![]() Gelug Buddhists see Tsongkhapa as a reformer who restored the purity of Buddha’s doctrine in Tibet after other Buddhist schools had lost their way. Shugden is entrusted with guarding the purity of the teachings of the 14th-century master Je Tsongkhapa and is said to punish and terrorize wayward monks who take an interest in the teachings of competing Buddhist schools. K elsang Gyatso’s decision to split off from the Tibetan Buddhist establishment and create a new tradition was in fact the culmination of an old conflict about a protector deity associated with the Gelug school named Dorje Shugden. “The NKT presented his books as the emanations of the mind of a Buddha.” ![]() “Kelsang Gyatso is the source of all authority in the NKT,” says David Kay, a British researcher who wrote his PhD thesis on the organization’s formation. It turned out that as a member of the NKT, Jamgyal was expected to denounce the Dalai Lama and reject all spiritual teachers besides Kelsang Gyatso, who is viewed by many NKT members as the sole holder and savior of pure dharma. By joining the NKT, she was in fact being pulled into a religious conflict dating back centuries and had inadvertently become a member of an organization that has been accused of being sectarian, controversial, and so concerned with religious purity that it has isolated itself from the wider Buddhist world. ![]() “If it were not for the NKT,” says Ani Jamgyal, “I probably would not have chosen to become a nun.”īut Jamgyal discovered that the NKT was not as far removed from “feudal Tibetan politics” as she had hoped. ![]() Unlike most Buddhist traditions, the NKT asks ordained members to take only ten vows, which according to Kelsang Gyatso replace all the hundreds of vows usually required of ordained Buddhists. The organization has also expanded quickly in countries such as Mexico and Brazil, and the NKT’s unique canon of texts has been published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Chinese. The International Kadampa Retreat Center near the Grand Canyon in Arizona, which opened its doors in June 2017, has started construction on the fifth Kadampa World Peace Temple, which will seat close to a thousand worshippers. Just this year, new NKT temples and centers have opened in Boston Washington, DC Fort Lauderdale Oslo and Paris. The NKT has been so successful in attracting Western practitioners that it is already one of the largest Buddhist traditions in Britain and is growing in the US and globally, with 1,200 centers currently open worldwide and new centers opening up all the time. Many Westerners have been drawn, like Ani Jamgyal, to the NKT’s systematic study program, which offers a simple process of ordination and books that explain Buddhist philosophy and practice in terms that are easily understood by Western audiences. Kelsang Gyatso, the leader of the New Kadampa Tradition. New Kadampa Buddhism was established in 1991 in Britain by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (affectionally called Geshe-la by his disciples), a Tibetan lama born in 1931 in Central Tibet, who in the ’70s came to Britain to teach Buddhism. That’s what she thought she had found in Kadampa Buddhism, a new Tibetan Buddhist tradition that also goes by the name New Kadampa Tradition – International Kadampa Buddhist Union (abbreviated to NKT-IKBU, or just the NKT). “What drew me to Buddhism were its teachings, not everything around it,” says Jamgyal. As a social justice activist who cares about such issues as racism, immigrant rights, and poverty, she wanted not to escape into the exoticism and problems of another culture but rather to find pure Buddhist teachings that could be applied to the problems of the present. “I have no nostalgia for old Tibetan feudal politics,” she says, “and I have no desire to learn how to make butter tea or eat tsampa.”Īni Jamgyal, a 63-year-old Buddhist nun who is the daughter of a Baptist minister and lives in the mountains outside Albuquerque, has no interest in meddling in Tibetan politics or traveling to the East, because, she says, there are enough problems here in the United States. When she first encountered Kadampa Buddhism 20 years ago, Ani Jamgyal liked that it offered modern Buddhist teachings adapted to today’s Western society, without the trappings of another culture and its history.
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