Fri, 27 Jun 2008

Between mantram and microphone: the remarkable work of the Buddhist nun Ani Choying

By NNA correspondent Cornelie Unger-Leistner

MAINZ (NNA) - Almost simultaneously with the start of the European Football Championships, around 200 people witnessed a quite different kind of premiere at Mainz University of Applied Sciences: the film “One more concert, one more child” was shown there for the first time in Germany.

Film-maker Karin Guse has created a portrait of the Buddhist nun Ani Choying Drolma, who tours Europe and the USA with spiritual songs to raise funds for a girls’ school in Nepal. The artist was present at the film-showing in Mainz and gave a concert afterwards. The event was organised by the department for women’s affairs at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.

Whereas Buddhism is most often publicly represented by men, primarily the Dalai Lama, the film by Karin Guse documents thriving female involvement in this religion.

Born in Nepal in 1971 as the daughter of Tibetan refugees, Moktan Lama - as Ani Choying was originally called - decided at the age of eleven to become a Buddhist nun. Tulku Urygen Rinproche, the head of Nagi Gompa monastery, became her teacher.

Singing and melody, as Ani Choying explains, play a major part in the rituals of Buddhism. The novice, who already had great vocal power, gradually became a formidable singer over the years. Ani Choying says in the film, “I don’t sing, I pray”, thus accentuating the spiritual background without which her performances are inconceivable.

In 1988 she was discovered by the American guitarist Steve Tibbetts, who recorded a CD of her singing and suggested she go on tour with him. There followed invitations to give concerts in the USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and she also became well-known in her own country of Nepal.

“Suddenly I had money, a whole lot of it, but what was I to do with it?” she relates. She conceived the plan of founding an educational institute for nuns, for while the monks in Nepal all receive education, there are many older nuns who pray and sing with great perfection but cannot even write their own names.

They are not alone in this in Nepal. As we hear in the film, in the Himalayas 40 percent of men and 80 percent of women are illiterate. Ani Choying therefore started the Nuns Welfare Foundation, whose chief project is the Arya Tara School, situated 18 kilometres from Nepal’s capital Kathmandu. The nun was strengthened in her resolve to launch this project by a visit to the spiritual leader of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama. “Are the nuns also learning to read and write?” his Holiness asked her, as she relates in the film, and Ani Choying was able to confirm this.

Today over 50 girls and women aged eight to 24 attend the school, and every concert enables Ani Choying to fund one more school place. Six hundred euros is sufficient for one year’s school attendance.

Most of the girls come from poor families and this is their only chance to receive an education. As part of a state-recognised school curriculum, the young nuns are taught Nepali, English, maths, social studies and science for six years. In the film Ani Choyang proudly tells us that three girls who went to her school are now attending a Buddhist university in India – a dream which she always had herself but was never able to realise.

Instruction in Buddhist rituals takes place in the Tibetan language. Ani Choying’s aim is for the girls to return to their villages and become teachers there.

In the film she explains how important it is to start with the women. “If you send a man to school you’re just educating one person. When a women goes to school, you’re educating a whole family, for it’s the mother who brings up her children.”

Film-maker Karin Guse, who met the nun at a concert in 2003, tells Ani Choying’s story in striking images. Unlike most others who film in the Himalayas, she does not dwell endlessly on breathtaking pictures of the landscape. The landscape is there of course, but it only provides the backdrop. Guse’s camerawork focuses primarily on the people, and their deep involvement with religious and spiritual life. Apart from details about illiteracy and the situation of women in Nepal, we do not hear much about the country itself.

Karin Guse worked on the film for four years, but in 2005, due to the difficult political situation in Nepal, things ground to a halt. Now at last the film has been completed – precisely at the moment that the world public is focusing greater attention on the South Asia region because of the Olympic games and natural catastrophes.

The concert which Ani Choying gave after the film, ended with a memorial to the victims of the natural catastrophes in Burma and China in the form of a mantram sung together.

In the concert itself, the audience could experience the effect and fascination of Ani Choying’s ritual songs. It almost seemed as if the plain concrete block of Mainz University of Applied Sciences faded away to allow through another world that is invisible to the eye but can become audible in song.

And it also became clearer, perhaps, why people who consistently live by the rules and traditions of Buddhism are currently exerting a great power of attraction on us in Europe. With great naturalness and elegance, Ani Choying – who is a nun after all - moved between mantram and microphone, between deep concentration and humorous engagement with those around her.

And so, quite effortlessly, without any hint of missionary zeal or presumption, she communicated her authentic spiritual conviction to the audience that it is human thoughts which form the world.

Her song “Flower Eye”, whose refrain she also sang in German at the end, encapsulates this. The eye of the flower sees the world as flower world, says the song; and the eye of a thorn sees only undergrowth.

Just beforehand, Ani Choying declared laughingly that this song in particular had brought her pop-star popularity in Nepal. “Flower eye, flower eye” the people in Karin Guse’s film call out to her, thronging cheerfully around her as she hurries from appointment to appointment in Kathmandu, and visits a school. She never has a spare moment, we hear, for too many tasks await her whenever she returns from her concert tours. So she’s happy to have a driving licence and a car – even though it is by no means common for a nun to drive a car in Nepal.

End/nna/ung/mb

Links: www.choying.de, choying@karin-guse.de, wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal

Item: 080627-03EN Date: 27 June 2008

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