Meet a Teacher: Damchö Diana Finnegan

In the 1990s, Damchö Diana Finnegan found herself at an existential crossroads. After seven years as a finance and technology journalist in New York City and Hong Kong, then as a freelance correspondent across Asia, her career was thriving. Her finances were comfortable. She had seen much of the world. Yet something was wrong. “It was a moment where the elements of an apparently successful life were all pretty much in place,” Damchö says, “and there was a sense of ‘this can’t be the whole thing.’ ” Around this time, she found herself in Nepal to report on traveler attractions, including treks on the Annapurna Circuit, whitewater rafting, and meditation courses in local Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. While staying in one such monastery to do research for her article, she found that the dharma eased her disquietude. “All of these values that I wanted to construct a life around were being articulated very clearly,” she reflects. One year later, she was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun.

Damchö returned to the United States in the early 2000s to pursue her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lived in a nearby Tibetan monastery’s off-campus residence with a few other nuns. Having to pay all costs out of pocket, many of the nuns carried part-time jobs on top of their studies. A group of monks also studying at the school lived in other monastery buildings rent-free. The gendered discrepancy in these living situations led Damchö to ponder, “Who is going to create this type of [supported] community for us?” Following years of push-and-pull on the topic of full ordination for women in the Tibetan tradition, including the 2007 International Congress on Buddhist Women’s Role in the Sangha: Bhikshuni Vinaya and Ordination Lineages, the answer became clear for Damchö: “I reached the conclusion that we just have to make our own.”

Over the previous decade, she had spent a significant amount of time teaching in Puerto Rico at the request of her teacher, who had a dharma center there. Year after year, her Spanish improved, from conversational proficiency to fluency. Along the way, she connected with many other Spanish-speaking nuns. So when she completed her dissertation and moved to Dharamsala, India, with the goal of establishing a new Tibetan Buddhist community, it was a given that it would serve the Spanish-speaking world. In 2009, Damchö, along with three other Spanish-speaking nuns, founded the fledgling Comunidad Dharmadatta. The group spent a year living together in India before developing an extensive online practice community, including livestreamed dharma talks, robust educational courses, and guided meditations—all offered for free, and all in Spanish. Unlike the post-Covid era, a fully remote sangha was uncommon at the time. “At that point, people weren’t familiar with it but were open to it,” Damchö says. “And this was especially compelling for Spanish speakers, because they’re dispersed across such distances and much less likely to have a dharma center in their town. We have people from Patagonia to Turkey to Australia, and this [online community] was the way that it really reached their heart and touched their being.”

“The elements of an apparently successful life were all pretty much in place, and there was a sense of ‘this can’t be the whole thing.’ ”

The nuns of Comunidad Dharmadatta relocated from India to Mexico in 2015 to be closer to many of their community members. This move marked the beginning of a nomadic period for the group, which continued for five years before they found a more stable residence in Virginia. Their online offerings grew with each passing year, and, subsequently, so did their sangha. Today, their online meditation halls register around 30,000 visitors weekly, and their comprehensive seven-year study program has around 500 students enrolled, with three graduated classes since its inception in 2015.

The onset of Covid-19 only further strengthened Comunidad Dharmadatta’s numbers. As many Buddhist communities struggled to transition to a fully remote dharmic landscape, Comunidad Dharmadatta already maintained a well-oiled online machine. Damchö connected with other Buddhist teachers and gave them tutorials on proper camera placement and audience engagement. “When you’re teaching online, that distance is very strong, and you’re competing with all other sorts of stimuli and notifications: the phone that’s beeping and the emails that are coming in and the physical environment,” she says. “So how to really connect with the person and keep them connected—it’s an art.”

In the years since the pandemic, Damchö’s community has reassessed its values and structure in response to a growing awareness of widespread abuse by Buddhist teachers. Comunidad Dharmadatta has begun to decenter the role of the teacher—moving away from the traditional top-down Tibetan Buddhist structure that formed the community’s base at its beginning. Damchö herself renounced her monastic vows in 2023, and now operates as a lay teacher amongst a diverse set of leaders for Comunidad Dharmadatta. Several of the nuns who lived together in Virginia have now dispersed, and today Comunidad Dharmadatta is sustained by a collaboration-based team in which monastics are no longer the majority.

Damchö is embracing this new chapter in her trajectory as a Buddhist teacher with a determination to resist structures that she finds “unhelpful” and “unliberating.” She describes the group in its present form as an “intergenerational, women-led, explicitly antipatriarchal Buddhist practice community with a deep commitment to a more earth-based and ecologically aware practice orientation,” and hopes to serve her ever-expanding Spanish-speaking community with inclusivity always top of mind. “Wherever you come from, join us and let’s practice together,” she says. “We hope it serves you wherever you’re going next.”