Episode #207: Nobuko Nakano
“I didn't really have an inclination towards an identity,” says Nobuko Nakana, about growing up in a Japanese Buddhist home in Australia. “Even if I would look in the mirror, and I'd see Asian features, but I because I grew up with very Caucasian, external surroundings. I felt like I assimilated and blended in with the white Australian upbringing.”
Nobuko’s father was with the Japanese Navy, and so the family moved around. They spent her early years in Japan before eventually settling in Melbourne. Her parents practiced Mahayana Buddhism, following a sect that was over 800 years old; its main temple is located at the base of Mount Fuji. Nobuko remembers a lot of chanting growing up, and she says the religion also imparted other lessons that were integrated into her upbringing. “I think it's a very underlying, Japanese way of communicating, like being very mindful of the impact we have on others as we speak.”
Another kind of impactful lesson came when she was just five years old. Her older sister told her about the Holocaust, and hearing about all that horror and death was very heavy for someone so young. But rather than being overwhelmed after learning about this terrible history, it instead offered a kind of reflection on death that she was somehow able to contemplate in those early years. “When you have that awareness, then those fundamental things are deeper, and things in life become a lot more precious,” she recalls. “It can let go of a lot more of superficial dramas and thoughts that are going on. You don't get so attached to them.”
Years later, while studying marine biology at university, Nobuko started to feel sharp pangs of unhappiness, although she didn’t know what was causing them at the time. “I think there's a part of me that always yearns to investigate and understand what freedom is,” she notes. “I was born in the Year the Horse, and the horse never wants to be reined in!” So she decided to take a year off, and spent the days alternating between two jobs, and the nights taking psychedelics at raves while sampling Melbourne’s exuberant nightlife scene. In addition to opening up to new facets of reality, the drugs also manifested interpersonal change as well. “I grew up very introverted, as well as quite shy, and going through the whole party scene, it opened me up to developing lifelong friendships with people who I still have in my life now, and consider my oldest friends. It was understanding on a deep level what true heart-connection and intimacy means with other people.”
Her experimentation eventually led to LSD, and on one trip, she began to feel as though she could predict the future, which made her contemplate the importance of intention. “If we have intention, then whatever is behind that intention, it will occur,” she says, “That's why it became so important to come from a wholesome space of mind as much of the time as possible.”
Noboku’s first taste of meditation happened around that time. Returning home in the early morning hours after a night of clubbing, her boyfriend gave her some basic instructions. But it didn’t stick. Then fast forward several years, and her new partner at the time told her about vipassana courses he was taking in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. However, she wasn’t impressed “He wasn't an inspiration, because he was smoking a lot of weed,” she says bluntly. “He was pretty stoned, and he wasn't practicing.” But shortly after, Nobuko met someone in a farmer’s market who had also been practicing the same technique, and believing in synchronicity, felt it was time to try it out. She attended a retreat at Dhamma Aloka with her twin sister, and the results were astounding. “I knew that it was possible to experience the clarity of the mind and the clarity of the moment, and to have in-the-moment awareness without drugs.”
But while she continued to take more courses and also began serving, she wasn’t yet ready to let go of her heavily partying lifestyle, or give up intoxicants. She took a job teaching English in Japan, but continued to indulge in the vibrant nightlife scene there. However, as she was preparing to return home to Australia, she felt she had finally come to a fork in the road. “I just knew that that hedonistic lifestyle, it didn't bring any pleasure, because I was feeling pretty crusty. I'd already done a vipassana course and I knew the benefits and how clear I felt.” With that in mind, she made the commitment to spend an extended period of time sitting and serving courses at Dhamma Aloka.
The first eight months were terrible! She went through serious drug withdrawal, but eventually came out the other side. She became more grounded in the tradition, and the rhythms of a busy meditation center. “It's like a snowball of perpetual motion, of internal energy building up,” she recalls, “but also, it’s a real test to see if I was really practicing what was being taught, which was being equanimous with a lot of my emotions that were coming up.” Although Nobuko was aware that her choice to stay at the center bucked societal expectations to some degree, she felt confident that she was following her heart’s intentions.
Those initial months eventually stretched to two years, and when she finally left the center, it was with an intention of going even deeper into the practice. She traveled to India in 2010 and stayed at the flagship center of the Goenka tradition, Dhamma Giri, where she took an extended Pāḷi course. “I realized how much I loved meditating,” she notes. “I found that when I really applied myself to something with such commitment and depth, I can see the results and the benefits. When I was a teenager, I used to do long distance swimming, and that was probably my first seed of having that really strong drive, of finding something that I felt really passionate about, and I could see the benefits, mentally and physically. And then with meditation, I could see mentally how much it was benefiting me.”
Around that time, she enrolled with her partner in a 45-day vipassana course at Dhamma Sindhu, a Goenka center in Gujarat. They originally had plans of returning to Australia and becoming more committed in their relationship, but on this course, something fundamental shifted in Nobuko; she realized that direction—a relationship commitment in lay life—was no longer for her. “I just knew that that's not the path that I was going to take. It was actually really painful to have to let that go, and very emotional.”
So she traveled through Nepal and Thailand, and finally landed in Burma. She initially spent several months at Dhamma Joti, the Goenka center in Yangon, but suddenly all foreign yogis were required to leave because of something that happened there. So she went to stay for a time at The Phyu Taw Ya Monastery, whose Sayadaw had formerly been a teacher in the Goenka tradition, and who she deeply respected.
