I have a fondness for pictures of decay and dereliction. I found this on the net (it was not attributed, so I can’t pass that on), and it combines two of my favourite topics: decay and dharma.
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Friday September 4th, 2009. Posted by Alex W:
Thanks to Lorraine Vost for this picture from Lama Pema Dorje’s course last month:
Submit your guesses in comments! (Oh, I had to change the setting for comments so that I have to approve them before they appear, as I was getting anything from a handful to a score of spam comments every day, but I will of course approve anything that is even 1/4-way reasonable.) You might need to click-to-enlarge to get the necessary detail. I asked the same question about a different picture on Pica Pica, but the intervening years and the number of people make that one much more of a challenge. Thursday August 27th, 2009. Posted by Alex W:
John Davies has a way of finding both interesting and funny things on the net. He forwarded me the link for site that calls itself The Gompa. Now although I’m tagging this with charlatans, I’m not at the moment saying that’s what this guy is – to be honest, I haven’t even read his site properly. But if one is tempted to come to a snap judgement… This was my favourite picture, which is the illustration for “Tibetan Snake Boxing” in which “the main focus is on fighting while kneeling, sitting, rolling or lying on the ground. The Snake Boxer, through tumbling, rolling, leaping and coiling, controls the balance of his opponent by striking or locking vulnerable pressure points with devastating effectiveness.”
On second thoughts, I am willing to class him as a charlatan. What do you think? Wednesday August 19th, 2009. Posted by Alex W:
Saturday last, at the Rigpa Centre in Sydney: Lama Pema Dorje gave the teachings on Lujong, for which I previously publicised a flyer. On the Saturday morning there was a White Tara empowerment (from the pure vision of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo). It was explained that this was a valuable but not essential support for the practice. The practice itself is not too difficult (although some of the stretches are more than most of us could manage), and very invigorating. It seems there are some people who even make it their main practice. I was impressed by the organisation. The event was not complicated, but the organisation was efficient and unobtrusive, and I got no sense that anybody was less welcome than anybody else. Buddhism is, of course, not free from cliques, but there was no sign of it here. Here is a picture of the Lama teaching:
And one of him with his wife (Kunzang, I believe):
The event was held in the Rigpa centre. Their shrine is a mass of prints and photos, with not so many actual statues, but I was very taken by one rather dark Guru Rinpoche. Unfortunately the photo below doesn’t quite capture the feeling that I got from it:
Anyway, one of the main reasons for this entry is that these teachings, and Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche himself, have a close connection to Padampa Sangye. A year or so ago, a translation of a biography of Padampa Sangye was published by Snow Lion (1-55939-299-1) under the title “Lion of Siddhas”, which I would like to recommend. You can click the picture to go to Snow Lion, where you can read more about it, or even order it:
It is in two main parts. The first is the biography itself which is kind of nice, although so thickly larded with miracles it would not be to everybody’s taste – you have been warned! The second main part comprises a feast of mahamudra instructions from Padampa Sangye. Well, perhaps “feast” is not quite the right word, as it’s probably best appreciated by dipping in for a few lines or a paragraph at a time and savouring them well before going back, so perhaps it’s more like a large box of Belgian chocolates. Wednesday August 5th, 2009. Posted by Alex W:
That’s the name of the Harris Park centre. After the splash as it opened, I’d almost begun to wonder whether it was time to be disappointed – little or nothing was happening. But now things really do seem to be on the move. A newsletter has been published. You can get it from them, or download it from here. And the E-Vam site also now has a webpage for this centre. It’s just a pity that so much is happening all at once, what with this, the visit of Lama Pema Dorje and the visit of Dekhung Gyaltsey Ripoche (see this recent post). Where to go? What to do? Who to see? When to get round to actually practising? Saturday August 1st, 2009. Posted by Alex W:
I thought I had finished complaining about E-Sangha, but the latest thing to happen to me is getting near the last straw. A regular poster by the name of Sunsimao had submitted a post, primarily consisting of a letter said to have been written by Thubten Jamyang Gendun of Ba Sengtri Monastery. In it, he reports that: … the Khenpos and Tulkus here at the Sengtri monastery have requested that the faithful people of the Domed area perform the following virtuous actions for a period of ten years: … and to perform other actions including, for instance “lighting 130,000,000,000 butter lamps and more”. Now I am not sure what the “Domed” area is, and don’t know whether it as small as a village or extends throughout the world, but even in the latter case the numbers make no sense at all. Perhaps they were misunderstood, perhaps they were properly understood but simply mistyped. This was so glaringly obvious to me that, although there were a couple of pious comments saying how wonderful and inspiring this was, I added one saying that on the face of it the numbers are bizarre. I looked at just the first one, starting with the wild assumption that a full million people would take part. I assumed that they could recite one “round” of the mala, which is 108 recitations, every minute. This is fast, but not unreasonable when this short mantra is recited as an ongoing buzz. I then assumed that these people would recite for 10 hours a day and take no holidays. A quick calculation will show that this would take 40 years. On the more reasonable assumption that only 1000 people take part, they would of course be going for 40,000 years each before moving on to the second mantra. Having pointed that out, I asked what it was that I was missing. I might, after all, have in some way misread or misunderstood the letter, or that there might be a reply like “oh, sorry, I have put in too many noughts”. There were one or two brief replies like “perseverance” and “a long life” – actually I can’t quite remember. End result? The next day my comment and its replies were deleted and the thread was locked down. No comment, no explanation, no request for clarification. Now if that is not petty and narrowminded, I really don’t know what is. What are they afraid of? Is it that amongst the many possible explanations, one is that the good Thubten Jamyang Gendun is not very good with numbers? Or that he has inflated the numbers just so that they are bigger than those from the next Rinpoche? Or has the translator of the letter (I don’t know who that was) got muddled over the Tibetan numbers? Is he or she someone who shall not be accused of making a mistake? Are they worried about contributors who will say BOO when something is patently silly? Whatever – it is astonishingly childish. Of course, I asked the moderator of that thread, who goes under the name of Dechen Norbu (a lot of people use pseudonyms there), what the reason might be for deleting the question and locking the thread down. I asked:
Are you able to tell my why it is unacceptable to the E-sangha moderators to point out that 870,000,000,000,000 recitations of the mani (I think that’s 870 trillion) is not a realistic number?
Or were the posts deleted and the thread closed for some other reason? The answer was as follows: Perhaps there were too many zeros in the number, perhaps there were thousands of people doing the accumulations. Who knows? So
Now if my lama tells me to recite, say, the Dorje Sempa mantra one hundred thousand times over the coming months, I neither set out to do it a hundred million times (which I would never finish), nor do I think that just a single hundred would do rather than a thousand of them. And I rather imagine that most of us, “Jamyang Norbu” included, would notice if our pay packet was a hundred, a thousand or a million times larger or smaller than what we reasonably expected. There is, I submit, nothing polemical or negative about looking at what is actually being suggested. But that’s probably obvious. It’s the attitudes of the E-Sangha moderators that are just beyond the pale. I shall be reluctant to return. |
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