Ani Kunzang has been a Tibetan Buddhist nun for almost half her life. She lives in Dunedin but calls colourful, diverse India her spiritual home.
After nearly 20 years of travelling there on pilgrimage and now in her 70's, she tells me she still feels that magnetic pull.
In the early days of my training as a nun I was a bit afraid of India; it seemed like a wild place to me. But in 2001 there was an important ceremony at the monastery where my lamas were educated - so I decided to go.
We flew to Bangalore in the south of the country and travelled from there to Mysore. I was immediately captivated! It was such a fun town with lots of cool shops and places to eat. I had dinner on a rooftop on a starry night and visited a huge palace with a Maharaja and a great golden throne. The environment in India was fascinatingly different from New Zealand.
Then I went to the monastery with its thousands of monks and saw the way they studied and the extraordinary Tibetan art in those huge temples - it was really wonderful and absorbing.
On a later visit I stayed at Thosamling International Buddhist Nunnery in Sidphur, near where the Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala. The nunnery was high in the Himalayas and being winter, it was extremely cold compared to the south. This diary entry tells what was like.
“Beginning of spring. I am sitting in a cold, unheated room at Thosamling. The Himalayas reach upwards in great shafts of rock and snow to my back and the plains of India undulate out across the space in front. Around me lie terraced farmlets, stark and grey with winter and to the west a tea plantation where leopards sleep at night. I rise at 5am and prepare for early meditation and prayers in the temple with the other nuns. The silent meditation in the stark temple is so still and the other women also concentrating makes it a very special time. I watch the birds as they watch me - crows, green parrots. Then today two pairs of pheasants that hop lightly on the grass and into the leafless trees.”
We do regular prayers and practices every day at the nunnery but I also go to teachings as many of the high lamas of Tibetan Buddhism live in or around Dharamsala. In 2019 I booked a trip from Thosamling up to Manali to get teachings from the Dalai Lama. Then it flooded and they were cancelled! But I decided I should go anyway because it might be my only chance to see Manali.
It was extraordinary but very difficult. The road was one-way and we were above these enormous, unbelievably deep gorges. When we got there the river had washed away the bridges leaving just one for us to cross and the river was incredibly swollen. I was the only guest in my hotel - everyone else had reneged because of the weather. But it was lovely - up a valley surrounded by apple orchards. The overripe ones were lying on the ground and animals were released into the orchards to gobble up the last of the fruit: little horses, cows and goats. And people were also gathering broken sticks and pruning and burning.
It was very basic. I saw people riding horses everywhere, people carrying sticks on their backs. I even saw somebody driving a yak. There was that real touch of the Himalayas there. I turned the table in my room into a desk and put it by the window and sat there and wrote and went for walks and just enjoyed it, had meals in my room because I was the only guest! I had a wonderful holiday for a short week and then came back. But it was pretty scary coming and going.
I do feel at home in India, especially amongst the Tibetans.
Being with other ordained people, one feels very natural and normal and also enriched - by the artwork and the teachings and the language. I’ve studied Tibetan language in New Zealand, self-taught but helped by the Tibetans living here. But when I go there it's being spoken all around me. There is a young woman from Lhasa at the nunnery and she loves teaching me Tibetan and I love her teaching me so I improve, which is wonderful. It’s really nice to be surrounded by that culture.
In New Zealand, people mostly look at me with curiosity and smiles. It's more secular, so religious people are seen as being a bit odd. In India people treat you with a lot of respect because you wear the robes of the Buddha so there’s an understanding there. It's a mixed bag because there’s a billion people but it’s a very spiritual country where religious activity and ritual and meditative experiences, people dedicating their lives to religion, are seen not only as a normal part of society but also admired because it’s considered a difficult path. So it is easier in that sense. 
I’ve learnt to wear masks to protect my lungs. I’m very careful about water, always eat cooked food and I'm not over friendly to the local people, especially the men.
Also, I never leave food out! One time I was travelling with a large party and somebody had hired a room for us to wait for an early morning train. We arrived there about midnight and the train was due to leave about 3am so we were dozing on chairs, some people were sleeping on the floor. This woman had left an open packet of biscuits beside me on the table but I didn't really think about it. I was resting on a chair when I heard this 'ristle, rustle, rattle, rattle.' I thought sh*%, what's that! I looked up and there was this bloody rat, it was a white rat and it leapt straight onto my lap! Ugh! I screamed and woke everybody up.
India has changed in the time I’ve been going. When I first went it was both more and less beautiful. There were fewer cars and they shared the roads with bullocks, camels even elephants! My first time in Bangalore I came out of the hotel and there was a group of camels down at the gates all beautifully saddled up about to do their daily work. You simply don’t see things like that anymore.
As it’s become more wealthy there are more and more cars on the road and the animals have just disappeared. Now you seldom see them mixing with the traffic. But at the same time you don’t see the same number of needy people or beggars and public toilets are appearing everywhere. In many ways the people are flourishing but then Western society is taking over as well.
Could I go again? Yes I think so, as long as I’m able. I’d feel my life had become a bit closed off if I decided never to go again. For me it’s an open door to somewhere very spiritually and emotionally uplifting, colourful and diverse.
