The day with Zenkar Rinpoche began innocently enough packing up his books and other items for his flight back to London. For our tea break, I filled the kettle, turned on the stove and left the water to boil, expecting it to whistle. I didn’t know that Rinpoche’s hosts customarily used the oven shelving as storage space for things that should not be stored in an oven. The kettle whistle didn’t work, but the smell of smoke did as it…

How does a nice Jewish girl, raised in the sheltered suburbs of New York, convey to a Tibetan Buddhist master her culturally conditioned phobic reaction to the very sound of the word nun and its implied austerity? I can’t say why monk doesn’t sound as forbidding, lackluster, or as humorless as nun, but I do know my discomfort with the word was an expression of fear that had no real basis.

Chorten Khandro was inspired to orchestrate a “debate” between me and a long-nailed Tibetan tulku (incarnate lama). The tulku was annoyed that I let my hair grow a few inches in marked contrast to the severe buzz cut I sported on a previous visit to Chorten Gompa. He felt it was an insult to the buddhadharma that I, a Buddhist nun, eschewed the discipline of a shaved head. Apparently, my short hair was a no-no and warranted investigation…