A Different Kind of Luxury

"From the Bars of Osaka to the Tibetan High Plateau"
Ruriko Hino

	Articles from the Japan Times series "Alternative Luxuries" (each article will be rewritten into a book chapter in the forthcoming: A Different Kind of Luxury)

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	Having recently returned from six-months living in a monastery in Tibet, Ruriko Hino is telling me how she first got interested in devoting her life to the study of Tibetan Buddhism and to eventually becoming a Buddhist nun.
	"I was nineteen years old, and working in a hostess bar," she says, making a face. "You know, serving whiskey to businessmen, wearing makeup, putting on a smiley face all the time so that I could pay my tuition at the interior design college I was going to.
	"But when I wasn't working and attending classes, I went to a lot of Reggae concerts, and I began to meet Jamaican people there, Rastafarians. I could immediately feel their powerful, powerful hearts, and their strong connection to the spiritual world."
	Hino speaks with a thick Osaka dialect peppered with rapid-fire staccato sound effects interspersed with long, drawn out vowels of rising and falling intonation. There's almost a musical zaniness in her excited and intense contact with whatever it is she's speaking about.
	We are sitting in the dining hall of Tokurinji, a Zen temple near Nagoya, where we met at a festival celebrating Japanese-Nepali friendship. We are drinking Himalayan tea after a sumptuous Indian vegetarian meal, surrounded by tapestries and printed cloths hanging from the walls. Hino has a long purple scarf wrapped around her head and is wearing loose-fitting Tibetan garments embroidered with geometric patterns in red, orange, and black. At the other end of the long table, a solitary Vietnamese monk in yellow robes is finishing his meal. I can truly feel all the various currents of the vast Asian continent mixing here, and I can sense their potential for creating a richer and more fertile future for tomorrow's Japan.
	I ask Hino, (now 26) how she decided to give up on her idea of a career in interior design, quit her job as a hostess, and go to Tibet.
	"What happened was, about four years ago, there were three earthquakes in my life, one after the other, Bam-Bam-Bam!" she says clapping her hands together quickly.
	"The first earthquake was the one in Kobe. The second upheaval was the poisoning in the Tokyo subway, although I wasn't there myself. And the third was watching my grandmother die. I went to see her in the hospital, and there she was lying with her mouth gaping open, in excruciating pain, with tubes up her nose and down her throat; she looked like she was trying to scream but couldn't make any sound."

	"That's when I really had to ask, 'What is this life about?' I knew I had to make a change."
	Hino's first visit to Tibet was only as a short-term traveler, but over time she became more and more deeply involved. In her last voyage she took up residence in a monastery for half a year, studying with a priest, or rinpoche, in the Nyngma order. "I don't know how it happened, but I was switched on just like a light when I went to Tibet," she says.
	"I would wake up every morning at dawn to the chanting of the other nuns in my room," Hino writes in an article published in a newsletter of the Tibetan meditation community in Japan. "At first it was very difficult, because one of them chanted in a very grating way. But I eventually began to join the chanting myself. Though my pronunciation is a long way off, I could manage to chant slowly, and so I could let myself go."
	After chanting, Hino would sweep and clean, make butter tea for everyone, eat tsampa (a toasted barley porridge) and begin her studies. "That was my daily routine."
	She tells me then of her pilgrimage through the high desert from one holy place to the next, and I ask her if she met any other Japanese people on her way. "No, I was the only one. I didn't see any Westerners either. I would just walk all day by myself through the desert and over the sand dunes and arrive at night at the next temple where I could take my rest and eat."

