Ruta Sevo's Blog: Roots of My Writing - Posts Tagged "buddhist-nun"

In the novel, I wanted to portray a Peace Corps volunteer who decides to stay in Nepal and becomes a Buddhist nun. Are there any like her in the real world? A really famous “Western nun” is Alexandra David-Neel who snuck into Lhasa in the 1920s by walking out of China. She was a French woman with a passion for Buddhism. She both became a nun and learned Tibetan, and collected manuscripts. (More about her later.) What about contemporaries?

Diane Perry is nearly my age. She was born in England in 1943, the daughter of a fishmonger. She too read Sartre and Camus around the age of eighteen, but one book immediately made her realize “I am a Buddhist.” She attended meetings of a Buddhist Society to learn more. At the age of nineteen while still in England she met Choygam Trungpa, a lama, who invited her to be a disciple. Finally she found a way to travel to India at the age of twenty-one, where she met her lama Khamtrul Rinpoche and soon became the Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo. Her spiritual journey included meditation in a remote cave, at 13,000 feet elevation in the Himalayas, for twelve years. Her extraordinary story is written by Vicki Mackenzie and is called Cave in the Snow: Tenzim Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment. See http://www.amazon.com/Cave-Snow-Tenzi...

June Campell is a Scotswoman. She decided at the age of ten that she would travel to Tibet and become a Buddhist. Unfortunately, the Chinese invasion of Tibet in1959 closed off the country when she was old enough to think about travel there, but the resulting emigration of Tibetan Buddhists to places all over the world reached even Scotland, where she met lamas and “took refuge,” which is the ceremony of induction. This was the time of the “hippy Sixties.” She travelled among dharma centers around the world, learning practices and the Tibetan language, and acted as a language interpreter. Her book is academic for the most part, about the significance of the female in the philosophy and symbolism of Tibetan Buddhism. What is highly unusual is her account, in Chapter 6, of becoming a secret sexual consort to a high-ranking lama (who had taken vows of celibacy). You’ll have to read the impact on her moral and spiritual perspective. If you studied anthropology, you’ve heard of the method called “participant-observation,” which is the idea that you become part of the culture you are studying in order to understand it from the inside. Although she was not consciously an anthropologist, her scholarship is very thorough and she is unabashed in revealing the extent to which she experienced it. She lectures in Edinburgh. Those who reveal the secrets of Tantric sex are threatened with madness and death. She not only told, she wrote quite thoroughly, and spoke to sell her book. Which, as I noted, is fairly academic. See Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism. See http://www.amazon.com/Traveller-Space...

There are more stories. You can find all of these people using Google or searching in Wikipedia. There is the American Dierdre Blomfield-Brown (born 1936) who became Pema Chodron. There is American Thubten Chodron born in 1950. And American Helen Alexa Koclanes who married an Indian man and in the process of fleeing the marriage ended up in Sri Lanka and became Bhikkhuni (Sister) Miao Kwang Sudharma. She published Wonderful Light: Memoirs of an American Buddhist Nun. See http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Light...