GETTING DOWN TO EARTH

A dharma sister in Brazil just sent me the link to a wonderful new website, www.ecobuddhism.org, which has posted my teacher’s aspiration prayer for the planet as well as His Holiness Karmapa’s 108 must-dos to save the Earth and green the world. The list includes planting a vegetable garden and fruit trees, composting, being vegetarian and dishing the dirt to make young people more earthy and ecological. Best of all, it says to make healthy offerings of fruits and trees instead of candy and biscuits, and to plant trees as a long life aspiration equal to releasing birds and fish. This is wondrous news.

It is especially thrilling because it describes what has been uniquely happening in my teacher’s sangha for the last ten years. I had no idea we would be the vanguard of a new movement when in March of 2000 I barged into the no water, no electricity, dirt floor kitchen of my Rinpoche’s Kathmandu boarding school to cook for 250 undernourished kids. But with the magic of those Biblical loaves and fishes, the three meals I prepared provoked huge changes in food shopping, that led to cooking classes, gardens, compost, nutrition talks—and inevitably a stream of “help us too” pleas from others who saw the children’s energy and immunity blossom. Last week I was asked by another Rinpoche’s monastery to come quickly to its kitchen. It had 100 young monks whose health needed boosting.

The noble truth of what has become the veggiyana is that strong bodies make strong minds. Almost 775 years ago, the Zen Buddhist patriarch Dogen Zenji wrote in one of his most important teachings that taking diligent care in the kitchen enables all members of the Dharma community to practice in the most stable way. Hunger, fatigue and sickness, he noted, are unbeatable distractions.

Sadly, it doesn't take long to see that Himalayan people are more often than not malnourished. Mainly this is due to their traditional penchant for eating, to the exclusion of anything else except chilies, endless quantities of white food: bread, potatoes, rice, noodles, daikon, cauliflower and milk. Every Rinpoche or Khenpo I have cooked for suffers, not surprisingly, from high blood pressure and diabetes due to this diet. It definitely shortens their lives. So saving Dharma seemed to mean, for starters at least, making food more colorful, and fruitful.

Then Karmapa came along and said make the food more vegetarian. Protein became the problem for Tibetans hooked on meat, milk and butter. Cold turkey vegetarianism also exacerbated widespread iron deficiency. Two years ago, I was running around Kathmandu filling up trucks with kilo jars of peanut butter and sacks of raisins. Two years before that, I drove totally across the valley with half a banana tree on my lap, sticking out of the taxi windows, in order to get enough bananas to those 250 kids. That's when I knew fruits had to get closer to the kitchen and started to buy trees. I inadvertently and unknowingly smashed a pile of taboos by telling the monks to get their hands dirty in a garden and an orchard if they wanted long lives and strong minds.

Now Karmapa is telling them it’s a must-do more important even than meditating. So at Namo Buddha monastery they’ve planted over 2000 trees in the last eight months and tripled the size of the small vegetable garden we started. The abbess of the Tara Abbey nunnery where two dozen fruit trees were delivered last December told me with a beatific smile how wonderful it was to see her young students learn to touch the earth the way the old villagers where she comes from do. No nun is fainting any more, too weak from malnutrition to stay on the path.


What began with me taking off from a meditation seminar to learn the nutritional qualities of all the lentils in Nepal, what I called running around memorizing the difference in a hill of beans, so I could feed 250 people for one day has become an ad hoc program spread to the stomachs of thousands every day --and in a culture whose common Hello is: Have you eaten rice yet? The extra money offered for food has reduced the cost of infirmaries, infirmities and medicines. It is strengthening bodies for the extra effort to garden, which is reducing not only the cost of food itself but also the higher cost of driving a truck long distance to procure it, which reduces stress on the planet. It strengthens minds not only for meditation but the extra curricular classes in cooking and nutrition that empower students and monks to return to their mountain villages ready to reduce the rampant malnutrition there and break the ongoing cycle of physical suffering. Lama Sherab of Tsum has called for help.