	I try to imagine her, a solitary figure dressed in her bright colors on a footpath traversing the vast barren landscape, and I think of the distance she has covered.
	One of the most challenging aspects of Tibetan Buddhism is the practice of full body prostrations, involving kneeling down, sliding the forearms along the ground and touching the forehead to the ground.
	"I had been aware," she writes, "that I still felt a certain embarrassment and resistance to doing prostrations and chanting 'Om Mane Padme Om.' But one day I realized that I didn't have time to be making any more excuses, and I thought I should just do it, and set out for the Jokhang Temple. As soon as I began, though, everyone started staring at me. The Tibetans do prostrations all the time, but they weren't used to seeing foreigners doing them. With the people's encouragement, however, I ended up doing 200 full prostrations! I was very proud, but when I asked the others how many they do, they said one or two thousand a day. I got quite embarrassed and I decided that the actual number of prostrations didn't matter."
	"After I finished doing prostrations I was filled with a wonderful freshness--I felt very good. When I came back to the monastery and I did the evening chanting with the rinpoche and the other nuns, I sensed something different inside me which I'd never felt before. I felt that, spiritually, I had moved forward a step."
	Hino is now back in Japan to tie up any loose ends before she goes back to begin her training in earnest for the three year preparation for ordination. I asked her if has been difficult being back.
	"Well, of course, Tibet is a very high place, and in a sense, Osaka is a very low place, but I also know that there's probably a reason I chose to incarnate here. Just for one example, my mother has an alcohol addiction, and I can't just ignore the problems here in Japan forever and just do what I want to do."
	"Does that mean then," I asked her, "that you will come back to Japan to bring the Tibetan teachings here, or open a temple?"
	She laughs her high, fruity laugh, perhaps in response to the idea of such grandiosity.
	"Tibetan Buddhism is extremely, extremely deep," she says. "First I have to deal with the next 3 to 5 years, get ordained and bring that to a conclusion. Then, maybe after 10 or 20 years, in a natural way, I might open a temple. But first I have to polish and sharpen my own intentions and dispense with all the unnecessary things. Also, after my own training, I want to do something for Tibet, maybe be part of the peace movement."
	I asked her whether when she brought the teachings back to Japan she would change them to fit the Japanese context.
	"I don't think about changing anything. I am just letting everything be absorbed by my pores. I'm not thinking, 'Is this correct or mistaken?' 'Do I agree or not?' I don't want to look at the teachings with the eye of doubt. The seed is my belief, and it has sprouted, and I feel moved. If necessary in the end, I may change it, but I am not approaching it from the beginning with the mindset of 'I have to change this.' "
	As I listen, I wonder whether this kind of thinking might be a kind of medicine for my inordinately choice-oriented Western way. Perhaps there is something very important about simply accepting what is given, whether it's doing thousands of prostrations a day, waking up at dawn to chantings in a foreign tongue, or just quieting the voice of critical analysis every once in a while.
	As Hino gets ready for her nightly meditation practice, I ask her why she thinks that Japanese people don't practice meditation very much anymore.
	"Perhaps it's the pace modern people set for themselves. There's no mu, no empty time in their lives. People aren't accustomed to nothingness. But no matter how you think about it, mu is necessary. Otherwise you get tortured by time and swallowed up whole by everyday life. But with some meditation, it's easy to keep on a straight track towards whatever is your goal."
	"Do you think that people in Japan will start meditating more in the future?" I ask.
	"I don't know about that." she answers, "There's still a lot of ignorance and prejudice. You know, people say, 'What, are you practicing some weird religion?' But on the other hand, I think that regular people who work in offices in Japan are having more and more exchange with people who have lived in India or have studied a spiritual discipline, and so perhaps people are opening up."
	"In any case," she concludes, "all of the Japanese traditional arts: kendo, ikebana, Sumo, whatever, those are all spiritual practices. If you don't have a clean and purified spirit you can't do them well at all. It was only after I studied in Tibet that I could see these as deeply spiritual practices."
	In just five short years, I consider, Ruriko Hino has gone from being a hostess pouring whiskey for businessmen to trekking on a solitary pilgrimage across the deserts of the Tibetan high plateau. I remember once again that tremendous possibility is within the reach of each human being, every single one.
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