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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In this case, most of the words are “Thank you,” repeated over and over.
This is Sonnam Yutron, out and about in her wheelchair, attending the Guru Rimpoche empowerment ceremony at the lake today. It’s not clear in this picture, but Lobsang was practically in tears at being out with his wife and being able to attend the teachings.
Y’all rock. Thank you.
February 26th, 2007
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In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about local visiting protocols, starting with an early morning visit by five nuns and a goat. I think this bit needs a bit more explaining.
Indian and Tibetan social boundaries are very different from the Western style. One result is bizarre social situations where one walks into someone’s house to see if they might be home to receive visitors. Another has to do with the Indian art of watching other people. There’s no social restriction on staring. A Black indji lady with a lip ring and dreads is fully stare-worthy, by Indian standards, but only for about five minutes or so. After that, when it’s obvious that I’m not suddenly going to turn into a dragon or a god or an animal or whatever, folks usually give up. I can tell now which folks are from out of town; they’re the ones doing double-takes as I pass them on the street. Too, there seems to be a firm belief that work is not occurring unless there is a spectator or two on hand to watch. Sometimes, it’s a “if a mystery fells a tree in the forest, do you pay him for the work if nobody saw it” style of thing. Other times, it’s just something watchable, like TV, only a bit more interactive.
So the spectating also applies to visits. Often times I’ve visited someone’s home, only to find they were out, and had their ama, bhi or houseboy or whoever serve me a cup of tea and park me in a corner. This also meant being treated to whatever other bits of domestic life were happening, whether it was a bit of television, or explaining to chilluns home from school that they absolutely cannot have one more toffee today, and that they should go outside and play or something to burn off the sugar they’ve already consumed.
In this part of the world visitors are always welcome, and there’s usually a cup of chai and a biscuit or two offered, even if the cupboards are otherwise bare. When visiting Tibetans, the tradition gets and extra twist: you’re supposed to bring a nice treat like fresh fruit, biscuits, juice or some such. This helps your host restock their goodies for visitors, and at the same time politely ensures that they have something to serve if they haven’t made it out to the bazaar yet to stock up.
During Losar the whole business gets “kicked up a notch” with the inclusion of the holiday pastries known as kapsas. Kapsas, for those of you not familiar with them, are the special social-festival-weapon foodstuff of the Tibetan New Year’s holiday. They are a fried pastry treat made with little sugar, and enough flour to turn them almost adamantine after a while. You’re supposed to enjoy them with a cup of tea, but after encountering a few super sized kapsas at their hardest, the military applications of this treat are a little obvious. However, they also play a part in a bit of social ju-jitsu peculiar to the Tibetan culture.
Traditionally, on Losar, every household makes a bushel and a peck of these things. The next step, in a strange Tibetan version of “Tag”, is to pack up the kapsas in your house, wrap them in a fine white katak, and go visiting to leave them at other people’s houses while making a special Losar visit. The day is filled with people dressed in their holiday best–silk tchubas, fine silk shirts, and their very best silver-and-turquoise jewelry–racing from house to house in an effort to unload the kapsas menacingly piling up in the kitchen. Unfortunately for us, Lena is something of a celebrity here, and so a number of people, especially the cave nuns, competed with each other in making sure Lena got a batch of their kapsas which were so much better than so-and-so’s kapsas. So despite Lena’s best efforts to give away as many as she could, even going so far as to drag bag after bag of the things down the hill to town in a series of Losar visits, this was the result:
Scary, ain’t it? Even as of this writing, we’re still handing out the kapsas like there’s no tomorrow…in case you ever come to visit, You Have Been Warned.
Editrix’ Note: Just after I completed this entry and was about to post it, we had visitors, including a Khampa kenpo from Ziggar Monastery. Mind you, a full week after Losar. During the visit a boy politely entered the room, and deposited this:
These, of course are the gonzo Khampa kapsas, the ones that can double as cricket bats if you’re not ready to eat them yet. Now to figure out who’s left among our friends to visit…
February 25th, 2007
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Tso Pema has turned into something of a mob scene. In addition to the regular increase in population that comes with Losar celebrations, a huge influx of pilgrims arrived today to attend a special four-day teaching offered by a high-ranking rimpoche. Even at 6:30 in the morning, the kora path around the lake is packed with practitioners walking practically shoulder to shoulder. Losar visiting protocol has had us totally discombobulated. Apparently folks just walk right in if our gate isn’t actually locked. One morning at about 7:30 Lena got up to find five nuns and a goat who had followed them in in our veranda, wandering around curiously and wondering where we were! Well, the goat wasn’t really looking for anybody in particular. It happily found our bucket of vegetable leavings (to be fed to local cows) and was helping itself to some breakfast. But I digress.