The schoolchildren are composting, tending a few fruit trees in the school yard and menu planning for cooking class every Saturday in which they prepare lunch for the entire school, population now over 500. They now know that raisins have iron which makes them peppy and peanuts have protein which makes them strong. They seem to love all this hands on extra curricular stuff. The Roots and Shoots Club that Jane Goodall started for them is now at the nunnery and monastery as well, along side puja practice.

Many dharma sisters and brothers have happily joined hands in this veggiyana. Dharma Gaia Trust is out there supporting Buddhists supporting the environment, and contributed to those 2,000 trees. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche is out there this spring teaching on minimum needs and maximum contentment. In an interview on the ecobuddhism website, he says: “Powerful interests might not be able to experience a change of heart—greed is not easily changed, after all. The karma is really ripening, and at the same time virtue is appearing in front of all of us. We can see that choice clearly. Instead of affecting indifference, we should reflect and act appropriately. As Buddhists, we can make strong aspirations for positive change to come about, within a time frame that is not too late. Thinking negatively, blaming anyone or feeling hopeless will not help. Taking hope and taking action is what will transform things.”

Who knew ten years ago in a dirt floor, electricity and water free kitchen, cooking red beans, rice pudding and eggs could do exactly that? Welcome to a world where giving peanuts makes a big difference.

I am setting up a website, www.veggiyana.org, for the dish on what's happening in the sangha kitchens and gardens around Nepal, so anyone hungry to transform things can come to the table. It will be ready in June. Om mani padme hung.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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MOMMY NEAREST

For most of last week, I was glued to my cell phone. My Maine goddaughter went through twelve hours of surgery in Boston, and among the too many stresses that led to Dana-Farber Cancer Center were the increasingly unreliable behavior and erratic whereabouts of her blood mother. Edie had been a model mom who cooked three meals a day, drove car pools and shared homework problems right through high school. She was always there for her children. But while her daughter tried to raise two children, run a demanding restaurant, sustain a relationship with a man who couldn’t get a job, and help her best friend also her business partner manage ovarian cancer until it killed her leaving an estate to be managed, Mother turned into a roaming cell phone signal that didn’t come in or gave only impenetrable static. I wanted to give the get well gift of steady access.

Before she left Maine for Mass General, my goddaughter swore to me it didn’t matter any more that her mother was somewhere in the Maine woods on yet another misadventure. “I’m okay with not having her in my life right now,” she said. “Having her around has become like having a third child to take care of.” I didn’t argue because she didn’t need more grief than she was about to face in surgery. But I was, and am, willing to bet everything she was deceiving herself. That's why I clung to the phone.

My theory of family relativity has two truths, which interact the way they do in Dharma. Say what you will, relative truth is never the absolute one, and often contradictory to it. You can bet the vodka in matters of Mother, the absolute truth is that blood is thicker than brains. Mommy is the matter over mind. All the insouciant declarations that Mom’s behavior doesn’t affect you inevitably get belied by a stomach churn, a less springy step, a heavy sigh, a fleeting pang of self-pity, too much dope or drink, the phantom nerve pain that comes from an amputated limb, some unhappiness that creates an energy block that sets up a playing field for the likes of cancerous mutation. I have seen the scenario too many times.

Except for complete enlightenment—and the absolute truth is I don’t know that at all, I do not know anything stronger than the primal force of Mommy. This is of course simply code for the basic human need to be cared for or cared about—specifically with compassion, described in the Dharma as removing the causes of suffering. Since so much suffering is caused by the stark feeling of loneliness, Mommy is the manifestation of desire to have somebody standing by, somebody seemingly stronger who will be there without question or judgment, somebody who, as the old Sinatra song sings, will love you all the way, “taller than the tallest tree is, that’s how it’s got to feel.”

Mommy is a tenacious and tremendous trope. It is the essence of Buddhism, which was designed to make all human beings behave toward all beings like a mother caring for her precious child. A bodhisattva gives all to prevent suffering, shining as endlessly and effortlessly as the sun. That’s the miracle of Mom, for you--and why the new Mom-in-chief Michelle Obama is far more popular than the "what, me make cookies?" Hillary Clinton ever was. Is it not the hope for unconditional love in this lean and mean world that drives the thriving house pet business?

