Teiun

School children in Tacoma, Wash, gazed with solemn curiosity last week at their schoolmates Veronica Pratt, 17, and Patrick Pratt, 9, whose British-born mother, Mrs. Sunya Pratt, had just become the first white Buddhist priestess in the U. S.

Before the ornate altar of a Buddhist temple in a Tacoma side street, Julius Goldwater, one of the 50 white Buddhist priests in the U. S., intoned: "This candi date desires ordination." Red-robed Bishop Kenju Masuyama, head of all Buddhist temples in North America, placed a kesa (stole) around the neck of yellow-robed Mrs. Pratt. Chanted she: "I take my refuge in Buddha. I take my refuge in Dharma. I take my refuge in Sangha." Thus Mrs. Pratt entered the life of Upasika Bhikum ("Utmost Perfection of Womanly Virtue"). Taking a new name, Teiun, she continued her old work : teaching U. S. and Japanese Buddhist children in Tacoma.

When Sunya Pratt was 14, her father gave her a number of books, told her to choose her-own religion. She chose Buddhism with "its philosophy of com passion, calmness, emancipation from ignorance and prejudice, its justice." Later she made Buddhists of her children and her husband, J. Wesley Pratt, a traveling salesman. ("It gives them a better understanding, free of all superstition.") But when the children grow up, Mrs. Pratt, now 38, intends to leave them and her home. She will have her head shaved, put on the. yellow robe of a mendicant nun, divest herself of all possessions except a bowl and a prayer chain, "and in the Ori ent enter some retreat or live alone, the homeless life, seeking Nirvana."

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