Gaden Relief Projects Helping Tibetans and Mongolians preserve their unique cultures. Zangskar

Kim Gutschow,
Zangskar Project Coordinator

Kim Gutschow is coordinator of Gaden Relief's Zangskar Project. She has visited the Zangskar region in north India nearly every year since 1989. A volunteer for Gaden Relief since 1991, she has delivered funds to Zangskar, written sponsorship letters, and accounted for the expenditures at individual nunneries. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.

Kim has spent over three years living at Karsha nunnery during the past decade. She began living at Karsha nunnery in the course of doing her fieldwork for a Ph.D in anthropology at Harvard University. After studying classical Tibetan with Oxford Professor Michael Aris, she learned to speak fluent Zangskari, Her research took her on foot through each of Zangskar's valleys and its many nunneries. Yet it was her lengthy sojourn at Karsha nunnery that solidified a relationship which extends far beyond the usual doctorate fieldwork. As she describes in her recent book, Being a Buddhist Nun, she became deeply enmeshed in the community of nuns at Karsha and intrigued by the gender dynamic within Buddhist monasticism.

As she explains, "When I first traveled to Karsha, the villagers were rather skeptical about my decision to live at the nunnery. It was the first time a layperson had chosen to live with the nuns at Karsha. But here I was, telling them that I wanted to study Buddhism and local Zangskari culture from the perspective of its nuns. After their shock wore off, they soon tried to dissuade me, arguing that I'd get a much 'better' understanding of Buddhism from the monks."

"But that was precisely where I disagreed. The monks may have more elaborate and spectacular rites. They may have larger endowments and more imposing physical institutions. But that does not necessarily make them better Buddhists."

"Over the course of many years in Zangskar, I became more and more aware of how closely and clearly the nuns hone to the Buddhist precepts. Their poverty does not impoverish them in the eyes of the Buddha. If anything it allows them to keep the discipline more easily than the monks. The hardships they face on a daily basis only strengthen their considerable resolve and make their commitment to the Buddhist path all that much more remarkable."

Although her life changed rather dramatically in May 2004 with the birth of her twins, Tashi and Krishan, Gutschow looks forward to many more visits to Zangskar in the coming years.

Here are some of Kim Gutschow's essays on the life of Zangskari nuns:

The Nunneries of Zangskar
The Women Who Refuse to Be Exchanged
The Smyung gnas Fast in Zangskar
A Novice Ordination in Tibet
Yeshe's Tibetan Pilgrimage