DHARAMSHALA, India (RNS) — When Geshema Delek Wangmo was 12 years old and starting her Tibetan Buddhist journey, she joined her teacher on a pilgrimage.
The journey, which involved traveling on foot from the high-altitude town of Litang in the Kham region of Tibet to Lhasa in a valley of the Himalayas — both spiritually significant locations in Tibetan Buddhism — required her to beg in villages, sleep in tents, embark on meditative practices and live with villagers who offered the monastics vegetables, butter, cheese and milk for their sustenance. A year-and-a-half later, the young nun traveled hundreds of miles, enduring harsh weather and terrain, to reach Kailash, a sacred mountain in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
Now, Wangmo, 44, is the first woman principal of a nunnery in north India’s Dharamshala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. In April, when the nonsectarian Dolma Ling Nunnery transitioned to female academic leadership for the first time in its three-decade history, it marked a radical shift in the landscape of Tibetan Buddhism in exile.
“If more women take on leadership roles in religion, there’ll be a spurt in positive thinking, compassion and quality of education,” said Wangmo, who came to the nunnery in 1990.
Along with two sen …