Nepal I: 7 Weeks in a Buddhist Monastery

Chapter 1 of my Nepal adventure takes place at Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu, where I spent seven weeks studying Tibetan Buddhism.  My time here was one of profound learning and growth.  In this post I will give a little insight into what life was like as a Western guest living in this Tibetan Buddhist monastery.

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I came to Nepal directly from Thailand in the middle of November.  My reason for traveling to Nepal was to attend the famous November Course offered by Kopan Monastery.  

Young monk in front of the main meditation hall at Kopan.

The Course

This 30-day course for Westerners has been a yearly occurrence since 1971 (yep, almost fifty years!).  The aim of the course is to teach students all about Tibetan Buddhism, following the style of how the original Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, taught the gradual path to enlightenment.

The meditation hall designated for our course.

Hundreds of students attend this course every year.  My cohort consisted of about 300 people.  Registration for the course was full within a few hours of the application period opening in August!  Fortunately for me, I had known that I wanted to do this course for over a year, so I was prepared to register the moment I could.

My seat for the month.  Second row, with a clear view of my favorite statues: Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion, and Sakyamuni Buddha.

The Schedule

The schedule for every day was the same:

5:30 AM - prostrations

6 AM - tea

6:30 AM - morning meditation

7:30 AM - breakfast

9 AM - morning teaching

11:30 AM - lunch

1:45 PM - discussion group

3 PM - afternoon teaching

5 PM - tea

6 PM - evening meditation

7 PM - dinner

8 PM - night meditation

9 PM - bed

(Total of 3 hours of meditation and 4.5 hours of teachings per day.)

Rules

While staying at the monastery, everyone is expected to follow the five Buddhist precepts: no killing, no stealing, no lying, no sexual misconduct (actually, in the monastery grounds, no sexual conduct at all), and no intoxicants.  I thus followed these for the entirety of my time at Kopan, during and after the course.

We had to give all of our technology (phones, computers, tablets, etc.) to the front desk when the course began.  No contact with the outside world!  It was so freeing and enabled me to be entirely present.

For 10 days toward the end of the course, we had to take the Mahayana Precepts.  This meant beginning the day half an hour earlier (4:45 wake-up bell, woo hoo!), vowing to not engage in frivolous activities (singing, dancing, basically anything not course related), and vowing to eat only once per day.  It was actually easier than I expected to only eat one meal every day, especially because we got to drink hot cocoa in the mornings and evenings.  The hardest part of Mahayana Precepts for me was not singing!

We were in silence from after the night meditation until after lunch the following day, every day.  We also had some days of mandatory 24 hour silence, and we could opt to wear a yellow ribbon if we preferred to stay in silence during times that were not mandatory on other days.  I did this for 5 days in the middle of the course.  It helped me focus and remember why I was there.  Otherwise, I preferred to not be in silence, as there were such wonderful and interesting people there, and I wanted to socialize with them when I could.

The entire group that made it to the end of the 30 days.  Can you find me?

(Hint: I'm in the fourth row from the front, directly in line with the main statue.)

The Students

I made amazing friends during my time at Kopan.  There were actually very few students from the United States; most of the new friends I made were from Europe, Israel, and Australia.  I'll introduce you to a few of them here:

My discussion group!  Left to right: Janis from Latvia / Paula from Brazil / Shirel, Bat, and Einut from Israel / Andrew from the US / Fulya from Turkey.  Not pictured: Jane from China, Lisa from Amsterdam, Sadik from Turkey, Kinga from Ukraine, Betty from Canada, and Maria from Dubai.  This was our final meeting, so we had a feast of snacks!

My core friend group by the end of the course.  Left to right: Gabe from the US / Thomas and Nick from Australia / Janis from Latvia / Toby from Denmark.  I adore these goons.

My first friends at Kopan!  We arrived at the monastery a few days before the course started, so we got to explore Kathmandu together.  This is (left to right) Ollie and Jess from Australia / Lydia from the UK/US/Germany.  I love this photo because another tourist snapped it of us - we must have looked so interesting - and I asked her if I could take a photo of her photo.  Very meta.

Last but certainly not least: after the course, a couple friends and I ran into Renato, our meditation leader, and we got a picture with him!  He was such a great leader, and a dear person.  He is currently a lay person but is on the path to becoming a monk.  Left to right: Renato from Italy, Tuval from Israel, and Remi from France.  

There were literally dozens more that I became close with during the course, but I must carry on with the post.  To any Kopan friends that are reading this: I LOVE YOU, my Dharma family!!!

Living

My bedroom.

I stayed in a 9 bed dorm.  It was awesome.  I think we had the warmest room in all of Kopan because of all the body heat, and because the sun shone in our windows during the day.  (There is no heating at the monastery, and it was winter, so night time would get quite cold.  Think 40s°F / sub-10°C.)

My bed for 7 lovely weeks.

The roof of the dining hall with some familiar faces!  Can you spot Shirel, Remi, Fulya, and Nick?

Our meals were served in a wonderful, buffet-style dining hall.  They were all vegetarian, so it was super easy for me to stay nourished.  Plus, the roof got sun at lunchtime, so I was always up there sunbathing and enjoying my food.

Free Time

I did quite a lot of art during my time at Kopan.  I will be releasing it on my ART WEBSITE (!!!!) very soon... stay tuned for that!  (I am beyond excited, can you tell?)  Here's a preview of an un-colored piece...

