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Teacher · 1898–1978
Widow who taught Buddhism to Kathmandu women under the Ranas and founded Nepal's first Theravāda nunnery.
Dharmachari Guruma was a Kathmandu widow who taught the Buddha's teaching to women at a time when the Rana government held that religious study was not for them. She became one of modern Nepal's first Theravāda nuns in 1934 and founded the country's first Theravāda nunnery. Until Dhammawati Guruma came back from Burma in 1963, she was the most prominent Nepali nun (LeVine and Gellner).
She was born Laxmi Nani Tuladhar in 1898. She was married at twelve, in 1910, and after the deaths of her husband and her children she turned, in her early twenties, to Tibetan Buddhist teachers for comfort (LeVine and Gellner). She was one of very few literate women of her generation and read whatever Buddhist books she could find in Nepal Bhasa, Nepali and Hindi.
At Kindo Baha, the small monastery at the foot of Swayambhu hill where the Theravāda revival began, she read from these books, taught the Dhamma and told stories from the Buddha's life to a growing group of women (The Kathmandu Post; LeVine and Gellner). When Mahapragya and Pragyananda appeared in Kathmandu in 1930, the women went to hear them preach.
The authorities took notice. According to The Kathmandu Post, in 1931 she was summoned to the government's Home Office and told to stop studying and preaching, and she asked why the princesses in the palace were allowed to study. She and her companions were later called before the prime minister and told again that religious study was not a woman's business. They carried on studying in private.
Three women from her circle took the precepts at Kushinagar in 1931, but Laxmi Nani held back. In 1934, after the great earthquake of that year, she angered her in-laws by giving away goods from the family shop to hungry townspeople, and decided to leave lay life (LeVine and Gellner). With a small group of friends she walked to Kushinagar in India and asked the Burmese monk Chandramani to ordain them. He sent them first to a nunnery in Arakan, Burma, to experience monastic life. After some months they returned to Kushinagar, took the precepts and received new names, and Laxmi Nani became Dharmachari. Kloppenborg notes that in the early 1930s Chandramani supported a group of Nepali women who went to Burma to study and be ordained.
Like the other Theravāda nuns of her time she was an anagārikā, keeping ten precepts, rather than a fully ordained bhikkhunī, because the nuns' ordination line had died out centuries earlier. Back in Kathmandu her relatives nicknamed her Mhasu Aji, "yellow grandma", after her robes, and she returned to teaching at Kindo Baha.
In 1944, when eight monks were exiled to India, the nuns were told to leave as well after a delay of some months. Dharmachari appealed to the prime minister, and the nuns were allowed to stay on condition that they did not preach (The Kathmandu Post; LeVine and Gellner say the nuns organised a petition). Four of them, Dharmachari among them, then went to Trishuli, a trading town north-west of Kathmandu on the route to Tibet, where they held Buddha puja and taught the Dhamma until the police detained them and sent them back.
Tired of crowding and of interference at Kindo Baha, Dharmachari bought land nearby with her own money and built a nunnery with donations from her devotees. LeVine and Gellner date its founding to 1947. She wanted an image of the Buddha lying in final nirvana like the one she had seen at Kushinagar, and a ten-foot statue carved from a large stone was inaugurated there in 1949 (The Kathmandu Post). The nunnery was named Nirvana Murti Vihara after it, and is also known as Kindol Vihara. She added a guest house for women from outside the city, and it became a centre of devotion and study for Buddhist women from across the valley. She also wrote devotional hymns.
She died in 1978, aged 80. Her biography was written by Lochan Tara Tuladhar. The story of the revival she belonged to, and of the meditation centres that came after it, is told in Vipassana in Nepal: a short history.