Rebuilding the Colleges That Train Khenpos, in Exile

The monastic colleges, shedras, that train and confer the khenpo qualification were overwhelmingly destroyed or closed following the Chinese takeover of Tibet, and the great majority of the Nyingma, Kagyu and Sakya tradition's shedra system as it exists today was rebuilt from the 1960s onward by Tibetan teachers in exile, chiefly in India and Nepal, who reconstructed the traditional curriculum and reestablished the years-long course of study needed to produce new khenpos essentially from scratch outside Tibet, an institutional rebuilding effort on a scale comparable to what Christian monastic orders would have faced had their entire university system been destroyed within a single generation.

A number of these reestablished shedras have since begun conferring the khenpo title on non-Tibetan students who complete the full traditional course, a development still relatively recent and geographically concentrated in a handful of institutions, so that a small but growing number of Western khenpos now teach in dharma centres they or their teachers founded outside Asia entirely, extending the same scholastic tradition that had to be rebuilt once already in exile into a second, still newer setting further still from its Tibetan origin.