ABSTRACT
Tibetan Buddhist nuns often acted in the background and have seldom been recorded in historiography. However, a few preserved documentations address their lives and impacts. Despite prevailing social and religious norms, some nuns even negotiated their marginal positions and took the center stage of female agency. This can be observed, for example, in the former Buddhist Kingdom of Sikkim in the Himalayas. By contextualizing these remarkable Tibetan Buddhist nuns in Sikkim, the connection of marginality, inequality, and dependency will be examined. A focus lies on the intersection of social identities or categories of inequalities in a religious setting, such as gender, education, origin, privilege, and social status. The findings reveal that a few Tibetan Buddhist nuns have left a lasting mark on Buddhist communities in Sikkim.
