The Time I Disappeared Into a Buddhist Nunnery, And Then Reemerged.

My Himalayan Coming-of-Age

Shugsep Nunnery

Much like the Buddha, I lived a flat and relatively shielded life till 18, when my parents made the mistake of letting me taste the forbidden fruit of inter-city higher education coupled with a steady monthly allowance.

En Route to Dharamshala

That summer, drunk on my newfound freedom and in pursuit of adventure, my 18 year old self applied for a fellowship offered by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The opportunity included immersing myself in the Tibetan freedom movement, studying Buddhist philosophy and hanging with the Lamas in the hope to “find myself” in typical Hollywood fashion.

Two hours before the overnight bus ride, we assembled at Tibetan market in central New Delhi. After some easy instructions I, along with a group of 25, hopped on a sleeper bus en route to McLeod Ganj, Dharamshala.

Dharamshala, literally “a place of refuge,” is where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community found sanctuary in India. After the collapse of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1912, Tibet briefly enjoyed autonomy under the 13th Dalai Lama. That peace ended in 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party invaded.

Thus, on 10th March, 1959, the 23-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, the reigning Dalai Lama, the 14th reincarnation of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the kind and gentle leader of the humble Tibetan folk, disguised himself as a soldier and escaped across the rugged Himalayas, into India.

He was welcomed at the border village of Zemithang with warmth and fanfare, and with a message of friendship from the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Arrival at Shugsep

The next morning, we woke up to breathtaking views of the snow capped Dhauladhar range of the Himalayas. We were in the middle of nowhere when the bus stopped. I along with 3 others were asked to disembark. We were dropped at the remote Shugsep nunnery, while the rest of the group continued. They were going to be putting up at Namgyal, the famous tantrik monastery and the current residence of the 14th Dalai Lama.

When you look at it from a gender lens, the locations make sense. Political and spiritual leadership in the Tibetan community overlapped and were almost entirely male. So it made sense to have the monasteries housing the Dalai Lama, senior Buddhist leaders and other monks in the heart of the city, close to the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. The nunneries, on the other hand, were situated remotely, amidst the protected forests of the Kangra Valley, to keep the nuns safe from harassment and outside influence.

Needless to say, I was disappointed. My plans to chill with the Dalai Lama and regularly visit the Tibetan parliament looked to be in serious jeopardy.

In hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

After getting off the bus, we walked for a few minutes and arrived at the main entrance of the nunnery. A few steps later, we reached the main temple of Shugsep. It was a beautiful building.

The nuns took us to our rooms. I was sharing the space with a nun called Pema. Pema was a student in year 4 of the nine-year academic program at Shugsep that covered Buddhist philosophy, debate and Tibetan language. She was one of the very few nuns who spoke fluent Hindi.

The First Breakfast

On the day we arrived, Pema took me to the dining room, which featured a hall with multiple tables. We went to the front of the hall and collected a piece of bread. I also took a cup of steaming Tibetan butter tea with the meal. The table had some condiments.

I took a first bite of the bread. It was bland, so in typical Indian fashion, I added a teaspoon of the red condiment on top of my morsel. That was a mistake, because this was homemade Sepen chutney made from the spiciest Sichuan peppers. Now, I have fairly high spice tolerance, and yet 13 years later, I still remember how the spice hit so hard it numbed my entire body. I went back to my room after this. Pema brought me some tea and bread for dinner. No more condiments for me.

Since my entry had been such a disaster, I decided to make up for it with discipline. The nuns woke up daily at 5AM. The following day, I showed up at the main temple of the nunnery to pray with them. We gathered in the prayer hall which was centered around an altar displaying statues of the Buddha, lineage teachers and deities. It was adorned with butter lamps, incense sticks and offering bowls.

The prayers began. For the next one hour the nuns chanted Buddhist mantras and sutras. As they prayed, they simultaneously played a hand held prayer wheel. This, as two nuns played the Dungchen horn. The chants alongside the instruments created a calm, mystical mood, very different from the loud chaos of Hindu temples.

