Spirituality for gender equality

December 22, 2019 1:13 PM

Swords swirl around their bodies, coming perilously close to piercing flesh. Blades flashing in the morning sun, the young women twirl, cartwheel and then kick in unison, finishing their graceful movements in a centuries old kung fu fighting stance. Dressed alike with matching shaved heads, the women and girls finish their daily exercise and move on to their other duties as part of the Kung Fu Nuns of the Himalayas, a name they have proudly adopted. They have a Twitter.

Meet the Kung Fu nuns teaching self-defence to young girls in the Himalayas

Spirituality and Kung Fu may make for an unlikely combination, but the Drukpa Kung Fu nuns are proving that martial art can help promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Himalayan region.

Twenty-six-year-old Jigme Rupa Llamo and 28-year-old Jigme Migyur Palmo are visibly excited. These Kung Fu nuns are all set to travel to New York where the order will be presented with Asia Society’s Gamechanger Award on October 24 for the transformative impact they are making in Asia through their diverse efforts.

These twenty-something nuns are using the power of Kung Fu to bring a turnaround in the attitude of girls by not only teaching them martial art but also self-confidence and the strength to defend themselves.

The Yogini Project

What I am witnessing in this striking predawn display is more than 1,000 years of tradition being turned on its head. For more than a millennium this practice of kung fu was reserved only for monks, its roots lying far to the north in the legendary Chinese monastery of Shaolin. It was here in the fifth century that kung fu was said to have originated, after Bodhidarma, an Indian prince turned Buddhist monk, set out to take the teachings of the Buddha to China. On finding temples there vulnerable to attack by thieves, and many of the monks struggling with the rigours of monastic life, the monk devised a system of fitness and defense that drew heavily on the ancient traditions of Indian yoga. Like yoga, Shaolin kung fu developed from an observation of the way animals move. Over the centuries the Shaolin monks incorporated many different animal postures into their practice until eventually the mastery of many of these styles developed into a form represented by a dragon. Unlike the fire-breathing dragon of Western mythology, the Chinese dragon is a powerful spiritual creature.

It is telling, then, that the nuns of Gawa Khilwa belong to the Drukpa order of Himalayan Buddhism, druk being the Tibetan word for both “dragon” and “thunder.”

Climate change and kung fu nuns: the fight for women’s safety in South Asia

Every year, in the remote depths of the Himalayas, hundreds of nuns clean plastic from the waterways of the mountain range. Trekking miles, the group picks up tonnes of rubbish, carrying it down the mountains, and shipping it back to Delhi to be recycled.

Known as the Kung Fu Nuns of the Drukpa Lineage, these women are at the forefront of environmental and social change in the Himalayas. With an increasingly temperamental climate exacerbating natural disasters and rapidly melting the mountain’s glaciers, Himalayan communities are facing extinction. For women and girls in the region, there’s an even more immediate threat: as they’re thrust into poverty and displaced from their homes, they become increasingly vulnerable to sex trafficking.

In the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Kung Fu Nuns offered aid to remote villages in need. Observing a disturbing increase in people selling off their daughters following the disaster, the nuns took direct action by way of bike rides across the Himalayas. “It was to show these villages that women were strong and capable enough to bicycle,” the group’s communications coordinator Carrie Lee tells me, “so they’d also be physically strong enough to farm, thereby worthwhile keeping and raising, and not selling off.”

posted by Johnny Wallflower (3 comments total)

Previously. (Great links in this new one and worth revisiting though.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:38 PM on December 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks, I missed that!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:49 PM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Women are awesome martial artists. I had a great lady teacher who was a 5th Dan, and one time when I was younger I sparred with a girl from WingChun who kicked my ass. The TaiJi class I'm in now is almost 50% female and it's great.
posted by ambulocetus at 3:55 PM on December 24, 2019