Another Path to Enlightenment : Lifestyle: At age 48, a longtime soul-searcher trades his cushy job and toys for a simple life of chanting, chores and celibacy as a monk.

Two years ago, Joe Nevotti had a new car, a sailboat and an apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay that he shared with a girlfriend. The stuff, he says, “most people would have killed for.”

This month, in a ceremony that began with the shaving of the former management consultant’s head and ended with his girlfriend kneeling at his feet, Joseph Richard Nevotti II became a Buddhist monk.

It’s been a rocky, 10-year trek for the onetime Episcopalian, who even ambled across sizzling coals in a quest for fulfillment that led to Wat Thai of North Hollywood, the Buddhist temple where Nevotti has become the third American to be ordained in 20 years.

“He’s quite a rare bird,” says Nampet Panichpant-Michelsen, one of the 100 or so congregants who turned out to support the strapping ex-Marine, for whom temple monks had ordered an “extra-huge” saffron robe. “It’s such a rare occurrence. That’s why all the Thais are emerging.”

Now, Nevotti anticipates at least a year of chanting, chores and celibacy. The car and boat are history.

“Those were just sort of details,” he says, “not particularly important.” The gut-wrenching step, he says, was giving up his girlfriend, Marty Donahoe.

Donahoe, 47, who flew from San Francisco to support Nevotti and returned home to an empty apartment, was also buffeted by emotions. At the close of the head-shaving ceremony, she wept.

“I’m very sad,” she says, “and happy.”

Two days after losing her man to what one Thai woman called the world’s “oldest fraternity,” Donahoe was less fuzzy about her emotions: What she felt was abandoned.

“Yesterday, I was sort of raging and crying all day,” she conceded.

And what about Nevotti, a Ph.D. pushing 50 who once read four newspapers a day and watched three television channels at once, the remote control glued to his palm? Is this a midlife crisis without the red Corvette?

As Nevotti describes it, the phenomenon that erased his former life is more complex than yuppie Angst. After years of intense soul-sifting, the “boy from Omaha, Neb.,” as he calls himself, is accepting the paradox of his life. He is “coming home,” to foreign territory.

“I’m an outsider because I’m a Westerner and because I can’t speak their language,” he says, referring to the 15 or so resident monks with whom he will share the temple grounds. “But I’ve never been made more welcome or more a part of any place I have ever been.”

A recovering alcoholic with two grown children and three divorces, Nevotti credits Alcoholics Anonymous with turning his life around and paving the way toward Buddhism.

“I could barely spell spirituality 10 years ago, before I went to my first AA meeting,” says Nevotti, who plans to open the temple’s community center for weekly AA meetings. “I knew there was this big, gaping hole inside of me, but I had no idea what it was all about.”

But even sober, Nevotti discovered that adult toys offer limited pleasure. The stereo equipment, the art, “all the goodies--it was like they owned me,” he says.

In search of satisfaction, Nevotti attended est seminars, “rebirthing” classes and a self-hypnosis course that included a barefoot trek across 2,000-degree coals. “I was doing a lot of things like that in the early ‘80s, just looking for an answer,” he says.

In 1986, Nevotti broke from Christianity after studying the life of Jesus and becoming convinced that “God . . . is within all of us,” a central tenet of Buddhism. “I recognize the spirit as being something within, as opposed to being something on the outside,” he says.

His spiritual umbilical cord severed, Nevotti dived into the study of Eastern religion, traveling to India and Thailand, where his fascination with Buddhism deepened. His practice of vipassanna meditation--a technique used to clear the mind and control behavior--was another step leading to monkhood.

In January, Nevotti decided to take the plunge. He called Donahoe from a car phone. When she got the news, Donahoe recalls, “it just sort of felt like my whole stomach fell out. I expected him to tell me something, but I guess I just wasn’t prepared. Who would be?”

While Nevotti wears the saffron robe, the two may continue their friendship but may not touch or be alone in a room without another monk present.

Nevotti says he is committed to his new life for at least a year--beyond that, he can’t say. In Thailand, most young men become monks for a short time of “soul ripening” before marriage. For some, the commitment never ends.

