PERSON
Pema Chödrön
The American Buddhist teacher who transformed Tibetan contemplative practice into a curriculum for inhabiting uncertainty—and whose maps of groundlessness, shenpa, and unconditional friendliness turn out to be the most precise guides available to the inner life of the AI transition.
Pema Chödrön is the cartographer of the gap. Born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York in 1936, she encountered Tibetan Buddhism after a second divorce upended the comfortable life she had built, and was ordained by
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche as the first Western woman fully ordained in the Tibetan tradition. The teaching she has spent four decades transmitting is deceptively simple: the ground was never there. The stability that human beings construct through careers, identities, and expertise is fabricated rather than discovered, and the suffering of modern life arises not from dissolution itself but from the desperate resistance to it. She is an unlikely guide to artificial intelligence, having retired from public teaching before ChatGPT existed—but the transitions she describes with surgical precision, from the solid certainty of a professional identity to the vertiginous openness of not-knowing, are exactly what the winter of 2025 forced on millions of
AI-age builders. Through concepts including
shenpa (the hook that sets