I have known Tsultrim Alione for fifty years, as a colleague, teacher and a co leader in the American Buddhist community. She is one of the most dedicated, honest, ethical and sincere teachers I have ever known…Tsultrim has been a powerful voice standing up for the respect, protection, and honoring of women across the Buddhist and spiritual landscape. Her book Women of Wisdom is a celebrated classic, and been followed by subsequent important books. Her lifelong dedication to uplifting the lineages of women’s teachings that have been neglected in the Buddhist world has been an important contribution and major benefit to the entire tradition. She is a teacher who unfailingly values and and protects women, I’ve been present at some of the largest and most important gatherings of Buddhist teachers over the past decades, where Tsultrim has courageously stood up, chastised, and called out situations of the misuse and abuse of women. She has become a beacon for many, year after year helping to resolve the sufferings of the misuse of power and mistreatment of women. This is one of her great contributions to the Buddhist world.
Jack Kornfield
Lama Tsultrim Allione, the founder and spiritual director of Tara Mandala, is a powerful inspiration to Western Buddhist practitioners in the Tibetan tradition. She has received guidance and transmission from the greatest Tibetan masters and has upheld their teachings with great integrity and diligence, while building and supporting a splendid Dharma center…Lama Tsultrim has taught her students carefully and according to the stringent standards of Buddhist knowledge and wisdom. Over the years, having observed them carefully, she had confidently authorized some of them to become teachers themselves, and she has invited teachers from other disciplines to teach at Tara Mandala. She maintains a broad perspective on the skillful means to train the mind to its highest spiritual potential while adhering rigorously to the lineages she has received from Buddhist masters.
Chagdud Khandro
I write in support of the activities of Tara Mandala and Lama Tsultrim Allione who founded this International Buddhist Center in 1993 with her late husband Mr. David Petit…I visited Tara Mandala in the mid-90’s when there was only a single yurt on the land. As a Board Member during this period I saw first hand the meticulous care with which plans moved forward year by year…I was close enough to the activities to recognize just how much ongoing effort, skill, and courage it took to conceive and carry out such a vision. During those years, with David’s help, Tsultrim was still raising her three children—all now well grown with families of their own. She was also developing her dharma teaching and dedicating herself with unwavering passion to nourishing women students in their lives and practice, and training women as well as male teachers. She also published her well received Women of Wisdom…
Anne C. Klein, Ph.D, Lama Rigzin Drolma
I have been blessed to know Lama Tsultrim Allione for 54 years. We met in Sarnath, India, in 1971, and like two strands of DNA, our paths have woven together with many significant points of contact over the decades…I write as a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies, a former Assistant Professor at University of Virginia and Stanford, a Buddhist teacher for 30 years, and a psychotherapist for over 40 years. I am the author of Buddhist Practice on Western Ground…Lama Tsultrim was an impressive nun in 1971, and she remains a source of inspiration to me and countless students and fellow teachers. Clearly a visionary, she has worked tirelessly to make her Buddhist center, a safe, secure, welcoming environment for all students. She has an exemplary track record of embodied compassion in opening Buddhist teachings to all, with sensitivity to the many issues that are present in our culture with respect to gender, gender identity, race. She has been at the forefront of educating Buddhist laypeople in the U.S., and Europe.
Harvey B. Aronson, Lama Namgyal Dorje
As a long-time practitioner and a caring and close friend of Lama Tsultrim, Costanzo, and Cady Allione, in my experience, they are some of the kindest, most generous people, and committed people that I have ever met…I’ve been to Tara Mandala more than once, and it’s an amazing place, an awesome accomplishment, and a land of extreme blessings. There are many yogis and yoginis practicing there right now, have practiced in the past, and will practice in the future, such a vast Dharma effort! Tara Mandala is an oasis in the midst of this ocean of samsaric suffering.
Marcia Binder Schmidt, Marcia Dechen Wangmo
