Lit from Within

A visit with Tibetan nuns reveals the truth of impermanence.

By Diana Reynolds Roome

There should be a word for that moment of sudden joy after you've been through turbulent times and realize everything in your life is, after all, in perfect harmony.

I had that feeling when I finally arrived at the Dolma Ling nunnery in Dharamsala, India, after seven hours of hard, stinky, noisy riding in a grubby bus with flowered curtains and no springs. Traveling with a small group at the invitation of the Seattle-based Tibetan Nuns Project, I would be among the first foreign visitors to stay at the newly built nunnery that had been inaugurated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama just the previous year.

I knew that the journey would be challenging, but I had always felt a strong wish to understand more about the brave Buddhist women who had risked everything to rebuild their community in exile. Sometimes the rebuilding was literal, as they hauled sand and stones to construct their nunneries. With our bus driver honking all the way from Delhi and most of the way into the Himalayan foothills, though, it was hard to think about much of anything, let alone meditate on the source of their strength. Then the landscape spread out to reveal hills and pine trees, gamboling monkeys, and tangles of orange lantana blossoms, and I began to focus on what lay ahead.

We found the community, with its gracious white and maroon buildings, at the foot of a snow-flecked mountain with green terraced fields on the lower slopes. My simple but comfortable room had a tiny balcony, and as I walked out on it, I heard the energetic rushing of a stream below. Two nuns in maroon robes were laying out a length of material on the grass beside it, and the air reverberated with strange and marvelous bird calls. A kalij pheasant with long tail feathers swooped past—a living version of the birds depicted in the Kangra Indian miniature paintings I'd loved for years.

That was when I knew things could not be better. There was even enough space to do yoga, so I practiced a few poses, including Natarajasana (Lord of the Dance Pose), said to symbolize the destruction of the old self in preparation for the creation of a new one.

Remarkable Women

That evening, feeling renewed, I attended puja (prayers) with the nuns. They sat in rows on low wooden benches in the temple assembly hall, with our group sitting a little apart against a wall. Down at the far end of the hall I could see three magnificent fabric images: Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion; the Green Tara, the female bodhisattva of compassion (also known as "she who saves"); and the Buddha Shakyamuni (the historical founder of Buddhism, also known as the Awakened One). The nuns ranged in age from 14 to 80. I was near some young novices who occasionally had trouble keeping up with the words in the thick Tibetan scripts they were following.

The sound of their chanting seemed at first unremarkable—rhythmic, but mostly limited to a few notes. But as I sat admiring the beauty of the temple and the serene faces of the nuns, I started hearing new sounds. Beneath the strong common pulse, inner notes were emerging as individual voices rose and fell at different pitches, volumes, and speeds. The chanting reminded me of the sound of river water flowing over stones.

I was so mesmerized, I ceased to feel the discomfort in my knees from sitting cross-legged for so long, and I became lost in the sound of human voices that seemed as eternal as the babbling of the stream beneath my room. My breathing was even, my sense of contentment even greater than it had been that afternoon.

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