A special announcement for SF/Bay Area readers who are interested in the Dharma, or Tibetan Buddhism:
Continuing Saturday morning, June 13th in San Anselmo and continuing at various locations around the SF Bay Area through mid-July, Venerable Wangdor Rimpoche will be teaching from the complete text of Kaden Sho Lap, translated as “Flight of the Garuda,” a Dzogchen heart text of the Nyingma lineage. Rimpoche traces the core text back to the words of Padmasambhava himself. He has agreed to do “Flight of the Garuda” in its entirety, including commentaries and transmission of the Direct View of Mind. He will be teaching this over the course of nine or ten sessions (final number depends upon suitable locations.)
To reiterate: you do not have to attend all sessions. Wangdor Rimpoche sincerely hopes that those of you who are in the Bay Area will try to attend as often as possible to receive the transmission and pointing out and hear this beautiful, poetic text for yourselves. As a Dzogchen Heart Text, Flight of the Garuda prepares the dedicated student of Dzogchen meditation to achieve full realization.
Here’s more info about the weekend teaching:
Please call or email for directions.
Phone: 415-454-5243
Alt Phone: 415-497-8890
Email: mountain@energyarts.com
Class times:
11 am to 1pm—First session (Saturday)
1pm to 4pm—Lunch/Unsupervised practice (Saturday)
4pm to 6pm—Second session (Saturday)
10am to 12 noon–Third session (Sunday)
Subtitles for the teaching this weekend will be:
Flight of the Garuda Songs #4 “Initiation into the Nature of Mind”; #5 “Cause of Delusion”; #6 “Recognition of the Nature of Mind”; and possibly #’s 7 and 8– “Mandala of Intrinsic Buddhahood” and “Method of Attaining Utter Certainty” if Rimpoche decides to go that far this weekend. How many songs he decides to give in a given session is decided at the time of the teaching.
The Garuda is a mythical bird renowned for its speed and martial prowess. The Flight of the Garuda is a Tibetan Buddhist text consisting of 23 poetic songs to help meditators attain Dzogchen (Great Perfection) realization—beyond the Karmic wheel of causation.
The aim is to cut through the root of the mind attached to the appearance of phenomena and experience the true nature of mind—the Primordial Awareness. The more experience you have in meditation, the more you will gain from this teaching, however even beginners will benefit from participating in a teaching from such an accomplished Dzogchen Master as Lama Wangdor. We are honored that he has agreed to teach this material.
When you arrive
1. Please do not park in driveway this space will be reserved for Rinpoche.
2. Use available street parking next to residence.
There will be some cushions at event but please bring your own cushions/mats if possible, to leave some available for those who do not have one.
For more info on the where and when of following sessions, you can read the event calendar.
After this weekend, these precious teachings will continue on July 4th, in Berkeley, CA, 10:30 AM at the Dondrup Ling Center.
June 12th, 2009
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A special announcement for SF/Bay Area readers who are interested in the Dharma, or Tibetan Buddhism:
Beginning Wednesday night, June 10 in Berkeley and continuing at various locations around the SF Bay Area through mid-July, Venerable Wangdor Rimpoche will be teaching from the complete text of Kaden Sho Lap, translated as “Flight of the Garuda,” a Dzogchen heart text of the Nyingma lineage. Rimpoche traces the core text back to the words of Padmasambhava himself. He has agreed to do “Flight of the Garuda” in its entirety, including commentaries and transmission of the Direct View of Mind. He will be teaching this over the course of nine or ten sessions (final number depends upon suitable locations.)
Attendance at all sessions IS NOT REQUIRED, but Wangdor Rimpoche sincerely hopes that those of you who are in the Bay Area will try to attend as often as possible to receive the transmission and pointing out and hear this beautiful, poetic text for yourselves. As a Dzogchen Heart Text, Flight of the Garuda prepares the dedicated student of Dzogchen meditation to achieve full realization.
The first session is 7:00 - 9:00 pm on June 10:
3044 Wheeler St. (@ Essex st.)
Berkeley, CA
Directions:
3 blocks from Ashby Bart and the intersection of Shattuck & Ashby. Entrance is up the steps on Wheeler st. We are on the second floor. Bring cushions to sit on. There is a limited number of chairs for those who really need them.
