Gaden Relief Projects

February 5, 2004

Dear Sponsor:

The nuns of Zangskar deepest blessings, warmest regards, and pray for your continued health, happiness, and peaceful progress towards enlightenment. As we approach the Tibetan Year of the Monkey (2004), the nuns continue to be grateful for your generous contributions and pray that this Dharmic connection continues.

For the past five years, Gaden Relief-Nuns' Project has successfully funded eight nunneries in Zangskar. This year, we disbursed funds to nunneries in Karsha, Zangla, Pishu, Dorje Dzong, Tungri, Skyagam, Shun- Satak, and Bya villages (see map) which house roughly 106 nuns. Your funds provide small annual stipends to the individual nuns which are spent on living expenses such as staple food items (rice, wheat flour, oil, lentils, spices, sugar, salt, Tibetan tea, vegetables, and kerosene or gas for cooking). Those nunneries with the fewest resources have chosen to pool a portion of their stipends in order to hold wintertime meditation retreats for several weeks and sometimes months, during which tea and one daily meal are served to the resident nuns.

During such retreats, the entire community of nuns will gather on a daily basis to say prayers on behalf of all sentient beings, while renewing a sense of spiritual purpose and training. The wintertime is a perfect time for meditation and retreat as the landscape lies still and frozen and agrarian work all but ceases. These sessions are especially helpful for the younger nuns who have recently joined the nunneries, as they practice the recitations and chants that will be required at many ritual assemblies throughout their monastic career. While the younger nuns practice, the senior members discuss their monthly and annual agendas and make plans for the coming year.

In recent years, we have completed several construction projects using Gaden funds. Funds from Gaden Relief were used to supplement generous donations from the village of Skyagam and across Zangskar to complete an assembly hall at Skyagam nunnery in 2001, which can comfortably house the community of 14 nuns. The hall is airy and light, affording a much greater ease for reading scriptures than the dark community temple which the nuns had borrowed in past year. It is heated by means of a metal stove produced by local blacksmiths in Leh and purchased with Gaden funds several years earlier. The hall is decorated by simple wall paintings and an elaborate wooden altarpiece which was carved and painted by local artisans (see enclosed photos).

The second major construction project was the completion of a greenhouse in 2002 at Karsha Nunnery, in which I participated in both 2001 and 2002. The necessary rocks and silt to make mortar were carried to the site in 2001, after an initial surveying of the site. It proved impossible to complete the construction that summer as no skilled mason could be found in the valley, where new construction was rampant due to rising incomes and prosperity. In the summer of 2002, the nuns engaged a senior mason to assist with the construction. The biggest challenge was obtaining a central beam which would support the greenhouse roof. Not unlike a New England "barn raising, the procuring and placement of the greenhouse's main beam required the help of the wider Karsha community. While the monks were crucial in providing the central beam, local civil servants in Karsha were needed to procure the thick UV resistant clear plastic that the local government supplies for greenhouse constructions at subsidized rates.

Because the monks from nearby Karsha monastery were engaged in a construction project of their own, they just happened to be felling trees in their poplar grove during the week the nuns needed the beam. The nuns and I rushed down to begin negotiating the purchase of the much needed beam from the Karsha monks. The senior treasurer of the monastery was resistant at first, claiming he needed all the trees he was felling, but eventually agreed to sell the nuns the next poplar to be cut. In a matter of minutes, a young monk had severed the trunk, and the nuns jumped in to strip the long trunk of its branches and bark. After a brief moment to catch our breath, seven of the younger and strongest nuns and I carried the weighty beam up the Karsha streambed. As we proceeded up the steep and slippery scree slope, we stopped for rest, before being aided by a few additional nuns and the mason. After placing the precious "mother beam" (ma gdung in Tibetan) of the greenhouse neatly in place, we celebrated with tea and cookies.

