism at a Crossroads, encouraging laypeople to consider the future of the monastic order and how female monks can improve it.
Even with the strong voices and clean records behind the movement, gender equality in Tibetan monasteries has yet to take off on a massive scale like what is happening in Bhutan today.
Suzanne Mrozik, associate professor of religious studies at Mount Holyoke College, said: “This historic ordination is likely to put further pressure on other Buddhist groups in different countries to pay tribute to nuns in Tibetan Buddhism. Provides full ordination.”
For some Buddhists, starting a monkhood on the summer solstice is an auspicious sign, with a “rainbow around the sun” in Bhutan, according to a Facebook announcement.
