What Happened to Me in the Past Week

After the village head received my letter in which I gave my suggestions on inviting the lama last week, he was persuaded to go and check the lama first before inviting him, since I told him that examining a teacher before following him was very important. It turned out that the lama was a qualified and experienced teacher, who was not attached to luxury lives like the one I saw in the video last week; besides, he was very good in interpreting Buddhist texts and conducting rituals. So, decision was made that we would invite this lama to come to the village this week. Fortunately, the lama received our letter and accepted the invitation, thus preparations would need to be made as soon as possible. Just as what the village head had illustrated in last week’s letter, villagers should cooperate in making the preparations. For example, artists should prepare chalk drawings in front of the entrance of the village temple. They should draw 8 auspicious offerings, namely lotus, conch shell, dharma wheel, endless knot, offering vase, umbrella, gold fish, and victory banner; farmers should donate food as offerings, traders should donate gold and money, and scholars should donate dharma texts. Other things such as kha btags were also necessary in welcoming the lama. As a trader whose secondary skill was in scholarship, I donated a dharma text but I did not donate any gold. The dharma text was said to represent “speech” in the traditional five offerings to a lama, and it would serve as a kind of blessing by putting it to the top of one’s head, so it was something that had religious and ritual significance, as a lay scholar and a trader who mainly traded hand-copied Buddhist texts, I felt it was my responsibility to donate it. However, as I said in my last week’s letter to the village head, I would not donate money or gold, because I considered money and gold as things improper to be offered to a faithful Buddhist. An experienced lama should be offered enough foods and drinks to keep him alive and spread the teachings of Buddha in this world, but what was the need for money and gold? Someone might argue that money and gold could be used to purchase foods and drinks, but if this was the case, we should directly offer foods and drinks, why should we bother to offer money, which needed to be “transformed” into foods and drinks? In my opinion, everything that was necessary for survival, like clothes, foods, drinks, and shoes, should be offered directly, not in the form of money or gold. I would not like to see this good lama we invited to be defiled by gold and money and became the one I saw in the video.

Beside the invitation of the lama, two important things happened to me in this past week; one was that I attended a death ritual conducted for villagers died in the last hailstorm, another was the connections I built with other villagers, especially the scholars and doctors. Three weeks had pasted since the hailstorm attack, but because we were all kept busy by the reconstruction of our village, a funerary ritual was only performed a few days ago. The ritualists in our village conducted the ritual by strictly following what was written in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Death was not an end but a transition, which was to say that death was an end of this life but at the same time it was the beginning of the next life. This state of bardo and the experience of this transition between lives could be fearful and stressful. Our ritualists knew it and they provided direct and clear guidance to the souls of our dead villagers into their next rebirth. The atmosphere at this funerary ritual was indeed not pleasant; the voice of crying and mourning could be heard everywhere from the beginning until the end. An old woman stood next to me cried and told me that she lost her son in the hailstorm; her son was a farmer and was also the only worker in her family, she did not know how to survive in the future without him. I soothed her by telling her that we had to endure all the sufferings brought by sudden changes as long as we were still in the samsara, this was why we should dedicate ourselves to the teachings and practices of Buddhism, since only by following the right Buddhist teachings and practices we could one day achieve enlightenment and leave the samsara. I also reminded her what Tsong kha pa said about the mindfulness of death. I told her she should not feel sad for her son, since her son was a good person that generated good karmas in this life and had always put the purposes of this life above those of the present life. He used his life as a human properly, worked hardly and practiced Buddhism faithfully, these would all serve as causes of auspicious birth in future lives. Being aware that death was certain, the time of death was uncertain, and at the time of death nothing was of benefit except religious practice, we should all make use of this life as a human being to cultivate ourselves as much as we could.

After a few days of this funerary ritual, I was summoned by a group of scholars in the village. They heard about my business of trading hand-copied Buddhist texts, so they asked me if I would like to work with them in building a library. Our plan was that they would give me some newest Buddhist sastras and rare sutras to make hand-copies, and then I would sell these hand-copied books in our village and towns nearby. I could take 40% of the total benefits and the rest 60% would go to the scholar community to be used as the fund for the library. Also, the scholars would like to purchase Buddhist texts from other places that were not widely available in our village and nearby towns, they would give me a booklist of the texts they wanted, if I could find them and bring them back, they would like to pay 20% extra to the original price for my service. When I returned home, my friend Kedao, who was also a Han immigrant to this village, came to visit me. He was a Tibetan medical doctor and he asked me if I would also like to include medicine in my trading list. He told me that when he went to save the villagers in the next village affected by the naga illness, he realized that medicine was not enough in this area, it would be really helpful if I could bring some from nearby towns or Lhasa when I travelled there. I poured him a cup of tea and told him I would be happy to do it, since we were friends and we all lived in the same village; connections between different communities in the village was important to the welfare of each individual as well as the entire village.