Our Trees offer up the Ink
The head nun in the village has agreed to help oversee the creation of a printing press. Our visiting lama has given the village resources for this gift which will help with the creation of a library one day within the nunnery. One monk said that it took twenty four years just to edit four tantras in the 17th century and today will not be much faster I think. Since the Lama’s visit, the activity level of the village is no less than before his arrival. It is not only time to prepare for the cold winter, there are plans for a medicine factory and it was noticed that the storm has opened some old cave entrances and my friends, Pasang, Stephen and others are going to join an expedition climbing to them to see what might have been hidden within. Stories in the village of hidden texts and relics have been told for generations. Pasang is very hopeful sutras we have never seen before might have been hidden in one of the caves, these are called terma, and if they were discovered this would change our village even more but we will have to wait and hope the expedition is safe and fruitful. Texts were discovered in caves in Nepal not long ago.
As a craft person and artist with fine tools, my skills are most valuable working here for the printing room. I have offered to create the pigment, ink, which I enjoy and help to create the relief blocks for our first book we print. With the imminent arrival of winter the timing is perfect to make ink. The hazelnuts and walnuts are ripe and are falling from the old trees behind the nunnery as if they are gifts that know their importance beyond food. Perhaps they have even more to offer us than meat of the nuts and ink. We will still enjoy the meat of the walnuts and hazelnuts and perhaps sell some to others through the winter months. The process of making ink is an ancient one and requires what is available to us here. Although I have not found an acacia tree to collect one of the ingredients the rest were rather simple. My hands and arms will now be stained this dark black/brown for weeks to come from the process.
Candice has done rituals so that the sacred woods will welcome our harvest as we do not wish to upset any of the deity. I have collected enough nuts for a dark permanent ink which will last on paper or fabric a very long long time. I cracked the walnuts which is a messy and exhausting process and chipped out the meat to be cured in the back of my hut by fires for the next few weeks. Nuts need to be dried and cured to be edible in our diet. The debris, once removed from the casing and nuts, is put back into the soil in the forest to feed other trees. What we have left, I soak and pressing the staining juices into the pail with water, I tend to it regularly. At the same time, I need to make a fermented liquid with the stems and roots of the japonica which I found by the river. The milk from our yak will give enough sweetness to start the fermentation using a lactic acid method and then I will allow it to all sour to be the vinegar we need. Before I let the mixture turn to vinegar, I will ask Chogyam Dorje, my friend who is a healer, if he wishes some of the fermented liquid to use to clean injuries or help with other ailments.
My challenge in the process was the gum to add viscosity to the ink. With no acacia nearby, I approached a neighbour, Dishad, to ask if I could have some of the carcass of the chicken being prepared. At first he was sceptical but now that he is a part of the printing group, he sees that the ink must be stable and that I needed the birds pieces. The connective tissue, when boiled, creates enough of glue like gelatine to add to the liquid in the pail. At the end, I strain this liquid into pots to use when ready. The large number of walnuts and hazelnuts will prepare enough ink for any printing this year I hope. The head nun will store this ink where it is safe for us to use. During the two weeks it has taken me to collect nuts, roots and cure the ink so it will be dark I have had time to meditate on the changes everything goes through and how this impermanence is what I need to concentrate on.
Did I mention that Herbert has come forward to offer his services to be a book trader to help create the dream of a library faster? This will be a great help in moving the plan along to have books available for use since the printing of our own is a long process. Even now, I am smoothing out blocks each day now so that the scribed papers can be etched into them backwards and then I will be helping with my tools to create reliefs of each letter and image so each block can be one page of a book. It is the small parts of this job that take so very long. Monks and lay people are offering to help scribe and etch but it is important that someone watches and makes sure there are no errors in the work. We will get the book done and we will offer all the resources we can to help each other.
The history of printing books in Tibet is a rich one and quite intimidating now that we, as a village are entering into the craft. There are books, that when printed on our style press required 200,000 wooden blocks to create the folios, or pages. The Derge Kangyur was printed over 1500 times in a period of twelve years and although there is some evidence that trained craftsperson pairs, working the press, can print up to 11000 folios a day, this is not the speed we will be working at. I suspect we will be requiring corrections to our labour by the editors or the deterioration of the text will result. With the gift of each person’s skills, resources and materials not only will merit come to our village but to all who have given. This wholesome karma is not why we are giving to the project but the project will give us this and much more back. Just as the healer, who came with a gift of an amulet to protect me from plaques when the Lama left our village will gain merit, so will we all by joining in to create the library, climbing to investigate the newly opened cave mouths and creating a medicine factory to heal others in an around our village.
