Lama is coming!
While writing this week I realized that I have forgotten to tell you my name. My name is Nele, which means hawk. A number of weeks before I was born my mother was gathering barley for visitors to our house when she felt me move in her stomach for the first time. She looked up to the sky to rejoice and saw a hawk flying overhead. When she recounted this story to my father they both felt it was significant and decided to name me for the hawk.
The lama has decided to come to our village! As I walked to the house I am working on today everyone I talked to was rejoicing and talking excitedly about the Lama’s impending visit. My next-door neighbor was one of the scholars who worked on writing the letter to invite the lama so I stopped by to congratulate her on a successful job. Often our village is plagued by malicious gossip about wealth discrepancies, family problems or any number of evils that befall people in our village. This evil gossiping and the ill will that accompany it have been put on hold due to the joyous occasion of the lama’s visit. I have decided to donate 20 building resources to help with the building of the throne for the Lama when he arrives. Last week I discussed all of the preparations for the Lama’s that I was learning as an aspiring ritualist. Now that the visit is confirmed I will begin the preparations. Today after work I am going to go the temple and sweep all of the floors, clean the offering bowls in preparation for offerings from the villagers and clean and prepare new butter lamps.
As I learn more about ritualism I become interested in the woman’s role in Buddhism. Now it is not uncommon for a woman to be a nun but still they are given less food and offerings than the monks and live in worse conditions. It is still harder for a woman to choose the ascetic life, as her family wants her to stay in the home and work instead of abandoning them to meditate. I am very interested in some of the first women to choose the religious life and why they chose that path. To learn about this I am reading two texts about ani, or nuns, in the Buddhist tradition.
The first text I am reading is a personal account written by Orgyan Chokyi. This is the oldest known autobiography of a Tibetan woman. She was from Dolpo in Nepal, which has a similar inhospitable environment that we face here in the Tibetan Plateau. Orgyan Chokyi inspires me because she worked very hard to become an ani and it is amazing to me that she was able to write her own autobiography at the time. Although I am interested in this ani I can’t and do not want to commit to living the life of a hermit that Orgyan did, I care about my family too much. I will continue to study Buddhism rituals and work in the temple.
The second female Buddhist text that I am reading is about Patacara. She had a very sad life story where she found the man she loved but then he and their two children tragically died. This introduction to the extreme suffering spoken about in Buddhist texts eventually led her to become ordained as a nun. After hearing the Buddha speak she became an expert in monastic rules while reflecting on the indulgent way she had lived her life in the past. Patacara has a large following of nuns.
While I am not interested in abandoning the household life, these and other early Buddhist women who went through a lot of hardships to follow the Dharma inspire me. I have learned that early monastic women had many more rules to follow than the monks. The book I am reading says that was probably to protect the women, as it was dangerous for them to be living in isolation alone. Buddhist women often renounced motherhood but I do not want to be that extreme of a practitioner. There is a place in Buddhism for laywomen who still work and participate in the household. Even in our modern village today the nuns are given less than the monks. I do not think this is fair. I think the reason for this is that the monks are more often the teachers of religion, such as the visiting lama, whereas the nuns tend to practice in solitude. I am excited for the lama to visit because it will be my first real event since I have been learning about ritualism. As I mentioned last week my main job is to make sure the smoke offerings of juniper continue to burn. This job should be easy enough for me to watch the Lama arriving and entering and hear his teachings and the Lama’s long life prayer. The whole village, including my family, cannot wait for the arrival of the Lama and the merit and good fortune he will bring to us.