For more information, contact:
tomaasm@yahoo.com
For more info on the where and when of following sessions, you can read the event calendar.
June 9th, 2009
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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?
May 2nd, 2009
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In other years Losar in Rewalsar is a happy time. Town is filled with Tibetan children home from school for the holidays, pilgrims from Ladakh and Kinnaur, traveling salesfolk from Kullu and Spiti hawking socks, shawls and jewelry. The highlight of the year is the annual celebrations held at the various gonpas (monasteries) in the area, followed by eating as much sweet rice and khapsas as possible. Each year we travel down the hill to Zigar Gonpa, to experience songs, dances, and traditional Tibetan party games like tug-of-war, or tsampa eating.
Not this year. At the last moment Losar was cancelled as a celebratory occasion. Instead, the holiday was to be spent in mourning, for Tibet and all the people lost in China’s latest round of suppressing the country. Countless Tibetans died in the last year. Friends disappeared into Chinese jails or into the Tibetan hinterlands, hiding among relatives still living the nomadic life.
And so, Losar as a holiday was officially moved up a day, and the gathering itself declared as a day of mourning. There’s a computer program I have that calculates Western dates into Tibetan dates, and their capacity for good fortune or ill. Consulting it, I discovered the adjusted date for Losar gatherings was the last day of a “Black” month occuring during the dark of the moon at the end of a very bad year. In short, it was inauspicious for doing anything more important than perhaps drinking a glass of water.
Nonetheless, Lena and I made our way down to the gathering to witness the lama dances and greet old friends.
No food, no endless cups of butter tea, no fancy dress. No party canopy. No chairs from the tent-house. Those attending made themselves as comfortable as they could sitting on the bare ground, or on nearby rooftops. People arrived wearing everyday clothes, instead of their best tchubas and silk shirts with extra-long sleeves.
The brightest spots in an otherwise solemn morning were provided by one of the ceremony’s oldest attendees, and one of the youngest. Two years ago Sonnam Yutron was so paralyzed by arthritis that she had not seen the sun for four years. Two days ago, she walked out of her house on her own feet (with some assistance), properly dressed in tchuba and apron as any other Tibetan housewife. The few steps that represented a major milestone for the Emergency Medical Fund happened without fanfare, only a few meters away from Zigar Gonpa.
The other was bright spot was a pugnacious little monklet who proudly declared he was all of three years old (probably four by Western reckoning). His personality and bearing so impressed a Ladakhi princess attending the ceremony that she treated him to a jalebi (Indian fried-sugar treat). Shortly afterwards a group of important visitors from Taiwan called the monklet over to give him a few Losar treats too. As the he passed the child of some poor migrant construction workers, he stopped. Very gravely, and very carefully, the monklet broke his treat in two so the other child could have some.
Overall, there were no exuberant Losar greetings, or flinging of kataks around the necks of loved ones. Wangdor Rimpoche, Kenpo Sonnam Tashi (the monastery’s abbot), and Zigar Rimpoche stayed hidden away in an upstairs receiving room, from which they watched proceedings. Ordinarily they would have seats of honor in front of the audience, in which they could receive New Year’s greetings, and hand out strips of blessed cloth to visitors.
This year the gonpa held only the lama dances. No PA system, or even someone to play master of ceremonies. The musicians sat up on the dais where normally the rimpoches would sit, and played as soon as the dancers were ready. The dances were intense and mournful. I watched them with a profound sense of loss and grief. China has tortured and killed so many people. The “Middle Way” of diplomacy and talks with China has completely failed.
As I write this, tonight many of Rewalsar’s Tibetans are taking a candle-lit kora around the lake, in memory of those killed or lost in the last year. Unable to attend in person, we have set a candle out on our balcony to join in.
Will you do the same, tonight? Light a candle to bring a little light to the Tibetan New Year?
