Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun [Paperback]

Faith Adiele (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2005

A wry account of the road from Harvard scholarship student to ordination as northern Thailand's first black Buddhist nun.

Reluctantly leaving behind Pop Tarts and pop culture to battle flying rats, hissing cobras, forest fires, and decomposing corpses, Faith Adiele shows readers in this personal narrative, with accompanying journal entries, that the path to faith is full of conflicts for even the most devout. Residing in a forest temple, she endured nineteen-hour daily meditations, living on a single daily meal, and days without speaking. Internally Adiele battled against loneliness, fear, hunger, sexual desire, resistance to the Buddhist worldview, and her own rebellious Western ego. Adiele demystifies Eastern philosophy and demonstrates the value of developing any practice—Buddhist or not. This "unlikely, bedraggled nun" moves grudgingly into faith, learning to meditate for seventy-two hours at a stretch. Her witty, defiant twist on the standard coming-of-age tale suggests that we each hold the key to overcoming anger, fear, and addiction; accepting family; redefining success; and re-creating community and quality of life in today's world. 10 illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jan Willis meets Anne Lamott in this funny, observant memoir by Adiele, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Burned out by the pressure of undergraduate studies at Harvard, Adiele took a year off to get her head together and do field research in Thailand, where she had once spent time as a Rotary exchange student. She became fascinated with Buddhist nuns and began soliciting their stories, a process that led to her rather impulsive decision to seek "temporary ordination" as a nun herself. The nominal-Unitarian-turned-Buddhist is humble about her spiritual insights: "Where I should be über-nun, I'm not even what is perceived as a practicing Buddhist. I don't meditate regularly; I nurse anger; I despise tofu. Dammit, I don't appear to have learned anything! So how can anyone learn from me?" But readers can and will learn from Adiele, who parses out her second stay in Thailand with a comic's timing, a novelist's keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist's sensitivity to issues of race and culture. Her main narrative is almost talmudically surrounded by commentary: all along the outer margins of the book, quotes from Buddhist luminaries mingle with excerpts from her own very raw journals from that year. As she admits her fear of the rats that infested her meditation cave or chronicles her pride in gradually increasing her meditation hours, we are privileged to see an unvarnished vulnerability.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

By her own reckoning, Adiele is an unlikely candidate for Buddhist spiritual enlightenment. Neither Asian nor disciplined, she doesn't fancy meditation; despises tofu; and, raised Unitarian, isn't particularly religious. Yet the Nigerian-Scandinavian ex-Harvard student from eastern Washington became the first black Buddhist nun in northern Thailand. She first went to Thailand at age 15, after winning a Rotary Club International Exchange Program scholarship at a time when most Americans could barely find Thailand on the map. Although used to being different--she wryly notes that, every day, she was an exchange student in her own country--she wasn't prepared for life in a tiny rural Thai community, in which she was the first black anyone had seen. But something about the country and Buddhism appealed to her and she chose to return, though she was as surprised as anyone else when she decided to become a Buddhist nun. A warm, witty account of an unusual woman's spiritual journey and search for identity between the vastly different cultures of East and West. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (July 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039332673X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326734
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #520,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born of a Nordic-American mother and a Nigerian father, Faith Adiele was raised as the sole African girl on a farm in the Pacific Northwest. After flunking out of Harvard, she shaved her head, took a vow of silence, and moved into the forest, becoming Thailand's first black Buddhist nun. She then won a fellowship to Nigeria, where she met her father-originally thought killed in the Biafran War-and siblings for the first time. A second trip inspired the PBS documentary "My Journey Home." A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Nonfiction Writing Program, she has worked as a community activist and diversity trainer, and lectured and taught writing all over the world. She is hard at work on a second memoir about 3 generations of family on 3 continents.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful, engaging book about a black American woman's encounter with Thai Buddhism, September 4, 2008

By 

William Courson "William Courson" (Montclair, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun (Paperback)

As a biracial child of a struggling, single mother in a remote Washington state farming community populated almost entirely by white farmers, their families and their Mexican employees, Faith Adiele became familiar very early in life with race and class differences. In high school, as part of cultural-exchange programs, she visited Mexico and Thailand. In both countries, her experiences fueled her growing outspokenness on issues of race, poverty, and women's rights.