I am often asked at what age nuns join the nunnery and when I answer that nuns are sent by their parents between the ages of 5 and 15, people are shocked or surprised. In fact, young nuns are apprenticed over a lengthy period of time up to several years -which allows the child as well as the nuns time to decide whether the apprentice is fit for the monastic life. For instance, Namdrol first came to the nunnery at age eight and spent a winter living with her two paternal aunts, Putid and Tsering. Namdrol proved herself a quick study as she quickly memorized the required texts which would be part of her daily ritual recitations as a nun. She obediently spent most of the winter inside Putid's tiny monastic house, occasionally accompanied by another new recruit, Kundzom, who was apprenticed to the head nun, Lobzang. While Kundzom was the middle of seven daughters born to a wealthy businessman in Karsha, Namdrol was a middle sibling with three sisters and three brothers born to a much poorer family in Yulang. At the nunnery, both girls received special attention from their kindly tutors, while at home they competed with their siblings for education, clothes, and food. Namdrol was sent back home for the spring, when Putid and Tsering had been busy stewarding the Great Prayer Festival at the nunnery with no time to take proper care of their niece. Although she had been somewhat homesick in the winter, Namdrol was eager to return to the nunnery that spring, and often refused to accompany Putid back to her home in Yulang that summer,claiming that her siblings were too rough for her.

Yet the rigorous solitary study required of apprentice nuns is not meant for every child. Many daughters are sent to the nunnery, but only few stay to become ordained novices. Those who don't enjoy the quiet and contemplative life soon find ways to make mischief in their tutor's rooms. They may simply refuse to memorize the required texts, steal, run away, or make trouble for their tutors in countless other ways. Others simply run back to their parents home where they grow their hair out, elope, or wait until the marriage proposals come in. Despite their parents' best laid plans, it is not difficult to avoid the monastic life altogether.

Indeed, many parents may send their daughters to apprentice at a young age, but wait years before they allow them to join the nunnery or ordain as novices. In these cases, parents are less interested in opposing than in delaying their daughter's wish to become a nun. While such parents know that they can make merit by sending a daughter to the nunnery, they also realize that they forfeit some of her labor after she joins. The self-serving wish to delay a daughter's entrance into the monastic assembly is economic more than political. There are also Buddhist reasons to delay a child's ordination or entrance into the monastic assembly. Parents may prevent their daughters from rushing into monastic life, for fear that the decision is made in haste. As Buddhists, they know the terrible burden an ex nun or monk bears in their future rebirth. According to a common belief, a nun or monk who breaks the four root vows to kill, lie, steal, or have sex cannot be reborn as a human or in any of the upper realms. Such beings are destined for one of the lower three rebirths as an animal, hungry ghost, or hell-being. Many nuns speak less of 'choosing' than of being chosen by their circumstances. Most nuns do not mention conscious choice so much as the rare opportunity they have earned, due to past merit or karma (sngan ma'i las). In local idiom, the requisite conditions for taking up the monastic life being born in a Buddhist land, appropriate caste, family, birth order, and geography are the result of past merit coming to fruition. Because merit is like capital, those individuals who are born with sufficient reserves of merit have the chance to take up the monastic life. In local idiom, people speak of a child's quick facility at learning to read or memorize Tibetan texts as a sign of past merit. Conversely, those who fail may justify their abandoning the celibate path through a lack of sufficient merit. As one ex-nun explained, "While I thought it was my karma to be a nun, instead I'm a mother. Yet I could not have known so beforehand, because karma is written upon our foreheads. Only those who are enlightened can read it...." While children are born across Zangskar every year, only few persevere and become nuns or monks. Both choice and chance often intercede to upset the lifelong goal of celibacy.

In closing, I would like to thank you once more for supporting the choices that these women in Zangskar have made, in taking up lifelong celibacy and monasticism for the benefit of all sentient and suffering beings. Their lives of asceticism is made possible by the generosity of their families, fellow villagers, and the loyal supporters from Gaden Relief like yourselves. The nuns pray for your continued long life, happiness, and good health and wish you peace in the coming year.

Regards,

Kim Gutschow
Project Coordinator, Gaden Relief

P. S. For more information, the Gaden Relief website will soon be updated with photos and locations of the nunneries in Zangskar that receive Gaden support.