February 26th, 2009
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Sometime during the early hours of this morning. Dusty died. He was one of two boy kitties Chime gave birth to only about three weeks ago. It was one of those respiratory ailments that is so lethal to young kittens. He showed almost no symptoms except for a growing lethargy and the occasional gooked-up eye. But late last night, it was obvious he was having problems breathing, and no matter what I did, he couldn’t keep warm. I wrapped him up in a fleece blanket as best I could, and then went to turn out the house lights for the night. I stopped to marvel at the odd points of green glowing light that were decorating the floor of the veranda, before I realized what they were.
Fireflies.
Dying.
A chill ran down my spine. Sometimes the Powers That Be can’t resist making reality as obvious as possible. It’s as if they want to make sure you don’t waste any time with denial, plea-bargaining, arguing, or any of those other emotional stages. Just cut right to the heart of the matter, and keep on keepin’ on.
And the heart of the matter is really this: it’s hard being a baby creature of any kind in India. There are just so many things that can kill younglings before they’ve ever had a chance to experience life at all. I’ve posted elsewhere about how humans and animals alike tend to procreate as much as possible, and then wait to see how many offspring actually survive. This is Chime’s second litter since March, and with me, Joy and Lena housing and feeding her, she’s still only managed a 40% survival rate. It’s one of the frustrations of being raised in the First World, and then living in the Third: so many resources we take for granted in the West are non-existent here. As I often do, I turned to the laptop, and Googled for pet advice, but all of it counseled the same things: “Take your pet to the vet immediately,” or more often, “Just go down to Petco and pick a bottle of these tablets.” Neither of these things was an option for a rural Indian kitty, dying in the middle of the night.
As I wrapped Dusty’s body in a katak this morning, I couldn’t help remembering the loss of our cat Velcro, about a couple years ago. We had no idea anything was wrong until she fell over in the bathroom, and couldn’t get up again. At the time we were living in the Bay Area, deep in the heart of civilization. In that region there’s any number of 24-hour animal hospitals, tricked out with all the latest medical gadgets, and staffed by vets who stand by to minister to an ailing pet no matter what time it is. It was only a matter of minutes for us to find an emergency room to which we could transport Velcro. After tenderly packing her up in a box, there was perhaps a 15 minute drive, and then she was receiving care comparable to what a human would receive. Examinations. Lab tests. An IV drip to stave off dehydration.
At the time, mind you, this turned out to be small consolation. Vet after vet came out to talk to us, saying in a gentle voice, “That’s a really sick kitty you have there.” Velcro’s illness turned out to be a cancer so advanced, there was no hope of treating her in a way that would maintain her quality of life. After a tearful couple of days, we opted to have Velcro put to sleep at home, with all of us holding her and singing manis as she died.
In India, when a cat is this ill, the only thing you can do is sing manis.
Which may be the lesson for today. Two cats, two very different cat lives, same ending. Life and death may be ugly, unacceptable, and hard, but there’s always that chance for salvation from the Great Wheel…
Editrix’ note: It’s two days later, and Sandy is dead also, from the same thing. I’m noting it here rather than in a separate blog post, because there’s only so many unfortunate animal stories I can bear to write. The respiratory problem set in so fast, there was really nothing to be done. I hate this. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to say to the Powers That Be, “Ya know, this ain’t right.” But this is the lot of many animals here.
July 15th, 2007
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This is one of the Rewalsar street dogs, comfortably parked in one of the popular meditation spots around Tso Pema (Lotus Lake). After all the animal downers of the last few posts, I thought I’d befuddle everybody with this illustrated koan. Enjoy.
June 4th, 2007
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A couple of posts back, Sammy in Iowa asked this question:
Could you write about helplessness too? i sometimes wonder about trying to become a bodhisattva when some around me are bent on increasing their own suffering. i feel more helpless when it comes to animal beings sometimes; but, i see it in humans too, myself included.
Hm. Well. This’ll be the first time I’ve ever written a blog post by request. Here goes…
A Boddhisattva is defined as someone who delays their own achievement of nirvana in favor of saving all sentient beings from the sufferings of samsara, and helping them to achieve their own enlightenment. One of the best known stories about boddhisattva action concerns Mahasattva and his encounter with a starving mother tiger. You haven’t heard the story yet? Oops, my bad.
