The Words and World of Life and Learning at Ge bcags Nunnery

Abstract

Ge bcags dgon pa is a Tibetan nunnery of female tantric Buddhist contemplatives, founded in 1892 in a highland valley of pastoral Nang chen, Khams (Qinghai Province, PRC) and still thriving today with approximately 250 nuns practising Vajrayāna in a lifelong curriculum. Ge bcags dgon pa was endorsed by the Nang chen kingship, and evolved to become the ‘mother nunnery’ (ma dgon) to over forty branch dgon pa across Eastern Tibet that follow retreat practices and yi dam (tantric deity) cycles from Ge bcags’ scriptural collection. The overall query of the thesis is about the quality of knowledge that is cultivated in Ge bcags training, and the nuns’ ways of cultivating such knowledge. The thesis begins by asking what cultural values in Nang chen’s late 19th century allowed for such a community of yoginī nuns to arise. It explores the education of the nunnery’s founder, and the people and processes that went into producing his volumes of scriptures. A core examination of the thesis is how the nuns read and derive meaning from their texts. The nuns’ highest knowledge is nonverbal, yet they spend many hours each day reading texts. What is the role of reading in a tradition of predominantly practical learning, where the nuns’ knowledge rarely becomes abstract or theoretical? To answer this question, the entire context of the nuns’ lifeworld and the components of their practice tradition are examined. Indeed, the need to understand the full, embodied context of knowledge is both the approach and the argument of the thesis. The thesis’ final chapter, which looks at the nunnery’s communal ritual life through participatory observation of one of the nunnery’s annual sgrub chen (‘great accomplishment’; group sādhanā ceremony), serves as a demonstration for the overall argument of the thesis. The various levels of the sgrub chen’s context are examined, from the outer atmosphere of the nuns’ roles and collective engagement to the words of the scripture. A translation of a passage from the sgrub chen scripture helps to show how the meaning the nuns derive from the scripture is not entirely in the words, but is a holistic, experiential knowledge gradually ‘accomplished’ (sgrub pa) through the nuns’ repeated ritual and meditative engagement with the text and its associated oral instructions.