The Visiting Lama… Hopefully

Our village is small, but yet there is always something new happening and to get ready for. Last week, the neighbouring village was hit with a terrible disease. My uncle and I’s services were very useful to the doctors of our village who bought their medicine and supplies, and went off to help them. Since then, there has been an increasing demand for a special Tibetan medicine, called rinchen rilbu, also known as precious pill.

It is part of Tibet’s culture and has been known how to formulate it for about 1200 years. However, this pill is very specific to make and requires great expertise that it can take about three to four months and many human resources to even just prepare the formulation. It is only made with pure ingredients, and rituals and blessings are associated to be able to finish the pill. Since it goes through such rigorous steps to be made, it is very expensive and hard to get in bulk. My goal is to load up on as much as I can, and sell them to make a profit.

There is a lama travelling through the region. The people of our village want to invite him to come and give teachings and religious empowerment rituals. I was hoping to offer any medicine or ritual ingredients, in helping for him to come and visit and to receive personal merit myself.

I’ve had several questions to ask my teacher in school. What do we necessarily need to do for a lama to accept our invitation? What kind of rituals are involved? What if we don’t have the necessary means to fulfill all that is needed? What happens if one thing doesn’t go as planned?

My teacher was not able to answer all of my questions. That being said, she did provide me with a list of how to properly invite a lama to visit our village. Unfortunately we need to provide resources to be able to prepare the temple… I’m concerned that we don’t have a proper temple. That is going to take lots of work for the builders and ritualists.

I’ve found it very interesting and a little absurd that we all need to provide all these requests, and all the lama does is make a prayer and teach. The lama is showered with gifts…