Building a Medicine Factory
The Lama arrived and everything went well! All of the villagers have received merit from his visit and from donating our skills and resources. The Lama gave some protective amulets to the ritualists and they have been teaching me about their powers. The Lama’s talk was inspiring to all and refocused us on the Buddha’s path. The Lama also gave funds to build the medicine factory, which the doctors have been planning to build, this is very exciting as I am helping to build it!
Tibetan medicine follows Buddhist texts and the Buddha’s four noble truths. Because of this my training in ritual will be useful for knowing exact rules for building the factory. Now that we are an occupied country we are losing many of our Tibetan practices, medicine is an important tradition for us to keep alive despite the Chinese. The medicine we will be making in the factory is made of many different kinds of herbs and minerals. The Tibet University of Traditional Tibetan Medicine often travels around and gives talks on Tibetan Medicine. Myself and some of the doctors will try to attend one of these talks in our area to learn more about building the factory and the kind of medicine that will be produced there. Tibetan medicine involves many types of herbal medicines for different ailments so the factory will have to have the capability to make all of these. As all Buddhist doctors know, Tibetan medicine is a combination of medical and spiritual practices. We will have to include both of these practices when building the factory and when producing the medicine. There are many steps involved in making pills that the factory will have to accommodate. The raw herbs and minerals must be gathered, washed and sorted. Then they are grinded and mixed and pressed into pills. The pills must then be dried which usually takes a few days. Then the pills are packaged and distributed by the doctors to patients in need.
The Lama also gave us some money to rebuild the library at the nunnery, which was destroyed in the terrible hailstorm and to purchase a printing press. The loss of the library was devastating to the entire community, but especially to the nuns. Because of the nature of Buddhism and our Tibetan society the nuns receive much less alms and money from the community. Their nunnery is much more modest than the monastery and their library was very important to them. I am glad that it will be rebuilt. The printing press will be a huge asset to our community because we will be able to print many religious texts and distribute them to everyone in the community who normally might not have access to them. Especially now with the occupation on Tibet it is vital that we continue to produce texts and preserve every Buddhist text we possibly can. The Chinese are trying to rid us of our culture but the printing press will be an excellent tool to fight back and keep spreading the Tibetan Buddhist ideas around Tibet and the world.
As part of my study in ritual I have been learning about the ritual preformed for the Lord of the Dance deity. The deity is called that because he/she is very creative and this is played out in dance. This ritual is about destroying the evil ghost which is created when a monk breaks his vows but in the larger picture it is about destroying illusions of the existence of the real world and happiness from material objects. One of the film’s I have watched describes a monk preparing for a ritual and it says everything is happening “in his mind’s eye, where the real ritual takes place”. Every action in a ritual is meant to symbolize a larger Buddhist idea and the action focuses the ritualist on this idea.
This ritual for Lord of the Dance involves ritual pills and a mandala made of sand. All of these ritual objects are symbolic. For instance, the mandala will be painstakingly created then brushed away to remind the monks of the impermanence. The true mandala will be created through meditation; the monks will visualize a palace floating in space. This is to symbolize that the highest heaven is here on earth, if only we have the wisdom to recognize it. The ritual pills used in the Lord of the Dance ritual are made of rice flour and water, then dried and coloured. These pills are not used as Western medicine but are tools of meditation that invoke the deity and help to focus the monks on compassion. The most illuminating part of the film I watched to learn about this ritual was when the narrator said that magic is the West is used to create illusions, but Tibetan magic is used to destroy illusions. The ultimate purpose of this and every other ritual is to benefit others and to truly understand reality by understanding that our world is all illusions.
