Khenpo

Khenpo is the title given in the Nyingma, Kagyu and Sakya schools to a senior scholar-monk who has completed the full course of study and is authorised to teach.

The learned teacher

The khenpo has completed the long programme of study in the philosophical and scriptural curriculum of his school and is authorised to teach it and to confer the monastic ordination, so the title combines the standing of an accomplished scholar with the authority to instruct and, often, to ordain, making the khenpo the counterpart in these schools of the geshe of the Gelug tradition. The office is one of learning and teaching, held by those who have mastered the tradition body of study and are recognised as competent to transmit it.

Abbot and teacher

The word is also used for the abbot of a monastery and for the preceptor who confers ordination, so the title carries a sense of authority over the monastic community and its formation as well as of scholarly attainment, and its exact application varies between the schools. Entry is by the completion of the course of study and recognition by the tradition. Like the geshe, the khenpo standing is scholarly and is distinct from the tantric authority of the lama and from recognition as a reincarnate teacher, though one person may hold several of these roles. The khenpo thus represents the scholar-teacher and often the abbot of the Nyingma, Kagyu and Sakya traditions, the master of learning who transmits the study of the school and stands at the head of its monastic instruction.

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.