It’s the nutshell for the whole idea of refuge. “A man don’t mind if the sun don’t shine, or the stars grow weary and dim," is the lyric of the poignant song Lost in the Stars, "just so long as the Lord God’s watching over him, keeping track how it all goes on.” That’s what people want or don’t from government too. That’s me glued to the cell phone. That's the comfort of karma, the yidam deities who see all suffering, and me praying continually to the Three Jewels for protection or guidance. I wouldn’t get through the day if I didn’t go through it mumbling: “Rinpoche” or “Guru Rinpoche” or “Karmapa, don’t leave me with this. Don’t leave me.” Remember the chilling words of the historic Jewish plea: “My God, why have you abandoned me?”

Because my mother died when I was 22, I learned first hand what a big deal that loss really is, even if I didn’t think so at the time. I still had my beloved great aunt who had no children of her own and had adopted my mother and then me to fiercely guard. Her death two year’s after my mother’s was the 8.0 earthquake that ripped open the landscape, tore away all shrubbery and shelter and left the scar of immense craters. Nobody rushed into the vacuum of that eerie, lonely and scorched lunar terrain where cries for help! or here!, or hear! just echoed and bounced back like boomerangs. I don’t wish the desperation on anyone.

Ten years later, my best friend died at 35, leaving three children between the ages of 3 and 12. I was the official godmother of the eldest, and because my friend was an only child, she made me solemnly promise that after she died, I would always be there for her kids. She confessed she was haunted by the memory of a fourth grade classmate who showed up in ragged, ill-fitting clothes because she was an orphan with no one to care about her.

I can’t count how many tedious 13 hour drives I made to where her children lived, for graduations, birthday parties, special school events and shopping needs. I took phone calls all hours of the day and night for prom protocol, sibling rivalries, cooking guidance, nightmares and outfit coordination. The absolute indelible memory I have of those dozen years comes from the summer after she died when I brought the children to my house for a week. I went up to tuck the three-year-old in and kiss him goodnight, and as I started to sit on the edge of the bed, he pushed me away with enough strength that I hit the floor. I picked myself up, understanding how much he could not bear to know, to experience, what he was going to be denied because he’d lost Mommy.

It has been, I now see, my life’s work to find this need and fill it. A few years ago at my teacher’s boarding school in the back of Kathmandu, the headmistress pointed out a very shy, little six year old for whom, it turned out, nobody came although he did have family. I “adopted” him. That year I simply took him out for pizza on Saturday and bought him a winter coat. It was enough for him to remember my name and eventually make me a drawing. So I made an effort to stay in touch and the headmistress wrote he was more engaged in activities and with others. When I showed up this past December asking for him, a bright nine-year-old came running with a huge grin to hug me unabashedly. “I’m so happy,” he said, “Now I am so happy.”

Yesterday I had to rush out to buy shoes for one of my teacher’s monks who lives here in America because, he confided, he needed a new pair. Last year I freaked out the young cashier at a Gap store by showing up at the register with 15 pairs of maroon men’s socks, all for visiting monks who sheepishly confessed that’s what they needed most. So few dharma students think of the monks as human men who might need little ordinary things, but someone years ago taught me to check up on their basics, so it has become my ritual. As a result, many monks call me “Ama-la”, dear mother. Even to my surprise, the two high ranking Bhutanese lamas who are traveling with the museum show of Bhutanese ritual art objects, because I had them to dinner and served them home made Bhutanese food. Mommy is very global. It's a thriving recession-proof business.

