In the West, I ate beef and bacon with abandon. I was raised on Southern Black cooking. which is all about the pig. Everything–with maybe the exception of dessert–is cooked with bacon fat. The kitchen was never really fully stocked without a coffee can of drippings standing by for the next round of greens, or eggs, or whatever. And beef? As close as the nearest grocery store: steak, hamburger,…
Now I live in an area where eating beef is a stoning offense. Cows are sacred here: they provide the all important milk, which in turn produces butter, yogurt, paneer, and treats like milk fudge. The cows wander freely along the roads, stopping at the produce wallahs’ stalls to graze on the unsellable leavings. They have a serenity about them that Western cows do not. I think the attitude comes from the certainty that they will not be randomly killed for their meat or their hides, and that for the most part they have the right of way over taxis, buses, and even police cars.
A couple weeks back Joy observed that owning a cow here in Himachal is not easy. Feeding a cow and keeping it healthy is hard work. Every day we see farm wives walking along the road, porting the next load of long grass or succulent tree branches for a cow’s next meal. The arable portions of Himachal’s hilly landscape are dedicated to crops of people food. The idea of committing a large parcel of land, and water to keep it green, just for a cow to stay in, is an alien concept. So the whole cow-eating thing, in addition to being a religious misdeed, is also an economic one. Raising a cow just for its meat alone is not economically viable here.
To be fair, Rewalsar is not a vegetarian town, certainly not with its large Tibetan population. Instead, sheep, goats, and chickens take up the slack. Meat buying here is nothing like its Western counterpart: no sterile styrofoam trays or plastic wrap; no additives or preservatives; no neatly shaped identical bits of anything. Instead, there’s a carcass or two in the window, plus various hunks on a counter. You point at the hunk or carcass you want, specify a weight in kilos, and get handed a flimsy plastic bag filled with raw sheepy (or (goaty) bits.
What am I to make of the American way, then, of meat eating? Lately I’ve been reading about a strange phenomenon where people will happily eat meat as long as nothing about it reminds them that the meat actually came from an animal. They eat things that have had all bones, skin and funky innards carefully trimmed away, or have been transformed into sausage or hamburger. They don’t want any reminders that the steak or hamburger or whatever was once a living being that was up and walking around. They don’t want to think about blood, butchery, and guts. There are children who are convinced that milk comes from…a box. Or the store. Certainly not any kind of animal. This is not an attitude I think much of. I could rant about it here, but Barbara Fisher over at Tigers and Strawberries did it a lot better.
Here such knowledge is unavoidable. There’s no way to purchase meat or a meat-based meal here without knowing these things. In our favorite momo restaurant, the meat is chopped and prepped on a tree stump, and fed through the grinder, right next to the tables. Herds of sheep and goats occasionally clog the road as they travel from one grazing spot to the next. Every day, as I walk down the path the town, I pass the neighbor’s cows, one of whom provides the morning milk. Sometimes I’ll say a few manis for them as I go by. The idea of ignoring what these creatures give for my table (and my cat dishes) is absurd.
In the midst of all this gastronomic pondering, the Dharma friend of a Dharma friend happened by the house. (Hi, Lise!) She dropped off as a gift a small book titled The Udamwara Lotus Flower Protecting the Life of Helpless Beings: Statements from sutra relating to the eating of meat, by Geshe Thubten Soepa. Wow, talk about timely. But sometimes, the Dharma just be like dat, you know? I haven’t finished the book yet, but it relays beautiful quotes from the various sutras about meat eating, and the conditions under which you can do it. It’s an interesting work, because so many Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists are meat eaters, following the traditions of their high-altitude diet. Western Buddhists who believe that all Buddhists are vegetarian tend to be a little startled when they encounter their first lama or ani sedately dining on a plate of momos, or slicing tidbits off the bone of a nice piece of pressure-cooked mutton.
