Gampo Abbey and the Work of Continuation

When Pema Chodron became director of Gampo Abbey in 1986, she took charge of an institution that was itself a first: a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America built from the ground up for Western monastics rather than adapted from a Tibetan model transplanted wholesale. The task facing her was less about doctrine than about translation in the broadest sense, working out what a monastic container built for people who had not grown up inside the culture the practice came from should actually look like day to day. Her own path to that position, ordination as a novice in London in 1974 and full bhikshuni ordination in Hong Kong in 1981 at the sixteenth Karmapa's own request, put her among a small number of Western women holding full ordination at the time. Her writing since, built around working directly with difficulty, uncertainty and fear rather than around technical doctrine, reaches an audience far larger than Gampo Abbey's own residents and has become one of the more widely read introductions to Buddhist practice generally available in English. Her continuation of Chogyam Trungpa's teaching after his 1987 death, as one of several senior students who carried it forward, sits alongside the community's own later and separate reckoning with aspects of his and his successor's conduct: she has remained a teaching presence through both halves of that history rather than stepping away from either.