Between the house move and the Losar visits, Joy, Lena, and I have barely been able to tell which day it is, let alone what’s happening in town. The huge temporary population means that every spare bed or bit of floor space that a sleeping bag can land on is occupied. Lena was actually chasing around town to find bedding for some guests due to arrive at our house. Meantime, I was spending time in phone shopping hell, seeking a replacement for Joy’s phone, which is still totally cooperative as a phone, but refuses to be a modem and create Internet connections. Both of us decided late in the afternoon that we had had enough errands for a little while, and stopped into Vijay’s Chopstic Restaurant for coffee. (Real coffee. made in a French press, no less.) It occurred to me to find out more about the teachings that were happening. Since everything in Rewalsar is literally a stone’s throw away, it was a real short walk over to the Drikung Kargyu Gonpa to find out the teaching schedule. As it happened, they’d run out of copies of the English translation of the schedule, so I hung out for a few minutes, getting a verbal rundown of the next four day’s events.
A large Black man entered the room. Now understand, India is just chock fulla dark-skinned people, some quite sizable. However, Westerners have a distinctive look to them, and this was the first African-American I’d seen in something like eight months. So you can imagine my shock when he turned to me, and said: “You’re Nyondo.”
“Yes,” I allowed cautiously, while wondering if any bits of my tawdry checkered past had caught up with me, half way around the planet.
“I’m Steve Daniels.”
This seemed like a safe statement to agree with, so I did so. “Okay,” I said just as cautiously.
“I read your blog!” he said cheerfully.
“You’re a blog reader?” I admit, that was a stupid thing to say. I was just in too much shock from actually encountering an actual reader of my blog who wasn’t Joy or Lena. I tried to fix things with a more prosaic, “Welcome to Tso Pema.”
After a bit of chat Steve confided in me that there was something he’d been meaning to do for a while, and was glad he’d run into me because he would have a chance to do it. Before the chills had a chance to run the full distance down my spine, he’d pulled out his wallet, and made an on-the-spot donation to the Medical Emergency Fund Joy had set up.
Behold the power of the Internets, y’all.
This fund, originally started to supply a crippled woman with a wheelchair, also supplies other medical necessities to folks in Rewalsar who are in need of medications or medical treatments, but can’t afford them. A lot of you have already met Sonnam Yutron, via Joy’s blog. Well, if you’ve ever wondered what some of the fund’s sponsors are actually like, meet Steve Daniels. I’m not sure I can adequately communicate how Joy and I are alternately awed and
ecstatic by people’s generosity in giving to this fund. So far, we’ve not only manifested Sonnam’s wheelchair, but supplied others with much needed medications, dental treatments and so on.
I forgot this part while Steve and I were in the same room, so excuse it please: Steve, you are cordially invited up to tea at the new, improved Casa de MommyWizards in Rewalsar. All you need to do is tell the bus driver or rickshaw wallah you need to get to Lena’s house, in Vikashnagar. (The yellow X.) There’ll be kapsas waiting for you!
February 11th, 2007
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Editrix’ note: This blog post contains mostly religious content, concerning Tibetan Buddhism. If that isn’t your cuppa chai, or your own religious beliefs require you not read this, then feel free to skip this post for something a bit more entertaining.
“Kali-kali” is perhaps the second Tibetan phrase I ever learned. The first, of course, was “Tashi Dillek” (”Hello”). “Kali-kali” literally translates to “slowly-slowly,” and it’s one of those everyday phrases with 101 uses. When a Tibetan driver goes too fast on the mountain roads for Western sensibilities, a “kali-kali” will get him to reduce his speed. If you’re walking along a rocky mountain path to visit some of the cave nuns in retreat, they might gently encourage you with a cheerful “kali-kali” to take your time and step carefully among the stones. With our Dharma teacher Wangdor Rimpoche, “kali-kali” can have a variety of meanings, depending on the situation. Whenever he answers “kali-kali” to the question “Would you like such-and-such done?” it could mean any of the following:
- Yes, but take the time to get it done right.
