Pema Chodron

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Pema Chodron was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York City in 1936, and spent years working as an elementary school teacher in New Mexico and California, a documented secular career distinct from the monastic administrator her first article introduces already directing Gampo Abbey. She married twice and divorced twice, and it was in the aftermath of her second marriage ending, in her mid-thirties, that she traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, a documented turning point distinct from the 1974 London ordination her first article opens with.

She studied with Lama Chime for several years before that 1974 ordination, and it was Chime who first encouraged her to work with Chogyam Trungpa, whom she had already met in 1972 but had not yet studied under formally, a documented sequence distinct from the direct account her first article gives of her path to full ordination in 1981. Her eventual, decades-long connection to Trungpa, continued after his 1987 death, grew out of this earlier introduction rather than beginning with it.

That the teacher whose writing on working directly with difficulty has reached readers who have never set foot in a Buddhist center herself came to Buddhism only in mid-life, after two marriages and years spent teaching elementary school, marks Chodron's pre-ordination life as a documented case where a widely read voice on facing uncertainty was formed by an ordinary, secular life before any of the monastic titles her first article records.