Mahasattva was one of the incarnations of the Buddha. One day, while traveling through a forest, he encountered a starving tigress and her cubs. The tigress was too weakened by hunger to hunt properly, and feed herself and her children. Selflessly, Mahasattva offered himself to the tigress, so she could kill him, feed, and regain her strength. But the poor tiger was too weak to strike him down. Mahasattva then cut his own throat, so the tigress could feed.
I know when I first heard this story, my first thoughts were about how beautiful the story was, but would I ever really slit my own throat for a helpless animal? Hm. And what about all of the encumbrances of modern life? There’s bills to pay, and then that meeting next week…and, if I died that way, what would happen to my stuff? A lot of the helplessness I feel is partly a sense of being caught up in my own little section of samsara.
So there’s one of the biggest differences between a boddhisattva and us regular folk. A boddhisattva has none of these worldly considerations. He or she is purely focused on the salvation of all sentient beings. There’s no time spent telling other folks that they need to slit their throats for hungry tigers; no postings on a blog site or on YouTube to trumpet their accomplishments; no bumper stickers or t-shirt sales to spread the word about this work. There’s just the moment, and the tiger, and the knife.
It’s also true that some of my helplessness comes from being at a loss as to how to begin saving a particular being. Sammy mentioned folks bent on increasing their own suffering. I have a personal tale of my own to share…
Some years back I was riding in a friend’s van with some other folks. We were in the Mission district of San Francisco–not the more gentrified part filled with trendy restaurants and nightclubs, but the section in the low ‘teens, where gangs and drugs and prostitution abound. It was night, and we’d pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank. We all stopped what we were doing to gape through the front windshield. In the glare of the van’s headlights, one of the local crack whores was changing clothes in a corner of the gas station lot. She made no attempt to shield herself from the light at all. Modesty is one of the first things to go when it comes to a lifestyle bent on turning that next trick to get the money to buy that next rock as quickly as possible. I remember the scene to this day; and one of the first thoughts to go through my head was, “Ya know, Nyondo, when you’re saying manis for the salvation of all sentient beings, this is one of those beings.”
Despite that, I still felt helpless in the face of her suffering. Although I was working one day a week for the SAGE Project, this particular woman wasn’t a SAGE client, and probably not even close to entering a program that would help her escape the life she was living. And I’m not proud of this, but the fact is my friends and I did nothing, immobilized by the sheer amount of help this one person needed. Housing, medical care, clothing, food, detox, regular employment…
The whole experience was something of a revelation. For one thing, the boddhisattva attitude makes it clear there is no room for racism, prejudice, or judgement of any kind. How can you commit yourself to saving all sentient beings, only to say “except for that soul, over there?” Ridiculous. And while I still might not be prepared to slit my throat for the first hungry tiger I encounter, there are many other smaller things I can do for other beings, if I keep their salvation firmly in mind.
I could end the post here, but the fact is that even here in the remote Himalayan foothills, the desire to become a boddhisattva is sorely put to the test. I’ve written previously about the animals here, but in this case I’m referring to a person.
There’s a man here who was once employed as chowkidar (caretaker) of the lake. He would go around and clear away some of the garbage, and generally patrol for litterers and vandals. Then he started to go crazy. He would shout his prayers to the fish in the lake, and bless me continually as I passed by. He took on that skinny, wild-eyed look that people get when they’ve been listening to the voices for too long. He started to pray in the middle of the bus stand, chanting “Om Namah Shivay” while forcing the buses and taxis to drive around him. About two months back, he came up behind me, and tried to cut of some of my hair with a knife. He didn’t hurt me, and got only two or three dreads. The odd thing is, after it happened, I didn’t become angry. I mostly went into some kind of shock, and felt sorry for him. Friends asked me if I wanted to go the police, and I refused.
You see, in the States, calling the police for this kind of situation would result in a “5150” (Danger to self and others) and a nice hospital stay with food and psych meds. Here, though, the only thing calling the police will do is result in beatings and a stay in a jail cell. Would beatings and imprisonment do anything for the craziness? No. Would I feel better about myself for having put someone through that? No. For the most part, no one in town is willing to call in the police for this reason.
