Slow and Tell
I just traveled 12 hours two ways to spend five days from 8 AM to 5:45 PM sitting through what's called in Tibetan Buddhism "monlam." Monlam seems to be Tibetan for aspiration, but it is most often used, as in this case, to signify an extended period of public prayer. It turns out most of the selected prayers are aspirations, what you might call high hopes or perhaps demands of the deities with offerings and promises thrown in to sweeten the deal.
This one was the sixth annual North American monlam, a miniature of the grand monlam held annually in Bodh Gaya where the Buddha reached enlightenment almost 2,600 years ago. It was in Canada, outside Vancouver where a horde of Hong Kong Chinese reached emigration a dozen years ago. It starred my teacher, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche fresh from consecrating his rebuilt monastery inside the heights of Tibet, and featured 35-40 monks and nuns in ever changing regalia, lots of white khatas (scarves of respect), piles of red money envelopes and gallons of milk tea to lube voice boxes. Depending on time or day, there were also between 200 and 400 extras: the faithful, mostly the Canadian Chinese.
The program was hectic, starting every morning at 8 AM sharp with three prostrations, then everyone on one knee like the Buddha's original converts, taking the basic vows for the next 24 hours: no killing, no stealing, no intoxicant to blur the mind, no mischievous sex, no lying or slander, no denying the Buddha and the Dharma are refuge from the madness of the world. Seated back on the cushion or the precious few chairs the Chinese were unhappily required to provide the aged and disabled, we began rapid incantation of vows for compassion and steps to attaining ultimate wisdom, words written in India 2000 years ago. Some were in the Buddha's original Sanskrit, linking us to a remarkably long, unbroken tradition.
The monlam prayer book was 490 pages thick with a 120 page book addendum. All day long we hopscotched through its various prayers-- sometimes repeating 14 page ones the traditional three times to indicate we really meant what we prayed. We got a break for lunch and two short breaks for bathroom.
A very accomplished chant leader monk, umze in Tibetan, had been flown from India to ensure the authenticity of this effort, and another monk clacked wood when the staccato flow started to sag. It was all in Tibetan, the words transliterated in differing books into English and Chinese so everyone could recite with the monks and nuns, some of them not Tibetan either. Ditto the three Vedic visitors head to toe in white. The rhythm was so clipped and brisk, you had to keep your finger flying from word to word, your mind on the line in order to keep up. If you stopped to entertain a passing thought, look at your watch or blow your nose, you got left behind, hopelessly lost, sitting silent desperately flipping pages. You needed genuine undiluted nonstop mindfulness: unrelenting focus, total commitment to being in the moment, to now! Yada yada dada no stop keep it up yada yada dada and so forth and so on for two hours at a time for those who wander in samsara have minds that wander too.
A body can get very frustrated sitting hours on a thin cushion or hard metal folding chair and/or trying to speed read Tibetan mumbo jumbo. If you dare stop to look at the English translation below the transliteration so you can at least know what you are doing there, you lose the pace and the place and end up left behind and out. A big thundering drum with two hundred people chanting to its boom and everyone else who is distracted as well as the energetic Chinese ushers can see your lips are not moving because you blew it. My personal aspiration was to stop blinking, thinking and drinking (tea) so I could stay with the chant. Truly a challenge, a weird fitness sport I did not master.
It is also a long time to hold your seat and those heavy books that you cannot put on the floor or under your foot or butt because inevitably an old Tibetan woman will come by, remove them and scold you. No telephone, no texting, no talking to the person next to you who you don't know anyway. You are supposed to wait to sip your tea at a precise moment in the prayers that isn't in the book. You have to hold onto it and hope you've got the right bottoms up cues from the monks and nuns. Then you must find a place to put the cup so nothing spills.
You just have time to pee and get back or to eat and stretch, grab a coffee, count khatas or prepare red envelopes and get back. If you are gone too long, somebody else takes your seat, even when you leave those books on it. Impermanence is the shrugged rationale. At 6 PM you run somewhere for dinner, speed back to the hotel to stretch your body, check your email, clean your clothes and your body, then sleep so you can get up at 6 AM. You have to get dressed, fed, parked and seated before 8. Special program Saturday night. Huge crushing crowds in wind driven teeming rain. No time for tourism. Nothing but aspiration prayers.
The what am I doing? moments come all too often. Why did I spend all that money to fly here and stay here just to sit uncomfortably and mumble stumble for hours? The same money would have given ten days in Europe. Or I could be home eating fabulous food, swimming in the sea, savoring summer as it slides away and not spending this money. There it's hot and sunny; here it's raining with windstorms knocking out the power. Such resentments upend your chanting. They highlight failure and make you wonder why you bothered to subject yourself to it.
Naturally, you want to read the English translation to know what you're involved in. So naturally you go off course from time to time and discover all the prayers you are reciting for five expensive days are for all beings to be freed from their suffering, everyone to have joy, no one hurting, wisdom triumphant happily ever after. What do we want? Happiness for all! When do we want it? Now! For five days, you are begging the Buddha and his extensive retinue of active deities to get down here and do their thing and you mean this so deeply, you say it three times, offering to be first in line to help. I supplicate you to appear...I offer everything...for the benefit of all....
Finally it's over. No more stuck in a seat, no more speed chanting and terrible milk tea. You head to the airport listening to the news. Millions are migrating from Middle East terrors and horrors; the Arabs have mastered Machiavelli to the nuclear degree; millions are evaporating in the stock market and dying in ganged up Central America; more Americans died in gunfire. The Koreas are at each others' throat. The Chinese are bullying. The Republicans are lying. Democrats are tone deaf and blind. Income equality is beyond out of control. You ask yourself if anything you missed was important in any way? Was anything better anywhere? What could you have done?
And that's when you realize, as you hand your boarding pass to TSA, how precious and priceless and extraordinary it was to abandon all that agony and not add to it. You spent five full days just sitting still as non negative energy, praying with all you might that everyone gets joy and the world becomes a happy place. While all those Chinese spent all that time preparing and pouring lubricating tea, you were pouring positive ions on the fires of hell. I beseech you to come to this place so that all beings will have happiness.... What a revolutionary aspiration that is! How many people take five days off just to pray for that? How precious. How special. May all beings share the blessings and find happiness.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 2:04 PM
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