The Blue Blanket Conundrum

Well, the fancy canon digital camera my Dad gave me just announced it was a dead with a blood curdling buzz. Since I’m not about to buy another one in the near future, I guess that’s the end of the photography part of this blog for the time being.

This death is in keeping with my theme: impermanence. My afternoons are spent going through all the boxes of my accumulated stuff. First, I scanned all the photos, then I scanned all the correspondence I could, now I am taking apart and shredding all the medical charts I have accumulated.

That’s right, medical charts. For about 18 years I practiced homeopathy, and then quit for financial reasons. Medical charts can’t be destroyed for 7 years, so I’ve been holding on to them. I had hundreds of clients over the years, and the faces of most of them pop into my mind as I shred their charts. I think there are companies who do this for you, but being a cheapskate, I am doing it myself. It is unclear if the $85 shredder will survive the whole job. Sometimes it seems unclear if I will survive the whole job! These charts have clasps and staples, and these need to be undone by hand. I suppose I could throw away the file folder part, but I am too much of a tree-hugger to waste all that cardboard. So, I cut or pry the clasps off. The shredding part seems to generate a some kind of electrical field that does not make me feel well. Fortunately, I have moved beyond the moldy files now—I am no longer vaporizing mould into the atmosphere. But there is a charge to all that violent churning of the machine, and I am a sensitive little flower.

The boxes of non-paper stuff are a delight to dispense with after dealing with files. I just threw out yards of rainbow colored cloth from an ill-conceived curtain project in Greenfield, MA. I just found my faded corsage from my wedding there—I am happily friends with my ex, but don’t need to keep dead flowers to remember her. Yellow vinyl men’s rain pants. A worn out ill-fitting Tibetan skirt. A dirty down coat with a broken zipper and duct tape patches. These items post no obstacle to disposal.

Tonight, though, I face two of my own baby blankets. The pink one that I never favored, and MY BLUE BLANKET. I was as inseparable from my blue blanket as Linus was from his. The blanket use persisted, and did the pacifier, long beyond the appropriate age of obsolescence. In fact, the fact that I still have it bespeaks of it’s symbolism.

The qualities of my blue blanket that made it so lovable were three-fold. First, I think in the back of my mind I knew my Mom knitted it during while she was pregnant with me. Second, it is a nice soothing color, a light greenish blue. Third, the yarn is fabulously soft, perhaps cashmere. But the most satisfying thing about this blanket was it’s smell.

Now, the little faded blanket smells mostly like basement. But, if I bury my face in it like I once did, I do believe I can perceive a faint hint of its old aroma. I think the old smell must have been the smell of the wool itself. Family systems being what they are, I could always seek solace from my blue blanket, plunging face into it’s comforting folds and being transported to some other place of warmth, softness, soothingness: unconditional love.

I would like to thank the goat who’s wool became my alternate universe.

But, what to do with the blanket?

On Tibetan Grammer, Goats, and so on

I started a class with David Curtis or the Tibetan Language Institute tonight, mainly on Tibetan grammar. He started to discuss the poem the Divine Tree (ljon pai dbangpo) tonight by teleconference. When I got off the line, I asked Lama Pema Dorje about it. Rinpoche is not a scholar, has little formal education, yet has an incredible wealth of knowledge--and a great memory for detail--based on extensive reading of Dharma texts and receiving oral teachings. We had an off-the-cuff conversation with various members of the family chiming in periodically with their memorized (sung!) renditions of this poem--all learned in different times and places.

He said the name of the author of our text Yangchen Drupei Dorje, is a name he was awarded based on his mastery of the first two of the five outer knowledges. He could not remember the other name the author is known by. To the best of his memory, and he is not sure of this without looking it up, these five are (phonetically, via my tin ear)
Sum da--grammer
Yeng Nga--poems, songs
Nyon Ju--many names
Do Kar--drama
Kat-di--astrology

When Sum da and Yeng nga are accomplished, one is given a lovely name related to Manjushri or Saraswati. Yangchen in this particular author’s name refers to Saraswati. Saraswati is a knowledge-language--music related female Buddha.

Rinpoche was in school for two years as a child in the 1940’s, before that he was home schooled by his father. His father was a Tibetan lama who settled in Dolpo, Nepal. The family followed their lama Golok Serthar Rinpoche for a couple of years when he taught throughout Nepal. This nomadic community of practitioners arranged a group teachings for the children each day with an old lama named Dorje. These were considered to be Dharma teachings, but they were learning the language at the same time. Rinpoche did not come in contact with Divine Tree text until he was older. First, the kids learned the alphabet by reciting it out loud for several years. Then, I think they did some spelling out loud. What they did during this two years in this little school was recite texts out load, both alone and in groups, starting slow and gaining speed. They traced the letters as they recited, because otherwise they would be reciting from memory and not learning how to read and write. If they looked up they were reprimanded.

