The Buddhist

Daisy MacCallum, a native Scot who came to the U.S. as a young girl, is now seventy years old, living the simple life of a Buddhist at a Tibetan monastery in Pennsylvania. Her grown children, Mac and Jennie, see Daisy's “calling” as fitting right in with the other strange doings of their odd mother’s life. Privately, they refer to it as “Daisy’s Buddhist Thing.”

Daisy becomes seriously ill and decides to let matters of this physical world take their course. But her guru, Rinpoche, the abbot of the monastery where she has been living, reminds her, “You have issues with family, and they have issues with you.” He advises her to resolve these issues and teach them that her passing is a natural part of the transition states of life, death and rebirth.

Daisy reluctantly leaves the monastery and starts the slow and sometimes painful reconciliation. Her son, Mac, with problems in his own family, introduces his mother into that mix, but his wife, Carla, is in no good mood to accept Daisy’s difficult presence. Daisy’s daughter, Jennie, long estranged from her mother, grudgingly accepts Mac’s invitation to join in this “family reunion.” In the steps and missteps that follow, and the back and forth of learning to deal with each other, they begin to come to a new understanding, and Daisy, near the end of her time in the physical world, finally comes to realize that their issues were never more than the individual karmas of each of them, needing to be worked out individually.