Telling Stories Differently: Changing Landscapes of Ordination for Buddhist Monastic Women in the Tibetan Tradition

Price-Wallace, Darcie M.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ygh5-ra92

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Telling Stories Differently: Changing Landscapes of Ordination for Buddhist Monastic Women in the Tibetan Tradition

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This dissertation purposely prioritizes Tibetan and Himalayan tsunmas’ perspectives on the topic of restoring a full ordination lineage for ordained women. To do so, it examines the gendered landscapes of Buddhist women’s ordination, which has been a contentious issue throughout Buddhism’s twenty-six-hundred-year history, beginning with the Buddha’s eventual acceptance of women ordinands. I investigate the longstanding debate about reinstating the full ordination of monastic women by listening to the stories of contemporary Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist tsunmas, and by clarifying the way in which they creatively replicate or innovate upon religious leaders’ and Vinaya scholars’ research of Vinaya and its commentaries on the topic of gelongma ordination. Past discussions of this issue ignored those most directly impacted by this debate—tsunmas. Through extensive Tibetan and Hindi-language interviews with tsunmas living in diaspora communities in India, I fill that gap in our understanding by examining the presence of women ordinands in the stories tsunmas tell. The central aim of this dissertation is to center the multivocal perspectives contemporary tsunmas hold on how to best revive a gelongma lineage for themselves and their communities of Tibetan and Himalayan tsunmas practicing Tibetan Buddhism in India. Their perspectives shine light on the historical and contemporary frameworks within which they view both the possibility and impossibility of gelongma ordination. Among their heterogeneous life stories about their own vows and tsunmas’ vows in Tibetan history, a few tsunmas spoke of a plurality of ordination practices in the history of Buddhism in Tibet and India. While these terse acknowledgements of gelongma ordination in Tibetan history are uncommon and do not shape the dominant discussions of restoring gelongma ordination, they remind us that gelongma ordination is not simply a contemporary issue with a single interpretation, but is instead part of a significantly longer and multivocal set of narratives, one that can be seen in the deeply nested stories of Tibetan tsunmas and gelongmas from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries as well as the lives of contemporary tsunmas who hold or aspire to receive gelongma vows.

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