The texts they learned from were:

Dorje Chopa (Diamond Cutter Sutra)--Lay households had a shrine at home and at minimum it always had a Dorje Chopa text--if they could afford more they had a whole collection of texts including many mantras and sutras, called sung du. As a young person, Rinpoche would copy out the Dorje Chopa for friends (for free), or for nomad people (for goats). He knew how to make the paper, the ink and the brushes--remember there was no industrial revolution there. Once the supplies were made, the process of copying took several days.

The other texts that were recited were the Seven Supplications to Guru Rinpoche, the long sutra level Twenty one Taras, and the Manjushri supplication.

If you are curious what happened to the goats: The females were milked, the males were saved from slaughter.

Sitting here after our conversation it sparked a few thoughts for me. I am always thinking about the drop-out rate of Americans who are dropped right into the foundational practices (ngondro), and read the Words of My Perfect Teacher, when they get inspired by a Nyingmapa lama to start practicing and studying the Dharma. Our Nyingmapa lamas often see how educated we are (and how old we are) in America and want us to move ahead very quickly. This is perhaps more true of us than of other schools of Tibetan Buddhism. But we see here that classic Nyingma ngakpas started studying and practicing the Mahayana--albeit by rote--in childhood.

I wonder if it wouldn't be good for many of us to start by studying the Dorje Chopa, and these Guru Rinpoche and Tara supplications, in a cultural appropriate way, as a pre-ngondro. The great unifying master of the 20th century Nyingmapas, HH Dudjom Rinpoche made his own daily practice compilation (chos spyod) of these Mahayana teacings, practices and supplications, plus some mantrayana practices, which can be found in volume Tsa (18) of his collected works. As I understand it, all his people used this daily practice book. Yet, no one has translated this. Not sexy enough?

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.

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

Downers

I'll admit it, I'm in a negative mood today. I found making a list of icky things I have to do now, and it made me feel better.

Things that drag me down:

• Paying a tax accountant to do my taxes, after admitting defeat and filing for an extension.
• Rewrapping and returning a very large heavy item, paying UPS and at restocking fee, because it appeared identical to me to the actual item I should have ordered.
• Putting an assortment of pages, taken from various sadhanas to photocopy, back in the right place.
• Telling my good friend that I found a check I had promised him I would offer to great lama on his behalf, long after the lama has returned to Tibet.
• Having a Targus Chill Mat—a device that keeps one’s Macbook from frying ones thighs-- break one month after I bought it, and reading the warrantee: which covers “defects” but does not cover “wear and tear” or “consequential or incidental damage.” Should I bother trying to return it?
• Calling Brinks about discontinuing my alarm service and finding I signed a three-year contract that I am obligated to pay no matter what.
• Being able to sit cross legged on a cushion for three hours one day, and not being able to do it the next day.
• Filing.
• Having my dishwasher break about one year one month after purchase, and coming to terms with the fact that having any repair person do anything to it costs just about as much as buying a new one.
• Having Christians make elaborate devotional prayers to God and Jesus out loud on behalf of everyone in a group I am apart of. (silent is fine).
• Having to explain to Jehovah’s witnesses at the door that, no, I don’t believe in God, nor in “creation,” nor that the universe is so ingenious that it must have been made by someone really smart.
• That I can’t cut and paste things from Word into my Blogger blog using safari—while I can using Firefox.

Thank you for listening!

Seasonal Check-in

All important me, school photo, 1964, Age 5

Soon after my last post a Tibetan family moved in with me unexpectedly.  You know, Tibetan dharma people have a keen sense of modesty, and it felt plain wrong to go on reporting on my life for the world to see because I have been so closely intertwined with them.

I had a related conversation with a lama I encountered this morning.  I recently volunteered to scan a group of old photos he carries with him into my computer.  They have unique pictures of some of the great Nyingma masters of the 20th century, and I was sad to think they might be lost.  Of course, I haven't shown them to anyone.  I offered to make CD's of them, so the lama could give them away as gifts.  In a conversation this morning I found that idea was not warmly received.  The lama was concerned that the photos would end up in the internet, posted in association with his own name.  It might then be perceived that he was trying to increase his own status by linking himself publicly to these high lamas or siddhas.

Certainly, there are a lot of examples of this on the internet.  Sometimes it seems from lama's websites that the most poorly regarded lamas have the best teachers, because they have pics of all the great lamas with themselves.  

This, of course, makes me nervous about my blog--and also a personal journal I am keeping of my life in the Vajrayana--like a Carlos Castenada or Lynn Andrews adventure, except true.  Since I was about 16 years old I have written for publication, and I was an early heavy utilizer of the internet even before the WWW--so writing and sharing like this is an enjoyable habit for me.  But how often am I simply boosting my ego, versus writing for the benefit of others?

Egotism is the hardest emotional affliction to see in ourselves.  It seems that many of us are finely perched on a razor thin fulcrum between excessive pride and low-self esteem.  It is as though this is a see-saw for us merely because we only experience these two dimensions--positive versus negative self esteem.  Or is that one dimension? The dimension of Buddha nature--the indwelling potency of sentient beings that can neither be enhanced or diminished, merely revealed or obscured--is unknown to us.