“That’s how they all start out, a week, a month, six months,” says Panichpant-Michelsen, who “sponsored” Nevotti into monkhood by vouching for his character and pledging money. “You talk to older monks, they all started out like that.”

As a monk in the Theravada tradition--a conservative branch of Buddhism practiced today in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand--Nevotti, an admittedly impatient man, must now observe 227 rules intended to pave the way toward enlightenment.

But the hardest part so far, he says, is getting his robe on. Four days into monkhood, after an irritating struggle with the unwieldy yardage, Nevotti finally emerged from his living quarters a half-hour late. Speaking briefly to an early visitor, he headed for the temple.

“I’m going to just sit and chill out for a few minutes and let the frustration of my robe pass,” he says. “It’s real frustrating for a 48-year-old man to have to have help getting dressed in the morning.”

Minor annoyances aside, the new monk has no regrets about the turn he took March 8 during a three-hour, tradition-laden ceremony. The rite appeared to transform Nevotti, who joked nervously when the first locks of graying hair were snipped from his head. He smiled less frequently as a silent monk worried over his scalp with an electric razor.

“Should I be solemn?” Nevotti asks.

Cleanshaven, Nevotti changes from his sweat suit into a white robe that signifies he has become “half-man, half-monk” and leads a procession around the temple, a gilded edifice on the corner of Roscoe and Coldwater Canyon boulevards.

Inside, the ceremony turns increasingly sober as Nevotti and a dozen monks gather near the ornate altar. Kneeling, palms pressed together, Nevotti sits in a pool of sunlight on an expanse of maroon carpet, his body shivering steadily as perspiration drips from his face. Then he vanishes behind a wooden screen, emerging moments later with a robe draped over his body, one fleshy shoulder exposed.

Donahoe, who watches from a respectful distance, appears stunned.

As the rite continues, Nevotti is interrogated by two monks whose questions signal the degree to which tradition has clung to this ritual: “Are you human?” “Do you have leprosy?”

Finally, Nevotti makes his promises: He will not kill any living thing, he will not lie, he will not have sexual intercourse. . . .

With a resonating voice, a slender monk pronounces, “Your life is different.”

As the ordination ends, Nevotti settles into a wooden chair as Buddhists line up to offer gifts--envelopes of money, a robe, towels, toothpaste. Donahoe falls into line.

During the following week, Nevotti begins to learn just how different his life really is.

The temple compound--next door to a gas station and across from a Filipino-American Southern Baptist Church--includes an office where monks visit and watch Thai videos, a community center where children attend school and several tract houses on an adjacent street where some monks sleep.

On a recent morning, the monks gather at the temple at 6:45, sitting quietly as the outside world comes noisily to life around them. At 7, at the chiming of a grandfather clock, they begin to chant rhythmically as a tractor scoops broken pavement into a trash bin outside. Thirty minutes later, the chanting stops abruptly and the monks sit in silence.

Next, the cluster of men, Nevotti towering above the others, strolls from the temple to a nearby dining hall where two round tables are laden with deep-fried fish, sausage, pickled cabbage, scrambled eggs, stir-fried broccoli, white rice and a mountain of fresh fruit.

Like an Asian version of “Babette’s Feast,” breakfast keeps coming--barbecued chicken, sliced tomatoes, green onions and fresh cilantro. (Vegetarianism is not mandatory for Theravada monks.)

Lunch, at 11:30, will be similar. From noon to dawn, the monks fast.

Traipitra Sarnsethsin, a meditation trainer, sits at the edge of the room, watching. “Joseph is one of my best students,” she says, beaming. “I am very proud of him.”

Nevotti says the kindness and respect from Asian Buddhists have helped ease him into this new life: “I’ve just been welcomed with open arms. They’re basically as pleased that I’m here as I am.”

Nevotti, however, is still in transition, weaning himself from old habits. “I’m suffering from severe withdrawals,” he admits. “I only read one newspaper in the morning, but I still listen to the MacNeil/Lehrer report in the afternoon.”

Will he be bored or enlightened?

“The person who’s fully responsible for my boredom is me,” Nevotti says. “When I was a layperson, there was always someplace to run. There’s no place to run now.”