The Tibetans worked out a few compromises. It’s not evil to eat meat that has not been killed specifically for that purpose–say, if a sheep or yak simply missteps and falls down a steep hillside, slice it up and put it in your cook pot. Too, there’s a belief that it’s better karmically to kill a large animal for food, and thus feed a lot of people at once, than it is to kill a much smaller one for only one or two folks. So no birds, fish, or bugs (like shrimp or lobster) in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist diet. (Anyone who’s gone for the all-you-can-eat Shrimp platters at Sizzler can feel really guilty now.) At a meal featuring meat, there’s also a meat blessing to be said over the plates before eating, to improve the animal’s karma for having fed others. Ignorance, by the way, is not a virtue: according to Udamwara Lotus, if you can’t tell whether the meat got to your table appropriately, you shouldn’t eat it.
So far the most startling thing is this quote from the Angulimala Sutra, discussing the cat situation by name. Cats, unlike people, are dedicated carnivores, despite the millennia of domestication.
“…beings that have previously been cats, constantly attached to eating meat, and beings that reject Buddha nature will all become rakshas [blood-thirsty cannibals] resembling cats. In the future, too, beings that have taken the form of cat-like rakshas and find killing others and meat-eating irresistible, will be the same as beings that have turned away from Buddha nature.”
That’s pretty plain. But what about short-lived kitties like Smoke, and Tiger, who moved on to their next incarnations never having tasted meat, or developed a craving for it? And having received a blessing from an enlightened master beforehand? Hm….
One other Buddhist practice I want to touch on is the one of liberating animals. In this practice animals are bought back from butchers and pet shops, and released back into the wild to live more natural lives. In the West this practice may be as prosaic as buying a bunch of worms and sardines from the bait shop, and releasing them back into the countryside, or the seashore. Here in India and nearby countries, it’s not uncommon for practictioners to buy sheeps, goats and chickens for release. I don’t know how many creatures our teacher Lama Wangdor Rimpoche has liberated, but I understand it’s quite a few. One very good Dharma of ours in the West added something extra to her practice of animal liberation: each animal her teacher ceremonially liberated, she stopped eating. The year he released fish, she stopped eating fish; the year he released some sheep, she stopped eating mutton, and so on.
Outside of Buddhism, there’s an interesting animal-liberating concept that’s gaining in popularity: sustainability. Critics of America’s methods of industrial food production point out that the big-business farm methods produce food that is less healthy, increase animal suffering, damage the environment, and make it economically desirable to buy processed food preserved with chemicals, rather than fresh produce and dairy products. These methods are doable, certainly, especially with government subsidies to big agri-business, but they’re not sustainable in the long run. People, animals, and the environment all suffer long-term effects that may take generations to recover from.
In sustainable methods, farmers and ranchers work on a smaller scale, allowing animals to range freely, and making sure their methods make environmental sense. One of the side-effects of sustainability is that as it gains in popularity, more and more people are thinking about what they eat. There’s a mindfulness to learning the backstory of one’s groceries that somewhat resembles the mindfulness of determining whether the meat on the menu is karmically sound.
Americans. Thinking about what they eat. Crazy, ain’t it? Or am I crazy, for not thinking about what I eat, until I shifted countries?
April 26th, 2007
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Rewalsar is a small Indian hill town. It’s not Delhi, or Mumbai, or Bangalore.
This being so, living in a house just outside Rewalsar means more than a few lifestyle changes. Occasionally I’ll get a bit of mental whiplash when I look back on the differences between the modern life I had in the Bay Area, and here. Just to give you guys a taste, I thought I’d spend this post listing some examples…
1) Making Coffee:
Bay Area: The night before, pre-load coffee-maker with ground coffee and water.
The next morning, stagger out of bed and into kitchen. Push button on coffeemaker. When the coffee’s done, pour and add fixin’s. Drink.
Rewalsar: The night before, fire up the stovetop (see below) with an electronic lighter. Fill up the humongous teakettle with water, and wait for it to boil. This is a good time for a few rounds of a sock or sweater. Once the water boils, pull over a footstool and put the water flask on it for ease of filling. As always, marvel at the the amazing way the flask keeps liquids hot for, like, ever. Everyone in town has at least a couple of these things, designed to keep tea hot during a day of visits from friends and neighbors. The flasks are a kind of super-thermos that use cork stoppers. After filling the flasks, place on counter to await the morning coffee-making procedure.
