The Next Dalai Lama Should Be a Woman

Photograph of the Dalai Lama by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.

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The Dalai Lama is known as a symbol of peace, compassion, and nonviolence. During his visit to Washington, D.C. this week, it is no surprise that he will receive another award for his work promoting human rights.

Far lesser known is his role as a feminist. In 50 years of exile from Tibet, this self-professed “simple monk” has been the driving force behind the growing prominence of women in Tibetan exile society. He has even suggested that his next reincarnation could and should be a girl. “Woman is more compassionate and has more power to understand and feel the needs of others as compared to man,” he said at a press conference last November in Dharamsala, his exile home in northern India.

That the Dalai Lama—believed by Tibetan Buddhists to be the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of compassion—should return to the world as a woman is a radical notion that perturbs even open-minded Tibetans, men and women alike. And despite his wishes, the 15th reincarnation will very likely be a boy, just like all the prior ones.

But in other arenas, the Dalai Lama’s long-standing support for more power and status for Tibetan woman has had a steady impact since he fled into exile in India in 1959. He explained his commitment to empowering woman in a documentary called Women of Tibet: A Quiet Revolution: “Everywhere half of population is women. Women’s participation in building up society is very important, especially in the preservation of Tibetan culture.”

In the film he also spoke admiringly about a milestone in Tibetan history known as Tibetan Women’s Uprising Day. On March 12, 1959—just days before he fled his homeland -- about 15,000 women spontaneously gathered in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in an unprecedented display of peaceful protest against China’s invasion of Tibet.

Those women were “heroines,” says the Dalai Lama in A Quiet Revolution. It was “as if they already knew the feminist movement!” He laughs gleefully as though he has told a hilarious joke. At the time, Tibet was closed to the outside world. To a Tibetan, Simone De Beauvoir and Betty Friedan might as well have been Martians.

“But of course they had no idea ... I think that is perhaps in Tibetan history the first time. Women’s movement. That’s, I think, very remarkable!” the Dalai Lama marvels.

Perhaps shaped by that display, the Dalai Lama fought for women from early on. When he established an exile government in Dharamsala in the 1960s, he went out of his way to include women in his “experiment” with democracy.

Inclusion was a radical step, since women did not openly participate in politics in Tibet and were traditionally seen as the “jewel of the home,” according to the Tibetan saying. Girls typically did not attend school unless they were from well-to-do families. But shortly after fleeing to India, the Dalai Lama’s first priority when he was still in his early 20s was to set up a Tibetan school for children. Girls should attend these schools in equal numbers as boys, he decreed.

He extended the inclusive policy up the education ladder to geshes, the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a Ph.D. that takes roughly 18 years to complete. Until the Dalai Lama started to press the idea of women geshes in the 1980s, most Tibetan Buddhist nuns did not take part in rigorous religious training nor did they receive much formal education.

Today at Dolma Ling, a nunnery about 30 minutes' drive from Dharamsala, there are more than 200 nuns. About 15 of them aspire to become geshes and are at different stages of their studies.

The Dalai Lama has insisted on opening the geshe degree up to women despite initial skepticism from religious leaders and the general Tibetan community.

“People never dreamed of nuns getting this degree. They thought women were not allowed,” says Rinchen Khando, director of the nonprofit Tibetan Nuns Project, which is based at Dolma Ling and provides education and aid to nuns.