Nine lives, nine very different religious paths: A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet
- then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her job & middle-class family in Calcutta to find unexpected love & fulfillment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of each year, a temple dancer & is worshipped as a deity. An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4, 000-line sacred epic that he still knows by heart. A devadasi
- or temple prostitute
- initially resists her own path into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling.