Jashar Goenpa

Jashar Goenpa, in full Jashar Lhundrup Choling, is a working nunnery at about 2,240 m in Zobel gewog, just off the road between Yongla Goenpa and Pemagatshel’s old town. A two-storey temple with magenta roofs stands on a wide paved courtyard, with single-storey quarters along both sides and a steep hillside behind.

It was founded by a nun, Anim Woesel Chöden. After her death the community fell into disrepair, and it was restored under the lama Gyeltshen Trulku, its spiritual director.

A nunnery of retreatants

In late 2012 the Bhutanese nun Sonam Wangmo spent two months at Jashar for a study of nuns’ education, published in 2016. She found it known across Pemagatshel as a nunnery of retreatants. Some nuns study and recite prayers; others sit in solitary retreat. A number had completed the six-year retreat.

Her most striking finding was about the villages. In Pemagatshel it is the nuns, not monks, whom households invite for shabten, the prayer rites a family asks for, and nuns who have done three-, six- or nine-year retreats lead them. Their male gomchen teachers still go with them, to reassure the families. She knew of few other nunneries in Bhutan asked to do this work.

The nunnery’s core practice is the Guru Dewa, performed as a tsog offering on the 10th and 25th days of each lunar month.

Nuns in the masks

Gyeltshen Trulku had trained and encouraged the nuns to perform cham, the masked and ritual dances, in public at a drupchen held once every three years. In 2012 the training was still going on, with monks from the Pema Gatshel Dzong teaching them. The study called it a first for Bhutan.

Still a nunnery

In April 2025, on a Central Monastic Body course teaching monks and nuns to fix their own water supplies, a member of the Jashar community put it plainly to BBS: “In our dratshang, everyone is a nun.”

Yongla Goenpa is 6 km and about half an hour away, on its ridge above. See things to do in Pemagatshel for the rest of the district.