Gender and Resource Allocation: Monastic Education and Patronage in Drikung Kagyu Communities

This paper offers preliminary reflections on a larger study, in which I seek to outline the roles of education and gender in determining whether and how patronage patterns have shifted with the rise of nuns’ education in recent decades. The larger project addresses relationships among monastics, and between monastics and laity, in the Drikung Kagyu communities found across the Himalayas. In this paper, I address the shifting demographics of nuns and monks in Drikung institutions across Ladakh and Uttarakhand, and the external secular and internal institutional pressures that have led to these changes. I also consider the way my own positionality has influenced these findings. Initial phases of multi-sited ethnographic research have reinforced some of my presuppositions about how an increase in women’s education has influenced the perceptions of nuns as ritual specialists in their home communities. However, unanticipated external secular pressures have been equally influential in determining who chooses to join nunneries and monasteries.

Tibetan Buddhist communities have undergone a great deal of change since the creation of a significant Tibetan diaspora in India in the mid-twentieth century. One of these changes has been the development of educational curricula comparable to that of monks, and the establishment of these systems of learning for nuns, which have been made widely available to women and girls who choose to join Tibetan Buddhist nunneries. I am tracking how the rise of educational opportunities for Drikung Kagyu nuns has shifted lay and monastic perceptions of nuns vis-à-vis their position as authoritative figures in the wider religious community, whether and how this has shifted how monks perceive nuns (and vice versa), and how lay patterns of patronage (through donations and sending their girls to become nuns) have been impacted by these changes. I have chosen to focus on the Drikung community as a means for constraining an otherwise potentially sprawling project, and in order to lift the efforts of this community in particular to the wider world.

This paper outlines these preliminary findings, to wit, the specific influences stemming from of a variety of external secular factors, as well as internal, personal, and institutional monastic factors, that all influence whether women and girls decide to join a nunnery. I also describe what my interlocutors have shared regarding the question of whether the monastic systems of education can be truly presented as coequal, the role of non-Tibetans in historically Tibetan monastic systems, and the places where nuns and women are more willing to engage with these questions in spaces protected from the external male gaze.

This paper focuses on a few specific Drikung sites where several types of learning are taking place, and the interviews I have conducted thus far at each site. Initially I have learned some interesting things about how these shifts in education for women and girls under the auspices of a Buddhist institution have changed the landscape of education, not just for Tibetans, but for other Buddhist and Buddhist adjacent families as well. The question has arisen about who will constitute the next generation of Buddhist monastics in India, as Tibetan families become more established, and indeed, smaller than in decades past. Shifting fortunes for Tibetan families have also influenced who decides to become a monk or a nun, and their reasons behind doing so. Finally, the ways that the laity interact with Buddhist ritual specialists and other religious practitioners has changed in fundamental ways. The details of all of these queries will be presented alongside snippets of interview content, and data showing the change in how monasticism is perceived by Tibetan and non-Tibetan Himalayan Buddhist households in 2024. The paper concludes with some questions for further research, and argues that we need new ways of thinking about monasticism, gender, and religious institutions, and how these institutions, self-reflection on how scholar positionality can influence what one learns in the midst of fieldwork, and how Buddhist communities are working to maintain their significance in the quickly changing world of the twenty-first century.