- Yes, but not right now.
- Yes, but don’t trouble yourself to get it done right away; take your time.
- Doesn’t matter to me, but go ahead if it’s not too much trouble.
- No.
So you see how this simple phrase can carry a world’s worth of meaning. For the most part, though, “kali-kali” is used in the sense of “bit by bit”, or referring to something progressing in slow but steady increments. In Tso Pema, as I write this, is a massive project of Rimpoche’s that has been proceeding “kali-kali” for the last six years, and still has another year or so to go at the same pace. The purpose is to construct a Buddhist pilgrimage center, topped by an 84-foot tall statue of Padmasambhava (Guru Rimpoche). There’s more info about the project here.
With Indian construction methods, where everything’s done by hand, the site’s foundation alone has taken 3 years to complete. These days most of the work is focussed on the statue. A certain percentage of the work is of a religious nature, carried out by an everchanging volunteer cadre of monks, nuns, and laypeople. They are all working on preparing dzong, the holy texts that will fill the completed statue, and bring it to life.
Kali-kali…
The holy texts arrive in huge bundles. They are a variety of mantras printed on big sheets of yellow paper.
The next step is to cut the sheets into long strips containing a couple lines of mantra apiece.
The strips are rolled up, two at a time, around a short piece of incense.
The tiny package is rolled along the work surface with a block of wood to tighten the wrapping.
The ends are tapped to line up the paper edges so they’re flat.
The end of the strip is glued into place.
The “head” of each dzong is then dipped in red dye.
Some dzong are larger than others. This is the most common size. Others may be the size of a pinky finger, or even palm-sized. Bear in mind that even at the larger size, we’re still talking about making millions of dzong. It takes more than just a couple dzong to fill an 84-foot tall statue. Kali-kali. Moving on…
Yellow fabric is cut into small rectangles to be wrapped around the dzong.
Other volunteers wrap each dzong with a piece of fabric, and glue it securely.
The first stage is done. Now for some serious heavy lifting….time to take the dzong outside for putting into tsa-tsas (small religious statues)!
Groups of young men are given sticks to beat clay mix with boards, to remove any lumps that have formed. The clay is mixed up and doled out to other volunteers in several-kilo lumps.
The clay is portioned out into a lump the size of a fist, and kneaded a bit more by hand to ensure smoothness.
The lump is oiled, and then pressed into a brass tsa-tsa (religious statue) mold. The oil prevents the clay from sticking.
On the other (non-oily) side of the lump, a dzong is pressed deeply into the clay.
Then the lump is placed on a board, mold side up, and the mold pounded with another board to force the clay into all the crevices of the mold.
The mold is carefully lifted away, and any clay tag ends are trimmed off.
The finished tsa-tsa is gently moved to another board, which will be used to carry it…
…and all of its many siblings…
…into the statue.
The various mantras that power the dzong have slightly different purposes. So , the tsa-tsas are sorted into different areas of the statue (head, arms, legs, etc.) to bring it to life.
Rinse…
and repeat…
until statue is full.
The people who work on dzong tend to chant or recite mantras as they work, adding to the efficacy of the texts. Everybody and anybody willing to spend some time cutting texts, rolling dzong, glueing fabric, or molding tsa-tsas is welcome, even if it’s just for a hour or two. The construction crew at the statue has its own cook and requisite chai-wallah, serving up Tibetan tea, black tea, sweet masala chai, and gallons of thukpa and thenthuk to keep everybody going. I’ve already gone up a few times, to sit with the nuns and drink tea and roll dzong.
This is an invitation to any and all of you Buddhist practitioners out there to come out and help with the dzong over the next few months. We really need your help–we’ve got a statue to fill! No special talent or even language skills are needed. Just a willingness to roll paper, glue fabric, or stamp clay is really all that’s required. Once you’re in Tso Pema, just have any taxi or bus wallah drop you off at the path to the Guru Rimpoche statue. Smile as you enter; any number of people are sure to smile back and make a place for you.
January 15th, 2007
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