Living With Buddhist Monks and Nuns: an Intimate View of Religious Life

American students in Nepal find the experience both puzzling and enlightening

By BETH MCMURTRIE

Last year, when Michael Naparstek was still a student in Hartford, Conn., he tried to imagine what life would be like in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. He pictured red-robed monks gliding about, lost in thoughts of nirvana. Or perhaps they'd sit still as stones, legs crossed, meditating for hours about the meaning of life.

Surely they wouldn't play soccer in the courtyard. Or sneak out for scooter rides around the neighborhood. Or make each other laugh with their imitations of Hollywood movie stars.

Well, they would and did, as Mr. Naparstek discovered shortly after arriving here in the capital of Nepal in January. The Trinity College sophomore and six classmates spent a semester living and studying among the Tibetan monks and nuns who make their home in Nepal.

The program is one of a small but growing number of study-abroad programs focused on Asian religions. Antioch College was the first, starting a Buddhist-studies program in India in 1979. The School for International Training, in Vermont; the Friends World Program, at Long Island University; and Naropa University, in Colorado, offer similar programs in countries such as India, Japan, and Nepal. In addition to studying the religion and culture of the region, students are encouraged, and sometimes required, to participate in religious practices, such as meditation, in order to understand them better. All of the programs report a steady increase in participation in recent years, due in large part to a growing interest in Buddhism in America.

Trinity is a relative newcomer to the club, having sent its first batch of students to Kathmandu this year. Elli Findly, a professor of religion who helped design the program, believes that students must immerse themselves in Tibetan Buddhism in order to understand its complexities. Too often, she says, textbooks present the religion as a pure and abstract philosophy. Popular culture compounds the myth with cliched images of pious monks and ethereal nuns.

"I think what is very clear-cut and idealistic in America is very complex here," says Ms. Findly. "When they come here, they realize that Buddhism is not about meditation, but it's really about life, and it has political and economic consequences."

Many of those consequences can be felt at the Samtenling monastery, where Mr. Naparstek took up residence in early February. Situated at the end of a brick path that winds from the gold-topped Boudhanath Stupa, the largest Buddhist shrine in Nepal, Samtenling is home for 80-some monks. It is laid out like a three-story motel. The spartan bedrooms, with space enough for just a bed and a desk, look out onto a courtyard, where they gather for meals. Twice a day they hold group prayers in a large room decorated with vibrant frescoes depicting the life of Buddha.

Samtenling's proximity to the bustling activity around the stupa, which is surrounded by restaurants and Tibetan souvenir shops, lends the monastery an informal atmosphere. Young monks, some no more than 5 years old, kick soccer balls around the courtyard between their religious lessons. On Sunday nights after dinner, they rent movies from a nearby video shop. Indian films that include musical numbers, romance, and villains are a particular favorite.

By March, seven weeks into his stay, Mr. Naparstek has made fast friends with a number of the younger monks at Samtenling. When a couple of them learned that he had a guitar, they begged him to teach them the Eagles song "Hotel California." Now he meets them in the afternoon to practice chords -- out of earshot of the frowning older monks, who disapprove of such frivolous endeavors.

One of Mr. Naparstek's best friends, a monk nicknamed Michael, likes to quote from the movie Scarface. "Say hello to my little friend," he sneers with his best Al Pacino accent, waving an imaginary gun. Sometimes he and Michael sneak out and ride a scooter through the dusty streets of this congested city, past cows nosing through piles of garbage, and battered taxis cruising for fares.

Although the monks' piety and their vow of celibacy set them apart in fundamental ways, Mr. Naparstek says, "the main thing I learned is that monks are people. They aren't any different from you or me at all. They just happen to have no hair and red robes."

The Trinity students' own religious backgrounds are mixed. A couple of them are lapsed Roman Catholics. Others have experimented with a variety of faiths. Though Buddhism holds a certain appeal for some, they are here primarily to study the practice of religion. A mixture of majors in anthropology, religion, and philosophy, they struggle to get beyond a textbook knowledge of a religion and a culture that seem so foreign to their Western experience.

"It's just really impressive to see how much religion can be a part of people's lives," says Adjua Greaves, a sophomore studying anthropology. "It doesn't seem like such a big part in America."

The seven students -- five women and two men -- are spread out over Kathmandu, in two nunneries and two monasteries. Three times a week, they bicycle to a three-story house that Trinity has rented on a quiet cul-de-sac. This is the site of their formal schooling -- and the place where they can take hot showers or use one of two computers to write their papers and send e-mail. In the mornings, they take Tibetan-language classes. In the afternoons, they listen to lectures on the religion, politics, and history of Tibet and Nepal. Peter Moran, the program director and an anthropologist who has lived in Nepal off and on for 16 years, gives many of the lectures on Buddhism.

The students, who pay about $16,000 for the semester -- the same as they would back on the Hartford campus -- are also expected to give something back to their monasteries and nunneries. They help the monks and nuns with their English, which is often rudimentary, and teach them basic computer skills. Otherwise, the students are out and about, listening, talking, observing life in Kathmandu.