But the pull of wearing robes, which had first come to her during her extended stay at Dhamma Aloka, only grew stronger as she committed more deeply to the spiritual path. She started looking for tangible options to make her desire a reality in Burma. As she didn’t want to lose her eligibility to sit long courses in the Goenka tradition, she decided that it was best to ordain at a Pariyatti (study) monastery, as it would not expose her to other meditation techniques. Moreover, the Pāḷi course had inspired her to learn more about the suttas, and she looked forward to studying them in depth.
She ended up finding a suitable nunnery in Yankin Hill, just east of Mandalay, and ordained. Because the Burmese Sangha doesn’t formally recognize the bhikkhuni order, Nobuko could only become what is called a sayalay, and allowed to observe a maximum of ten precepts. Even though everything in her past few years had been leading Nobuko to that moment, the actual ceremony was surprisingly intense for her. “I got my head shaved, and I could feel how my energy was changing,” she says. “I felt very emotional! I was actually crying as I was getting my head shaved.”
Beyond her initial ceremony of becoming, she found that the experience of being a nun had its challenges. The strongest was that, even nine months into wearing robes, the pain of having let go of her relationship with her boyfriend was still so acute that one day she decided to disrobe, leave Burma, and go back to him. While writing him a letter about her intention to return, the senior nun approached. Although not able to speak or read English, the nun realized what was happening. “I could see her perspective and the space she was coming from,” Nobuko recalls. As a lifelong monastic who had never known the intimacy of a relationship, the nun didn’t understand the particular kind of internal struggle that Nobuko was facing, yet was adamant that she resist the tempation. “It was just so black and white, and I thought, ‘She's absolutely right!’ I actually never sent that letter, and he never found out.”
Over time, however, her nun’s life took on a predictable routine. Early on, Nobuko had arranged lessons from a respected monk who lived at nearby Oo Yin Monastery. “It was quite remote,” she remembers of the area. “When I climbed one of the mountains, all you can see, it is amazing! Idealistic scenes of green rice paddies and oxen and mountains and small villages, really grassroots living of Burmese people and dirt roads.” So she would sleep and eat at the nunnery, and and then walk to Oo Yin Monastery to receive private tutoring, and where she also began to teach English to the novices. She began to relish what the monastic life had to offer. “There is an unspoken but yet so deeply felt sense of why we're in robes,” she explains. “It’s with a deep honor and reverence and respect for the Buddha's teachings.” For Nobuko, being a nun affirmed a sense of commitment and determination to work arduously in order to escape the trappings of worldly life, and seek full liberation.
Yet eventually, after the novelty had worn off, Nobuko started to notice various aspects of monastic life that she had at first been unaware of. The first was gender roles. “I had decided to flow and accept the great fortune that I could be sayalay in this country, and not look at it as a comparison, or that I was lesser,” she remembers thinking. But the fact that women were barred from upper areas of pagodas—which Noboku attributes to the perception that females had a lower vibration than males— became harder to accept. She also became disheartened at how few monks scrupulously followed the Vinaya (monastic discipline) as well as some of more egregious incidents when she encountered monks who were actually intoxicated. But it was another issue that pushed Nobuko over the edge.
It was 2015. One day, as she was perusing a monastic newsletter, she noticed several articles warning against the increasing presence of Muslims in the country. In talking to her fellow nuns, she found that many of them believed the growing, anti-Muslim propaganda. “They really had this perception that all Muslim people were bad,” she recalls. “Their immediate judgment was that they're going to get their heads cut off by Muslim people, so they have to stay clear of them!”
Nobuko couldn’t reconcile how a community that had been so supportive and generous towards her, and was so committed to following the Buddha’s teachings, could become so hateful and paranoid. “To actually hear these stories coming out of these Saṅgha publications, completely demonizing Muslims, I was absolutely shocked! It actually created fear inside me. The Buddha had taught compassion to all beings, and that all beings are equal. And yet they uphold this perspective— how can this be?!” Nobuko realized that it was time for her to move on from Myanmar.
Not that long after she left, in fact, the Rohingya crisis erupted, and she felt strongly that she had been witness to some of the initial seeds of the genocide being sown. Her reflections on the complex reality of the country deepened. “Fundamentally, it is a Dhamma country. We can't rule that as an absolute complete blanket portrayal of them,” she says. “They are human, and things like greed, corruption, anger, they will all also exist. Where there is dhamma, there can also be anti-dhamma as well. That's the reality of the human the human conditioning. That's just how it is.”
Even though she had left the country, Nobuko had still not disrobed. She sat a 45-day meditation course at a Goenka vipassana center in Thailand, then returned to Melbourne. Her mother confided to her that she wanted her to return to lay life. “I hadn't lived in the world for nine years, so I gave it some thought, and I decided, ‘How about I give it a shot being back in the world, and try to be a good, wholesome, dhammic person in the lay life, a contributing member in society?’”
The transition was not easy. Even the prospect of trying to meet a potential partner had changed so much during her time away, with the explosion of online dating. But she has found work teaching yoga and integrated herself into a community. “I surround myself with friends who I've known for more than ten years, a lot of them vipassana meditators. People around me are very supportive, and we have similar values, and follow a path of always trying to do what's wholesome and have the intelligence to communicate. If we've done any mistakes, we come forth and bridge that communication, and always connect with love.”