Kelsang Wangmo
| Kelsang Wangmo | |
|---|---|
| Religion | Tibetan Buddhism |
| School | Gelug |
| Personal | |
| Born | Kerstin Brummenbaum Lohmar, Germany |
| Senior posting | |
| Title | Geshe |
Geshe Kelsang Wangmo is a German-born Buddhist nun, scholar, and teacher. She is the first woman, and so far the only one, to be awarded a Geshe title, considered equivalent to a Ph.D. in Buddhist philosophy.
Early life
She was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Lohmar, a small town between Cologne and Bonn in Germany. During her childhood, she attended church but grew uninterested in religion in her teens. After completing high school in 1989, she went on a backpacking trip. Travelling through Israel (where she stayed on a kibbutz), Turkey, Cyprus, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan, she reached India. After visiting Kolkata, Varanasi, and Manali, she landed in Dharamsala. She had planned to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to start university, studying medicine. But eventually, she stayed on.[1]
Conversion to Buddhism
She joined an introduction to Buddhism course at Tushita Meditation Centre, at Dharamkot above McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh. She went on to study Buddhism seriously. She took ordination as a nun in April 1991. She later enrolled in the traditional Geshe curriculum (a 16-year course) at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (IBD) in Dharamsala. She was awarded the Geshe title in 2011.[2]
Since 2004, Geshe Kelsang Wangmo has been teaching Buddhist philosophy classes in English in Dharamsala, following the curriculum of the IBD.[3]