A bright child and a gifted student, Adiele found her way paved way to Harvard but as her university career began was struggling with a ferocious set of personal demons. She discovered quickly that her own biracial background and rural upbringing made her experience of being an African-American utterly unlike that of her black classmates. "My entire identity was in opposition to what was around me," she says of those days. "I didn't have the tools to dissect what was going on in this very segregated community."

Scared, exhausted and unmotivated, she found herself enrolling in a study-abroad program sponsored by the University of Washington, making her second visit to Thailand to develop a sociology project studying Buddhist nuns. Once there, she made an almost spur-of-the-moment decision to undergo ordination herself, but for scholarly rather than religious reasons: she wanted to experience the nuns' lifestyle firsthand. Doing so, she hoped, would allow her to "challenge traditional anthropological methodology and understand the women I was presuming to write about."

Adiele, a Unitarian who had never before meditated, would later write: "Only after ordaining did I discover -- to my horror -- that I'd chosen to reside in an intensive meditation retreat," meaning that she could expect to spend up to 19 hours a day in contemplative activities. Bald and browless -- like many Buddhist nuns, she was required to shave off the trappings of vanity -- she spent two months in a forest temple, learning the intricacies of purposeful, mindful, seemingly simple living. She rose at 3:30 each morning, donned a heavy, full-length white robe, spent long hours in silent sitting and walking meditation sessions, and got by on a single, pre-noon daily meal of rice and vegetables. The adjustment was a huge struggle for Adiele's very young and, as she puts it, very Western mind and body.

Despite the emotionally and physically unsettling process of settling into monastic life, Adiele found that her time in Thailand offered a peculiar kind of respite. In a place that, in those days, had limited exposure to African Americans, she was merely "different," rather than the target of preconceptions based on race. Most importantly, she discovered that spiritual practice, with its conflicts and struggles, means moving toward self-awareness and inner peace. These lessons, she says, strengthened her resolve to work against racism and sexism. "When I read about the Buddhist quest, I realized that it was also the black quest, [or] the women's quest."

"Meeting Faith" chronicles her months in the temple and her attempts, failures, and painfully-achieved successes at living the Buddhist monastic life. The main text, extracted from the journals she kept in Thailand, is a detailed, often emotional narrative of her experiences. A second column, in the margins, includes instructions and admonitions from the temple's head nun, along with excerpts from Adiele's research materials on Asian women, Thai culture, and the role of women in Theravada Buddhism. The resulting story moves between the author's intensely personal voice, the somewhat detached tone of social-science tomes, the head nun's prodding encouragement, the reverent clarity of Buddhist texts, and the concrete details drawn from other sources. Adiele says the technique allows readers to follow and feel her ordination experience in a far-off, unfamiliar place, and to be "disoriented and overwhelmed" -- just as she was.

"Meeting Faith" is a funny, bittersweet, observant memoir by Adiele, today an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, that offers a warm and witty accounting of an unusual woman's spiritual journey and search for identity between the vastly different cultures of East and West. I recommend "Meeting Faith" to anyone interested in learning more about Buddhism, its monastic institutions, the role of women in that great tradition or about Thai culture and lifestyles. This was a wonderful, "delicious" read, and a difficult book to put down; I very much look forward to reading anything that Faith Adiele may choose to write in the future.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A real gift..., August 28, 2005

By 

Wendy D. Fambro - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun (Hardcover)

I recently purchased Faith Adiele's book as a gift for a colleague. The write-up sounded like something that would appeal to him. When it arrived, I thought I would just glance through it to be sure it was appropriate, and found myself immediately hooked. Not only have I become immersed in the writing, but the book arrived at a time of major transition in my life, and Faith's journey has in significant ways come to inform my own. There is also the sense that with the journal notes written in the margins of every page, I have shrewdly gotten two books for the price of one! Highly recommended.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening and engrossing!, April 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun (Hardcover)

Though I'm not a Buddhist, it's a topic that fascinates me, and Faith's memoir provided a riveting and highly accessible introduction to what it means to live as a Buddhist. I thought the book's format, which weaves in quotations from an amazing array of scholars and commentators, was fantastic -- very engaging and personal. The book was full of insights and surprises. Best of all, the author has a wry and appealing sense of humor about her odyssey in Thailand -- and, more broadly, about the universal quest to find spiritual fulfillment.