Preparing for the Cave — Week Six

I am so excited to go and find and explore a library cave. I am planning on getting scholar resources before our trip so that I can be of assistance in helping to understand what the manuscripts say since we only have one scholar coming on the trip. It is also important that I have some scholarly knowledge as there are murals on the cave that I will try to understand since we can not bring those back with us. We will need to bring people to help carry all the artifacts back so that there is more time to examine what they say and mean, as well as they would be great artifacts to have in our community. We plan on finding the caves with the help of a map we hope to attain from a hunter who has experience in the forest.

I am hoping that we will be able to have a journey that will be both fulfilling, as well as safe. I am hoping that we will be able to learn many things from the cave. We plan to stay at the cave for a few weeks to make sure that we have learned everything we can and to make plans to transport the items back to our village.

It is the hope of the group that we will come across a terma, how exciting it would be for us to discover new teachings that will guide us in our times of trouble. It is our goal to come across a terma because it is rare to find such a teaching and it would be so exciting to be the people to find them as well as have the opportunity to learn what teachings they have in them.

Our food is going to be supplied by a villager who has a small farm, I also intend to bring a bit of my own food, as it is always important to be prepared when going on a long trip in which there are many obstacles. I plan on purchasing some warmer clothes this week as going up to the caves will have a colder climate to help with the journey. I also plan on bringing some different herbs as I am a trader and my main good that I trade is herbs.

If we do make it to the cave I hope that everything is still intact, as I have heard whispers of the weather flooding and impacting caves and the relics inside of them. Other people may have also already discovered the cave we are hoping to reach, and the relics may have already been taken out and examined if this were to happen hopefully there would be murals left on the walls to examine. I am hoping that besides relics we will be able to see what else the caves were used for perhaps mediation for monks or dormitory caves for monks, or a final resting place for the deceased.

Hopefully the artifacts and scriptures that we find will help the new library at the nunnery with new information. Which will in turn help our whole village learn more. It is also the hope that some of the artifacts we find will help us understand further the teachings that we already have.

I am excited to leave for the trip and to have this exciting experience; next week can change so many things for my life if the trip is successful.