Heather Damchoe sits in her mother’s living room and thinks of home, almost a dozen time zones away.
The time and space between her two “homes” has been an enriching journey from her Saskatoon high school days to becoming a Buddhist nun in a monastery in southern India.
Opening up her small computer, Damchoe clicks on thumbnail pictures of the monastery where she lives and studies. A keen photographer, her pictures present vivid images that provide the backdrop to her present life. It is holy ground, and it’s here that she walks the path toward the enlightenment Buddhism offers to its faithful followers.
Back when she was a student at Walter Murray Collegiate, her name was Heather Moody. A good student in the school’s Grade 12 advanced program, she was developed a growing interest and fascination for the Buddhist religion.
She first encountered Buddhism during her final year of high school, when her father invited her to see a performance by some Tibetan lamas visiting Saskatoon. The event triggered a spark of interest that became a passion after she began reading books about Buddhism.
“In Grade 11, I was a goth and dressed in black for a year. I gave that up when I discovered Buddhism,” Damchoe said.
At the end of her high school days, Buddhism was providing more and more answers about life which felt true to her. It was answering difficult questions such as: Why do we suffer? What is the meaning of life? Where do we go when we die?
In 1999, she received a graduation gift of a trip to Vancouver. It was during the visit that she formally became a Buddhist by taking “refuge,” where she committed to rely on the Buddha as her teacher, to follow the Dharma — his teachings — and accept the community as her companions and support.
She was given the Tibetan name Damchoe, which means Holy Dharma. Some months later, she was invited to teach English at Jamyang Choling Monastery for Women in Dharamsala, India.
The four months she spent teaching provided stronger evidence that Buddhism was to be her religious pathway in life.
“I greatly admired the life the nuns led. They seemed very pure hearted, joyful and free of worldly concerns.
“I returned (to Saskatoon) to help my family become comfortable with the idea of me becoming ordained as a nun,” she says. “I wanted them to be on board.”
Her decision to wait a few years before ordination proved beneficial.
In 2001, with her parents’ blessing, she moved back to India, to Namdroling, a Tibetan monastery in the south of the country. The following year she received novice vows from the abbot of the monastery.
Damchoe has now spent almost a decade at the religious complex, studying and translating Buddhist texts into English for a growing western audience. While she returns to Canada every two or three years for a few weeks to visit friends and family, the massive monastery is the place she lives, works and studies most of the time. The monastery is home to about 4,000 monks and 600 nuns.
She’s now in her seventh year of a nine-year program in Buddhist philosophy.
Damchoe has her own small room in the facility, and either cooks her own simple meals or takes them from the nunnery kitchen. Her food and instruction are supplied, although she is responsible for her health-care needs. It is a simple life, although the study sessions and exams can be demanding, she says.
In between her studies and translation work, she spends time in meditation. She says meditation is the practice of settling the mind in an undistracted, calm, clear state.
Read Damchoe’s blog at damchoewongmo.blogspot.com.
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By Peter Wilson, SASKATCHEWAN NEWS NETWORK; CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
http://www.leaderpost.com/
