Having recently returned from six months in a monastery in Tibet, Ruriko Hino is eager to talk about how she first became interested in devoting her life to the study of Tibetan Buddhism and eventually to becoming a Buddhist nun. "I was 19 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. 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, and drinking Himalayan tea. Tapestries and printed cloths hang from the walls. Hino herself is a colorful tapestry, dressed in loose-fitting Tibetan garments embroidered with geometric patterns in red, orange and black with a long purple scarf wrapped around her head. At the other end of the long table, a solitary Vietnamese monk in yellow robes is finishing his meal.

Hino, 26, says she decided to give up her interior design career and go to Tibet after a series of what she calls "earthquakes" that shook her life.