Monday, September 29, 2008

A Truly Civilized Funeral


Tibetan vultures waiting to eat

Today I picked Lama Pema Dorje and Kunsang up at SFO after he had spent the weekend teaching in Olympia, Washington. We all did our own thing when we got back to the house. At dinner, I went in to the kitchen to show them a photo of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in a funny green fright wig that symbolizes his commitment to the environment, and talked with them about the pollution and global warming.

Then, they brought up an art project I am anticipating that will involve needing a few vulture feathers. Vulture feathers are illegal to sell in this country, so I have been planning to visit my high haunts in the Oakland hills to see if I can find any. But Rinpoche and Kunsang have been looking for them for me too, which I find very sweet.

The subject of vultures now having been broached, I asked Rinpoche if they did Sky Burials where he grew up. He was raised in the 1940’s in the ethnically Tibetan borderlands of Nepal and Tibet, called Dolpo. He said yes, he had seen many sky burials as a boy, because his father--a well-respected lama of the region--performed them. Actually, the people in the region generally buried people, but his father encouraged sky burial practice.

The night before the sky burial was to take place, the lama would do a chod practice--playing his chod drum, blowing his kangling, and singing the sadhana--at the house where the corpse was. This was a standard Throma Chod practice, with just a few words changed. Kunsang says, this is like calling up the vultures, believed to embody the dakini principle, and inviting them to lunch the next day. Rinpoche describes the Tibetan vultures as much larger than the ones here, or those in Nepal proper. They are about the size of a sheep, he said, as he described the beauty of each part of their body with great appreciation; he gestured with his hands to illustrate the white feathers here, the black feathers here.  Particularly wonderful were the fluffy white feathers under the wings that were like fur.

So, the next day, the assistant lama would carry the body to the charnel ground on his back, then put it down and cut it up. There is a special name for this assistant, one of the main lama’s students, and the role seems to have a pretty clear job description. Then, his father would start performing the chod practice.  There is a special cemetery liturgy in this collection of practices.  The vultures would come and eat the body completely within 20 minutes. It took a certain number of vultures to eat a large person's body, and a smaller number to eat a child’s body.

As it happens, one time a 16 year old boy died, and another lama in a different area performed the chod for him in the winter. When the body was offered, no vultures came. The lama buried the body under stones. The family was very upset, and there was a belief among the locals that the dakinis had not come for the boy because he must of been very un-virtuous. So, when Rinpoche’s father came through the area in the spring he was asked to remedy the situation. The night before he did the practice, called “shaking the nest,” to let the vultures know to come the following day. He was kind of joking around saying something like, “actually we need 11 vultures for this size man.”

Then they went out and dismantled the impromptu cairn on the body with the help of the local lama, who was a student of Rinpoche’s father. The corpse now looked like a partially frozen pile of blackened meat, not really recognizable as human. They spread it out on a area the size of a blanket. As soon as his father started to perform the chod ceremony the vultures arrived in group numbering exactly 11. Rinpoche said some of the vultures landed the normal way, on their open feet, and others came it very fast at an angle and fell over when they landed. The way he described it, it appeared as though they had been hurled there, or as though a powerful magnet had drawn them there.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Letter Litter

Dear Reader,

I am mulling over the idea that all denial is fundamentally denial about impermanence. So, I guess you could say my primary interest and practice right now is completely facing up to the natural beginnings and endings of things.

I spent the day continuing tackling a big box of filed letters people wrote me in the 1980’s. I was in my 20’s in the 80’s, a young revolutionary of the radical feminist kind. In the early part of the decade the internet was mearely a glimmer in it’s creator’s eyes. We had no fax machines, no scanners, no he copy machines. Calling long-distance was quite expensive, so we rarely did that. A good typewriter—an IBM Selectric—was completely out of reach cost-wise for young people, particularly countercultural types like my band of Midwestern lesbian-feminists.

So, what did we do? We wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote. We wrote on yellow legal pads, we wrote on spiral notebook pages, we wrote on a the continuous green paper that came out of computer printers, on construction paper, greeting cards, and quite often, the backs of extra posters from women’s cultural and political events we organized.

I have literally thousands of pages of these letters. Now that people don’t write letters anymore, and few people know there even was such a network as the earnest Amazons of the 70’s and 80’s U.S., I find it difficult to throw them out. So, instead, I am making pdfs of most of them. The criteria for keeping-versus-tossing is “Will this fit through my Scanner?” I am taking them by the handful, not reading them, just trying to get the pages right side up and roughly in order, and the coaxing them through the feeder. Big batches of them, hundreds of full color letters in one pdf marked with the approximate year received.

I’m trying not to read them, just plow ahead and get one grocery bag after another into the recycling bin. But, of course, the memories come back just seeing the handwriting. The stirs up many thoughts, like:
• where did we find the time to do all that writing!
• how romantic we were, about politics, culture, friendship and love
• how kind and nurturing to each other—since we didn’t have babies in those days, could it be we were lavishing that unspent nurturing on each other/
• how passionate about everything, we spared none of the emotions
• brave really, but overly proud of it
• how interwoven art, poetry, song and politics were with our lives

I thought I was tremendously important in those days. At that time one could just put out a newsletter or two, organize a few events, write a long article about one’s half baked ideas, and one could view oneself as an influential woman. I wrote everyone in our community, blowing off my mouth, no matter how old or highly regarded they were. And, what’s amazing to me is that they wrote back. I have letters from the lesbian glitterati of the day: Adrienne Rich, Holly Near, Alix Dobkin, and the leaders of virtually every women’s publication in the U.S.

I also kept unbelievable weird letters. A 1983 forty page critique of everything about me from my lover at the time, a letter from a masochistic man who wanted to be my slave, and a letter from a radical lesbian woman of color Dianic Wicca practitioner who wrote a raging diatribe to me in purple ink, enclosing in it a small swath of cotton carrying dried lavender flowers. Of the later, I remember having the feeling when I had received it 25 years ago that a curse was contained within it. When I think about that young woman now, I feel so much concern for her. She was from Oakland, and very troubled. Did she live or kill herself? Poor honey. I remember that even among the uber-radicals out here in Oakland she was viewed as distressed, but too defended to help.

After scanning that last batch, I felt dizzy and weak and needed to get some fresh air the lie down. Was there still potency in the hex-laden lavender?

With that I will close, dear reader, and write again another day.

Sincerely,

Yudron