Not So Cold Storage

One of the most awesome characteristics of the Himalayas is how every Buddhist house, no matter how crude or cramped, has its own shrine room. This separate space invariably gleams with walls complexly painted in dazzling Technicolor and a spotless floor covered with blazing colored rugs. Even the brass statues and copper butter lamps its owners have accumulated radiate brightly, although the room abuts-- as it did in one ordinary house in Paro, Bhutan—an abysmally grimy, soot covered kitchen that has no windows, vents or chimney. Opening that door to the sealed sacred space really transports you from Samsara to a pureland, open sesame!

The shrine room in the Kathmandu apartment of one of my dharma sister’s could be a bowling alley. Totally out of all proportion, it’s startlingly bigger than the whole rest of the two-bedroom place. Yet my friend has never tried to turn it into anything else. “It wouldn’t be right,” she says, “even if I needed the space.”

You don’t consistently find that kind of decorous devotion, that priority, on this continent. I know one childless California couple who’ve turned the third and smallest bedroom of their little house into a shrine room for their own occasional practice and a childless Maine couple who built a small retreat cabin for themselves back in their woods. I suspect this is why their properties get chosen to house Rinpoches.

I’ve heard that a widowed dharma sister down in southern California cleared out her living room furniture and created a shrine room big enough for weekly classes, a natural extension of her therapy business. And I learned that a couple in northern California turned their unused basement into a shrine room so their meditation group could have a consistent place to meet. These are public spaces.

Devoting a whole room of your house to private or public Dharma shows real commitment, a generosity hard to escape or rescind. After all, can you just go ahead and divorce the Dharma by redecorating? So these rooms rebuke the feint of heart. I want to say I am a very devout Buddhist who tries everyday in every way to practice Dharma, but I have to say I have never dedicated more than the corner of a room, and invariably a very private one like a bedroom, to a shrine, even when I had a lot of rooms in my house.

Truth told, I was already in the dharma maybe a dozen years before I got inspired enough to cobble together some version of a shrine: a table covered by a cloth, two candles, a Rinpoche photo and a small ersatz jade Buddha found years ago at the weekend market in Bangkok. Over the next few years, I played at home improvement by buying a brocade cloth to cover it, shiny brass statues from Kathmandu, even seven offering bowls. The real kick I got out of that shrine came from the table I chose to support it. It was an antique 18th Century New England tavern table, so every time I saw it there far from the smoky rowdiness of an 18th Century hostelry, serenely bearing statues of White Tara and the Buddha instead of sloshing ale tankards and chewing tobacco, I got a little thrill at intimations of how I was somehow purifying its karma.

I live now in an apartment where I am using another table for a shrine in that nook of the bedroom intended for a book shelving or entertainment unit. It's the indented space between a former fireplace and the window on the abutting wall. It’s overhung with a thangkha I had professionally painted for my practice, and covered with an expensive brocade from Hassim in Varanasi, a mandala offering, six statues that were gifts or purchases, photos of Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama, plus seven offering bowls filled with rice and topped with representations of the standard gifts. The lollipops I use as torma sit in front of the rupas they were offered to.

My shrine, as my friend Tommy says of everything else in the world, is what it is. It’s alternately called “charming” or “idiosyncratic” by other western Buddhists who ask to see it. In more frank moments, I call it a cop out. This is because I converted the old formal dining room of an Edwardian flat into my private sleeping space, and had I been a good Tibetan or really committed Buddhist practitioner, I would have turned the grand old breakfront built into an entire wall into a natural shrine. That is of course exactly what Rinpoche’s monks, visiting my place for dinner, thought I did. So I remain haunted by the dismayed surprise on their faces at finding I’d stuffed the glassed-in shelves not with statues and brocade-wrapped texts, the open space in the midway not with butter lamps and flowers. I had filled the see-through shelves with sweaters, tee shirts and shawls, the open space with all sorts of little boxes stuffed with earrings and other bling.

My warped priorities haunted me this past weekend when we made a farewell party for the two Bhutanese monks who’ve been here in San Francisco since February, part of the traveling museum showing of sacred objects from their Himalayan nation. The show ended in May, but they’ve had to remain specifically to do pujas over the objects wrapped in crates in a cargo terminal at San Francisco airport waiting to be shipped later this month to Musée Guimet in Paris. Twice a week by bus and by BART, they trek to the cargo terminal for their two-hour ritual of incense burning and chanting. Other than that, they’ve been pretty much free.

And how do you think two Bhutanese monks spent their summer vacation? Building shrines to meet demand! They sawed raw wood, carved, hammered together and even painted three of those gaudy floor to ceiling breakfronts with the myriad little glassed-in statue nooks you find in all monasteries in the Himalayas. People paid for the effort, putting the first real money in their pocket. They bought new shoes.

Our party was in an East Bay back yard of a small, three-bedroom, one-bath house that does not have a garage. A family of four lives here, and for three weeks the two monks did too, while the owners traipsed back and forth to Home Depot for wood, nails, paint, and glass to create an authentic looking shrine. It’s now sitting pretty in their dedicated shrine room, which is part of what we celebrated. It's the picture here.

But this is not just any shrine room! It is one of those ubiquitous backyard storage sheds you find at Home Depot or Lowe’s, those corrugated metal pitched-roof structures with one door and one window, where you’re supposed to stick the lawnmower, kiddie pool and spare tires. That is indeed what it looks like in the yard, but open the door and voila! A floor to ceiling red/blue/yellow painted shrine filled with radiant statues, offering bowls and butter lamps; thangkas covering the metal walls, brightly colored Tibetan carpets obscuring the metal floor and those gaudy brocade banners dangling from the pitched center of the roof.

Talk about changing karma! And ingenious use of space. Here’s hoping turning storage sheds into purelands, mentally and physically, becomes all the rage very soon.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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