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The Himalayas: Wanderers from the West
BY W. K. JACKSON
(continued)
It’s only proper, then, that Paul’s heroes are two Buddhist masters who epitomized the “incredible synthesis of academic study and practice,” as he puts it. Naropa was a learned Indian saint who combined university study with over a decade of meditation in the jungle. Paul’s own guru (and his other hero), Khenpo Rinpoche, was in retreat for twelve years (at one point even sealed up in a cave) before Chinese aggression forced his escape from Tibet. This motivated a great period of study; now Khenpo Rinpoche is one of the most learned scholars in the Tibetan Buddhist world.
And like his guru before him, Paul Brownell finds himself in the mountains, practicing dharma and driven toward a future that is, as yet, uncertain. Strong candidates for roles in his post-Darjeeling life include the mastery of the Tibetan language (not to mention Japanese and Sanskrit), prolonged meditation, further philosophical studies, and perhaps even a family (“I love kids”). For now, however, Paul’s place is in the foothills of the mountains from which his guru fled, overlooking the vast country where Naropa reached his own spiritual heights.
* * *
At 13, an Australian Catholic girl from the Snowy Mountains could never have dreamed that she would one day live with a Tibetan family in India – and as a Buddhist nun, to boot.
But at 14, that girl’s world fell apart and anything might have seemed possible.
Sister Yeshe (her Tibetan name, by which she prefers to be known) is young, only 26 years old, but starting from that singular, reality-shaking event eleven years ago, she has lived what many would consider two lifetimes’ worth of experience.
And it all began when her father passed away tragically from cancer, sending her into a spiritual spiral that left her feeling empty and desolate.
“When he died my whole world was shattered,” Sister Yeshe said. “Everything I knew fell away. I started questioning: why am I here, why am I suffering?”
It was in this condition (which she frankly describes as “quite suicidal”) that she - one of the driven from the beginning – left.
Dropping out of her Catholic school for girls, Sister Yeshe was at a loss for an explanation of life. So, clothed in her mother’s bed-sheet (“as a sari”), the teenager wandered as a hippie, hitchhiking around Australia doing what the driven are apt to do: search.
“I tried boys, drugs, everything,” Sister Yeshe said, but none of them satisfied her thirst for the real answers. The hippie life was an escape, but it presented no destination. Thus her efforts became more and more radical, her hopes grounded in finding an explanation for life in the extreme.
“I lived in a teepee for a while. I camped out in the national park for a while. I was like a nomad, you could say, and in my travels I kept hearing the word India, India. ‘India is where you’ll find the meaning of life’.”
Like Siddartha Gautama himself, who, upon witnessing pain and suffering for the first time in his life, resolved to find the Answers, Sister Yeshe had become a wanderer, and her wandering led her to Buddhism’s birthplace, that country teeming with people and heavy with history and shrouded in a blinding fusion of myth and reality: India. At 17, she left for the subcontinent.
“When I came to India I felt more at home [there] and in Nepal than I did in my own country,” Sister Yeshe said. “I’ve always felt very out of place in my own culture.” The reason for this baffling phenomenon seemed finally within Yeshe’s reach when, walking past a bookstore, she noticed in the window the title Reborn in the West. The book presented the theory that Tibetan lamas are increasingly being reborn in the West now that atheistic Communists administer the once-religious nation of Tibet. Here, perhaps, was one of the Answers for which she was seeking.
Sister Yeshe recalled thinking: maybe I was reborn in the West.
And she fell in love with Buddhism. “It’s been my faithful companion ever since,” she said.
Perhaps the words of one of Sister Yeshe’s many poems express her feelings most ably:
In the darkness of existence
I found a light
In the heart of pain
I found something bright
Stumbling through things
Confusion at an end
All that was frost
Is now born again…
Immediately she felt an urge to devote her life to this new path, a path that had seemingly provided some answers. “Right away” she desired the robe, but realized that her life experience was too limited to become a nun so soon.
“I wasn’t ready,” she admitted.
Returning to Australia a new woman, she found a job (her first) helping a Tibetan Lama run his Dharma Centre in Sydney. The nine-to-five routine only strengthened her desire to become a nun, while her understanding of her newly adopted religion increased with five years of instruction at the Dharma Centre. When a visiting Lama came to Australia and she felt convinced that she was ready, Sister Yeshe – then 23 years old – took her vows.
“Then my life changed again,” Sister Yeshe said. Taking sacred vows is a salient adjustment in and of itself, but even the simple act of wearing robes brought its own new – and unexpected - challenges.
“People don’t see you anymore, they just see the robes,” Sister Yeshe explained, “so their expectations of you skyrocket. People in the West don’t know what to do with monks and nuns, even Buddhists. I had to carve my own niche, and I found myself nomadic once again.”
And nomadic she certainly was, living in garden sheds (she spent months in one of them), in Korean (Theravada) temples, and sometimes in her mother’s house. But, haphazard habitations aside, as a newly ordained nun Sister Yeshe by no means disengaged herself from the world. Her involvement with the community stretched from working with HIV patients to teaching yoga, from instructing prisoners in meditation to writing her own autobiography/introduction to Buddhism (published by HarperCollins under the title Everyday Enlightenment). Such pursuits complimented her mostly contemplative life. Almost four years of such activity passed.
Then India began calling again.
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