When my Chinese professor at Cambridge proposed the idea of going to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan as part of my studies, I grasped it. I am not a Buddhist and I had no interest in becoming one. This five-week trip was not about where I was going, but about what I was leaving behind — a life that I did not particularly want to be living. At 21, I had been suffering for close to a decade from various forms of a fierce, often debilitating eating disorder.

In the past year it had spiralled out of control. My sleeping and eating patterns had, at points, been so off balance that I simply stopped functioning. Living in halls at university, I found myself trapped in the nightmarish loop of bingeing and restricting — a vicious cycle if ever there was one.

My student life alternated between manic, starvation-induced highs and suicidal lows. I locked myself in my room for days at a time, unable to face my own reflection in the mirror. I loathed Me. I had lost touch with what it was to lead a life that didn’t involve malicious voices in my head, irrational fears of food, of people, and enough tears to fill a million times over my half-empty glass. I had done the rounds of psychologists’ couches and paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege and their Prozac prescriptions. But perhaps all I needed was something that during my worst patches had been noticeably lacking — discipline and structure. Like my mother had imposed throughout my happy, healthy childhood. Multiplied by ten. And perhaps, a Buddhist monastery, with its rigid routine, was just the place to find it. A boot camp to rid me of my neuroses.

Not long before I was due to leave, I received an e-mail from the head nun. “And of course, you must be short hair,” she wrote. “How short?” I replied. “Shorter than the ears.”

I had a haircut. My long, glossy hair reduced to a short back and sides. Afterwards, I rushed to Fenwick’s to have my eyebrows threaded and my eyelashes tinted — determined to retain some trace of femininity, savouring this last dose of vanity.

And so I found myself standing at the door of the Karuna Institute of Buddhist Studies, unsure and unprepared, yet this unknown future surely couldn’t be worse than the past I knew. The monastery inhabitants had long since gone to bed. Just one tiny, bespectacled nun had stayed up to welcome me. She put her hands together and shyly mumbled the Buddha’s name as she bowed her head in greeting. She led me silently up two flights of stairs, along a dim corridor and into a small room. I turned around and she had disappeared. I stepped up on to the wooden sleeping platform, spread out the single, thin blanket and slept as if it were a down mattress.

I woke at 11.30 the next morning. The rest of the monastery had been up for seven hours. I emerged from my room to bemused sideways glances. Just out of bed on my first day in a new place, and it was almost bedtime. I spent the few waking hours I had trying to work out what exactly this new place was. The Karuna Institute is essentially a school for monks and nuns. They spend three or four years studying for either a high-school diploma or a higher education degree in Buddhism. They attend classes on meditation and “eminent monks”, and they follow a daily routine incorporating the spiritual, in the form of twice-daily chanting and meditation sessions, and the academic. Students come from all backgrounds. Former teachers, nurses and soldiers as well as factory workers and motorcycle deliverymen are rendered equal and strangely androgynous by their shaved heads.

Their ageless faces are a testimony to their sheltered lives, away from the stresses and strains of the modern world. It is a well-known adage within monastic circles that the age at which you take your monastic vows is the age you stay. One student had become a monk when he was 11. Now 21, he was a Buddhist Peter Pan. He shuffled around in his panda bear slippers shoving chocolate snacks in his mouth as if it was permanently Saturday morning. Puberty, it seemed, had passed him by.

I hated the place from the start. We were prohibited from leaving the monastery complex except for one tantalising day a month. We wore hot, heavy uniforms. I spent most of my time drenched in sweat. I felt claustrophobic.

By way of induction, I spent my first three days chanting, meditating and prostrating to the Buddha. My legs throbbed, my back ached and, five weeks until my flight home, the countdown had already begun.

I was woken at 4.30 each morning by my “room friend” rapping her knuckles on the floor. I would go down to the first chanting session of the day where I would be pushed and prodded until my toes were suitably lined up along an invisible line.

We had hours of classes every day in which we read classical Chinese stories, learnt Chinese history (with an unmistakably Taiwanese slant) and practised calligraphy. Our teachers were brought in from the local village. They treated us as you might treat hospital inpatients, plying us with food and news from outside. We devoured both.

On top of classes, we were also made to clean the monastery daily, from top to bottom.