Tenzin Palmo's Dongyi Gatsal Ling Nunnery in the mountains of northern India is only half-complete, but it already houses 24 young nuns; some of the girls escaped from Tibet, enduring rape and abuse at the hands of Chinese and Nepali soldiers, while others came from Indian families in search of a better life than their mothers or sisters. The nuns study meditation, rituals, debate and philosophy; English and Tibetan; along with practical skills like driving, tailoring and computers. For two months a year, the girls live in a silent meditation retreat; "You can imagine a group of 24 teenage girls keeping silent for this long, living in one house, eight to a room," Palmo says, wryly. "It takes great discipline."

The nunnery, once complete, will hold up to 200 nuns at a time; with an additional center nearby for international Buddhist women seeking retreat. The hope, says Palmo, is that the nuns will eventually become spiritual teachers on par with the male gurus and yogis. Already, her nuns have had audiences with the Dalai Lama, who has himself begun to preach spiritual equality.

"The Dalai Lama has said: Male body, female body, it makes no difference. If you really study and practice there is nothing you cannot accomplish in the female body," Palmo says. "This is important for the nuns to hear, because the message is always given that somehow if you have a female body you did something wrong in your last life. The best thing you can hope for is to be a good girl, work very hard, and come back as a boy the next time."

Palmo has been working to open her nunnery for nearly nine years, and in the time since she began, a number of other nunneries have also opened their doors in India, offering a real education to young Buddhist women. This is due partly to Western Buddhist women, who have been arriving in Tibet to study and provide the first feminist role models for young Tibetan girls.

In the last decade that she has spent travelling the world, lecturing and raising money for her nunnery, Palmo has seen all things Buddhist gain momentum in the popular Western media. This is not, she notes, the first time she's witnessed Buddhism become fashionable: Her own arrival in India in 1964 came just before floods of hippies flocked to India seeking gurus. Her hope is that at least a few in this round of "spiritual materialists" will see past the $350 yoga bags and quick-fix weekend retreats to find a more lasting religious practice.

"Buddhism is a trend. It rises and it falls; in the 1960's the hippies were all going to India in search of truth -- with capital letters and blazing lights. Most of them just got stoned and that was it," she says. "But most of the great teachers in America today were from those hippies. At a certain point they saw through their illusions and got down to work."

Perhaps Buddhism is currently on the rise because its simplicity offers such a contrast to the high-tech hustle of the last decade; even so, the "simplicity" that Westerners covet doesn't much resemble the austerity of Buddhism's eastern roots. Then again, Palmo suggests, you don't need to get rid of all of your possessions and live in a cave in order to seek enlightenment, even though materialistic trappings won't really help.

"People know that, in the end, getting a new car, or another set of clothing, another Haagan Daz, won't solve their problems," she says. "One of the advantages of being born in an affluent society is that if one has any intelligence at all, one will realize that having more and more won't solve the problem, and happiness does not lie in possessions, or even relationships: The answer lies within ourselves. If we can't find peace and happiness there, it's not going to come from the outside."

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