My business plan evolved from the advice of Isak Dinesen in an obscure essay written as an “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late.” It dates from 1953 and is about “a matter which is called feminism.” Trying to pinpoint the real, or what she calls the profoundly inspirational difference between the sexes, she says: “A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in life; a woman’s, in what she is. If one talks with a man about his parents, he will generally relate what his father has done in the world, saying My father. …And if then one asks about his mother, he replies, ‘Mother was lovely. …”

“The woman’s function is to expand her own being,” she goes on. “…A man who has accomplished nothing and created nothing is not held in much esteem. But I have known many women…who had no achievement to display, but who had possessed much power and exercised decisive influence and left their imprint on everything that surrounded them. …A man can assert himself in his lifetime and in history by a single deed. Columbus discovered America… . If in history we were told about a woman who had discovered America, we would probably exclaim, ‘What a madwoman!'”

And here’s where she speaks for me: “Out of deep personal conviction I wish to add that precisely our small society—in which human beings have achieved so much in what they are able to do and in the concrete results they can show—needs people who are. Indeed our own time can be said to need a revision of its ambition from doing to being. …I wish to insinuate into the minds of the women of our time, as well a those of the men, that they should meditate not only upon what they may accomplish but most profoundly upon what they are.”

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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HOLY GOALIE

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was dutifully in Berkeley April 25 to help the American Himalayan Foundation raise more money at a splashy event. But as usual when he comes to town, he also dutifully visited his own people. Somewhat hastily, the local Tibetans in exile arranged a public audience, and sold tickets to cover its costs. I was thrilled to be invited to it by Tibetan friends, for it isn’t everyday you get a legal way to eavesdrop on private conversation.

Mongolians were there too, a surprising lot of them, easy to distinguish because they wear pointed little caps that are distinctly not Tibetan. Their vanguard had specifically been invited to His Holiness’s last Tibetan assembly two years ago, and he started that one by forcefully insisting both groups recognize each other as inseparable family, if not sisters and brothers as he called them, then at least first cousins who share a common cultural and religious bloodline. Was it not, after all, the Mongolian emperor who gave the Dalai Lama his name, nine incarnations back? His Holiness implored the two groups to stick together to keep their common culture from falling apart in exile. He suggested Tibetans establish a community center where Mongolians would be welcome, and recommended using it to set up mother tongue language classes for children born here, social gatherings and artistic programs, anything to keep their culture on life support.

This reminded me that more than twenty years ago, His Holiness began a concerted campaign of consulting Jewish organizations for advice on how a people can survive whole in the tatters of Diaspora. Evidently His Holiness noticed Jews seem to excel at hanging on to their Jewishness wherever they end up. Among the anti-assimilation lessons he learned was the value of inculcating children both at home and away in an essentially parallel universe of specifically Jewish community centers, day or overnight camps, and nursery schools. At one point, I was asked to link the education director of the Tibetan Children’s Villages, headquartered in Dharamsala, with various American camping associations, Jewish and not, so the Tibetans could send teachers over to work as summer counselors, getting first hand, how-to experience in campfire circles, color war, arts and crafts, and volleyball.

This year’s program began with Tibetans proudly telling His Holiness they raised half a million dollars for a community center, most of it from two large, well-known foundations. Then they showed off their newly established Sunday morning language and cultural classes with a children’s chorus, all three dozen members dressed in one form or other of chuba. A few plucked Tibetan “guitars”, blew into wooden flutes, or banged drums as the rest serenaded His Holiness not just with folk songs, but with the free Tibet’s anthem. That of course brought down the house and a lot of tears. His Holiness seemed very moved.

I say “seemed” because the Tibetans in charge of this event decided to stuff all us “yellow hairs”, or Westerners, up in the peanut gallery of the venue’s balcony. In surprisingly blatant discrimination, Tibetans and Mongolians were sent through one entrance, Westerners forced to go around the block to another. We all actually met in the middle of the courtyard where security lines were also segregated, at least until they stopped moving and a concerned monk began directing westerners into the Tibetan/Mongolian lines, churning up the sort of pandemonium sadly common to Tibetan gatherings in Asia where frantic pushing and shoving frequently causes injuries.

