Lecturer in Buddhism
PhD University of Sydney, MA (Indian Philosophy) Banaras Hindu University
email: e.mcdougal@nantien.edu.au
Dr Elizabeth McDougal
Dr Elizabeth McDougal grew up in Western Canada, and then trained as a Buddhist nun in India and on the Tibetan Plateau for seventeen years. She studied a Masters of Indian philosophy at Banaras Hindu University, and a PhD (2021) at the University of Sydney on the modernisation of Tibetan Buddhist meditation lineages. She has taught in the Primary Ethics program (NSW) and an Australian natural health college, and is a Tibetan-to-English translator for the teachings of a lineage of contemplative nuns.
She is the co-founder of Gebchak Rigpa Harsey, an Australian charity for Tibetan nuns and schoolchildren, and a researcher with the Mental Balance Initiative (Center for Contemplative Research) and the Community Economies Research Network (CERN).
Inspired by the transformative learning systems of pre-modern Buddhist traditions, her passion is for adapting contemplative pedagogy in creative ways that can usher the emergence of new, holistic ways of knowing in our current world.
The Words and World of Ge bcags Nunnery: Tantric Meditation in Context
Gebchak (Ge bcags) Nunnery, founded in 1892 in Nangchen, Eastern Tibet (Qinghai Province, PRC), is still active today with around 250 nuns practising intensive Vajrayāna rituals, yogas and meditation. The nuns’ knowledge goal is tacit, embodied awareness, yet they spend many hours daily reading texts as part of their training. To understand the role of reading in Gebchak’s tradition, this book offers a critical ethnography of the nuns’ lifeworld and learning system. In an era of Buddhist modernism when knowledge is increasingly indexed in language, it demonstrates a community whose textual knowledge is cultivated through whole person learning.
This publication by Dr Elizabeth McDougal, lecturer at Nan Tien Institute, is now available to purchase from Brill.