Tibetan to the Core

An eerie sense of calm seems to have accompanied the lama’s departure from the village. After weeks of toiling and preparing for something or the other, there is now what seems to be a lull in the natural rhythm of our community’s activities. Everyone seems to be contemplating the words of the lama. It’s strange, but living on a remote mountaintop, you sometimes forget how small a role you play in the grand scheme of the universe. The lama brought to our attention that the earth, in comparison to the many galaxies of the universe, is tiny. So, by extension, we would be next to insignificant, right?

Not quite. We are not insignificant. Far from it, actually. The karma accumulated by our actions has in itself enough power to bring a halt to the inertia that fuels samsara, so we must never underestimate the gravity of any of our actions. He spoke of how the actions we perform over the course of our entire existence play role in our present and futures, and how we must not be deterred if we do not see our actions bearing immediate fruit. Kalachakra is there. Kalachakra is timeless. Kalachakra knows all.

His words brought forth in my mind images of the nuns from the remote nunnery on the fringes of the village. I saw the group of them sitting around a stranger child and meditating for her well-being. I saw one running from home to home, beseeching residents for chemicals of which she knew nothing, apart from the fact that they may aid a stranger child in recovering from her sickness. Again, I was stricken by the amount of selflessness displayed by these women for a society that barely took note of their existence.

As if hearing my wayward thoughts, the lama chose at that moment to mention that he would be donating the funds and resources necessary to construct not only a library, but a printing press in the village nunnery. While it was not the medical clinic I had envisioned, I humbly realized that Kalachakra had once again seen way beyond the scope of my tiny and fathomable mind.

To put the nuns in charge of the village library and printing press would be to bestow upon these women the honour of protecting and curating the loci of our tradition’s cultural and social practices. After all, it is written in the Lotus Sutra that, “If a good man or good woman shall receive and keep, read and recite, explain or copy in writing a single phrase of the Scripture of the Dharma Blossom … that person is to be looked up to and exalted by all the worlds, [and] showered with offerings fit for a Buddha … Let it be known that that person is a great Bodhisattva.”

In other words, by facilitating the production and distribution of books within the community, and thus providing access to sacred scripture for everyone, regardless of their status as a monk or nun, layman or laywoman, the nuns would be guaranteed to be blessed by the Buddha himself and gain merit for themselves and for all those in the community. Such, is the nature of a true Bodhisattva.

Despite having my hands tied with the plans for the construction of a new medicine factory in the village, I found some time to take a few of my college textbooks to the nunnery the other day using the motorcycle I had secured from my friend for the lama’s visit. Despite a majority of them not being able to read English, the nuns were thrilled that their library would now feature western books of wisdom as well! One of them commented that the library would now be like me, “Tibetan to the core, but with a western flair!”