Daughter of Buddha: An 11-Year-Old Girl’s Life in a Myanmar Monastery | Kids on the Silk Road

The 11-year-old girl, Hninn, lives in a small village in Myanmar with her parents and siblings. In Myanmar people believe in karma. If you earn good karma, you can have a better life. One day, two nuns pay Hninn and her classmates a visit and tell them about the purpose of being a nun. After listening to the nuns, Hninn gets inspired and wants to become a nun too. She wants to become a daughter of Buddha, so that she can enrich her future and be happy.

To become a nun, Hninn has to shave all of her hair off, meditate every day and say goodbye to her family and go live in a monastery.

As a nun Hninn can’t do just whatever she wants anymore. She can’t go bathing in the river like she did before, and she is not allowed to play with her friends or even sing. She needs to do a lot of chores to collect karma.

Hninn loves to meditate but it is very tough not seeing her family every day. She misses them a lot. Now Hninn needs to define what karma means to her and what she will do to have a good life.

The Silk Road was an ancient network of trade routes that were central to cultural interaction connecting the East and West. It created curiosity among cultures, for example with tea and silk from China suddenly sold in Venice. The trading may be a thing of the past, but the culture is still there… We chose the Silk Road because we want to show the kids how colorful the world is and to create understanding and curiosity of the different cultures. What if we all had less prejudice and more curiosity? Would the world be more colorful and less hierarchical? Would there be more empathy? Could we in the West try to learn from other cultures?

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Chapters
▷ 00:00 - Intro
▷ 00:29 - Karma Girl - Kids on the Silk Road (Myanmar)
▷ 20:26 - Credits

Original title: Karma Girl - Kids on the Silk Road (S2/E3)
A film by Jens Pedersen, Kaspar Astrup Schröder, Simon Lereng Wilmont & Camilla Magid
© 2020, Licensed by Autlook