Episode #158: Following a family tragedy when she was just a teenager, Ayya Yeshe set off on a spiritual journey, becoming a nun in a Tibetan lineage at just 23. However, she soon learned that female renunciates weren’t treated with the same respect as males, and left to train under Bhante Sujato in the Ajahn Chah tradition, before taking Bhikkhuni ordination in 2006 at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village.

“Engaged Buddhism is the way I practiced going forward,” she says. “A monastery in Asia is more than just a place where you go and sit alone and find liberation from the world, separate from the world…[it] is a community,” she explains, adding that in the West, “we are disconnected from community… from the planet.” While Ayya Yeshe also values the need for periodic seclusion, she feels that Westerner practitioners overemphasize this, overlooking the traditional Buddhist value of communal practice. She is also not afraid to call out Western yogis who remain disengaged, indifferent or apathetic in the face of injustice. She points to the danger of spiritual bypass, and encourages meditators to examine when they are passively benefiting from systems of oppression.

Ayya Yeshe is a strong feminist because of her experiences as a nun, being treated as a second class citizen just because she was a woman, that simply her gender was “bad karma.” But she knew that the Buddha taught that women had every potential of awakening as did men. So “it was by necessity that I became a socially Engaged Buddhist, because I literally had nowhere to live as a nun!”

She joined forces with Bhikkhuni Vimala soon after the military coup, encouraging Buddhist monastics around the world to photograph themselves with their alms bowl upside down as a sign of solidarity with the resistance movement. She understands that the military atrocities need to be resisted in some form. However, she notes the importance of deferring to those actively engaged on the ground, and doing more listening than leading.