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Entries in Tibet (31)

Tuesday
Feb212012

Tibetan Pain

Inside Drapchi prison near Lhasa, Chinese guards beat Tibetan nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand.

They applied electric cattle prods to their bodies, sending wire cranked juice through skeletons, extracting screams. Denounce the Dalai Lama, screamed one soldier, a young lackey from Human Province. He tightened metal screws around a woman’s wrists, bending them back at a horrendous angle until she screamed from pain, Never!

He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased the pressure. It was a job.

I am doing my DUTY, he screamed.

Save my face, sang a Chinese girl, an innocent victim of the national genocide one-child policy wringing out a mop made of spider webs inside water rainbows.

She languished in a large bland cavern classroom at a private business university in Fujian. It was private because all the students had failed higher level exams for more prestigious universities. They settled for this prison. She cleaned crumbling uneven cement floors with strands doing her Duty.

Beijing operatic actors fashioned death masks for their performance in a funeral formula. 

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Sunday
Sep112011

vairochana

In Boudanath, Nepal he chanced into the Saturday Cafe. Was it Saturn Day? Perhaps. Decent breakfast. Stupa view. Bookstore.
 
A woman sat at a table with her laptop. Typing. A traveller stood in the doorway. Are you writing a book, he asked. Pasang looked up, smiling.
No, I'm beginning a bi-monthly newsletter. Community. 
He sat down. They talked. He offered to help her. Everyone needs help.
 
They became friends and he'd journey over from Bandipur weekly to suggest all manner of ideas: focus, tone, editing, developing resources and so forth. It's a one-woman show.
 
He gave her a copy of his walking meditation prose poem from Lhasa travels. He revised it. She published it. O joy. In June she prepared to publish the first hard copy issue.
Pasang sent her web site URL. It has a great feel. Here it is. Give it a look-see. Share.
Thursday
Jun232011

Cycles

Namaste,

The cycle of existence.

A person creates subjective reality and illusions. People feel pure joy with compassion, gratitude and forgiveness. Your center is clear and unified. No past regrets, no future fears.

The Chinese-Tibetan puppet leaders in Lhasa ordered monks to increase 24/7 patriotic education classes in all monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control.

It’s about power and control, ruling through fear and intimidation. The Chinese after looting and destroying monasteries in Tibet and mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.

They recruited Tibetan monks to live and work as spies and infamous informers. This system proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and capitalist running dogs. It was a practical peoples campaign of fear and suspicion creating paranoia and ideological control.

Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice who resist or question this form of subtle patriotic education risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to liberal monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.

There are two kinds of suffering, said a girl weaving wool carpets in her yurt on the Tibetan plateau below bare brown mountains. Suffering you run away from and suffering you face.

Metta.

Saturday
Apr232011

scroll

blue lake soars white mountains 
range of annapurna
touch blue sky
majestic sense
foreigners trek, camp, parasail, river raft nature
they pass like seasons 
 
new Tibetan friends 
escaped in 1959
live in refugee camps 
work hard raise families weave futures
lhasa return only a dream
a famous haiku 
on a scroll
in mountain museum
is longer than climbing a peak
Saturday
Mar262011

Boudhanath

Namaste,

The road from Bhaktapur to Boudhanath is paved or broken or nonexistent.

Broken dirt rutted cement narrow filled with humans and black belching diseased smoke. Green fields, planting, turning dirt, harvesting beans, potatoes, cauliflower, hauling wicker baskets to market. Soldiers running their future, pounding old boots past a rising forest. Mountains run in shadows. Children in cold dawn light brush white teeth.

It's a returning to Tibet. Pilgrimage around around around circumambulation. Chanting prayers, earning merit. A shift from the Hindu spirit world of Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu. A feeling of peace and tranquility permeates your walking meditation.

Spin prayer wheels.

Lhasa Morning Meditation. We slow down. Each step is a breath. As before, in other planetary places we savor the beginning of a new day becoming - cold, isolated, sublime mysterious reality. The street blends into the circuit. Go to the main square.

Two large chorten furnaces are breathing fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings - throw sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. Merit.

We join the flow, shuffling along. Feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The  vast self vibration of frequencies in the flow. Our restless wandering ghost spirit feels the peace and serenity inside the flow.

The sky fills with clear light. As above, so below. Prayer flags lining roofs sing in the wind as incense smoke curls away. The shuffling pilgrims create a ceaseless wave - the sound of muted consistent steps, clicking of prayer beads, a gentle hum of turning prayer wheels, murmurs of mantras from lips. Everything is clear and focused on offering, sacrifice, gaining merit in the collective unconscious. Our river flows.

Dawn light blesses eastern snow capped mountains with a pink glow. A black faced half-naked boy throws himself down and out on his hands and knees prostrating the length of his skinny skeleton. He wears slabs of wood on his hands and an old brown apron. He edges forward, pulling himself along, rises, gestures to the sky, hands together, down along his skin out and down to the ground scrapping away flesh edging forward inside shuffling pilgrims. His eyes are on fire!

One completes one circuit after another, circling the Jokhang, the spiritual center of Tibet. More light, more people ascending into the square - handfuls of juniper feed roaring flames, Crack! Hiss! Burn! Back to Dust!

You will walk through the fire. Do this practice every day.

Metta.