Buddha's Daughters

“Even as a young girl Nyima had felt a calling to become a nun, she tells us. She was barely fourteen when, with the support of her family, she presented herself at the doors of a local nunnery close to the ancient Tibetan capital of Lhasa to be accepted as a novice. In years gone by, most Tibetan families would send their youngest son to become a monk, sometimes at the age of just three or four, to bring the family honor and often because they could not afford to feed large numbers of children. But with girls, it has traditionally been more a matter of the girl’s own choice. When a girl expressed a wish to join a nunnery, most families would look on it as the child’s karma, even if it meant they would see little of their daughter from then on.

For two years, Nyima immersed herself in monastic life with deep contentment. But then her young world collapsed. When she was just sixteen, she and a small group of fellow novices dared to make a stand on a street corner in Lhasa to protest against the Chinese authorities’ recent decision to deny future generations of girls the right to enter Buddhist monastic orders under the age of eighteen. The protest lasted only a few minutes before the group was arrested and imprisoned in Lhasa’s notorious Drapchi jail.

Nyima spent the next five years in prison. She tells us how, in summer, she was forced to stand all day outside on a box with sheets of newspaper stuck under her armpits and between her legs. If the newspapers slipped, she was savagely beaten. In winter, she was made to stand barefoot on blocks of ice until the skin of her soles peeled away. Once, when she replaced the words of a song inmates were instructed to sing in praise of Chairman Mao with her own version paying tribute to the Dalai Lama, she was locked for two years in solitary confinement and tortured with electric cattle prods.

Broken physically and mentally by her ordeal, by the time she was released Nyima had abandoned her dream of living as a nun. Her only goal was to escape what the Chinese euphemistically call the Tibet Autonomous Region, which covers only half of the land that Tibetans claim as their ancient territory. After fleeing across the Himalayas to Nepal, she made her way into exile in India. Regret for her lost vocation is written in Nyima’s soft features as she speaks.

This brief meeting is my first encounter with a Buddhist nun, albeit one forcibly disrobed, and it haunts me long after we have parted.

A few days after speaking with Nyima, I visit a nunnery near Dharamshala where I encounter hundreds more young nuns, some barely into their teens, some having also escaped Tibet. One pretty young nun with a shaven head named Dawa Dolma trekked across the Himalayas for two months without her family when she was just eleven years old. Inspired by the deep Buddhist faith of her grandmother, she too had decided at a very young age she wanted to become a nun and sought novice ordination as soon as she reached India. When I ask her how she feels now about her chosen path, her features light up. “It makes me feel as if I’m standing on a tall mountain,” she says. “It makes me feel as if I can see a long way.”

~ Christine Toomey, In Search of Buddha's Daughters: A Modern Journey Down Ancient Roads