The chowkidar disappeared for some weeks around Baisakhi Mehla, and showed up again in town the other day, crazier than ever. He now goes about town with his face covered in yellow powder, and bits of garbage tied onto his clothes. He’s been praying to me as his mother, and touching my hair. I told him off this morning, and a local wallah suggested again I go to the police. In town I ran into David, a Western friend, and asked his advice. It turned out the chowkidar had been praying to him as his “father”. David and I went back out on kora, and when we encountered the chowkidar, David gave him a stern, fatherly lecture not to touch his mother. The chowkidar apologized, and we continued on our way. During the walk David told me the local Rewalsar police had shipped the crazy man off to Simla, and it looked like the Simla police had shipped him back.
So now what? Here is the boddhisattva test for y’all. Here we have a sentient being, certainly in need of saving. But how to do it? He’s pretty far into his tin-foil hat reality and seems happy there, where gods are wandering around as confused indjis, and garbage makes perfectly good jewelry. For myself, the options seem to be these:
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Not leave the house for a while, and hope the chowkidar regains his sanity (or at least picks different parents)
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Leave the house, and play along with being his mother, as long as it seems safe
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Leave the house, but avoid him whenever possible. This tactic is kinda limited, since there’s only four main streets in Rewalsar….
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Leave the house, and go to the police.
What do you think? what would you do?
May 29th, 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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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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Today was a day full of pujas.
Those of you who care about such things already know that the Mercury finally hauled his butt out of Retrograde today. We’d put a number of things on hold because a Mercury Retrograde is inauspicious for so many things, especially if they involve communication. Moving, buying a computer, starting a new project, signing off on contracts. Much of our race to get the house livable concerned moving in before the Retrograde got underway.
A bit of backstory. Back in the (Western) day, when I was starting a new job every couple years, part of the learning curve for my latest boss du jour always involved a little talk about Mercury Retrogrades, and why launching the new network/website/software app during a Retrograde was a bad idea. Usually the Talk would be met with a lot of skepticism. After all, there’s no mention of the Mercury Retrograde in any MBA course. It’s not something you can assign a numerical value for ROI calculations. On one job, the Powers that Be were so skeptical, I gave up and went on vacation, rather than face a software launch during a Retrograde that was particularly hellish. After the first Retrograde, a newly-enlightened manager type would often sheepishly appear at my desk, asking quietly, “Hey, um…when’s the next Mercury Retrograde? And, uh, how long do they last, again?” I did manage to educate some corporate folks that yes indeedy, that stove’s hot, but never without going through the burned-fingers stage of learning first.
Fortunately, we now live in a part of the world where such things as auspicious and inauspicious days are taken seriously. Too, our part of the world is one where a lot of different gods reside. It’s in one’s best interest to be nice to the neighbors, regardless of which plane of existence they’re actually living on. So it should not surprise you to learn that Joy, using her finely-honed astrology skills, and our Brahmin landlord’s pandit, using traditional Hindu astrology methods, happened to arrive at exactly the same result when it came time to schedule the house-warming ceremonies for the house. The date would be March 9, at about 8 in the morning. Bitu’s pandit would come and perform a big housewarming puja. Lena also formally requested the Kenpo of Ziggar Monastery, and Palga Tulku, a bright young man who’ll end up running Ziggar Monastery some day, to come and perform a Tibetan house blessing as well. At some point during the day, we’d do our own private ceremonies, too.
Another infonugget for you: when a Mercury retrograde ends, there’s sometimes a bit of whiplash as all the things that were fubared get un-fubared, and start up properly again, sometimes with a vengeance. Which is how our house filled up with such a huge combination of Sky Pilots from different religions. (Counts on fingers) Let’s see…Hindu, Tibetan, Native American, Druid, esoteric….
Oh, and did I mention that most of these ceremonies involve setting stuff on fire? No? My bad.
This is all taking place in India. Precisely scheduled and timed events are on everyone’s wish list, and let’s just leave it at that. So we three MommyWizards arose nice and early this morning, and Malka, our bhi, arrived early as well, to give the house a quick sweep-up and serve tea as required. Eight o’clock came and went, and things finally kicked off around 8:30, with the Hindu puja.