Those observations will culminate in a research paper of their choosing -- the significance of particular deities in worship, for example, or the reasons that some Tibetans choose to become monks or nuns. That topic is especially fascinating to the students, as monastic life has proved more complex than they had imagined.

Daily life begins for most monks and nuns before dawn, with morning puja, or group prayer, which lasts for more than two hours. The ritual is repeated in the afternoon. When not in puja, the youngest monks and nuns attend school. The older ones memorize ritual texts, or study Tibetan, Nepalese, and English.

The monasteries and nunneries frequently welcome new members. Often they are young children, whose families in India or Tibet cannot afford to care for them. Those who come from Tibet are smuggled into Nepal through the Himalayas.

At first, the Trinity students were intimidated by the monks and nuns, seeing them as devoid of normal earthly desires. Ben Davis, a senior majoring in religion, recalls the day the director of his monastery brought home a television and VCR. Mr. Davis was shocked to discover that the monks had a taste for violent Charles Bronson flicks.

"I'm sitting in the corner thinking, 'Oh, my God. I feel like I'm watching a porn movie with my parents.'"

Mr. Davis had more difficulty than the rest of the students adjusting to his monastery. It was small, with only 36 monks, and was run like a boot camp -- Sunday-afternoon movies were the only respite in a rigorously enforced schedule. If the monks were caught playing soccer -- a common practice at other monasteries and nunneries in the area -- they were beaten. If they fell asleep during morning prayer, they were beaten.

Not all directors take such a hard line, but some, like the one at Mr. Davis's monastery, think the iron-fist approach is necessary. Without it, they worry that their charges might fall prey to the pleasures of city life right outside their doors.

Between the Bronson movies and the beatings, Mr. Davis has had a tough time making sense of what he's seen. He is perplexed at times, even disillusioned. "All the romanticism has been taken out," he says. "I had an ideal of Eastern religions in a lot of ways, and this has broken a lot of that down. Coming over here destroyed my conception of what Buddhism is."

He used to believe that Buddhism was a philosophy of life emphasizing detachment from people and material things. It does not even hold that there is a God. Instead, he found that Tibetan Buddhism, with its absorption in ritual and professions of faith, has plenty in common with the Catholicism he was raised with. "In Buddhism, you're supposed to use gods as tools" to reach enlightenment, he says. "But here there is so much faith in the gods themselves."

The lesson: "People need to be led. And people need to be told what to do."

The insights that the Trinity students are gaining aren't limited to religion. They are getting a primer in Tibetan politics as well. In the years since China invaded Tibet, in 1950, many Tibetans have fled their homeland to escape persecution. Monks and nuns are particularly vulnerable and have left in large numbers.

Sandwiched between Tibet and India, where Tibet's government-in-exile has been established, Nepal is now home to 25,000 of the world's 131,000 Tibetan refugees. Although it is 90-percent Hindu -- and dwarfed by neighboring China -- Nepal has been fairly hospitable to Tibetan refugees. Many Tibetans have become wealthy running hotels or carpet factories in their adopted home.

But their lives are tenuous. Wishing to appease both India, which is sympathetic to Tibet, and China, which is hostile, the Nepali government goes only so far in its tolerance. In March, several monks were beaten by police as they attempted to demonstrate peacefully on the anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet in 1959.

What might have been an abstract lesson in politics has become very real for the Trinity students. One of the monks who was beaten lives in Mr. Naparstek's monastery.

At dinner one night at the Keydong Thukche-Choling nunnery, over potato curry, fried chicken, noodles, and dumplings, a 63-year-old nun tells the students the story of how the place was built. Back in 1959, says Ani Chodon-la, her entire nunnery fled Tibet shortly after the Dalai Lama did. The nuns spent more than 20 years living in the hills of Nepal before making their way to Kathmandu. By then, many of the group were elderly, and it was left to the few remaining healthy ones to build, from scratch, the nunnery they live in now. They survived on noodle soup and donations from pilgrims, determined to re-create the home they had to leave behind in Tibet.

"Those days we worried a lot that if we didn't pull together, the whole lineage would fall apart," she says in Tibetan, which is translated by Mr. Moran, the program director. "We were really like beggars.

"Now," she says, looking around the long table laden with food and surrounded by people, "it is really good, isn't it?"

The story moves the students in ways they had not expected. "I've always been kind of cynical about faith in general and religion in general," says Erinn Rieth, a senior majoring in religion, who is living at Keydong. "But when Ani Chodon-la was telling the history, it was so beautiful. They were so strong in their faith, and that helped them."

As part of their semester in Nepal, the Trinity students are expected to spend a lot of time at Buddhist shrines, observing and talking with the people who come there to worship. One of their favorite places is the nearby Boudhanath Stupa. Its enormous, whitewashed dome is decorated with prayer flags and topped by a golden box, on which Buddha's eyes have been painted.

