Bhutan Nuns Foundation Training & Resource Centre
(From the Bhutan Nuns Foundation Website)
Since 2014, the Bhutan Nuns Foundation has been developing and constructing its new Training and Resource Centre (TRC) at Tsalumaphay, near the country’s capital of Thimphu. The TRC provides a space for the nuns, plus other women and girls, to come together, share and learn from each other. Each may develop themselves, by acquiring various skills necessary to meet the challenges of modern-day society. A major part of the TRC infrastructure has been completed, with the construction of approach roads and several buildings. Currently, classrooms/training rooms, a library/resource center, and residential facilities including kitchen and dining areas are finished. An extension of the old temple and a conference/training hall are under construction. In May 2019, the first resident nuns arrived, and are now serving children of the laborers on site. Scheduled to open fully in 2020, the Centre will provide a full range of programs for female monastics and laywomen following the Buddhist path, and serve as a retreat center offering meditation and regenerative workshops, training, and classes. With the help of a team of women leaders, nuns, BNF board and staff and an external resource person, we have created a framework for a strategic plan, as follows:
Overview and Rationale of the Training & Resource Centre
The Centre will be a space for nuns, nunnery managers, women, and youth, to come, learn and share with each other and those around them. Afterward, they will return to their nunneries, homes, communities, and society to promote spiritual and psychological values, well-being and welfare in the context of modern-day life and living. The Training Centre will also be a Resource Centre for research and learning – to understand how the Centre and the nuns can stay continually relevant to the needs of the times. We will consider what new skills are needed for nuns, and how to further develop Nuns as skilled resource persons to train and guide other nuns, nunneries, women, and youth and contribute to the development of the wider society around them.
Purpose & Goal of the Training & Resource Centre Programmes
Activities promote Nuns as active agents of social change, trained, capable and empowered social workers, spiritually guided, and relevant to the context, issues, and problems of the modern times, and contributing to the spiritual, psychological and physical well-being of nuns, nunneries and the society and communities around them, particularly women and youth who face problems or need guidance and support.
The Significance of the Training Center
by Prof. Manuel Lopez
Founded in 2009 by Tashi Zangmo, a lay Bhutanese activist, and under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen Mother Ashi Tshering Yangdoen Wangchuk, the mission of the Bhutan Nuns Foundation (BNF) has been to provide “a high leverage means of empowering and educating Bhutanese women,” and “it aims to improve living conditions and economic vitality of rural villages, and preserving Bhutan’s strong, sustainable culture and spiritual heritage, as it faces rapid economic development.” The institution has played a very important role since its foundation in raising awareness about the status of nuns and the importance of providing infrastructure and an education on par with that of monks. As Tashi Zangmo made clear during an interview, Bhutan’s nunneries receive no support from the government and barely any support from the Central Monastic Body (CMB). The progress made by nuns over the last few decades, including the construction of most of the current nunneries all over the country as well as their fight for access to the commentarial curriculum has been mostly carried out by the nuns themselves. A lot can be said about the work of BNF, but here we want to focus on their current construction of a Training Center in the outskirts of Thimphu,, which started construction in 2013, and it is expected to be completed in 2020.
The Training Center is a project unlike any other in the current religious environment in Bhutan. It is not a nunnery, and it is neither under the control of the government or the CMB. Although it has an educational goal as its core mission, the type of education it will offer will be neither ritual nor that of the commentarial tradition. The center’s core mission will be to provide training for nuns that will have social impact and, as acknowledged by Tashi Zangmo, it wants to embrace the idea of Socially Engaged Buddhism as it has been developed in other Buddhist countries. The center will offer counseling training, hospices and basic healthcare, palliative care, leadership and management workshops, short meditation courses for nuns and laywomen alike, and Yoga, Tai Chi and Qi Gong short retreats. After a conversation with Tashi Zangmo, and a close look at their annual reports, it becomes clear that many of the ideas behind the center are not influenced by the impact of secular education in Bhutan or the influence of Nyingma nunneries in India and Nepal, but to the exposure by Tashi Zangmo and many of the nuns at BNF to a series of transnational Buddhist networks and institutions that have approached the status of nuns, their education, and their role in modern society in new and creative ways. Over the years, BNF has visited Buddhist organizations like Tzu Chi in Taiwan, and have been inspired to incorporate some of their programs in health care and environmental programs into their curriculum at the Training Center. A visit to the Kasih Hospice Care Society (KHC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, also inspired BNF to incorporate some of their palliative care programs in Bhutan. The Training Center is expected to open in 2020, and it represents a creative alternative model for what nuns can learn and to what nuns can do: it is a pedagogical and social experiment that aims to change the role and the status of nuns in Bhutan.
Ideas like the training center are important not only because they offer new educational opportunities for nuns, but because they are rethinking the role and the status of nuns outside the confines of traditional monastic institutions and structures, either those of the CMB, which control the Drukpa Kagyu institutions, or those of the independent Nyingma nunneries that are connected to particular lamas in Bhutan or larger Buddhist networks in India and Nepal. Only time will tell the impact that the Training Center will have, but it certainly has energized and empowered those nuns fighting for change.