Religion without a country
Nawang Thokmey has devoted his entire life to a country he’s never seen. Born to parents who fled Tibet in the 1960s after the Chinese government gained control of the plateau and a political and cultural war broke out, Thokmey grew up in a Tibetan community in India.
Like hundreds of thousands of other Tibetan refugees, Thokmey watched the events of his country from afar, having spent his entire life in exile. For him the Dalai Llama has become a cultural symbol that represents a whole way of life that is threatened.
He arrived in Charlottesville in 1993, in one of the first waves of Tibetans with refugee passports. Equipped with two suitcases and no family, Thokmey landed with about 25 other Tibetans. Most of them dispersed into larger cities, but he felt drawn to the mountains and UVA’s growing collection of Tibetan volumes. UVA’s is one of only about a dozen university libraries nationwide accumulating the ancient texts.
More than 20 years later, he works with religious studies students to navigate the more than 16,000 volumes in Tibetan text that have arrived straight from the Indian Library of Congress.
I asked Thomkey what religion he practiced.
“Of course I’m a Buddhist,” he said. “But I am a 21st century Buddhist.”
The extent of my Buddhist knowledge prior to researching and writing this story consisted of whatever I learned from a brief world religions unit in my eighth grade history book. So when I sat down with Thokmey at Alderman Library, I was intrigued when he made the distinction between Buddhism as a religion and Buddhism as a life philosophy and science.
For Thokmey, Buddhism is about science and reason, and not necessarily a lifelong devotion to Buddha and morning prayers. Religion isn’t tangible, he said, and enlightenment can’t be proven, and his relationship to Buddhism is about a logical progression of thoughts and actions, not dissimilar to the modern day scientific method.
“You research, you experiment, you analyze, then you put it into practice and produce something,” he said. “You get different emotions and produce different things, like how to overcome emotions and pain. Everything has to have causes and conditions. It’s the law of nature, not just Buddhism.”
Having grown up with devoutly faithful and spiritual parents, Thokmey doesn’t discount the significance of a life dedicated to Buddhism. But it’s so ingrained into his culture that he’s wary of a Westernized misinterpretation of the religion.
“People meditate, and study Buddhism, and say ‘This helps me really good, now I’m going to be a Buddhist.’ No, that’s nonsense,” Thokmey said. “One can be a very good Christian, Hindu, Jew, whatever. But if you are Christian, you should be a Christian. It is very difficult to change your religion.”
Even with decades of researching and teaching under his belt, and countless hours spent directing students among the library stacks, Thokmey isn’t done learning himself. The collections encompass everything from Tibetan art and language to Buddhist philosophy and history, and he’ll pore over and discuss every topic to no end. But when it comes to what he spends his time studying, there’s no question: Buddhist science.
“In Buddhist science, we talk about love and compassion very scientifically, how to live compassionately,” Thokmey said. “Buddhist science is not about God; it’s about what is happening for us right now. It’s a science of the emotions, and it’s okay for anyone who really wants to be happy and know their emotions and have a satisfied life,”
Sandy Newhouse, a soft-spoken psychologist who grew up in a traditional Christian household in Pennsylvania, found Buddhism shortly after high school. A natural sciences and philosophy major who always had an interest in the complex Greek philosophy and positive psychology, she was intrigued by Buddhist philosophy and practice and was instantly hooked.
“When I discovered Buddhist meditation, I felt like I had come home,” Newhouse said.
She became a Buddhist at age 23, but said she’s never felt like her Christian faith has been replaced.
“Buddhism has really complemented my Christian upbringing,” she said. “It’s built on it, and given me extra tools to further develop compassion and think in logical ways.”
It took her parents a while to come around to her new lifestyle, but she said overall she’s never felt any kind of stigma around being a white, Christian-born, American woman practicing the Tibetan Buddhist faith. In fact, it’s what’s made her life “as full as it is,” she said, and it has guided her through unavoidable life changes and grief over the years.
For Conover, the transition from Christianity to Buddhism has been more gradual. He was a fourth year student at UVA, studying economics and poetry, when he enrolled in a mindfulness class that would fulfill a P.E. credit. He began meditating regularly, but doesn’t pretend that, as a naturally anxious person with no previous experience, it was an easy habit for him to form.
“I had a hard time doing it even once per week at first,” Conover said. “But it just seemed like something I needed to be doing.”
As meditation became ingrained into his daily life, he said he started naturally picking up on the religious aspects of it, but on his own terms.
Conover describes Buddhism as “Catholicism on acid,” and suspects that years of attending mass prepared him for the new lifestyle. Having always felt more connection to the rituals than the faith itself, Conover now identifies as a Tibetan Buddhist, but more practically and philosophically than religiously.
“It’s not like I just declared my faith in Buddha,” he said. “Nobody forces this stuff on you. It’s just here.”
Mikles, by contrast, said she remembers the exact moment when she decided to switch her undergraduate focus from psychology to religious studies. She had intended to become a doctor, but when an Islamic scholar delivered a lecture about Muslim creationism during an entry-level religion class, Mikles said she knew almost instantly that her keen interest in questions of the mind would be better channeled into religion rather than science. Born and raised a Catholic in Pennsylvania, she said she had always related to her faith and beliefs through stories, which is why Catholicism to Buddhism wasn’t such a huge leap for her.
“Religion to me is a collection of stories held together by rituals,” Mikles said. “And here I found another interesting set of stories.”
Now she makes regular offerings to a shrine to Buddha in her apartment and is pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies, with plans to be a professor. Not quite the white-coat lifestyle her parents had in mind. Like a lot of undergraduates away from home for the first time, Mikles began questioning her faith at William & Mary.
“When I got to college, I said ‘I’m not Catholic anymore; I’m a Buddhist!’ But I had no idea what a Buddhist was,” she said with a laugh.
She began by diligently practicing what she thought was Buddhist meditation, only to learn through her studies that it wasn’t. In fact, nothing about Tibet or Buddhism was what she thought.
“I quickly realized that I wasn’t a Buddhist, but was very interested in how greatly Americans had misunderstood Buddhism and sort of appropriated it for their own purposes,” she said.
She may not have been a Buddhist, but after taking several classes on the ancient religion, she decided she wanted to see it for herself, and took off on a trip to India, Japan, and Hong Kong. Much like her experience with meditation when she first began, the trip blew her expectations out of the water.
“It was really enlightening,” she said. “Buddhism in Asia wasn’t what I thought Buddhism in Asia should be. I expected it to be a lot more, I guess you could say, spiritual, and in many ways it was. But in many ways it was also a cultural practice and a way to talk about the dead and things like that.”
Ten years, a tour of Asia, two degrees, and a year in Tibet later, Mikles is in the early stages of earning a Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies at UVA. As she answered my question about the Tibetan Buddhist community in Charlottesville, I began to realize how typical its complex dynamics are for a religion that is connected to a place and culture that have been under siege for over half a century.
“In many ways I think it’s important to not forget that Tibet is still there, and that there are still Tibetans living in Tibet,” Mikles said. “And when I was living there, I was able to witness the incredible regenerative powers of the Tibetan people. But there are so many people living in exile who can’t go back to see this regenerating culture.”
As for her own religious beliefs now? Mikles said she’s found her way back to Christianity, but her Buddhist studies and practices have opened her eyes to a new understanding of the church she grew up in.
“It helped to communicate Christian values to me in a way that Christianity never did,” she said. “I like to say that the deities outsourced me to Buddha.”