I stood in line over an hour for an event that took maybe 35 minutes, these words of Tibetan friends echoing in my mind: "We don't mind. We'd stand for two days just to see His Holiness pass by in a car." The security check that had been holding it up cleared away all cameras, backpacks and bottles of water. All tickets were for general seating, but the left orchestra section was strictly reserved for Mongolians, the center for Tibetans, and the balcony for the rest of us, called in the signage: Westerners and Dharma students. It was packed. Rumor had it the Tibetan section was way oversold.

The mistress of ceremonies proudly announced the Tibetan flag was flying high over Berkeley, and the theater resounded with enthusiastic cheering for the city council. Only six weeks before, the California state legislature had been blocked by its Chinese-American members from acknowledging March 10, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese genocide. That’s how easily the flow of Chinese money drowns American morality these days, making us complicit in their crimes. Here's to Bezerkly’s defiant tradition of free speech!

The Tibetans introduced their latest venture, a quilt project for which all families in exile in California have been invited to sew a square with the names of relatives killed in the uprising for independence, or the ongoing genocide. The initial quilt was unfurled and presented to His Holiness who politely held it up for all to see. From my far perch, it looked to be white on the edges with red and blue squares arranged within. The wicked part of me realized how Americanized this project was because the Tibetans weren’t making carpets. But this fleeting thought was quickly replaced by one about how increasingly urgent His Holiness' aspiration has become for exiled Tibetans to find ways not only to refresh the world’s memory about their plight, but to keep alive their own of Tibet. Of their genocide the Jews could proclaim Never Again! But Chinese’s new monetary muscle means for the Tibetans, Ever Again, which means His Holiness is now a goalie stuck in the cage smacking back to fend off the opposition’s efforts to score. Dutifully responding to his plea to Tibetans making their way to the freedom of America to use that freedom to tell Tibet’s story, my Khampa goddaughter recently launched Voices of Tibet, a project dedicated to interviewing on videotape the remaining survivors of the great escape to give their great grandchildren and the rest of us authentic, uncensored history. You can read all about it at www.Voices of Tibet.org.

Finally His Holiness spoke. You never know what he’s going to say, so I leaned forward to hear as best I could. He went straight into a new and ingenious save the culture tack. Mongolians and Tibetans, he started, surprisingly adding Nepalese and Indians, even people who live inside the traditional borders of China, “when we study and practice Buddhism, we are all one, the same, without nationality to separate us.” Reminding everyone in the audience that Buddhism was inherent in Himalayan culture, perhaps its common cause,--he mentioned Ladakh in India and ancient kingdoms like Mustang in Nepal which are far from Mongolia-- he urged more and more serious Dharma study. “Buddhism has no nationality,” he repeated. “In this, all of us become one.” Of course he meant Tibetan Buddhism, implying Tibetan culture could be kept alive in the entire swath of the Himalayas as well as the entire swath of the Americas--anywhere people, for instance, chant Om Mani Padme Hung or present a khata.

The Dalai Lama went on to say accurate understanding of the Dharma of Nagarjuna and Shantirakshita—the Indian Buddhadharma that became the Mahayana and made its way to Tibet to turn into the Vajrayana, could only come from being as close to the lineage origin as possible. Since the Sanskrit or Pali or subsequent Indian original teachings had been lost to time and the Muslim invasion, the closest we come today would be original translations of Marpa and others into Tibetan. Therefore to study Dharma properly means learning Tibetan. This is a canny way to keep the language alive, one that my teacher also tries on grounds that every subsequent translation into whatever dialect or language alters the true meaning in the same way subtle shifts happen in, say, whispering down the lane.

Lastly, His Holiness reminded the Tibetans that when they came out of Tibet, peacefully settled around new monasteries, and went quietly about their Buddhist business, they were very much on moral high ground. Thus they easily earned the world’s sympathy. To keep that means keeping the moral high ground, allowing absolutely no slippage from best behavior. “This is all we have left,” he warned. “I am personally not bothered by the Chinese more and more fiercely calling me names because this is all they have left. It is a sign of weakness. Even the Chinese people have begun to see the justice of our cause. So we must continue it as we have done, nonviolently with the moral force of our excellent conduct.” The applause was deafening.

The Dalai Lama bowed and left.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion

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