The Hindu puja was part wedding ceremony, part sympathetic magic, and part construction project. First came the transformation of the guest room into a temple with the judicious application of string, bright yellow cloth, and palm fronds. Our landlord Bitu and his wife participated in the ceremony as man and wife, gently tossing flowers, rice and ghee over ritual objects as incense smoke filled the room, and the pandit chanted a mile a minute. Then everyone adjourned to the street at ground level, to build a little god-house in front of our actual house, and properly furnish it with incense, flowers, and a small hand-made doll representing a servant to keep it up.
During a lull in the construction activities, Joy began a Native American ceremony. This one involved a burnt-food offering out on the balcony to all beings and sundry. Compared to the Hindu pantomime and house build, Joy’s ceremony was relatively simple, involving reciting a prayer and ringing a dorje to let the proper beings know that dinner was served. The burnt offering was left on the balcony to smolder at its own pace.
As Joy completed her ceremony, the Tibetans rolled in, and we settled ourselves in the office for round three.
Yes, the office is right next door to the guest room, where the pandit was now busily chanting a mile a minute while pieces of wooden crate burned merrily away in a brazier. Um, yes, the guest room is one of the interior rooms, with no window leading directly outside (though the windows do lead to the open-air corridor…) Why do I mention these things? Um, no reason, really….
The Tibetans. Right. Back to the Tibetans. Part of the Tibetan house-blessing style is to bring kataks to drape over the household altar, a main doorway, and the stove (Tibetan Buddhism is very practical when it comes to matters of food and shelter). Another part is to bring tsok–essentially a food offering that gets distributed to everyone attending the ceremony. Tsok usually consists of biscuits, small bags of chips, and individually wrapped candies–stuff people can easily drop into a pocket or bag and carry away. This is one of the few ceremonies I’ve been to where there weren’t any Westerners who needed reminding that spaghetti, soup and casseroles are not good tsok.
Lena had remade the office to offer Tibetan flat seating to Palga Tulku, Kenpo, and anyone else who wanted it. There’s a protocol to the seating thing, where the leading rimpoche gets the highest padded seat, and any majordomos, seconds-in-command, or runners-up get a slightly lower pad, and regular folks get floor-level seating. Palga Tulku, as a tulku and rimpoche in his seventh lifetime (or thereabouts), got the highest pad, with Kenpo seated a couple of inches lower. As I mentioned earlier, Palga Tulku is a bright young man in his twenties who’s completed his regular studies, and come to Rewalsar to continue his religious training as a Tulku. What this means in practical terms is that we all sat with Palga Tulku discussing things like Internet connection quality, and whether Airtel or Reliance offered the better cell phone service, before he picked up his vajra and dorje, and started belting out that old-time religion.
Tibetan house blessing ceremonies involve blessing and feeding the “spirits of the place,” rather than the building. The spirits are fed actual food. In our case, coffee, biscuits, rice, several kinds of dal, and incense were on the menu. The foodstuff is blessed and then carried ceremoniously outside to be burned. It’s not just one serving, either; we whipped up a huge serving bowl of spirit feeding goodies, and an equally large carafe of coffee, and both were emptied out bit by bit as the ceremony continued. An attending monk carried each plate and cup of coffee out to our balcony to be burned in a round metal bowl filled with coals and more pieces of chopped up crate.
Let’s review, shall we? At this point in the proceedings, we had the house filled with smoke from rose-scented dhoop, white sage, pine incense, biscuits, rice, dal, and the fore-mentioned pieces of chopped-up crate…which turned out to make somewhat toxic smoke. There was a moment of arranging and rearranging all of the various burning things on our balcony so people wouldn’t choke to death while blessing the house. Joy, Lena, and I stood it long enough to add our own plates of blessed foodstuff to the burning bowl, and then Joy retreated to my room to stave off an asthma attack as the Tibetan ceremony wrapped up. Afterwards we all adjourned for lunch at Bitu’s house, where they served Brahmin vegetarian fare.
Sunset, as I write this. A couple more private house blessing pujas, and we’re done.
March 9th, 2007
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