In 2005, Frank Terry arrived in Dharamshala, in the Indian Himalayas, carrying a CalArts cap. Across the front, in large letters, it read: C.I.A.
Frank, in his generous American innocence, did not seem fully aware of the local implications. Dharamshala was home to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a place where stories of international espionage circulated easily. Chinese agents were rumored to move through town disguised as Tibetan monks or pilgrims; Indian intelligence was said to listen behind ordinary faces. Whether any particular story was true hardly mattered. In that setting, a brown foreign-returned student wearing a cap that read “C.I.A.” was not necessarily the safest way to deepen my relationships with the Tibetan community.
For Frank, however, the cap carried a warmer, more personal meaning. He had spent many years at the California Institute of the Arts, CalArts—or C.I.A.—in Los Angeles, where reams of peg-punched animation paper, unfinished films, and people dressed as if laundry were a tool of institutional control formed part of the natural environment. In his hands, this was not a political object but a gesture of return: not an ordination into Buddhism, but a re-initiation into the American dream and its unruly promises, and a small, tender correction of a wrong that had upended my life.
“Son,” he said, “time for you to come back home.”
I do not remember my reply. At moments of genuine emotion, I have often chosen between excessive solemnity and a joke that becomes regrettable before I finish it. Silence may have saved us both.
What I remember is his warm hand, the cap, and the prosody of the word home.
At the time, I thought the gesture marked the end of an interruption. Only years later did I understand that it marked the beginning of the question that would shape my life:
How do we enter another person’s world without requiring that world to become our own?
The journey had begun in Los Angeles, at CalArts, in Frank’s office.
I had brought him a proposal for a Buddhist-inspired animated story and the confidence of a young filmmaker who believed sincerity could compensate for every gap in knowledge.
“Travel to the East,” Frank told me. “Meet people who actually practice Buddhism. Watch how they think, react, and emote. Pitch your story to them. If they like it, ask why. If they dislike it, ask why. Eventually you’ll arrive at a version that bridges East and West.”
Then he looked at me.
“So, are you up for it?”
Frank asked questions in a way that made refusal seem like a moral failure.
Not long afterward, the attacks of September 11 changed the atmosphere of American life. Security entered classrooms, airports, borders, and conversations. People who looked Arab, Muslim, Sikh, or South Asian found themselves newly visible in ways that were rarely flattering.
I was an Indian student. My visa was revoked, and my CalArts education in Los Angeles was abruptly interrupted.
I cannot reconstruct from public history exactly what happened inside my individual case. Governments keep files; bewildered students keep memories. What I knew was that I had become a brown foreign student in an anxious country, and an administrative decision had removed me from the life I had crossed an ocean to build.
One day I was studying animation in California.
Then I was back in India, trying to explain to relatives why talent had not proved stronger than immigration law.
Frank understood that more than a degree had been interrupted. I had begun to feel expelled from my own future.
He did not merely reassure me. He created another path.
With his encouragement, I began research on thangka painting and Tibetan visual storytelling at the Norbulingka Institute in Dharamshala, a Tibetan arts center in northern India. Kim Yeshi, the founding director of Norbulingka, gave me the opportunity to undertake that work and guided me toward a more responsible approach to it.
“You may begin there,” she said, pointing toward a small library on Buddhist thought, iconography, symbolism, and thangka painting. Among the books was Worlds of Transformation: Tibetan Art of Wisdom and Compassion, by Marilyn M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman. It would eventually change how I understood not only Buddhist thought, but the possibility of a life remade through it.
“And there is French coffee in the back,” she added. “It is expensive to get here, so go easy on it.”
That was Kim Yeshi’s way. She did not merely grant me access to Norbulingka. She received me into a world she had helped protect, build, and translate across difficult borders. At a time when Dharamshala was thick with political suspicion and historical injury, she allowed a complete stranger into her private study, placed materials before him, and trusted that he might learn to approach them with care.
Her generosity was not softness.
It was discernment.
I had arrived believing I would study Tibetan thangka paintings. That belief lasted perhaps two days.
A thangka was not simply an image containing Buddhist subjects. Proportion, color, gesture, figure, implement, and spatial arrangement belonged to a system of practice and knowledge. Some aspects resonated with classical Indian traditions I knew; others challenged my Western art education. Tibetan Buddhist art fit neatly inside neither.
A posture could carry doctrine. A color could participate in cosmology. An image could be instruction, meditation, invocation, and map.
The thangka did not merely show another world.
It trained the viewer in how to approach one.
Kim helped me see that access was not understanding. An outsider can enter a cultural institution, collect terminology, photograph objects, and leave without traveling far from his own assumptions.
I had come with categories from animation: character, staging, emotion, narrative clarity. They were useful, but they were not universal. They came from a particular history of looking.
The Tibetan tradition was not waiting to become a variation of my education.
My education was being asked whether it could become large enough to encounter the tradition.
My confidence did not disappear gracefully.
One winter day, walking alone through the Himalayas in northern India, I became convinced that I had ruined my education, my career, and possibly my entire life.
Snow covered the landscape like an untouched sheet of drawing paper. My footprints made a clumsy line across it.
“Wonderful,” I muttered. “I can’t even draw a straight line anymore.”
The mountain offered no critique.
Inside my exhausted mind appeared Corny, my figure-drawing teacher at CalArts, silver-haired and wearing his battered cowboy hat like a benevolent deity of anatomy.
“Observe the model,” he used to say, “and the line will shape itself.”
I stared at the marks my feet had made in the pristine snow—less a line than a circle, intersecting with itself into an incomprehensible doodle.
Then, out of nowhere, came the voices of relatives who had warned me against studying abroad.
“We told you.”
“Foreign education is a rich man’s dream.”
“He thinks he has talent.”
