About
Dekila Chungyalpa is Director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an environment and climate education platform for faith leaders. She previously directed the World Wildlife Fund's Sacred Earth program (2009–2014), building partnerships between religious institutions and conservation efforts across the Amazon, East Africa, Eastern Himalayas, Mekong, and the United States. Chungyalpa co-founded Khoryug in 2008, an eco-monastic association under His Holiness the 17th Karmapa that coordinates over 50 Himalayan monasteries and nunneries in reforestation, climate adaptation, and water conservation. Her work focuses on faith-led environmental action and community-based conservation. Originally from Sikkim, she is the daughter of Tibetan Buddhist nun and meditation teacher Ani Dechen Zangmo.
Teaching focus
Chungyalpa appears at Upaya as part of the wider faculty Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered to teach alongside the Soto Zen core. Upaya's programs regularly bring in scholars, clinicians, scientists, poets, and knowledge holders from beyond the Zen sangha to teach in dialogue with the practice. Chungyalpa's sessions live inside that container. The work tends to ask how a particular field of expertise meets contemplative practice and what each can learn from the other. Sessions are usually held alongside zazen and the Soto Zen forms that structure the days at Upaya, so students can expect a rhythm of formal sittings, talks or seminars from Chungyalpa, group conversation, and silence. The framing is open enough for non-Buddhist participants to take part fully. The depth comes from Chungyalpa's own field rather than from technical Zen instruction. For students with a steady practice, the value is in seeing how practice meets a specific discipline, and how that discipline reads when held inside the container Upaya provides. For people newer to Zen, Chungyalpa's sessions are a low-friction way into that container.
Background
Dekila Chungyalpa appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Chungyalpa has chosen to share there. Dekila Chungyalpa is the Director of the Loka Initiative, a new environment and climate education and outreach platform for faith leaders at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Its mission is to support faith-led environmental and climate action efforts, locally and around the world, through collaborations on project design and management, capacity building, training, and public outreach. Prior to that, Dekila was awarded the prestigious McCluskey fellowship at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she researched, lectured and led field work with graduate students. From 2009 to 2014, Dekila founded and ran the World Wildlife Fund’s Sacred Earth program, building partnerships with faith leaders and religious institutions towards concrete conservation results in the Amazon, East Africa, Eastern Himalayas, Mekong, and the United States. She was the WWF US Director for the Greater Mekong Program from 2005 to 2009 and worked for WWF in the Eastern Himalayas for 5 years before that. Dekila is originally from Sikkim, a small Himalayan state in India, speaks Sikkimese, Tibetan, Hindi, and Nepali as well as English. She is the daughter of Ani Dechen Zangmo, a Tibetan Buddhist nun and meditation teacher who passed away in 1997. Having seen the impact of hydropower dams and deforestation firsthand while growing up in Sikkim, Dekila became an environmentalist at a young age. She worked extensively on community-based conservation in the Himalayas and the development of regional climate change adaptation strategies and sustainable solutions for hydropower in the Mekong river basin. She helped establish Khoryug in 2008, an eco-monastic association under the auspices of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, and coordinates over 50 monasteries and nunneries in the Himalayas that are carrying out reforestation, climate preparedness, disaster management, and freshwater conservation projects. That body of work places Chungyalpa inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Chungyalpa's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Chungyalpa contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Chungyalpa's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Chungyalpa's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Chungyalpa is recognized at Upaya as a senior teacher in the Soto Zen lineage. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Chungyalpa's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Chungyalpa at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Chungyalpa's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Chungyalpa is teaching.
