PEMA CHODRON: CONTEMPORARY TIBETAN BUDDHIST

Among the many contemporary Tibetan Buddhists of note, there is Pema Chodron.  Ane Pema Chodron ("Ane" is a Tibetan honorific for a nun) was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City.  She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California.  Pema has two children and three grandchildren.

While in her mid-thirties, and following a second divorce, Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years.  She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London.  His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to England at that time, and Ane Pema received her ordination from him.

Pema first met her root guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (the Vidyadhara) in 1972.  The term Vidyadhara means literally "awareness holder," that is, one who constantly abides in the state of awareness.  Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987.  At the request of the Karmapa, she received the full bhikshuni (female monastic) ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.

Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey.  The Vidyadhara gave her explicit instructions on running Gampo Abbey.

She first met the prominent Buddhist nun Ayya Khema (1923-1997) at the first Buddhist nuns conference in Bodhgaya, India in 1987, and they were close friends from that time until Ayya's death.

The success of Pema's first two books, The Wisdom of No Escape (1991) and Start Where You Are (1994), made her something of a celebrity as a woman Buddhist teacher and as a specialist in the Mahayana lojong (mind training) teachings.  She and Judy Lief, also a teacher and author of Buddhism, were instructed personally by the Vidyadhara on lojong, "which is why I took off with it," she explains.

At Gampo Abbey each winter she taught the traditional Yarne (Tibetan rainy season) retreat for monastics.  She spent the summers in Berkeley teaching on the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.  It was in California that Pema was appointed by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche as "acharya" (senior teacher).

In 1996 she published When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, and in 2002, The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

She is a member of the The Committee of Western Bhikshunis which was formed in the autumn of 2005.

In late 2005, Pema Chödrön published No Time to Lose, a commentary on Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.  Her subsequent publication was Practicing Peace in Times of War (2006).  She went on to study with Lama Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, spending seven months of each year in solitary retreat under his direction in Crestone, Colorado. 

In 2016, she was awarded the Global Bhikkhuni (Bhikshuni) Award, presented by the Chinese Buddhist Bhikkhuni Association of Taiwan.