The stupa is a favorite of Tibetan Buddhists. Under the glare of the sun, the students see the same people circling the stupa every day in prayer. The middle-aged monk who has prostrated himself so many times that he has a callus on his forehead. The old Tibetan women, leather aprons around their waists and braids of gray hair hanging down their backs, massaging prayer beads as they walk. The shopkeepers, mostly Tibetan, who mumble mantras as they sell beads, jewelry boxes made of yak bones, and scroll paintings of Tibetan Buddhist deities. To the students, who are used to seeing religion practiced quietly, privately, and no more than once a week, the sight is overwhelming.

"In America," says Ms. Rieth, "Sunday is for going to church, and after that, it's forgotten. Here, it's fully integrated into their lives. It's not an external part of them. It's always there."

The students' exploration of the religious lives of ordinary Tibetans has become a study of Nepali culture as well. It is unclear to them where Buddhism ends and Hinduism begins. Shrines to each religion are often built side by side, and people are comfortable worshiping each other's gods. "There are so many paradoxes and things that don't make sense," says Kristin Forester, a junior who is majoring in religion.

The openness of religious life in Nepal sometimes startles the students. Outside Pashupatinath, Nepal's most important Hindu temple, students see corpses, tightly wrapped in gold cloth, burn on the shores of the Bagmati River. They hear the skulls pop in the heat. Later they watch as men pour the ashes into the holy waters. Ms. Greaves recalls the time she saw a family bring a man to the river's edge and rest his feet in the water as he lay dying.

The way in which religion pervades every aspect of life in Nepal is probably what surprises students the most, Mr. Moran says. "When you study this in school, you think of it as something you can compartmentalize -- and you can't do that here."

He is pleased to see the students shedding some stereotypes about Buddhism and monastic life. "It's really important that monks and nuns lose some of their exoticism," he says. "The students need to see that monks and nuns have a full life. When you imagine someone as only a spiritual being, you flatten their humanity. That serves more of our own fantasy than it helps Tibetans."

The person who has best brought that lesson home is Tendol, a 27-year-old nun from Keydong. Ani Tendol-la, as she is known, is a formidable figure, though she stands no more than 4 feet 5 inches tall. She has been to the United States several times, helped to teach the introductory Tibetan-language class at Trinity last fall, and has continued teaching Tibetan to the students during their stay in Nepal.

Unlike many of the nuns and monks with whom the students are living, she is not shy. She wears a serious expression but is quick to break into a big smile when a student says something she finds amusing, which is often.

Ani Tendol-la says she decided, at the age of 10, that she wanted to be a nun, because "a nun's life is peaceful." Not so for her, however. In addition to teaching the students, she runs the business affairs of the nunnery and participates in Tibetan-refugee organizations around Kathmandu. She likes working with the students from Trinity, she says, because she believes that the better foreigners understand the situation of Tibetans, the better are the prospects for their one day returning to their homeland.

"She's awesome," says Ms. Rieth. "She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it."

Kathmandu has posed its own set of challenges for the students. The sheer poverty of Nepal is magnified in this crumbling city, packed so tightly that life spills out into the streets. People sell whatever is at hand: plastic buckets, chili peppers, slabs of raw meat on wooden blocks by the side of the road. Many residents live in tents or dank shacks on the outskirts of town, with no running water or electricity.

The students quickly learn to negotiate their way through the maze as they bicycle to the local shrines to do research for their papers, or to Trinity's program house to study. They grow accustomed to the poverty, but they are never numbed to it.

Alicia Flynn, a sophomore majoring in anthropology, remembers the day she came across a boy, no more than 3 years old, carefully picking up kernels of corn at a nearby shrine and placing them in a small sack. The corn had been tossed to the monkeys that live there, and the boy clearly had been sent to collect it for his family's next meal.

"It was devastating," she says. "I didn't even tell anyone about it for three or four days."

The students have had other difficult moments. Their Tibetan, which they began studying last fall, is still not advanced enough for lengthy conversations, let alone discussions of the subtleties of Tibetan Buddhism. Several say that's one reason they do not participate more in the religious rituals at their monasteries and nunneries.

Their service projects have also proved frustrating. The monks and nuns are often too shy, or too busy, to learn either English or computer skills. Two of the Trinity students, Bethany Groome and Ms. Forester, who live in a large nunnery on the edge of town, feel isolated because they have been placed in a separate wing for travelers, and eat separately from the nuns. "You can't blame them," says Ms. Groome, a junior majoring in Asian studies and religion. "We're just passing through."

But as the semester progresses, this "pretty abstract, philosophical group," as Ms. Flynn labels them, find themselves less worried about sorting out the nuances of Tibetan Buddhism and more drawn into the lives of the Tibetans themselves. They make friends with the shopkeepers and restaurant owners around the stupas. They promise to take notes and words of encouragement from the monks and nuns back to their families in Tibet, which the students will visit near the end of the semester.

Ms. Groome now counts among her friends an old monk who spends his afternoons drinking millet beer at a restaurant near the Boudhanath Stupa, and a Tibetan man who began a school for refugees who want to learn English. She is already planning to return to Nepal after she graduates.

"I'm here to study religion, but it's not always about religion, per se," she says. The friendships "are some of the most profound experiences I've had."

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