Who knew at the beginning of this study abroad experience that I would be having dinner at a Buddhist nunnery and conversing with Buddhist nuns in English! One week ago, my cohort and I were able to visit one of China’s most famous Buddhist temples, LiYin temple. Thanks to Professor He, a university professor at Zhejiang University of Technology, we were granted special access into a Buddhist monastery and nunnery right outside of the temple. Learning about Buddhism in a classroom and then learning about Buddhism from actual nuns in China was definitely an experience that I will never forget. The nuns were trying to learn English and as my group and I were trying to learn Chinese, it was definitely a language as well as cultural exchange to say the least. They started out by introducing the history of LiYin temple (the temple and its grounds they lived on) and then went on to give us a tour of the place they called home, all of which was done in English. I was definitely impressed that these young women, all of which I believe were not over the age of 35, was okay with just leaving everything they held dear to them and decided to live out the rest of their lives as nuns. Even now, just thinking about this fact makes me think how much both mentally stronger and less attached to material possessions they were, compared to me.

However, these nuns and monks were different than the ones portrayed in Hollywood. Although they did partake in the traditional ceremonies and knew all of the Buddhist hymns, they were really modern. Due to my limited knowledge of nuns and monks, apart from what I had seen in movies and tv shows, I expected them to be completely detached from the modern world, living in monasteries (in remote areas) and basically meditating for 20hrs a day. But to my surprise, they were modern in a sense that all of them had smartphones (mostly iphones) and they even played basketball (which they were really good at by the way), worked out, had art classes and could study English.

This event was hard to put into words just because of how much of an impact it had on me. From the Buddhist religion to just their outlook on life, these women were always so positive and excepted everyone and everything without judgement. You could say that I was “Enlightened”.