An Apocryphal Shaggy Dog Story
While in town today, a friend told me this tale of a dog’s life.
In Dharamsala, the monks at one monastery were undergoing shedra. This is a seven year course of religious study, during which the monks not only have to memorize many of the precious texts, but be able to debate their various philosophical points.
Seven years ago, a dog began to attend classes at the shedra. It consistently attended all the lectures, sitting patiently and listening along with the monks. When the class of monks progressed along to their second year of shedra, the dog followed along. Like them, it went to the second year lectures, and no longer attended first year classes.
The dog also began to attend the group philosophical debates that make up a large part of the shedra experience. It’s required that a monk not only know his texts, but understand them, well enough to defend his view of them against other views. When the monks met for debate, the dog met with them. It would listen to others make their points, and occasionally bark out one of its own. At every debate it would go around to all the monks, carefully looking over each one as if checking attendance.
When the monks passed into their third year of shedra, the dog followed. And again for the fourth year. And the fifth. And the sixth, and finally, the seventh.
By now most monks in the shedra were of the opinion that the dog would eventually become a khenpo–either a philosophical master who could ordain other monks, or even the abbot of its own monastery. But, in the ordinary scheme of things, a dog can not become a khenpo.
Not without dying first, and being reborn as a human….
So it was that just last week, near the end of the dog’s seventh year of shedra, right before its graduation…a rabies epidemic swept through Dharamsala’s canine population. 15 people were bitten, and as I write this, are still undergoing treatment with a series of rabies vaccine shots. 25 dogs came down with rabies, and one of them was this dog. All 25 dogs were put down.
Elsewhere I’ve written about how karma and the cycle of death and rebirth involve all creatures here, not just the human ones. It’s stories like this that remind me how anyone can become something else, either lower down the food chain, or much higher, throught the expiation of karma.
Now I’m wondering: will that class of shedra students ever go looking for their classmate, among Dharamsala’s children? Might they find a child who can easily outwit his elders in debate….and is afraid of water?