Their voices repeated until language became growling.
At that precise moment, a real pack of dogs appeared, chasing a mother monkey carrying an infant.
Something in me surrendered.
I barked.
The dogs stopped, apparently shocked to discover a larger and less stable animal on the mountain. They scattered. The monkey climbed a tree, shook snow from a branch, and looked down at me with what I chose to interpret as gratitude.
I began laughing, then crying.
From below came the bells of Namgyal Monastery in McLeod Ganj, reminding me that I was late for a meeting with monks who had agreed to evaluate my story—the story I had been revising through my months in Dharamshala, only days before Frank’s arrival.
This was not how I had imagined presenting myself to the monks: hurried, breathless, and already apologizing before the story had even begun.
The monks gathered around me in a café in McLeod Ganj. They sat in maroon robes, listening with extraordinary stillness.
I had been trained in Los Angeles to read an audience. A raised eyebrow suggested doubt. A laugh offered permission to continue. A glance toward the door announced that the meeting had ended spiritually, even if the body remained.
The monks gave me nothing.
No smiles. No frowns. No encouraging nods.
My entire storytelling method collapsed.
I had traveled to learn how Buddhists responded to my story. Instead, I discovered that I did not know how to perceive their response.
Their stillness exposed something unflattering. I watched audiences not only to understand them, but to determine whether I was safe.
So I began recalibrating.
I abandoned the original English pitch. I shifted into Hindi where I could. One monk answered unexpectedly in Kannada. I reached for Tibetan words I had learned, then for Buddhist abstractions I hoped might travel further than the familiar shorthand of animation and Hollywood storytelling.
Nothing produced the reassurance I was looking for.
Eventually, unable to extract approval from their faces, I stopped performing for it. I returned to the emotional truth that had first made me tell the story.
The monks remained still.
But their presence no longer felt empty.
When I finished, one by one they broke the silence.
One asked in Tibetan, “You Buddhist?”
“No. Why? Is there something wrong?”
Another asked, in Kannada, “Where did this story come from?”
“A dream,” I said. “But I have revised it many times.”
A skinny monk asked in Hindi, “Are you a monk?”
“How could I be a monk if I am not Buddhist?”
While I scribbled their questions into a notebook, one monk reached toward my laptop.
The others leaned in.
Five shaved heads and several folds of maroon cloth suddenly covered the screen.
For one magnificent second, I believed they were studying my designs.
They began talking rapidly among themselves in Tibetan.
I understood only fragments of their exchange in the moment. What follows is reconstructed from those fragments and from the conversation as I remember it.
One monk examined the screen carefully. “These look almost like studies for White Tara,” he said. “But where is the grid? There are no prescribed measurements. No seven eyes. The forms are free. Look at the hands, the posture, the face. They are completely earthly.”
The skinny monk leaned closer. “Yes. When we paint Tara, Chenrezig, or a protector like Mahakala, there are measurements, attributes, gestures, positions. The image has a discipline.”
He pointed at the screen. “When we show samsara, we have the Wheel of Life. When we map a tantric world, we have the mandala.”
He paused.
“But this—”
Another monk shifted so he could see better.
“This is samsara.”
Then the skinny monk looked at me.
“And he has been drawing it.”
The others burst out laughing.
I still could not see the screen.
Then they moved aside.
On it glowed my nude figure drawings from Corny’s figure-drawing class: shoulders, hips, breasts, torsos, and every contour this remarkable master had corrected.
Western art-school nakedness had appeared in full view at a gathering of Tibetan Buddhist monks in McLeod Ganj.
I lunged for the computer too late.
The young lad serving chai looked at the drawings, then at the monks, then at me. He grinned with the expression of someone who had just encountered a spiritual teaching transmitted without language, yet somehow landing perfectly well across cultures.
The monks did not condemn me.
They had done something worse for my composure: they had examined the drawings seriously, incorporated them into a discussion of Buddhist art, declared them evidence of samsara, and only then laughed.
Their laughter was not the laughter I feared, though I had been spectacularly exposed by my own laptop.
It had the rising rhythm of release.
One monk covered his mouth. Another leaned back, palm open, in a small amused gesture I wanted, perhaps too conveniently, to read as: yes, this too belongs to the teaching.
Whether that was what he meant, I could not know.
The chai boy’s grin completed the composition.
For a moment, the café arranged itself like an accidental thangka. The monks in maroon gathered around the glowing screen. The naked Western studies occupied the center like improper deities. The chai boy stood to one side, delighted guardian of the threshold. I hovered nearby, half student, half culprit, a figure caught between worlds and unable to decide whether to prostrate, apologize, or close the laptop.
There was no iconometric grid to organize any of us.
The skinny monk turned to me.
“You are a monk,” he declared in Hindi. “You just don’t know it yet.”
I was unsure whether this was spiritual recognition, affectionate teasing, or a translation problem.
Difference had not disappeared. It had become inhabitable.
When Frank came to Dharamshala in 2005, he helped pave my return to CalArts. The C.I.A. cap was his promise made visible.
Frank made my education possible. Kim showed me how to approach another knowledge tradition without treating it as raw material. The monks turned my failure to interpret them into a form of learning.
None asked me to stop being who I was.
Each asked me to become capable of meeting what I was not.
Years later, I would give this inquiry a name: Visceral Narrative Environments.
At the time, I knew only that my familiar signals had stopped working—and that their failure had not ended the encounter.
Before VNE became a theory, it was an interrupted life repaired through relation.
Before the research, there was a misunderstanding.
Before the story, there was a gesture.
And someone willing to bring me home—while accidentally making me look like the least subtle intelligence operation in the Himalayas.
From The World Between Us: Negotiating Reality Across Difference. © 2026 Gurachi Phoenix.