Abstract

Gechag Nunnery, founded in 1892 in Nangchen, Eastern Tibet (Qinghai Province, PRC), is still active today with around 250 nuns practising intensive Vajrayāna rituals, yogas and meditation. The nuns’ knowledge goal is tacit, embodied awareness, yet they spend many hours daily reading texts as part of their training. To understand the role of reading in the nuns’ tradition, this presentation will share an ethnography of their lifeworld and learning system. In an era of Buddhist modernism when knowledge is increasingly indexed in language and data, it demonstrates a Buddhist textual tradition whose knowledge is cultivated through whole person learning.

Bio

Dr. Elizabeth McDougal (Nan Tien Institute) is a Buddhist and Contemplative Studies scholar specializing in Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist communities. Author of The Words and World of Ge bcags Nunnery (Brill, 2024), she holds a PhD/MA from the University of Sydney and an MA from Banaras Hindu University. Her current research focuses on integrating tacit ways of knowing in contemplative pedagogy.

Photo of senior Gechag nuns, ca. 2000. Photo credit: Konchok Dechen

Contact the host of The written word in a Buddhist tacit knowledge tradition

There were 0 errors found in the information you submitted: