Alright so I'm a Tibetan Buddhist now, Kagyu style.  REPRESENT BOI!

Well, no.

I've been living and teaching at Samtenling, a nunnery close to Dehra Dun, and will be here until the end of September.  My student nuns, my friend nuns, they want me to stay to teach, or to become a nun myself, preferably both.  My friend Wes told me to tell them that "faith is a fucking copout" and to take the check and run, "that's what I would do."  He'd pussy out, though, and if there were a check he'd return it - most of these nuns fled from Tibet, risking their lives as they crossed the Himalayas in the dead of many long nights.  My mom, hyperventilating, said "You tell them, you tell them your MOTHER said that it's enough that they're nuns, and that you are coming home!  You are not going to be a nun!"  My brother's reaction was "Hahaha.  Have lots of fun!"

As for myself, certainly the style is enticing.  I love the scarlet and maroon robes, especially the heavy flutter of cloth and the slap of flip flops when the nuns are running.  I love the way monks and nuns make use of their shawls: dumping them in a heap on top of their heads; using them to hide their faces when they're feeling silly or shy; draping them like ghosts over their faces when they're tired; airing them like wings before prostration, then wrapping them securely again.

And of course, the hair, or more accurately, the lack there of.  I have a hard time of it, trying not to shear off my sprouting, gravity defying hair.  My homie the lama keeps teasing me, "Oh look, there's a barbershop!" or "You know, I've got an electric razor at home."

Then, the sea of bald heads has another effect on me.  These nuns, they are so adorable, I have never seen such adorable women in my life, and in fact, some of these nuns are strikingly beautiful.  Sometimes I have the strongest urge to grab them by their faces and kiss them really hard, with tongue, in succession: one nun to the next.  It would cause such a riot, and as the lama claims that Tibetans are the worst gossips in the world, I would become a legend: "There was once this crazy girl who looked Japanese, or Korean - but she was American! - and she was teaching English here, and one day she went nuts and shaved off all her hair - but she wasn't a nun! - and kissed all the nuns and went running off into the jungle and was never seen again.  Her homie the lama said she was eaten by a tiger, but we lock the gate every night just in case..."  The monk's college close by used to take Scottish volunteers for English teachers, but stopped because the Scots kept getting drunk and pissing off the roof.  If I went on my kissing rampage, I think I would have a similar effect on the nunnery's needs for American volunteers.

If I became a nun on account of looking pretty, I am fairly certain that I would be the only person in the history of the universe to renunciate for such a reason.  Still, Big Master D has said that only ten out of every hundred monks are true candidates, and I've witnessed this to be true.  Most monks are dropped off at their monasteries at a young age, according to their parents' wishes or due to poverty at home.  When they grow older, some find that this is not the life they want to lead.  They might become the drunken lama at Tso Moriri, or the monk who has affairs with foreign women who offer to be their sugar mommas, or the monk who lives at the monastery but has a wife and children waiting at home, and everyone knows it.  They might derobe and become lay people again.  Even if they don't go to these extremes, the majority fall into this materialism that puzzled me at first - monks with cell phones, monks in shades, monks on motorcycles - punk monks with attitude.  I don't judge any of them for it, because detachment - even desiring detachment - is, in my opinion, extremely difficult.  However, I must admit that I was a little crestfallen - I thought all these monks and nuns were, for the lack of a better word, pure.

I don't know if it's true that only seven out of the seventy nuns here are "true candidates."  They'd probably be appalled if I posed the question.  How might one judge, anyway, even when observing a monk or a nun who gets really excited about the newest cell phone?

The nuns here like to say that being a nun means having a happy, if sometimes boring, life.  Many of the nuns left hardship behind: here, they have ample food and housing, and are only expected to study, pray, and to perform chores.  Some of the nuns left their villages at very young ages, because of a low quality of education and a disinclination for farming.  Others renunciated because they wanted to study dharma, the Buddhist scriptures.  Still others simply want to help people, and believe that being a nun is the most effect way to do it.  Often it is a combination of all these things, and more.  Many of the nuns are greatly relieved that they are not expected to marry; almost all of them are extremely devout.

My particular friend, Dickey, had a very difficult childhood and dropped out of school at a young age to work as a servant.  She became a nun because she saw all this suffering around her, and figured she could help more people if she became a nun and prayed for all sentient beings, rather than if she somehow completed her education and became a social worker.  She says that being a nun is an easy and happy life, compared to the stresses of poverty.  Still, it is difficult for her and some of the others here, who have little to no spending money - for a new set of robes, or bus tickets home, or a recorder to tape lectures - and nuns are not allowed to work.

