Fait Accompli
“Unless you keep company with the uncertainty of the time of death, you can’t take the profound instructions to heart.”
— Guru Rinpoche
Mural of Garuda at entrance to Khandro Tsering Chodron’s chambers, Royal Palace temple, Sikkim. (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
After a mind-bending year of pilgrimage, teachings and retreat, I was adrift and without purpose in New York City. It was a struggle to integrate my burgeoning dharma practice with worldly tasks. Months later, without preamble over a transatlantic phone call, Alak Zenkar Rinpoche sliced me from afar with Manjushri’s sword:
“I want you to become a nun,” Rinpoche said. His words carried the unmistakable fragrance of fait accompli. I voiced resistance.
“I’d rather be a monk.” Zenkar Rinpoche laughed and asked why.
Stupa (containing Jigme Lingpa relic), Rigdzin Drubpe Ghatsal Monastery, Yangleshö, Nepal (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
How does a ‘nice Jewish girl,’ raised in the sheltered suburbs of New York, convey to a Tibetan Buddhist master her culturally conditioned phobic reaction to the very sound of the word ‘nun,’ and its implied austerity?
I can’t say why ‘monk’ doesn’t sound as forbidding, lackluster, or as humorless as nun, but I do know my discomfort with the word was an expression of fear that had no real basis. Rinpoche’s blunt directive was pivotal in my maturation as a practitioner, and it put a whole other spin on my devotion to the dharma. I had been on a wild, high speed trajectory, and this phone call confirmed it.
During the 1992 summer retreat at Lerab Ling, I wondered how anyone could possibly actualize the dharma’s profundity without becoming a monk or nun. Three years later, I had to admit that ordination and severing attachment to worldly ways was the way for me to go. This does not mean that I had a clear understanding of what such a commitment entailed, or knowledge of what the new context for my practice would be. To take nuns vows, I imagined, would give me limitless freedom to study and practice.
Minutes after the phone call with Zenkar Rinpoche, I sat on my meditation cushion and cried, or more precisely, wept. I had no choice but to let go of the life I knew.
To do this, I needed to trust the teachings and my teacher, which really meant nothing more and nothing less than honoring the unutterable wisdom of my heart. So, I turned a deaf ear to my ego-guru who periodically whined from within, “How can you leave town, leave home, and friends, and fine food? How long can you live on a shoestring budget? You’re not physically strong enough to cope with the air and water pollution in India and Nepal. You don’t speak the language!… and can you be celibate—reeeeally?
Impressive evergreens at bus stop/taxi stand, Pharping, Nepal (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
Pharping, Nepal (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
Afternoon snooze, Pharping, Nepal (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
The following summer of 1996, I needed a roof over my head for a few days and I was invited to share the apartment of a friend of a friend, a massage therapist who was a longtime disciple of Tarthang Tulku. On learning of my intention to be ordained, my host Nick asked, “Don’t you like sex?” The deadpan delivery of his question was perhaps its saving grace. The query didn’t come out of left field— he was a physically strong guy whose energy was compact and intense (I overheard the cries and grunts of his clients during their rolphing sessions). Although I didn’t quite buy the admiration Nick subsequently voiced for my decision, I appreciated his attempt to shift gears and be supportive. He said he understood that sometimes one has no choice but to go against the mainstream.
~~~
“Spiti” Ani Chodron, disciple of Thinley Norbu, Swayambunath, Nepal 1997 (Photo by N. L. Drolma)
In the mid 90’s, information about ordination in Tibetan Buddhism was scant and not readily accessible. I personally knew no woman in America who could serve as a role model. There is no blueprint for ordained sangha and no one was about to reserve a room for me at a monastery. Lacking reference points, I was groundless and somewhat nervous, but intent nonetheless on scrapping my paint-splattered blue jeans and career as an artist for the maroon robes and mind training of a Buddhist renunciant. The lives of Buddhist adepts have shown that by becoming a more naked person—stripped of pretense, denuded of habitual clinging to a false sense of self—an uncontrived selflessness emerges, and with it limitless noble qualities. I was inspired to actualize this selflessness, bodhicitta. Zenkar Rinpoche counseled me to receive vows from Trulshik Rinpoche.
“It would be very good if she becomes a nun, but it seems as if this may not happen.” In autumn of 1995, Dodrupchen Rinpoche (who I first met at Chorten gompa in Sikkim while traveling on retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche) divined my difficulties in New York; Tulku Thondup thought a divination would be useful and requested it on my behalf, which was supremely kind and skillful. Dodrupchen’s clairvoyance pushed me to resolutely plow through the obstacles.
Seemingly endless worldly matters needed to be settled prior to leaving the States for ordination in Nepal. To pay for travel and living expenses overseas, I had to rent out my apartment for income; I sold many books from my personal library, mostly novels, biographies, art and photography to a second-hand book dealer, and unloaded to friends whatever other “stuff” I could in the interim. (I also hired movers to haul my Yamaha upright and the rest of my things into temperature controlled storage space downtown. (Yes, attachment to objects is costly, and dumb.) Until a rental contract was firmly in place and ample money paid up front, I could not commit to a travel itinerary. Communications with the real estate agent were detailed and nerve-wracking. A kind friend agreed to collect my mail; invested with a power of attorney, he would deposit the tenant’s rent checks and pay my bills.
Other friends were less supportive, and they grew distant. It was hard for them to understand why I was uprooting myself from New York City to live the life of a Buddhist nun in Nepal. Ordination signaled to me something much grander than the formal taking of vows. I was choosing to be ordained as a Buddhist nun not out of any attraction to the cultural form itself, but for the freedom to plumb the esoteric wisdom of the buddhadharma. There wasn’t much I could say about my course of direction, and I had no wish to defend it.
In the dharma as in the depths of love, logic goes out the window.