The 2024 Khyentse Fellowship Awarded to Chagdud Khadro

The spiritual director of Chagdud Gonpa Brasil, Uruguay, and Chile and a Khyentse Foundation advisor, Chagdud Khadro works tirelessly for the benefit of beings. In recognition of her contributions and commitment to the Buddhadharma, Khyentse Foundation has awarded Khadro the 2024 Khyentse Fellowship. Past recipients have included Erik Pema Kunsang (2022), Venerable Professor K. L. Dhammajoti (2015), and Professor Peter Skilling (2012).

Established in 2011, the fellowship is KF’s top honor, with a US$30,000 award to support the recipient’s continued activity in preserving and promoting the Buddhadharma. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche personally heads the committee that selects the winners.

Khadro was on pilgrimage in Wutai Shan, China, when she received the news of the award. “I was stunned, then overwhelmed, thinking of the blessings of my teachers, especially Chagdud Rinpoche [1930–2002], and the support of the sangha that have made possible any accomplishment at all,” she says. “I spent the afternoon praying that I can honor the intention of the fellowship. It is so auspicious that this news arrived in a place permeated with the compassion and wisdom of Manjushri. For me Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche is Manjushri, which gives me confidence and faith.”

Born in the USA, Khadro (then Jane Dedman) became interested in the dharma while traveling in India in 1977. She met Chagdud Rinpoche, a Nyingma master, some months later, during a set of empowerments Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was bestowing at Tulku Urgyen’s monastery in Boudhanath, Nepal. She encouraged Chagdud Rinpoche to come to the United States, and shortly after his arrival 18 months later, they were married in California. Rinpoche said at the beginning that this would not be a “passport marriage,” and for the next 23 years their bond remained a teacher-student relationship anchored in a dynamic family life.

During the 1980s, Chagdud Rinpoche and Khadro resided at the dharma centers Rinpoche and his students established in Oregon and California. Then, in the early 1990s, Rinpoche began teaching in Brazil, and in 1994 they purchased land in Rio Grande do Sul and constructed Khadro Ling, the first traditional Tibetan-style temple (Tib. gonpa) in South America. She took the name Chagdud Khadro in 1997, when Rinpoche ordained her as a lama and invested her with specific authorizations. However, during Rinpoche’s lifetime she taught only infrequently, and at the time of his death in November 2002, she had been in strict retreat for 18 months. The abrupt end of that retreat on that morning signaled a radical shift of responsibilities.

As spiritual director of Chagdud Gonpa’s activities in South America, Khadro is responsible for upholding the spiritual lineages that Chagdud Rinpoche transmitted, authorizing invitations to visiting teachers, and for ceremonies, teachings, and retreats, working in close collaboration with Chagdud Gonpa’s other lamas and instructors. She now also regularly gives teachings and empowerments herself. Within Chagdud Gonpa this is for the sangha’s main practices; visiting other sanghas, her main teachings concern preparation for dying and transference of consciousness at the moment of death (Tib. p’howa), the Vajrayana preliminaries (Tib. ngöndro), and cultivation of the Four Immeasurables according to a paradigm set forth in Longchenpa’s Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind, a text that Khadro says has long been her guide in her own mind training. When people come to her for direction or advice, she tries to encourage the qualities and activities that she sees in them. “They can find this disappointing—it’s perhaps not what they expect from someone who has been invested as a lama,” she says. “But the dharma itself never disappoints—in this I have faith, and I aspire to gather more skillful means.”

Since 2002, Khadro has also guided several dharma construction projects, including, at Khadro Ling, Guru Rinpoche’s Pure Land Zangdok Palri (Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain) and a mandala of the 21 Taras. The Zangdok Palri, an immense collaboration by lamas, sangha volunteers, and artists, was consecrated by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in 2008.

In Uruguay, Sengue Dzong, a majestic temple atop a long ridge that juts up from rolling grasslands, was built by a generous sponsor and beckons the Spanish-speaking sangha. “Sengue Dzong already has the Kangyur [the recorded teachings of the Buddha within the Tibetan Buddhist canon], statues of the Buddha and Chenrezig [the bodhisattva of compassion], and scroll paintings [Tib. thangkas],” says Khadro. “My aspiration now is statues of the Sixteen Arhats. It is said that representations of arhats, combined with recitation of prayers, surely gathers the sangha.” In Uruguay several strong practitioners have completed the Vajrayana preliminaries and inspire others to do so.

“These building projects have taught me a lot about manifesting in this material world,” Khadro continues. “Never easy, and one must be committed not only to the skills and funding but also to the maintenance that will follow. My father was an engineer who oversaw the construction and maintenance of supertankers—maintenance being the more demanding of the two. He instilled in me the value of taking care of things. As well, one must be patient and aspire that the benefit of these constructions continues to increase through practice and blessing.”

Khadro also has a background in research, writing, and editing. Before traveling to Asia in the 1970s, she worked as a researcher in a consulting firm on a government study of residential crime and as a freelance writer and a fact-checker for several magazines. Two articles on environmental issues that she fact-checked for Audubon Magazine won the national magazine award for investigative reporting. These experiences have proved useful in her activities in dharma centers, as she later became managing editor of Chagdud Gonpa’s Padma Publishing, where she worked with the translator Richard Barron and others to produce translations of numerous sadhanas, Dudjom Lingpa’s Buddhahood Without Meditation, and Longchenpa’s Treasuries. Under Chagdud Rinpoche’s guidance, she also wrote his autobiography Lord of the Dance and compiled his teachings in manuals for ngöndro, Red Tara, and p’howa.

More recently, imparting the dharma to children has become very dear to Khadro’s heart. Khadro Ling has an enthusiastic group of resident youngsters, who take an active role in dharma activities such as lama dancing. A school with a focus on Buddhist values that Chagdud Gonpa had established was unfortunately forced to close due primarily to funding issues, but the after-school program became the seed for Khadro Ling’s “Buda Camp”—a dharma camp for children and teenagers that is taking place for the third time this January.

“The kids are so receptive to the dharma it’s like watering a plant and seeing it come to life,” Khadro says. Last year, with only a few days to rehearse, the campers performed a one-act play based on the chapter in the sutra “The Play in Full” (Skt Lalitavistara) about the Buddha-to-be Siddhartha Gautama’s temptation by Mara’s daughters and demons just before he attained enlightenment. Their performance, with “a riveting Indian temple dance by the daughters and a wild melee by a legion of demons,” as Khadro describes, enchanted the audience of retreatants and parents, and the performers gained a deeper sense of Siddhartha’s courage before becoming a Buddha.

The theme of the January 2025 camp is “generosity”—generosity in many forms, including tolerance, deep listening, and offering. Developing this theme also involves agency with money, and Khadro will offer a portion of Khyentse Foundation’s grant to the young sangha, for them to discuss and plan how to use it for the benefit of other young people. She is interested in what kind of project or projects they feel are important to the dharma.

January is also Khadro’s 79th birthday. “It is rare for someone my age to have the opportunity to start new projects, to be infused with a fresh source of energy,” she observes. “I intend to work hard and fast, and to collaborate meaningfully with others, including a widening group of knowledgeable, creative educators I have met through being a board member of Middle Way Education and other dharma activities. Let’s see what we can accomplish.”

Featured image above: Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche with Chagdud Khadro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2024. Photo by Renato Parada.