In the morning, stagger out of bed and go on kora. About an hour and a half later, put a drip filter over a different flask, and pour hot (Yes! Still extremely hot!) water through the coffee. Once the water pours through, pour coffee and add fixin’s. Drink.
2) Acquiring milk:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive to Safeway. Buy milk. Take home, place in fridge.
Rewalsar: In the morning, wait for a small Indian child (the son of our landlord) to call “Auntie?” through the front gate. Open gate and offer small cook pot for child to pour milk into. Reward child for bringing the milk with a toffee, or a piece of fruit. Reward cow for supplying the milk with a bunch of vegetable trimmings from last night’s supper, by handing it to the child. This milk is usually still body temperature from the cow. If I were a more “eat
local“-obsessive foodie, and had the Hindi vocabulary for it, I could probably find out which udder the milk came from. Stick pot on stovetop. Fire up the stovetop with the trusty lighter, and heat milk to foaming. Take milk off burner. Once milk cools, place in fridge.
3) Using a gas stove:
Bay Area: turn knob. When burner puts out blue flames, adjust height with knob and start cooking. No gas? Call the gas company.
Rewalsar: turn knob and listen for hissing gas. Put the trusty lighter next to the burner, and click the button-trigger. When burner puts out blue flames, adjust height with knob and start cooking. No gas? Switch the hose connector from your empty propane tank to a full one. Meantime, it’s time to get the empty one replaced.
Editrix’s note: everyone uses propane-fueled stovetops. The only true ovens in Rewalsar belong to bakeries. The tanks are a combination of reliable and indestructible, sporting a collection of dirt and dings from hard use. It’s not uncommon to see a chai-wallah sitting right next to the tank attached to his stovetop, smoking a cigarette or bidi while brewing the next glass. One of the tanks’ big advantages is that they work during power outages. Try that with your microwave.
To get the tank exchanged, ask neighbors when the gas truck will be coming through. If the truck isn’t coming today, give thanks for your second tank. Otherwise, everyone checks along the road to see if they can spot the truck. Whoever sees it first goes to the other houses to let folks know it’s time to drag out the empty tank downstairs and to the side of the road. An alternate alert method is to listen for a distinct “CLANG” from next door. The family matriarch, rather than drag the tank downstairs, simply tips it off her balcony. The tank will land next to the road, just in the right place where a propane-wallah can hop off the back of the truck, grab it and exchange it for a full one.
Meantime, a second propane-wallah carrying a purse hops out of the truck. Hand this man your money for the tank. Then go to the truck’s driver, and hand over your gas customer book–this book tracks your gas deliveries. The driver makes notations in the book and hands it back. Now for the fun part: dragging a full propane tank back upstairs.
4) Getting a snack:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive 4 blocks to 7-11. Buy Slurpee, preferably blue, or Pringles. Drive home.
Rewalsar: Leave house. Walk down path to town:
Go to general needs store. Purchase potato chips, or an Indian snack like aloo bhujia, and cold soda. Alternately, stop by a namkeen (snack) wallah for a few pani-puri. Walk back up path, or catch a bus or rickshaw.
5) Feeding a cat:
Bay Area: Get in car. Drive to PetCo. Buy bag of food. Go home, and open bag. (Do not have cat help you.) Pour food in bowl. Place in front of ravenous cat.
Rewalsar: Leave house. Walk down path (see above) to town . Go to Butcher.
Look at carcass hanging in window. If the tail is long and hairy, it’s goat; if it’s a bit thicker and woollier, it’s mutton. Then check out bits on butcher’s counter. Ask for a kilo of meat, and have him hack it into small bits. Ignore flies in butcher shop. The butcher will hand over a flimsy plastic bag filled with meat bits. Take bits home.
