Marsha's Travels: Monasticism

I just spent two days at Dorma Ling Nunnery and Institute (for Buddhist Dialectics), which is a nunnery in Lower Dharamsala, which by the way is a lot warmer than Upper Dharamsala, where I live. No, I didn't achieve a new level of consciousness or have any divine revelations while I was there. I did meditate long enough for my legs to hurt, which was precisely half an hour, but that was on my own. But I had a good time.

Dorma Ling is the chief nunnery of the Tibetan Nuns Project, which does a lot of good things for nuns and Buddhist women in exile and has a lot of nunneries, but this one has the distinction of offering the highest level of learning available to Tibetan nuns anywhere, in India or otherwise. In Old Tibet, nuns lived within male monasteries and received only minimal religious instruction so they could pray all the time. In the 1970's, some prominent members of the exile community felt this should change, and nuns should be taught complex scholastics and test for the geshe degree, which is the PhD of Tibetan Buddhism. They're still working on it. One woman tested and passed last year, but was rewarded a newly-invented "geshe-ma" degree and not permitted to test at the three main monasteries in the south (Sera, Deprung, and Ganden) were monks are tested. So it's a bit like the situation with women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism, and by that I mean almost exactly the same, with women getting stupid titles like "Maharat" and "Rabba" last year and then those being ditched anyway.

There was no sitting meditation, which is what we think of when we think of meditating. They were encouraged to do it in their spare time (of which they had little), but their day went like this:
5:30 am - wake up
6-7 am - puja (prayers)
7-7:30 am - breakfast
7:30 am - 12:15 pm classes
12:45-3:30 pm - prayers
4-7pm - classes, debates
7-7:30 pm - dinner
7:30 - short walk followed by bed

I was there for Sunday to get interviews, because it was their day off, which most of them spent doing laundry.

So what do they learn all day? Buddhist thought, which is incredibly complex. It takes 7 years to qualify to take the geshe degree. I didn't understand the classes (they were in Tibetan) though there were also classes in math, history, and English. In the afternoon was formalized debate system where they test each other's logic and memorization abilities.

Other nunneries are different. Some also have learning, but focus more on prayer or sitting meditation, as opposed to text meditation that they were doing here. Anything that is focusing your mind is meditation, pretty much. Every year nuns apply to this nunnery for higher learning, and some are rejected and remain in their prior location.

All of their free time is spent doing chores, and they've worked hard to become self-sufficient. They clean their own rooms, cook their own food (mostly rice and vegetables), produce tofu and crafts to sell, and help out cleaning up in the general community. They are here to train their minds, not sit around and wait for a personal revelation to happen. In that sense, it was very intense.

To read more about Tibetan Nuns Project, a charity I whole-heartedly support, go:

www.tnp.org