Srid

Tonight I had dinner with my friend Laurie, the chodpen (ritual master) for Osel Thegchog Ling.  Then we went to a Tea Bar to work on Dharma text production.  We have been wrestling with the Shitro terma that our lama discovered in 2002 ever since that time, trying to develop a usable version that suits the purposes of our sangha.  Now we are poised on the brink, soon we will have a new text.  

Since Laurie and I are basically Dharma nerds, we get all worked up over things that would seem to be minor points to anyone else.  We both particularly despise Tibetan phonetics that are not, well, phonetic.  I think this is because neither of us are translators, we represent the end user of a text.  We each have our particular heated opinions about certain words.  For example, don't even show me a text that has words like "srid" or "med" throughout as supposed phonetics.  That's how we end up with 30 year American practitioners who say they are practicing chod (rhymes with odd) with their bell, drum and kangling.  I'm convinced it is a plot by people fluent in Tibetan to make the rest of us sound like total idiots!  (Those d's are rarely pronounced, and neither is that r in "srid").  At least get us in the ballpark, folks!

Anyway, I wanted to come back to the Shitro mantra chain discussion that I started some posts back.  Remember, the Rinpoche for this sangha--we'll call him A. Rinpoche--started a mantra chain of the main mantra of the Hundred Peaceful and Wrathful Deity practice.  The idea of this chain, which I prefer to call a garland, is to have at least one person in our world wide sangha saying this mantra twenty four hours a day seven days a week, by tag teams.  We have a sister sangha in Italy who is doing nights and mornings, and we are doing afternoons and evenings, having each person take a half hour or more.  I'm doing one to two pm, if you would like to chant along.

Looking at my Shitro text, I have discovered that one's personal mantra accumulation minimum is supposed to be only a million of this main mantra, as opposed to the huge number I wrote below.  Also, my speed has picked up, so somehow I find it encouraging to be working towards my personal goal rather than simply continuing "until samsara is emptied" which was Rinpoche's vajra command.  Clearly, I am far from the first Bodhisattva bhumi.