Once home, cut bits even smaller, removing any bone chips and tough, stringy tendons. (Do not have cat help you.) Small reject bits with meat attached can be fed to ravenous cat immediately. Place bits in blender. Crush several washed eggshells to small powdery bits, and add to blender. Then add a couple handfuls of cooked rice or tsampa (ground roasted barley). Blend to a paste. Put half in fridge, half in freezer. When cat asks you what happened to the rest of the meat you bought, put one serving in a bowl, and place in front of ravenous cat.
April 18th, 2007
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There’s a brief teaching my dharma teacher Wangdor Rimpoche gives frequently. It’s a favorite of mine. In the middle of a lengthier Dzogchen transmission, he looks around the room, smiles, and says, “You know, you’re all gonna die someday.” And then he laughs.
And then everyone else laughs.
Everybody laughs because what he’s saying is perfectly true. And because it takes an enlightened master to remind us of something obvious we don’t usually think about. For whatever reason though, we seem to be in a time when, like it or not, we have to think about it.
After posting about Tiger yesterday, I got a number of heartfelt comments. Long distance hugs to y’all. Sarah’s comment gave me quite a shock. You see, on this end of the planet US news doesn’t come out this way very often. Yes, some folks have TV, but they mostly use it to watch either broadcasts from His Holiness (if they’re Tibetan) or bad Bollywood movies from 1968 (if they’re Indian). Newspapers tend to focus on regional happenings here in the state of Himachal Pradesh. So you can imagine how it felt to read about this catastrophe out at Virginia Tech. One lone crazy person with a gun. 33 fatalities. Hundreds of relatives to wonder “Why? Why the fuck did that have to happen?”
This morning I did what I could do: go down to the lake on kora, and say extra prayers for the lost and wounded. Healing prayers for those suffering grief. General prayers to cope with the unconscious cruelty of big K Karma.
Yesterday Pia and I had long discussions about karma, and what it meant for Tiger, and for Chime, and the tom intent on killing her brood. The tomcat may not really consciously think in so many words, “I’m gonna kill me some kittens today.” It’s just part of the evolutionary programming for securing territory. Where we got to with it is that the tom’s instinct for kitty-killing is one of the hellish aspects of the animal realms, dooming him to a lower rebirth as a bug or something until he could get past such bad karma.
But what about human youngling killers? What are we to think of them? After all, they’re not operating on instinct. They really do get up in the morning and think “I’m gonna kill me some kids today.” The easy answer is that they’ll end up in some hell realm or other for a few hundred millenia. And some day, they’ll begin the slow accumulation of better karma.
How lives happen, how deaths happen…seems there’s no escaping the great wheel.
I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones recently. The big “Why?” question seems to be reverberating in a lot of heads right now. In India catastrophes on the scale of Virginia Tech happen pretty frequently–trains derail and buses go over the high side. A common story in the Indian news these days is about the farmers who are so far in debt they’re committing suicide as a way out of their situations.
Then there’s the other side of the wheel, the one headed upwards. For every bit of horrible downward karma there seems to be good stuff headed up. There are all those people who, when faced with a disaster, rush to help rather than stand back or run away. Or those folks who are willing to just listen, or offer a shoulder to cry on when tears come. We often ponder Chime’s karma in taking shelter in our house to begin with, and getting all of her kittens blessed by an enlightened master. There’s this idea that Smoke (and maybe Tiger) will return as humans someday.
I wonder what they’ll be like. Maybe they’ll be people who’ll help others get further up the wheel of karma..
April 16th, 2007
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*sigh*
I really didn’t want to write this blog post. But, having written about the times and travails of Chime and her brood, I’d be remiss if I didn’t describe the next adventure…
The tom got Tiger today. Pia, Malka and I were all home. The first we knew of a problem was the sound of a cat fight issuing from Chime’s area. By the time we all stampeded into the hallway, the only things visible were two cats disappearing out through the front gate, one carrying a dark-toned tabby kitten, the other chasing hard on his heels.
I quickly gathered up Leopard, and held her close. Then we waited for Chime to return. Once she was back, mother and kitten had a somewhat tentative reunion, sniffing and washing as if to make sure the other was there. Both cats seemed discombobulated a bit as they sniffed and felt around and around in the box for the vanished Tiger. The rest of us are left pondering Tiger’s karma, and wondering about this aspect of Nature’s Grand Design.
