Building a medicine farm
After the Lama’s visit, our village has become a place with no Dukkha. People have built their strong faith that we have the power and special spirituality that will always help us through any Dukkha in the future. The Lama has left us with a lot. He donated resources for building a library and the printing machine. He also gave us several amulets and charms for our protection and peace in the village. I also received extra resources and merits for helping the people with naga illness and an amulet, called the cakra.
It has been a week since the Lama’s visit. The villagers have organized themselves into three different groups to contribute on beneficial projects for our community. Three groups will work on the projects under acquiring texts for nunnery/building printing press, building a factory and exploring to caves.
I decided to work on the factory building project. The factory will consist of more farms for medicinal herbs, infrastructures for handling/producing medicines and hopefully produce more so maybe we can export the rest. My main job will be exploring the mountains to collect wild herbs and managing the farm. In my group, we have couple builders, farmers, several doctors and a trader. We have only decided on the location in our village and few drawings for the factory. We are just starting the construction. As a doctor, I don’t have much job at the moment. However, I and few other doctors decided to go out to the mountains and collect some trees and plants for building the factory and the farm.
It is quite confusing when it comes to picking up the right herbs and plants for the medicine. Especially, some herbs, plants and mushrooms contain deadly poison. Even for most of the doctors, those plants and herbs look very alike. All the doctors and farmers have come to conclusion that we must have a legitimate process so it doesn’t let a simple mistake get to our medicine factory.
Along with the inspection guideline, the doctors have to research on the Tibetan medicines and its required resources. We must remember that the resources are limited. The Mother Nature and its goddess spirit only allow us certain amount of herbs and plants we can take from the mountain. It is crucial to know how to produce medicine so that we don’t waste any resources. For instance, the wild Ginseng is a very rare herb and highly effective medicine. Among the doctors and collectors, wild Ginseng is known as the gift from higher spiritual being. It can be easily confused with the young Platycodon plants and others. Therefore, in terms of collecting and farming, we must research and educate ourselves.
Some herbs and plants must grow outdoor but some can grow inside. The farmers prefer the indoor planting in case of sudden natural disasters like the last time. Fortunately, I have the lucky charm, the cakra, which was given from the Lama. The cakra is a charm that prevents animals, which damage crops. For its consecration, it should be hidden in a hole in the farm fields. I have also contacted some ritualists who are familiar with this charm and who knows about some other rituals and amulets for protection on farms. All these protective charms and amulets surely made the people feel better and safe. For the previous hailstorm, almost every villager didn’t get the protective amulets and affected by the hailstorm severely. However, the hailstorm didn’t affect the people who had the protective amulets.
For my project, our group still realizes that we have to work together as a whole community villagers. We went to other groups to ask ironworkers and explorers. The ironworkers could build the foundation of the factory and the explorers could cooperate with our doctors so that they could look for some specific herbs out in the mountain. The explorers go out much further from the main boundary. As a doctor, I am hoping that they could find us some special and rare herbs for the community.
Our group will finish the construction by the next month. Once we finish this project, there are many more things that we can do for the better future of the village. We can produce more medicine consistently and hopefully export the medicines to other villagers. I am as excited as when I found out that the Lama was coming to our village. There are surely positive changes after the Lama’s visit.