After prayers, we gathered for breakfast. The first rays of the sun shone through the mighty Dhauladhar as we had butter tea and bread.

Goodbye Vanity

It was a Wednesday, which meant the barber was at the nunnery. In ascending order, the nuns aged 6 to 16 formed a queue to get their heads shaved. I also stood in the queue to join the nuns, but I couldn’t follow through. I knew if my mother saw my bare scalp, I wouldn’t be allowed back home. The queue moved swiftly as the nuns said goodbye to their hair, a symbol of feminine vanity.

Hair was not the only symbol of femininity the nuns had divorced. There were no mirrors in the nunnery, not in my room, not in the bathroom, not above sinks. This was before the era of smartphones. So, for three months, I didn’t look at my face in the ways we’re now so accustomed to.

I can attest that this does something profound. For the time I was there, I lost many of my insecurities around my face. How do you fixate on something you cannot see? My body stopped being an object to evaluate and became a vessel that simply was. I tied my hair in whatever way was most practical. Makeup lost all meaning. My clothes became functional rather than expressive. No complicated shoes, no hair plucking, no jewelry, except for a simple prayer band the nuns tied around my wrist.

For a whole month, I did not leave the nunnery. The signals in the nunnery were poor and the internet did not exist in the way it does today. During this time, I did not read the news or talk to any friends. Calls with family were few and far in between. I spent my days watching the nuns pray and study. In the morning and late afternoon, I helped with chopping vegetables for meals. One week in, I injured my thumb from the chopping knife. I was not allowed in the kitchen after this. Instead I was assigned the job of supervising laundry.

The Nights

One Sunday night, I attended the tantrik meditative practice, “Chod”. As a part of this, the nuns visualized offering their bodies as a feast to demons, to overcome attachment and fear. The ritual was a stunning array of visualizations, chants, music and prayer. It is an important part of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and comes from the great 11th century female practitioner, Machik Lapdron.

On other nights, the nuns and I would stargaze. Up in the mountains, away from city lights, the Milky Way stretched spectacularly across the sky. The nuns spoke to me about their families and about the homeland. They told me what their parents had told them about Tibet, about towering Himalayan peaks and sacred turquoise lakes. They showed me their Green Books, the identity documents issued by the Tibetan Administration.

In spite of being eligible, many refuse to take Indian citizenship in the hope to someday return to a free Tibet. Their relationship to the land carried deep longing and poignancy I had never encountered before. I would only encounter something similar years later, working with Palestinians in exile.

Stepping Outside the Nunnery

One month later, I was ready to leave the nunnery for the first time. I was interested in navigating the Tibetan ecosystem in Dharamshala, to see the sights and eat the food. The first Monday after, I joined other research fellows in taking the bus from Shugsep to McLeod Ganj.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I regularly visited the Norbulingka Institute. This smaller model of the original palace in Lhasa, functions as a living repository of Tibetan literature and culture. Here, I took a workshop on Thangka painting and spent many a quiet, meditative hour drawing elaborate Buddhist figurines using tik-khang (grid lines) and filling the sketches with vibrant, natural pigments.

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I also spent a lot of time at the popular hippie haunt, Illiterati café. A few days in, I was reading at the café when I was approached by a Tibetan woman who had been observing me. She came over and held my hand. She then closed her eyes and after a minute, informed me that she is a shaman and she could tell that I had the gift of healing. She then took a piece of paper and wrote a phone number for me. She told me that I should call Tashi and learn the skill of Tibetan massage. She told me that I should not waste my gift.

Becoming a Certified Masseuse

Now, this entire situation may have been a sham and both the shaman and Tashi may have been conning me for all I know. But I have a well-documented weakness for following my curiosity into such territories. I called Tashi and secured my spot at the Tibetan massage school. That evening, I called my father to ask him to loan me Rs. 5000 for the course. My father, fearing I was being sold off to a prostitution racket, refused.

Only after I threatened him with the prospect of selling T-shirts on the streets to scrape the money together, did he agree, on the condition that I would update him every day. And finally, after weeks of practicing on a naked Slavic man, who, by the way, was also first man I ever saw naked (shout-out to Oleksandr!) I became a certified Tibetan masseuse.