*sigh*
This is the ugly side of life here. Dogs, cats and monkeys all reproduce as much as they can. There’s no knowing what fate is in store for a baby other than that the sun will rise tomorrow. Everything else is in the lap of the gods. On kora, once, I watched a baby monkey make a perfect jump from a tree branch. Its landing spot happened to be an electrical transformer. There was a loud pop, and then the rushing sound of the monkey’s mother diving in to rescue the body. The monkey troop moved on. On another kora, I watched a number of new-born puppies playing in the street. The runt of the litter struggled to keep up, moving slowly and clumsily after its mates. I just looked at the little thing, and knew. It died shortly afterwards. Several of the puppy’s littermates fell prey to fast-moving taxis.
Even the people here carry something of this attitude. I remember visiting our landlord’s house, where several female relatives were out in the courtyard, soaking up some winter sun. One was tending her newborn. I asked the baby’s name, and was informed it didn’t have one yet. People here wait a couple of months to name a child, when they’re more certain it’ll survive.
I should probably write something more soothing and inspirational here. Something that will take a bit of sting out of the loss. But, you know what? I got nothin’.
April 16th, 2007
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“Mehla” means “festival.”
One of the first things a Westerner might notice about India is the sheer number of festivals and holidays. Every couple of weeks, it seems, there’s another holiday honoring a god, a season, or some aspect of the family. Rural India, our friend Pia tells me, has so many festivals because they provide a kind of emotional relief for the poor. For a day (or two), even the poorest person can stop work, put on their best clothes, sing, dance, and eat treats they don’t normally do.
Well, the latest mehla to rumble through Rewalsar is Baisakhi Mehla, a festival marking the Punjabi new year. After all the madness that was Losar/Kumbh Mehla/Shivatri etc., I thought we were due for a little normalcy. But, um, no. Baisakhi is significant to the Sikh religion. And just to add to the festivities, Baisakhi also coincides with the Hindu New Year. Since Rewalsar is home to a pilgrimage site that’s holy to both Sikhs and Hindus as well as Tibetans, people are properly motivated to put on a party. Or two. Or six. The town’s population has literally tripled with the sudden influx of annual pilgrims and vendors. That’s how the sleepy area around the Hindu temples turned from this….
to this:
The Sikhs have festooned Rewalsar’s gurudwara with enough holiday lights to illumine the entire valley. The Hindus, in turn, have also dressed their temples in lights. So far the last couple of days, street lights aren’t really necessary in our neck of the woods. Or, for that matter, night lights. As with most religious festivals, the bells, drums and chanting started nice and early around 5:30 AM Saturday. Actually, they didn’t start at 5:30, because they hadn’t really stopped from the night before. During the day both Sikhs and Hindus had their respective processions. The Sikh procession included a group of blue-garbed warriors demonstrating their martial arts sword-swinging skills. One of the things I like about the Sikh religion is the sheer practicality of the “fifth K“– carry a nice sharp “kirpan” (sword) with you at all times, in case you need to defend yourself or the helpless and oppressed from any godless idiots who don’t know no better. Meantime, the Hindu processions included parade after parade of local gods from the surrounding villages. For Baisakhi these deities all wander down from the hills, to the sound of drums, flutes, and horns, and have a big convo down by the temple. Each one also goes on kora around the lake, and pays obeisance to the big honchos like Shiva and Ganesh.
Despite all the religious hoo-hah, though, Baisakhi is really about two things for most folks: eating and shopping. This is one of the holidays where villagers and pilgrims who don’t normally come to Rewalsar actually trouble to make the trip, piling themselves and about 8 or 10 other family members into a jeep or truck to get here. The first wave of visitors are itinerant vendors, hoping to making a killing within the three days or so of the festival. The kora path on both sides is solid with vendor booths. By 5 or 6 o’clock they’re all awake already, making breakfast, washing up, setting up their wares. The Sikh dentist-optician wallahs are the most surreal: they have tables out, filled with dentures, crowns, and eyeglasses. I’ve actually been told the dentist wallahs are pretty good, bearing in mind that anything they put in your mouth has been sitting out on the table in the street for a while, with the dust and the cows and the dogs. Okay! Moving on!
