Dharma Integrity Project explores the conditions that allow contemplative communities to remain healthy, ethical, and capable of sustaining the Dharma over time.
Buddhism has ethical teachings, contemplative practices, ideas about teachers and students,
sangha, compassion, non-harming, responsibility, etc.
Actual human communities have personalities, power, money, institutions,
conflicts, loyalties, fear, organizational incentives, and mistakes.
This project explores what happens where these two realities meet.
Our work examines how authority, ethics, relationships, and organizational structures function within real-world contemplative communities. We look at how trust is built and maintained, how leadership and responsibility are exercised, how accountability is established, and how communities respond when tensions, conflicts, or ethical concerns arise. The purpose is to support discernment, stewardship, and conditions that allow healthy practice to flourish.
A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Understanding a contemplative tradition deeply is one layer of this work. Understanding the human and organizational systems through which that tradition is practiced is another.
Our framework draws from Buddhist ethical systems and contemplative traditions alongside psychology, trauma-informed practice, organizational theory, ethics, leadership, safeguarding, cross-cultural perspectives, and systems thinking methodologies.
Systems thinking is particularly useful for examining how different parts of community life interact. Authority, relationships, trauma, institutional structures, cultural assumptions, financial realities, spiritual practice, and individual behavior do not exist in isolation. Changes in one part of a community can affect many others.
These perspectives help illuminate the conditions that strengthen trust, responsibility, psychological safety, and collective integrity, as well as the dynamics that can undermine them.
The project is also informed by frontline behavioral-health experience in high-accountability settings, including work with court-involved individuals with Problematic Sexual Behavior. This experience provided direct exposure to group dynamics under stress, boundary enforcement, escalation patterns, and the ways responsibility and authority function within structured environments.
Together, these perspectives provide a practical lens for understanding contemplative communities as living systems.
What We Work Toward
The purpose of Dharma Integrity Project is to strengthen the conditions that allow the Dharma to take root with integrity: meaningful access, material support, ethical responsibility, healthy relationships, and care for those whose contributions have too often been overlooked.
Our work currently focuses on these interconnected areas within Western Buddhism:
Supporting Female Buddhist Teachers
Women have long contributed to the preservation, practice, and transmission of the Dharma, yet female Buddhist teachers can face barriers to recognition, institutional support, financial sustainability, mentorship, and meaningful participation in leadership. These challenges can be especially significant when established traditions and institutional structures were historically shaped around male teachers and monastic leadership. We support efforts that strengthen the visibility, agency, professional development, and long-term sustainability of female Buddhist teachers.
Supporting Western Tibetan Buddhist Nuns
Western Tibetan Buddhist nuns can face significant material and institutional challenges. Stable housing, healthcare, education, eldercare, financial security, community, and sustainable long-term pathways for monastic life may be difficult to access. We support research, relationships, resource development, and practical models that can strengthen the well-being, dignity, agency, and long-term sustainability of Western Tibetan Buddhist nuns. Supporting women who have devoted their lives to the Dharma is not simply charitable work, it is part of strengthening the future of Buddhist practice, teaching, and community in the West.
Expanding Meaningful Access to Dharma
The practical ability to participate in Buddhist life can depend on resources that are easy to overlook: financial security, flexible work, transportation, healthcare, childcare, housing, education, and the ability to take time away from employment or family responsibilities. We examine these conditions and support efforts to make sustained Buddhist practice more materially realistic and socially welcoming. This includes widening access to resources and learning, encouraging equitable models of participation, and recognizing inclusion as an ongoing responsibility of healthy institutions rather than simply an ideal.
Strengthening Ethics and Reducing Harm
Buddhist communities are not immune to harm. Misconduct, misuse of authority, spiritual coercion, financial exploitation, harassment, discrimination, and retaliation can occur wherever power is concentrated and accountability is weak. We support trauma-informed and harm-reduction approaches to Buddhist ethics, leadership, and community care. This means taking concerns about harm seriously, protecting the dignity and agency of those affected, clarifying ethical expectations, reducing conditions that enable misconduct, and encouraging fair, transparent, and accountable forms of governance.
Healthy communities are not created simply by adopting the right principles. They require ongoing attention to how those principles are embodied in relationships, institutions, and everyday decisions. Dharma Integrity Project seeks to contribute to that ongoing process. Our intention is to help cultivate communities in which the Dharma can be practiced, taught, transmitted, and sustained with integrity—communities capable of recognizing imbalance, taking responsibility when harm occurs, and learning how to repair and grow.
Trinley Wongmo is responsible for founding the Dharma Integrity Project and the creation of this site.