1/6/2024 0 Comments Dalai lama buddhism typeMany 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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