With all of the vendors selling …
shoes, bracelets, underwear, cap guns, plastic storage containers, stove lighters, knives, coffee cups, radios, belts, chappali, bubble toys, foil hats, fresh pressed sugar cane juice, posters of the gods, vermilion powders, “action bindi”, curtains, dolls, glassware, neon-toned plastic flowers, Vedic astrology readings, jalebis, socks, watches, silverware, plastic buckets, jewelry, hair ties, fabric, toy kitchenware, “ready-made” children’s clothes, samosas, “OM” stickers, buzzing toy magnets, flutes, peacock feather fans, dhoop (incense), toe rings, pepper peelers, soaps, cosmetics, pujabhu (ceremonial Hindu puja plates), bill hooks, axe heads, and so on….
…the kora path looks like someone exploded a K-Mart (or maybe a Woolworth’s–remember them?) and artlessly dropped the various shelves around the lake. Then there is the pasture/playing field north of the lake, which in normal times is home to maybe a few piles of construction materials and the hard-working horses who carry it up into the hills. Every so often the monklets from the different gonpas will play a cricket match. Now, the same field looks a little different:
Like everything else in this part of India, the carnival rides are carried in and pretty much assembled by hand. There’s a lot of screaming involved whenever these things are in operation, but whether the screaming is happening out of happiness or fear is beyond me. As a spectator–especially one who’s seen the rides being assembled by hand–I would vote for fear, but that’s just me.
By far the trippiest aspect of Baisakhi is the traffic jams in front of the house, which is nowhere near town. Yesterday a bus, two jeeps, and two scooters vied for dominance over the one-lane road that runs between Rewalsar and some villages to the west and the holy caves. All vehicles were literally stuffed to bursting with people. I think each scooter was carrying a family of four. Just for reference, a typical Rewalsar traffic jam happens maybe once a week, and looks like this:
April 14th, 2007
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Happy Friday the 13th!
April 12th, 2007
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Those of you following along with Joy’s blog may remember Chime (pronounced Chim-eh), the socialized Tibetan kitty who moved in and promptly became a babymomma. Well, Chime and her chilluns have had their share of adventures already. You folks who cry easily at overwhelming combinations of cuteness, sadness, and family feelings can safely skip this post.
Editrix’ note: as you might have figured out by now, the phone numbers…of DOOM…were not in fact very DOOM-y. While our friends in Tso Pema completely believed in the lethal effect of the phone numbers listed, in fact not much happened when you dialed them. Lena proceeded to give one good friend of ours conniptions by grabbing his cell phone and dialing, to see what would happen. It was good for a chuckle. Alrighty then. Moving on…
Chime had three kitties: Tiger, a dark-toned striped tabby; Leopard, a lighter-toned tabby, and Smoke, who came out solid gray.
Lama Wangdor Rimpoche blessed them all before leaving for the States. Shortly after Chime moved in came a tom cat who decided he wanted our house to be his territory thank you very much, and he made several attempts to get at the new-born kittens. Chime and her brood were put in protective custody in Joy and Lena’s bedroom because this tom was so persistent.
Girlgeek that I am, I Google’d this behavior. I’ve never seen anything like this before. The cat site I found sez toms do this as a territorial thing when they’re not the babydaddy–they kill the kittens so the queen goes back into heat, ensuring any kittens that come along later are really theirs. How, or why, cats evolved this survival of the daddybaby fittest is beyond me.
