Geshema Dawa Dolma

Geshema Dawa Dolma was born in Tibet in 1982, into a nomadic family. In 1993 she escaped to India by way of Nepal, together with sixty-two other people, and lived for three years with an Indian family before joining Dolma Ling Nunnery in Sidhpur, near Dharamshala, in 1996.

At Dolma Ling she completed the full seventeen-year course in Buddhist and Tibetan studies, alongside classes in Tibetan language and grammar, Tibetan history, modern science and composition, and she learned to make mandalas. She also spent three and a half years studying Sanskrit and Hindi at Sarah College near Dharamshala and at Varanasi University, where she took a teacher training course as well. From 2015 to 2018 she followed the four-year Geshema degree programme, and after defending her thesis she was awarded the Geshema degree, the doctorate in Buddhist philosophy, at Khachoe Gakhyil Ling Nunnery in Nepal on 5 November 2018. She then entered Gyuto Tantric Monastery in Sidhbari as an external scholar, studying the major tantric texts, and in February 2020 she passed both the debate and the written examinations with the highest grade.

She joined Thosamling, the nunnery and institute for international Buddhist women in Sidhpur, in 2014, first as a conversation partner in the Tibetan language programme and then as a teacher of Tibetan and of dharma courses. She now gives five-day retreats there on classical texts of the Tibetan tradition, among them Tsongkhapa's Songs of Spiritual Experience, Chandrakirti's Key to the Middle Way and Atisha's Lamp to the Path of Enlightenment. Thosamling describes her as a teacher who works with evident delight and who pushes her students to study hard.