Dickey wants me to "make a nun."  But at this point in my life - or lives, perhaps - I wouldn't be able to do it.  I could handle the hours (4:30, sometimes 3, in the morning until 11 at night), the studies, the separation from family and friends, the relatively spartan living conditions, the celibacy, etc.  Though Tibetan is so difficult that I once almost cried from frustration, trying to enunciate the alphabet, I'd happily master it through sheer force of will, because without it, there is no dharma, no Tibetan philosophy and debate.  Though I can't meditate for even five minutes, the idea of going into retreat, with no human contact and confined to my meditation space, for three years, three months, three weeks, and three days, as is the goal of many of the nuns here, appeals to me.

My problem is just a tiny bit bigger - with Buddhism itself.

In the film Dedication, Henry tells us what life is.  "Life is nothing but the echo of joy disappearing into the great chasm of misery."  "Life is nothing but the occasional burst of laughter rising above the interminable wail of grief."  "Life is a horrible little gale in the midst of a forced death march towards hell."  And Buddha tells us that life is suffering, and then you die, and then you do it all over again, and the only way to rise above it is detachment, and finally, Enlightenment.

I feel what Buddha's saying, right?  I understand that attached love is not true love because it is contingent on reciprocation.  I get that we cause our own suffering because we think we are so important, and because we let our emotions define us.  Of course it's true that everything in life is impermanent.  I can even almost begin to grasp how achieving complete detachment isn't a cold emptiness, but a warm spaciousness - we have Big Master D to wit, after all.

But I can't find myself want to be completely detached.  I might exclaim, once in a while, "Life is shit and then you die!  Raw deal, yeah?"  But in truth, I believe, as Rudy, Henry's best friend, does, that "Life is a single skip for joy."  All the beauties that a life of attachment offers more than make up for its follies, its sadnesses, its stupidities.  So, I think that makes me rather un-Buddhist, does it not?

Still, being here has had some sort of an effect on me. You can't spend your mornings waking to chanting nuns and the horns of puja and end your evenings with the stomp and clap and laughter of Tibetan philosophy and come away with nothing. I've just go this bit of faith now, that it should cut like butter [1]. It means that - and, there's really no way to articulate this without sounding wooey, which I detest - I try to trust in life more. Recently, I'm none too worried about obstacles, and have been surprisingly adept at detaching myself from anxiety and irritation. What I've figured is, resisting too much, railing at the fates for what I cannot control, or change, is an exercise in futility. I can relax; I can throw my hands up and realize that it wasn't meant to be, but maybe something different, something special, is. If I didn't go down that road, which I very much wanted to, becaue it was obstructed by the landslide caused by monsoon rains, or more likely, barred to me by the highly efficient Indian bureaucracy, then maybe I'm supposed to go down the other road, because something else is waiting for me there.

I'm wary of this new attitude, because I'm attached to being detached, and I'm worried that it's some phase that will wash away, eventually.  It's easy to be carefree in a nunnery tucked away in the jungle.  But maybe this philosophy isn't so much a new idea as a deepening of how I'd always felt before.  Chalk it up to good karma, but I have always felt, and experienced, that I am lucky, and that things will be pretty alright for me.  So this detachment to anxiety, this conscious trust in a flow, is perhaps nothing more than an extension of my beliefs to begin with.

I don't need to be a nun to practice detachment, to practice faith.  To practice good thoughts and good deeds.  The lama likes to say that it is more important to be a good Buddhist than a monk.  I might add that it is more important to be a good person than a Buddhist.  So that's where I leave it - non Buddhist, non nun, and faith that life is not a vale of tears, but a single skip for joy.  That some suffering sharpens our fleeting, but entirely worthwhile, experiences of happiness.  I will leave Enlightenment for another lifetime.

A less thought provoking change, but a curious one, since my stay at Samtenling, has been a new found preference for butterscotch candy, which I always thought of as old people candy, and disliked, before.  I assume that this is a side effect of chillin' with the nuns, though none of them eat butterscotch.

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[1] "It should cut like butter" needs a bit of explanation. The butter must be room temperature, or it wouldn't be easy to cut through. Preferably homemade Ladakhi butter - they come in these round, yellow globes the size of two fists, and you can buy them from the ama-les sitting on the sidewalks of Leh - because that is the most delicious butter I have ever put in my mouth. Earth Balance might be a fair replacement. Actually "it should cut like butter" is a pretty stupid phrase, but that's just how it came out.