On another day, at the Illiterati Café, I struck up a conversation with a beautiful girl called Amisha who asked me if I wanted to go on a walk. Naturally, I agreed. We found ourselves wandering amidst the beautiful tea gardens of the Kangra Valley. Around 7PM, not long before the last bus left for my nunnery, Amisha asked me if I saw the man on the other side of the tea estate. I told her there was no one there. At this point, Amisha started a full-fledged conversation with an imaginary dude. As you can imagine, it took all my self-control to not visibly panic.

After a lot of persuading, Amisha agreed to walk back with me to the cafe. The next day, I met her again. She informed me that she was on medication for severe schizophrenia and showed me her art that helped her cope with it.

Traditional Tibetan Medicine

Amisha was in Dharamshala to visit the Institute of Traditional Tibetan Medicine to see if they had a treatment for her. Curious, I decided to join her on her visit to the Tibetan doctors. Now, I am a firm believer in allopathic medicine, so I was surprised to see long queues of both Tibetans and international visitors, some of whom had been waiting since 3AM. The medicines are reputed to be highly effective. In fact, my own father has been consulting Tibetan medicine for his diabetes and has shown considerable improvement (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and would strongly recommend doing your own research on this)

The adventures were incredible but I also found time to do some human rights research work. I wrote a blog piece on refugee rights for the Tibetan Policy Institute and briefly interned with the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile. I also met representatives of the non profit: Students for Free Tibet, including a monk/burn patient who had attempted self-immolation as a sign of protest against Chinese occupation of Tibet.

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Self-Immolation As a Form of Protest

Self-immolation refers to the practice of an individual setting themselves on fire, usually in public, as a form of protest. The practice has roots in Mahayana Buddhism. Historical records describe several hundred Buddhist monks, nuns and laypeople in China who offered their bodies as acts of resistance from the late 4th century AD onwards. The practice is also mentioned in Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra, where the “Bodhisattva Medicine King” is described as burning his own body as an offering to the Buddha. This has often been interpreted as the ultimate Buddhist expression of renouncing attachment to the body.

Since 2009, an estimated 160 Tibetans have self-immolated in Tibet and China in protest against Chinese occupation. One evening, I attended a discussion on this tricky subject. On one hand, self-immolation was described as a noble act of protest; on the other, monastic regulations (vinaya) prohibit monks from killing or harming themselves. The Dalai Lama has also discouraged the practice.

And finally, two weeks after I left the nunnery for the first time, I met his holiness the Dalai Lama for the first time.

Meeting The Dalai Lama

Now, at the outset, let me tell you that my religiousness (or is it religiosity?) is mostly decorative. So decorative that I’m not even sure I’m using the right word. But I do enjoy the cultural aspects of religion.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting two popes, multiple Sufi scholars, and innumerable Hindu priests, and yet I don’t believe in any kind of divine or magical power vested in people. I also know enough allegations have been made against all kinds of religious figures, the Dalai Lama included.

So, at the risk of sounding foolish, I will say this: when I met him, I could immediately understand why millions of Tibetan Buddhists put complete faith in his leadership. As he entered, the room seemed bathed in, for lack of a better term, a warm kind of spiritual gravity. He was smiling, almost mischievously. And yet, many in our group started tearing up. I even found myself getting emotional.

Our interaction was brief. I offered him a scarf, which he gently put back around my neck. I asked him if he had a message for me. He joked that I should stop being so serious. Then he shared what he called the full-circle realization of his long life: that true wisdom lies in living joyfully, like a child.

It’s been thirteen years since I met him, and his words keep coming back to me. Through highs and lows, ups and downs, I try to notice the small joys in the ordinary. I strive to cherish the time with my loved ones and hold on to a childlike curiosity about the world as it unfolds. Life is short, and taking oneself too seriously rarely helps. Perhaps this is my small attempt to shed ego and vanity, my flawed and fumbling practice of Buddhism.

Some names have been changed