This one is called "Shantideva."  It features a prayer we said at the beginning of every day during precepts.

My favorite activity that I did during my free time at Kopan is a bit unconventional.  Keep an open mind for this one, my friends...

A bit hard to see, but these are some of my favorite beings on earth.

Many who know me well know that cows are my favorite animal.  Naturally, when I spotted cows on a hill within the Kopan property line, I needed to befriend them.  It turns out that most of them were once milk cows for the monastery.  One of them, Calden, is a rescue who was predicted to die shortly after they got him as a calf.  Fast forward two years, and he is now the alpha of the group!  (Calden is the one photographed solo, in the picture above.)  There are seven cows living here, total.  

It is believed in Buddhism that every sentient being has its own karma, or stream of causes and effects, that follows its mind through rebirths.  It is considered an act of merit to expose animals to Buddhist teachings, as it is thought that this will prime the animal to follow these teachings upon its rebirth in the human realm.  I met the owner of the Kopan animal sanctuary, and he told me that people used to read sutras (teachings) to the cows, but that no one had been doing so recently.  I offered to do this, and he was so happy.  So, every day, I read the Heart Sutra to the cows.  This is one of the most important texts in Buddhism and takes about 5 minutes to read.  By the end of the course, I had it completely memorized.  I don't know if I subscribe to the idea that the cows will remember the teachings in future lives, but the owner of their sanctuary shared with me at the end of the course that things for the cows had improved significantly while I was reading to them.  After years of obstacles, they were finally getting a shed with straw floors instead of concrete, to help their knees, and the cows with injuries/infections had gotten much better.  Whatever the causes were for these conditions, I am so grateful that the cows' circumstances are improving now.  I love these beings so much.  I miss them.  I still recite the Heart Sutra to cows in Nepal, which gets me some weird looks, but I don't mind.

Our Teachers

All of our teachers in the course were nuns and gurus (lamas, in Tibetan) in the Gelug Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

 Getting blessed by Venerable Robina.

Our main teacher, Venerable Robina Courtin, has been a Buddhist nun for 40 years.  She is from Australia and has a very unique style of teaching.  She is basically the antithesis of what you'd imagine a Buddhist nun to be like.  She is loud, assertive, radical, and an incredibly powerful teacher as a result.  She is quite renowned worldwide, and we were so fortunate to be taught by her every day for an entire month.

I learned more from Venerable Robina than I can express in words.  I think of what she taught me every day.  Her words are the first thing I think of in the morning when I wake up: "Wow, I'm not dead yet!"  She started every lecture with, "One day closer to death."  This sounds morbid, but it's true!  Remembering this keeps us cognizant of impermanence and focused on what is important in life.  The most optimistic way she started a lecture one day is something I think about often: "One day closer to death.  One day closer to enlightenment, as well."

The cutest moment of Lama Zopa.

This is Lama Zopa Rinpoche.  He founded the November Course with the late Lama Yeshe in 1971.  He has taught at every November Course since then.  We got to hear ten teachings from him.  He is such a sweet human.  He simply oozes joy.  One day, there was a sloth stuffed animal offered on the table next to his seat.  At the beginning of his lecture, Zopa spent a minute playing with the toy, saying, "Before I start, this little guy wants to say hello!" and had it dancing around.  His laughter is so contagious.

Why I Stayed

So, you'll probably have noticed by now that 30 days does not add up to 7 weeks.  I stayed longer at Kopan after the November Course was over.  There was an optional week-long silent retreat after the course, which I stayed for, and then I kept staying until New Year's Eve.  I felt so inspired at Kopan.  I made a total of 15 art pieces there and filled an entire journal with writing about what I learned.  

The stupa garden was such a beautiful place to create.  One day, a monastery cat decided that my bag looked like the perfect place for a snooze.

I am so glad that I stayed as long as I did.  My time there inspired me to do something that has been a long time coming: I am creating a website for my art!!  My fellow students saw me making mandalas during the course and encouraged me to get my work out there.  They also said they'd like to color my work, so during the retreat, I began the project of making a coloring book.  The coloring pages I have made so far will be free to download and print when my website is live.  The entire collection of pieces I created at Kopan will be published on the website as well.  I will make a post about it once the website has launched.

Take-Aways

Hazy sunset view over Kathmandu from our meditation hall.

My top take-aways from my 7 weeks at Kopan are:

- Life is incredibly precious, and death is the only certain thing we have.  What is uncertain is our time of death.  So, we must truly make the most of every moment.  Understand that life is never a given.

- Everything is impermanent.  Change is the ruling law of nature.

- Everything is empty of inherent characteristic.  Our minds create our world.  We have immense power over our experience in how we label things.

- Everything is interconnected.  Nothing is truly independent.  Thus, connection is our true nature.

- We color our actions with our motivations.  When our motivation is to help ourselves alone, we suffer.  When our motivation is compassion, the benefit of others, we find happiness.

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I hope that this post about my time at Kopan has shed some light on what life was like for me in my 7 weeks living in a Buddhist monastery.  I would go back to Kopan in a heartbeat.  For more information on the November course, see the Kopan website, linked here.

Thank you so much for reading.  Stay tuned for the upcoming post on my time trekking in the Himalayas, and for the launch of my art website!!!

☸️