Man, evolution is just like gravity sometimes–it really sucks…
On the whole cats in our part of India are wild, *not* domesticated. The large dog population also means that cats are few and shy and stealthy. There simply isn’t a cultural set-up for keeping pets. Animals stay outdoors, people can go indoors. That’s pretty much how it works. There’s only two other people in town I know of who keep cats as pets. Chime is something of an exception–she’s well socialized to people, and answers to things said to her in Tibetan. She also eats momos like a Khampa. The lack of any cultural setting for pet ownership here also means all the accoutrements are also missing. Pet food? 12 hours away, in Delhi. Flea powder? Ditto. Kitty litter? Ya gotta be kiddin’. After weeks of feeding Chime on an “edited” Tibetan diet–namely all the mutton, eggs and dairy she can eat–the days when Joy and Lena and I raised a possum on some super-duper all-organic kitty crunchy nuggets seem like some sort of fairy tale. I can just imagine the looks of bewilderment I would get if I tried to describe this politically-correct cat chow to folks here in Rewalsar. But I digress…
Presumably the tom will stop going after the kittens after they’ve grown to a certain size, and look more like fellow cats than prey. So Chime and her brood are staying safely in their bedroom fort, Tiger and Leopard nursing and sleeping and so on as young ‘uns do.
Smoke, unfortunately, didn’t stay with this program. There’s no way to tell what happened to her. She stopped nursing, had breathing difficulties, and started crawling away from her litter mates. Chime just let her be. Years ago on a fiber arts mailing list, a good friend explained this phenomenon. Some animals can smell when a kit in the litter has been born with Something Seriously Wrong, and simply neglect the blighted offspring, because there’s no point in helping it survive. She also wrote about how when this phenomenon starts happening, any good-natured human rescue operations are pretty much doomed. The only two options–both of which suck–are to either let the kit die, or kill it if it’s really suffering. Whatever went wrong with Smoke, it killed her before she grew very big. Chime smelled something wrong, and by the next day it was obvious Smoke wasn’t going to make it.
Chime and the others were in the box with Smoke when she passed away. Poor Malka, our gentle-natured vegan bhi-bhi, was upset by seeing the little body when I laid it out on a katak. Pia, who is mother to a tulku (reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist Rimpoche) and was staying at the house, chanted a few manis and other prayers over Smoke’s body. Afterwards Pia and I talked a bit about Smoke’s karma. I posted a bit about animal karma in Tso Pema earlier: there’s a certain number of little baby animals–monkeys, dogs, and such–who end up dying after only a few days or weeks of life. It’s one of those things that makes me wonder about the Master Plan. Anyway, we think Smoke expiated some bad karma with her short life–although she didn’t live long, she survived just long enough to be born in our house with all of its juju, and have Rimpoche give her blessings. We decided the little kitten actually had a decent shot at a human rebirth.
Smoke lived up to her name. I took her down on kora. We went around the lake once, I sprinkled some of the lake water on her, and cremated her over by the prayer flags. Some monkeys stopped by to witness the whole thing. Pia also gave me special incense and camphor to burn with the body. A cairn went over the ashes, and afterwards Smoke’s katak went up with the prayer flags.
*sigh*
Meanwhile, back at the ranch….Tiger and Leopard are growing in size and cuteness. They haven’t quite mastered walking yet, but when they do…well, that’ll be another blog post.
April 11th, 2007
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So last week was kinda interesting, because a number of people stopped answering their cell phones. After a couple of conversations with Tibetan friends, Lena ferreted out the truth. They weren’t picking up calls because there were a couple of phone numbers…OF DOOM…that were known to kill people who answered calls from these numbers on their cell phones. Our friends all had stories they’d heard about folks who had just keeled right over dead, right after answering a call from one of the phone numbers…OF DOOM.
Except for the story of this one guy, who only ended up paralyzed, because when he got a call from one of the phone numbers…OF DOOM…he canceled the call, rather than answer it.
And who am I to question such things? I get up every morning to walk around a lake that’s supposed to be there because Padmasambhava wouldn’t burn properly.
Anyway, about the phone numbers…OF DOOM…should you receive a call from any of the Indian (country code 91) phone numbers below. DON’T PICK UP. ‘Mkay?
9888308001
9876725587
9816085868
No need to thank me. Your happiness–and mobile phone safety–are all that matter.
April 1st, 2007
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