Sister Vajira - Life As A Nun

Life As A Nun

To provide her with greater quietude, supporters built a bungalow for her in the palm-tree forest of the monastery garden. However, she suffered internal lack and noticed that she could not possibly meditate all day long and became physically ill. Taking on scholastic work offered itself as a way out of her frustration. Having learned English quickly, she then started intensive Pali studies and soon started to translate texts and carried on correspondence about Dhamma topics with various people.

One of the dāyakas of the monastery offered her healthier conditions and arranged for a nice bungalow to be built, into which she moved in 1959. Young Sinhalese women venerated her very much there, and one of them lived temporarily with her as a disciple.

Around autumn of 1961 the English monk Ven. Ñānavīra Thera, who lived 40 km from her in a kuti in the jungle as a hermit, had sent her a text he had written, A Note on Paticca Samuppāda, wherein he criticized the extension-over-three-lives interpretation. Thereupon an intensive exchange of letters followed. The early letters show a woman who, in her own thinking and discussion with Ven. Ñānavīra, earnestly searches a way to approach the essence of the Buddha's Teaching by repeated trial-and-error. This search finally yielded its fruit when she, by her own account (as given in a letter to Ñānavīra Thera), attained sotāpatti, or Stream-entry in late January 1962. The one who has "entered the stream" has ipso facto abandoned personality-view (sakkāya-ditthi), which is the self-view implicit in the experience of an ordinary worldling not free from ignorance, and understood the essential meaning of the Buddha's teaching on the Four Noble Truths. But the rapidity and intensity of the change of her views caused a kind of nervous breakdown and she disrobed, returning to Germany in 22 February 1962.