Songdhammakalyani monastery

I met the Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkhuni at Chulalongkorn university in Bangkok, where she had just finished giving a talk about women in Buddhism. I had sat in for the last half while a girl next to me translated some of her points in whispers. She spoke calmly and engagingly, and she held the attention of every student in the room. I sometimes found myself nodding with no knowledge of what was being said. 

The journey to Songdhammakalyani monastery took two hours from the university. I sat in the back of an air conditioned minivan filled with hairless women in orange robes and one other girl my age, a student from Bangkok. Her name meant field of merit, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Driving along the city motorway at night I had the strong feeling of coming home from a school trip. 

The friendliest bhikkhuni was Yu-jun. She had come from South Korea. ‘Lots of people in Thailand ask me about K-pop,’ she told me, ‘but I don’t know about that, I’m just a nun’. Her face was wide and kind. She spent the rest of the journey looking up the populations of different countries with her quieter neighbour. Yoghurts were passed back to the other girl and me, and I ate mine messily in the darkness of the back seat. The two women in front of me gently taught each other phrases in their own languages. The lilt of their voices sent me slowly to sleep.

We arrived at the monastery. I was shown my room - spacious, sage green, basic - and afterwards I locked myself in and started to cry. I felt a new loneliness without Izaak. I bathed using two buckets and felt better when the cold water washed over me.

Bhikkhunis of the Theravada tradition are not recognised in Thailand. There are 300,000 monks in the country, and only a handful of ordained nuns. This monastery was home to them all. It was founded by a woman who holds the record for cycling from Bangkok to Singapore in the fewest number of days. She chose a spot next to a 6 lane motorway, and the place, I was told, has never attracted tourists. Her daughter had travelled to Sri Lanka for her ordination to become the Venerable Dhammanada Bhikkhuni, Songdhammakalyani’s formidable and delightful abbess. The Venerable had phoned me herself to coordinate a pickup. ‘Matilda. You are interested in being ordained, yes?’ ‘No’, I said. ‘I just want to stay at the monastery for a few days’. 

It was all I wanted. I was deeply interested in Buddhism. Two months before, Izaak and I meditated for eleven hours a day, ten days in a row, with 150 other people in a pagoda in Nepal. We didn’t speak, read, or make eye contact the whole time, and we developed the ability to detect subtle prickling sensations around and inside our bodies. Leaving the centre on the eleventh day I felt fresh and awake. Now Izaak had left for Vietnam, and I had just a few days before my own flight home. I was eager to learn more about the practice that had so drastically changed my perception in Nepal. I didn’t want to stay in the city either. The prospect of navigating Khaosan road, Bangkok’s debauched backpacker hub, on my own made me nervous. 

The next morning, I slept through the gong for 5:30 morning chanting but Yu-jun woke me up in time for breakfast at 7:00. I wasn’t quite awake as I opened the door to her, and I forgot to bow. She reminded me, smiling. At breakfast I sat with the other girl away from the line of nuns. Before we could eat, we were instructed to stand behind the laden row of tables. The nuns stood on the other side, we all bowed with our hands together, and then another lay person gestured to me to hold my fingers up to the underside of the table in front of me. ‘You touch the table’, the bhikkhuni standing opposite me said, ‘to offer us the food’. I was glad to be a part of these rituals, but their precision made me nervous. The women chanted over the spread; their voices were harmonious and pure. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. 

We filled our own plates after all the alms bowls had been loaded. I took too much of a curry that I later found to have a strangely perfumed taste. It made me feel sick to eat, but I remembered that it was wrong to waste dana (donation), so I stomached it, wishing I had taken fruit instead.

After breakfast, I was taken round the monastery by my favourite nun, a slight, smiling elderly woman. She wanted to show me all six dogs living there. To each one we came across, she introduced me by name and detailed its relationship with the others. I had some questions I wanted to ask about Theravada and monastic life, but it didn’t seem like the right time. She looked so happy telling me about the dogs. 

Later, she took me to meditate at the Medicine Buddha, which stood 3 metres tall on its platform at the back of a square white room. Multipacks of bottled water stood beside it in offering. With slow movements of her foot, a nun guided an insect out of the door before she closed it behind us. ‘I don’t want to pick it up, I might accidentally kill it’, she said. 

The Medicine Buddha had been created from a vision by the Ven. Dhammanada in her meditation. In the vision, people went through an entrance in the right knee of an enormous, stone-carved Buddha to be healed. I folded my legs and imagined the scene in my own meditation; it was made vivid by the actual Buddha looming over me, waxed with a surreal dark blue.

I was meditating even as I swept leaves into piles an hour later. The silence was enjoyable, and I did not mind being lonely so much today. The sweat clinging to my limbs placed me firmly in the moment. I focused on the space between my body and my clothes.

In the evening there was chanting, this time in front of a shrine covered in statues of Buddha. I followed the words on a sheet passed along to me, occasionally trying to sound them along with the others. Imaya dhamma nu dhamma patipattiya dhammam pujemi. I worship the Buddha with these flowers. Just as these flowers fade, our bodies will undergo decay. After a while I lost my place and watched the backs of the nuns’ heads. They were so uniquely shaped, dimpled and tufting in different places, and all so elegant. Baldness makes them look younger.

Field of merit’s name is Naboon. She’s the granddaughter of the Venerable: I watched them walk arm in arm back to the abbess’ accommodation that night as the nuns started their chant again from the beginning.