The Words and World of Ge bcags Nunnery

This is an ethnography of a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery of full-time tantric practice. It explores the nuns’ relationship to their texts on their pathway to embodied, nondual awareness, and demonstrates the need for fully contextualized understandings of Buddhist textual knowledge.

---

Ge bcags (Gebchak) dgon pa, founded in 1892 in Nang chen, Khams (Qinghai Province, PRC), is still active today with around 250 nuns practising intensive Vajrayāna rituals, yogas and meditation.

The nuns’ knowledge goal is embodied, nonconceptual awareness, yet they spend many hours daily reading texts as part of their training. By investigating the whole context of the nuns’ lifeworld and ways of learning, this ethnography questions the role of reading in Ge bcags’ tacit knowledge tradition. At a time when Tibetan learning practices are quickly modernising, this book demonstrates a Buddhist tradition whose textual knowledge is not exactly literal, but cultivated through continuous, whole person learning.